Martin Avdeitch lived in a basement room with one window
looking onto the streets. He was a cobbler, had been for
40 years, and his hands bore the calluses and scars of his trade.
His wife was long dead, his children were buried.
For a time he had raged at God, but an old Pilgrim had taught
him to read, and slowly, through the Gospels, the rage had given
way to something else. One winter evening, Martin sat
with his lamp burning low, reading Christ's words about
welcoming strangers, feeding the hungry clothing the naked.
His lips moved as he read, tasting each promise.
Lord, he whispered, his breath misting in the cold air, If you
came to my door, I would serve you with all my heart.
That night, between sleep and waking, a voice spoke.
Martin, tomorrow I shall come. He woke before dawn, lit his
lamp and set to work stitching a boot.
But his eyes kept lifting to the window.
The street lay empty under fresh snow.
Then a figure appeared, a soldier sweeping the pavement
with a broom too short for his height, forcing him to bend low
with each stroke. His breath came in clouds, his
hands were raw, and when he paused to blow on them, Martin
saw how the cold had gotten into him.
Not just his skin, but deeper into his bones and spirit.
Martin tapped the glass. The soldier looked up,
suspicious, his face hard with the weariness of a man who
expects nothing good from strangers.
But Martin beckoned anyway. I'm working, the soldier said
when he came inside, not quite meeting Martin's eyes.
You're freezing, Martin replied, already pouring tea.
Sit. The soldiers sat stiffly at
first, holding the cup as if it might be taken back.
But as the warmth spread through him, his shoulders dropped.
He told Martin he'd been discharged after 20 years
service, given 3 rubles and this job sweeping snow.
His wife was dead. His son wouldn't speak to him.
I don't know what I did wrong, he said, staring into his tea.
Except maybe I was gone too much.
Except maybe I was always gone when he left.
He gripped Martin's hand with surprising force.
Thank you, he said, and something in his eyes made
Martin's throat tighten. But this isn't the visit, Martin
thought, returning to his work. Surely the Lord will come
differently. Hours later, a young woman
passed by, clutching a baby wrapped in summer rags against
the February wind. The child's cry was thin and
desperate, the sound of a creature giving up.
Martin's hand was already on the door before he decided to move.
She came in reluctantly, shame written across her face.
I'm not a beggar, she said quickly.
Of course not, Martin replied, putting bread and milk on the
table. But the child is cold.
As she ate, the story came out in pieces.
Her husband had gone to look for work in Moscow, promising to
send money. That was six months ago.
She'd sold everything. Furniture, dishes, her wedding
ring. Yesterday she'd sold her winter
coat. She held the baby close as she
spoke, as if trying to hide the worst of her circumstances
behind the small body. Here, Martin said, pulling his
late wife's shawl from a chest. It was good wool, warm, and it
smelled faintly of lavender. The woman's hands trembled as
she took it. I'll pay you back, she
whispered. You owe me nothing, Martin said.
The shawl was my Anna's. She would have wanted, and his
voice caught. She would have wanted the baby
to be warm. The woman wept as she left.
Martin stood at his window, watching her disappear into the
crowd, the shawl a splash of dark blue against the white
snow. That was good, he thought, but
where is he? In the afternoon, an old woman's
shriek cut through the street noise.
Martin looked up to see her clutching A ragged boy by the
collar, 10 years old, maybe, with a face too sharp and
knowing for his age. An apple lay in the snow between
them. Thief, the woman shouted.
Little devil, I was hungry, the boy yelled back, twisting like a
caught rabbit. Your apples are hot.
Your apples are half rotten anyway.
Martin pushed between them. The boy had the look of someone
who'd learned to expect blows, flinching before the hand even
moved. The old woman was breathing
hard, her basket of apples clutched to her chest like
armor. How much for that apple?
Martin asked. It's not about the money, the
woman snapped. It's about respect.
It's about. She stopped, looking at the
boy's thin face and the way his coat hung on him, and something
shifted in her eyes. Martin pressed a coin into her
palm anyway. The boys stared at both of them,
calculating the odds, looking for the trick.
Forgive me, grandmother, he said finally, the words coming out
rough and unpracticed. God forgive you, child, she
answered, and her voice broke. She reached into her basket and
pressed an apple into his hand. A good one, not rotten at all.
Here, take it proper this time. Evening came, and Martin lit his
lamp and opened his Bible with unsteady hands.
Where were you, the Lord? You promised.
And then the voice came again, gentle, certain.
Martin, did you not know me? And there in the lamplight stood
the soldier warming his raw hands, the mother holding her
baby close, the old woman and the boy together, an apple
passing between them. I was hungry, I was cold, I was
naked, I was a stranger. And whatever you did for the
least of these, you did for me. The figures faded like mist.
