Following Orders

By Lenora Rand
From February Recovery Worship Service

I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t handle it well.

Gary, who has been married to me for a very long time now, will attest to this fact. But early in our marriage he hadn’t learned this yet…and would occasionally try to tell me what to do. Like one night we were preparing dinner together, chopping up vegetables for a soup or something. We each had our own cutting boards and we were both hard at work when Gary glanced over at my chopping area and said in the nicest possible way that I was doing it all wrong. “You’re supposed to cut vegetables on an angle like I’m doing,” he told me, “That’s how you get the most nutritional value out of them. So start cutting them like this not just straight up and down like you’re doing it..”

When he finished speaking, Gary continued chopping carrots in his own merry and correct way, but I became very still and very silent. I’m not sure how Gary interpreted this stillness and silence. Maybe he thought I was thinking about the wisdom of his words. Maybe he thought I was thanking God that I had been enlightened. Thanking God I was lucky enough to be married to such a wise and knowledgeable vegetable cutting expert.

I wasn’t. I was the stillness and silence of a grenade which has just been dropped on the ground, in that second or two before it explodes.

I did explode. It wasn’t pretty. What I said came out of that dark hole inside me that contains all the stored-up rage and hurt of a lifetime. The kind of stuff that is more like the growls of a cornered animal than anything else. If I had been a cartoon character you would have seen steam exploding from my eyes and nose and ears. Needless to say, we had a big fight. Luckily we put down our knives first.

But I think Gary got the message that day. I don’t like anyone to tell me what to do. Even if they’re right.

Which brings me to our scripture for today, John 15: 9-17.

The crux of the passage is in this verse, John 15:12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Now I’m all for love. I mean, who isn’t? And if we had to take a vote today and I asked for a show of hands, all in favor of love, I figure there wouldn’t be many of us clutching our hands in our laps. Maybe none of us. What’s not to love about love, right?

Except of course, when you actually try to love. That’s where it gets tricky. It gets tricky when you’re commanded to love the boss and the company that’s just “eliminated your position,” i.e. fired you. When you’re commanded to love the parents who abused you or the children who can’t forgive you and don’t want to have anything to do with you. When you’re ordered to love the significant other who doesn’t seem to give nearly as much as you do, or the friends who don’t seem to have any time for you. Or how about this—how does it feel to be commanded to love terrorists who fly planes into buildings? Or leaders whose greed and short sightedness have given us a world in a financial abyss? And sometimes hardest to deal with of all—how do we respond to the command to love, when it’s ourselves we need to love, and when all we feel is screwed up and contemptible and unworthy of love?

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

When you think about it, this scripture is not easy. Not simple. Not clear. And as much as we all love the idea of love, when you put it like this, I command you to love, you may, as I do, feel like growling back at God from that dark hole of rage and hurt inside you, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Of course, most of us here come from a country founded on rebellion against authority. A country that said to its mother England, don’t tell me what to do. And our heroes are people who win mostly by not following the rules…think about the popularity of Bruce Willis in movies like Die Hard, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Live Free or Die Hard… I can’t help but notice that Bruce never made a movie called Die Hard And Follow Orders Politely.

And those of us who struggle with addictions …many of us come from families with addicts and various kinds of dysfunction, families where we learned early on to distrust authority, where we learned that the orders we received from our parents weren’t necessarily for our own good, or to enhance our lives. Our families were focused on their next fix rather than on caring for the real needs of their children. Or their commands stemmed from a desire to take care of their own need for the family to look good and to keep us kids from getting in their way and bothering them too much, rather than out of any real concern for our growth and well-being.

I had this figured out in my family by the time I was four years old. I remember one day being asked by my next door neighbor Tony, who was about my age, if I wanted to go with him and his dad to his grandfather’s farm for an hour or so. The farm was close by and Tony told me we’d get to play in the grain silos, which sounded incredibly cool to me. So I went into the house and asked my dad if I could go. And my dad was busy doing something, and just seemed annoyed by my interruption and said, No. Told me I couldn’t go. When I questioned him, I got yelled at. NO discussion. But I decided not to follow his orders, and I went anyway. I really can’t remember anything that happened at that farm, I have only the vaguest memory of those grain silos, but I do remember coming back home, bracing myself for the trouble I was going to get in because I’d disobeyed. But I got home and my Dad was still inside, involved in whatever project he’d been doing before I left and he hadn’t even noticed I was gone! Which seemed to my 4-year-old self like total confirmation of my decision to not follow his orders. It seemed like complete confirmation of the suspicion that had been growing in me for some time which was that I was more committed to taking care of me than my parents were. My parents weren’t really in my corner, on my side, looking out for my welfare. They were lost in their own stuff and I was basically on my own. I grew up in the days of the TV show Father Knows Best. But I decided at an early age, that I couldn’t trust that. I came to believe that Father Knows Best was a lie and I knew best.

Walking around with the belief that only you know best and that nobody is going to look out for you but you is certainly one way to live your life. It’s a way to live that can cause you a few teensy problems however. Or a few major ones. For me it has had a lot to do with my story as a compulsive overeater. I didn’t trust the rules about what was best to eat and how much and when. Three meals a day? Healthy snacks? Eat your vegetables? Drink plenty of water? Oh man, give me a break. That sounds awful. So I ate what I wanted to when I wanted to. I defied the commands of the food pyramid, frequently and mostly secretly. But then I felt bad afterward. Not just “bad” with a small “b” but BAD, all caps, morally bad. In order to take care of myself, I felt like I had to break the rules. Which made me a bad person, an outlaw. And I felt sad and lonely being a bad person, which of course, led me back to food for comfort and care. A vicious cycle.

