About Metaphor

Is the deer crossing the road, or is the road crossing the forest?

It’s a metaphor, of course. Little to do with the deer, roads, or forests. If you thought this was about animal rights, you missed the point.

We all tend, in certain spaces, to be literal and defensive. Which is really the whole point of the quote.

Can we take a step back, risk seeing from a different perspective? And it is risky, because it requires acknowledging that what we “know” might not be as certain as we imagine.

+ + +

A few years ago, I was privileged to work with some guys struggling with addiction. Those guys taught me a great deal about perspective. About looking beyond the tattoos and the external roughness. About truly listening when my first instinct was to talk, or correct, or (gulp) judge.

Each guy had a story, most of them radically different on the surface from my own. Abuse. Abandonment. Gangs. Drugs. Extreme privilege and entitlement. Prison. Racial victimization. Absolutely nothing like my middle-class, suburban background.

Except – when we hung out together, we discovered we actually had a lot in common. Adversity. Depression. Giving up. We liked to ride bikes.

And – somehow, Jesus dragged us into the light.

I learned our stories weren’t all that different. Yeah, the details diverged, but that didn’t matter. We could learn a great deal from each other. We could laugh and sweat and enjoy our time together.

Society – that’s you and me – tends to look at “men like that” through a certain lens. They made their wrong choices, they need to be held accountable.

Thing is, Jesus could look at you and me the same way.

Aren’t you grateful he doesn’t?

+ + +

Next time… what about our kids?