Martin sat alone in his basement room, tears running into his
beard. But somehow the lamp light
seemed brighter than before, as if a second sun had risen in
that small space where a cobbler had learned to recognize the
face of God. Welcome to the Imagination
Redeemed podcast, where we follow the great stories further
up and further in in pursuit of the life of Christ.
Welcome to Imagination Redeemed, everyone.
I'm Brian Brown, joins today by Sarah Howell, Christina Brown
and our storyteller Matthew Clark channeling Tolstoy.
Thanks for the read, Matthew. Absolutely.
So the other night Christina and I were hosting a Christmas party
at our house and I found myself in conversation with a couple of
friends and we we got to talking I think.
I think the story started with procrastination.
We were talking about how even 20 years ago it was, it was
pretty normal for someone to to utter the phrase, I am a
procrastinator, right? As an identity thing.
I particularly remember this from college.
There was this huge swath of people for whom that's my,
that's my identity. Therefore, I can't plan ahead.
I can't do this. I can't do that.
I am a procrastinator. And I think there are a lot of
ways that modern culture has taught us to lead with our
limitations as identity markers. As our story reminds us, there's
always the the temptation to to do this with money and and
possessions, but it seems like the list of things that we can't
possibly do keeps getting longer.
You'll hear I'm an introvert, so I don't this or I can't that.
I'm not a people person. That's just not my personality.
We've pathologized a lot of things, but even when we don't,
we have a tendency to turn constraints into character, and
we tend to define ourselves by what we can't do rather than but
what by what we might become. And sometimes we tell ourselves
that's humility. But what we're going to talk
about today is we're going to play with this Tolstoy story.
And on some level, the takeaways obvious, but there's a lot of
depth to it. And there's a lot of depth to
the historic church's answer to this question of a what is this
thing that we do to ourselves when we kind of shrink back and
and what's the antidote? So in this episode you 3 are
going to give me the antidote and it's going to be great.
No pressure. No, no, no pressure at all.
So can we lead with this, this shrinking back thing?
What thoughts do you have on on that, either where you've where
you've seen it or where you think it comes from?
I'm curious to consider how much, at least in my lived
experience with the age of the Internet and mass media and
information kind of right in my face at all times, how much
there is this kind of soft disguise of humility to state
your place in the world, which is I'm very small.
And when you look at how much people have done and will do and
how big of an impact there can be, there's I need to make sure
that I understand my place, which is not to be one of those.
I can watch amazing people do things in the Olympics, but I
know that I can barely do a cartwheel.
And so having such proximity in information and visualization of
such greatness, I think makes a lot of us average people shrink
back in a certain way, as well as the specialization of our
modern world. It's like, well, since I'm not
devoting 12 hours a day to gymnastics, then I feel really
confident and comfortable saying I'm just not athletic.
I'm just, I'm not someone who knows how to do those, anything
like that. So I'm just going to sit on the
couch instead of even dancing with you guys.
Yeah, Matthew and I talked about that with Terry Moon in our our
two-part episode on singing, how we're the vast majority of our
exposure to human singing now is through pre recorded highly
produced versions of the perfect take and, and how that that
colors our perception of what normal singing is and therefore
it colors our perception of what we are capable of.
That's a really good point. Christina Matthew, what about
you? Yeah, I was thinking about it in
terms of hosting things like I, I play a lot of house concerts
in people's homes. And one of the almost the very
first thing out of people's mouths when I say, would you
like to host a house concert is something like, oh, my home's
not good enough. It's not big enough, it's not
fancy enough. And they're, and they feel like
they can't do it because, oh, I and, and I usually say I've
played in all kinds of places and I can guarantee you that
your home is fine. It's and that one of the ideas
by the end of a house concert, I feel like people have learned
that their house can do something that they didn't know
their house could do and that what they, whatever they have is
enough that it's not. But there is definitely a sense
of I want to shrink back. I want to shrink back from
offering that because I just don't, I can't see my resources
and imagine how they could be adequate, how they could be good
enough. Does that resonate?
Yes, yeah. And I think it's, it's easy to
just kind of write all of this off as lack of self-confidence.
But the, it was interesting. So a number of months ago, Sarah
put me on the, the scholar Rebecca Deyoung, who's scholar
on, on virtue ethics. And I was reading a, a paper
that she wrote on Aquinas's writing on, on this trend.
And there was this fancy old word for it, pusillanimity,
which I'm only going to say once I only got No, that's it.
That's all you get. Beautifully said.
Just guess I wish you would say it again.
Say it three times fast to be thrown out of the room.
But it means smallness of soul. I think it's a little bit easier
for us to, to write off fear as an understandable emotion.
But Aquinas and, and Aristotle before him were pretty harsh on
this actually. And they, they identified 3
patterns that kind of feed this and see, see if any of this
sounds familiar. So where, where does this come
from? The first one is that we, we
measure ourselves negatively against others.