Since I’ve been in recovery one of the shifts I’ve been making—and it’s been a hard one for me to make, it’s a one moment at a time, kind of deal—is rather than seeing myself as a bad person in need of punishment, I’m starting to see myself as a sick person in need of healing.

So instead of being the outlaw in a black leather motorcycle jacket, thumbing my nose at authority and riding my Harley off a cliff in heroic defiance, I am learning to envision myself as an adorable child in one of those hospital shifts with a little too much southern exposure, propped up in a comfy bed, being visited by caring friends bringing me flowers and cards and DVDs and who aren’t there to judge me or arrest me, but are just there to sit with me and hold my hand or plump my pillows.

It makes a difference. Whether we define ourselves as outlaw or sick child, makes a difference. And what I’ve been learning about that in recovery made me want to take a second look at what John might have been trying to say in this scripture. So I started with that word I hate so much: commandment.

The dictionary definition of commandment is “an order or injunction given by authority.” I guess part of my problem is, when I think of an order from an authority, the first picture that comes into my head (other than seeing my own father, probably) is of getting orders from a military commander. I see one of those mean staff sergeants yelling at the recruits. I hear drop and give me 20. I imagine endless marches through the rain and darkness and cold all to satisfy the power-hungry whims of some petty jerk. A good thing I never joined the Army, huh?

So when I hear “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” I’m coming to realize, on some level that is also how I’m picturing God—the power-hungry, petty jerk, jerking me around to satisfy some need of his own without regard for what might be good for me. And I feel like, yeah, loving one another sounds like a good idea, in theory, however… I can’t imagine it working out so well. There probably won’t be an upside for me in this.

The funny thing about that definition of commandment-- an order or injunction given by authority—military guys aren’t the only authority figures out there giving orders. As I get older I have found myself spending a lot more time in doctor’s offices, leaving with a tote bag full of prescriptions. Leaving with doctor’s orders. These days, my doctor has me taking a smorgasboard full of vitamins and mineral supplements and medicine of various kinds. I feel like I have to allow an extra half hour to my morning routine just to get down all these pills. And I don’t always do it. I don’t always follow my doctor’s orders perfectly. Some mornings I take only a couple of the pills, the ones I deem most crucial. But here’s the thing. When I skip my pills I don’t feel like I’m being morally bad as much as I feel like I’m just not able to take care of myself as well as I could today. Because I see my doctor’s orders as something that comes from a desire for me to be well and healthy and happy, I see them as life-enhancing, I see them as good for ME.

That shift in thinking has been huge for me.

And, I’ve begun to think that maybe it’s no accident that sometimes in the Bible, Jesus would refer to himself as a physician. (And never referred to himself as a staff sergeant.) And so maybe, in John’s gospel, when Jesus commands me to love he’s not putting a gun to my head and saying do this or else, rather he’s handing me a prescription…he’s saying, do this and you’ll feel better. You’ll be healthier. Happier. You’ll become whole. You’ll be well.

Does this make it any easier to figure out how to love? How to love the boss who fired us, the so-called friend who hurt us, the spouse who doesn’t support us, the ones we call enemy, whether those enemies are people we work with or people in countries across the globe? Does it make it any easier to figure out how to love ourselves?

Maybe not. But it does give me motivation. It does help me see that if I don’t try to love, I may be missing out on something really good for me. It does make love something I want to try to figure out. With this new way of seeing, figuring out how to love myself and others seems like the way to life, the way to abundant life.

In the therapy group I belong to we have a ritual that has developed over time. This group is made up of people in recovery from all kinds of addictions—food, alcohol, relationships, debt, workaholism, perfectionism—you name it. And toward the end of every session one or two, or sometimes everyone in the group, will ask our psychiatrist for a prescription. What’s my prescription? We’ll ask. And then wait, like little birds in a nest, hungry for Mom to give them their bug or their worm. Or like people in a communion line on a Sunday morning, mouths open, ready for the bread of life.

This ritual in my therapy started probably because at one point some of the members of the group were taking anti-depressants and they needed a refill or a change in their medication. And the therapist would get out his prescription pad at the end of the session to write that for them. And some people got jealous. Wanted a little something to help them get through the week, too. Their own prescription. These days, no one in my group is taking actual medication but people still ask for prescriptions at the end of the session because what they are asking is for the doctor to tell them what to do. They are asking for a soul prescription. What would be good for me to do this week? How should I behave this week so that I will feel better? What should I do to love myself and others this week? Tell me what to do to have life and have it more abundantly.

And I’m right there with them. Asking for my prescription. Yes, even me, the person who never wants anyone to tell them what to do, I’m finally, day by day, starting to get it. Starting to get it that God is not the staff sergeant putting a gun to my head. Starting to get it that God is the doctor, with a steadying hand on my arm. God isn’t barking orders at me for his own agenda. God is actually good and loving, and looking out for me. And God is handing me a slip of paper and written on it are the words of life.

This is my commandment, that you love, Jesus said. I am finally beginning to hear this, I’m finally beginning to hear Jesus saying to me, saying to all of us sick little kids sitting in our hospital beds in the children’s wing, “You want to feel better, you want to really live? This is my prescription: love. Love each other. Love yourselves. Live in my love and love this whole beautiful, aching world. Just love.

That is the way to life.”