So we're, we look around at this horizontal perspective, this
fundamentally horizontal perspective of, of values,
There's me, there's other people and then I'm worse than them.
So we compare, like we said, you know, we compare our voices to
the recorded voices, our kitchens to Pinterest, our gifts
to someone more talented, our resources to someone more
abundant. And they contrast this with a a
vertical ethic that understands us as having value and gifts
connected to God, which we'll get more to more into you later.
But when we have that default posture of there's me and
there's everybody else and they're better than me, that's
real easy to do. Yeah.
And we start using words, can't words like can't, you know, I
can't afford to be generous. I can't afford to do that thing.
And when what we mean is I don't feel adequate.
Well, maybe we've talked about this before, but that, that
language, the language of affording has been really
important to me because just in the, the, the way that you just
used it, you didn't literally mean like, I don't have the
financial resources you meant. Like I don't.
There's something about me that's not enough and or there's
something about the way things are that means I can't give, I
can't afford to do that. And that's something I felt
really convicted about over the years that the Lord was saying.
What do you actually believe about reality, the reality that
I am supplying? Does that mean if you're
situated in that context, then if it really is a reality of
super abundance, then you can afford.
And it doesn't necessarily mean like I have to get more and then
I'll be able to afford. It means right now, right now
things are such that I can be kind to this person.
I can smile at that person. I can have some people over for
dinner and eat, you know, ramen or whatever.
Looks like Martin in the story. There's a quiet confidence to
the way that he just responds to the need.
Yeah, he's a cobbler. He doesn't have a big fancy
place. And the things that he does for
people in that story are not incredibly difficult things.
They're, you know, it's like a cup of water.
Let me adjudicate between this and get this apple for this boy
and help this lady relax. Let me, you know, get a cup of
tea for somebody. They're doable, you know.
But also, I think it's interesting because I'm struck
by how kind of unself aware Martin is in the story.
He's not thinking about himself in relation to the others.
He's actively looking to make sure that he doesn't miss the
Lord coming. And when he's doing that, he
can't help but notice these things that require attention.
And so there's some wording, the way that the story goes that you
read Matthews that like, he his hand was on the handle before he
decided to open the door. Yeah.
I thought about that too. It's so funny.
It's it's. Wonderful.
And and when you have the kind of duration that happens when
you first compare and then you make an action, that kind of
quickness of hand to a handle is not going to be present when you
have this comparison kind of like shoved into the middle of
any decision you make. And I think that's key.
Yeah, I don't want to misattribute a Lewis quote, but
was it Lewis who said humility isn't thinking less of yourself,
but thinking of yourself less? Yeah.
OK, I don't know. I don't want to be that person
who shares the meme on Facebook only to discover that it was
written by nobody. Hey, somebody, Somebody has a
snatch of wisdom. Somebody and I also want to draw
attention to one other thing before we get into the second
and third things about this smallness of soul that's
shrinking back because we can think about it in terms of of
resources. The story's fairly literal,
right There's material need and he's meeting material need with
his limited but existing material resources.
But we do this with. Bigger pictures of self worth.
And we do this with things related to talent too.
I mean, we see this in the the the creative spaces all the
time. There are so many ways in which
we can be called forth into joining the work of God in some
way, whether it is in in creating something new or
telling a story or writing a song or whatever it might be.
Putting ourselves forward essentially as as I've got
something to offer that's valuable and and we can those
are those are additional contexts right, in which we can
have this tendency to shrink back.
So we already talked about one example of the measuring
ourselves negatively against others in that context, the
singing one. The second thing that Aquinas
notes about this that feeds into the smallness of soul is the
idea that we cling to an ideal of self-reliance.
Basically say if I can't do it perfectly by myself, I won't do
it at all. So I'm I'm not enough.
And because I'm not enough, it can't possibly happen.
And then the third one is we depend desperately on others
opinions, letting worldly standards of greatness determine
what is even worth attempting. There, there's almost an erosion
of values that happens when we depend on other people's
opinions so that the goal just changes.
The one that I I'm thinking of specifically that mere Slav Wolf
in his new book, The Cost of Ambition talks about is with the
intense competition in elite education and how that shifts
the focus from learning for its own sake to mere status
attainment. And so like we've seen this with
the admission scandals and when we shift our standard from
something that is like objectively good to something as
shifting as the opinions of others, we're we're literally
shifting the trajectory and the goals of our lives.
It's not just that the motivation is tainted.
Do you find that how that plays out in either your life or the
context that you've seen? Do you find that that is colored
by the lack of face to face encounters versus face to face
encounters? Like are you more likely to give
into this smallness of soul when you're thinking about things
like something done online or something encountered online or
even just the question? I've noticed even since since
COVID, people just kind of built habits of not leaving their
house. So it takes more to get them to
leave their house and they're more, they're less likely to say
yes, and then they're more likely to cancel the minute it
kind of gets. Yeah, the minute that yeah, you
hit, you hit the discomfort point, kind of shrink back and
you send that cancellation. Sorry, can't make it.
I think, I think a lot of that is, I mean the the concept of
the root word of oh, goodness, fusillanimity and magnanimity.
Love. You.
Look at that and we're 4 for. 4 I'm working my way up to it.
I don't have the confidence yet. I'm comparing myself to you guys
and I feel like I don't have enough to pronunciation skills
to do. This.
Hey, if it makes you feel better, apparently so.
Some of the etymology is from Old French and I do like and
know some French, so maybe that's where my skills came
from. So if you do not know French,
then you couldn't excuse yourself from any requirements.
You didn't care about this word at all.
And then and then you found out it had was French in origin and
you're like, oh, let's talk. Not true, but anyway, I was just
trying to give Matthew an out, but, you know, thank you.
You're welcome. No, but for real though, you
know, I don't know which came first, the Old French or the
Latin, however likely Latin, but the animus means like soul or
like animation. You think of like something
that's alive and breathing and breath sort of living.
And so when I think about what your question, Brian, when
you're talking about is it harder to practice magnanimity
and easier to practice pusillanimity, I think I got it
when you're not encountering a face.
And I think when you said that, the answer, of course was yes.
But when he when I thought about why it was, it's it's about the
face. And I think there's something
about being face to face with someone.
First of all, there's like no excuse.
You know, you can't just like look at someone, just be like
don't want to talk. You know, you couldn't click the
ignore button on your phone. You know, you can like answer a
text later. You know, you can like look at a
Facebook message and be like, OK, I can answer that like after
dinner tonight or whatever. But when you're face to face to
someone, you're like directly met with their immediate needs,
their immediate like physical being, their animatedness, and
you are required to respond. Not not even just like morally
required. But there's something about two
animals. If you're going to like be
really like bring it down to basics, but two animals
encountering each other, they're going to react.
You know, they're either going to sit there and stare at each
other inside each other up, or they're going to flee or
interact or whatever it is. But I think there's something
where you cannot escape that interaction.
And so when you are face to face with someone who has a need,
yes, it's a lot harder to say no and makes it more in your face
to say yes, I guess. It I love I love this Christina.
Thank you so much. I, I never considered how modern
technology in the way that we interact with, most of us
interact with it is literally habituating us into shrinking
back from hard things. You know, like we get a dopamine
rush when we look at our phone and our notification.
And then when it's something hard we have to deal with, we're
like, oh, no, maybe later. Maybe when I feel like I'm in a
place where I can really interact with this well.
Yep. Which?
Which is wild. Yeah, it really is fun.
Fun fact I there. So there's there's a phrase that
I've heard a lot in reading contemporary social science
about procrastination to go back with that to that example.
And the phrase is always something like procrastination
isn't laziness, it's a discomfort response or, you
know, whatever the particular articles focusing on.
And I was thinking about that phrase just a couple days ago
and I just had the thought, isn't it still laziness?
And, and so I started, I, I started digging into both the
social science and, and older writings on sloth on acedia.
And yeah, sure enough, they dovetailed pretty neatly.
So essentially, if you say this discomfort response isn't
laziness, all you've done is just defined laziness out of
existence because the, that's, that's precisely what
procrastination is. That's precisely what the, the
more the older understanding of laziness is, it's the shrinking
back from this thing that is difficult.
And actually this smallness of soul that we're talking about is
considered a, a subset of that. It's this bigger.
It's it's a smaller piece of a bigger puzzle in which we build
habits of shrinking back from the hard thing.
I think something that people are trying to do when they call
procrastination, not just laziness, is their start.
They're trying to pinpoint something sloth that medieval
vice defines really well, which is apathy or weariness or a form
of sorrow. And, and that is a very real
thing when you are bombarded all day with too much, There is a
certain level where we do need to shrink back from some of it.
And, and so I, I think it's important to be realistic about
what is the world that we live in and how is it shaping us and
gearing us towards automatically with just the way our lives are
set up to have a tendency to be weary, to be apathetic and to
move towards laziness and shrinking back, not just because
we don't love Jesus enough, but that because we're in a
particular kind of context. Yeah.
Yeah, there. There's few things I want to see
if I can pull together. I was thinking about a a
particular philosopher, Emmanuel Levanos, and he talks about how
the face, the face is a thing that that requires a response
that is. I was still hoping you'd bring
this up, Matthew. I was almost going to ask if you
could, but then I was like. I don't know if I should.
Ask him that. I love it.
Keep going, keep going. But he, yeah, he talks about
this. Is it?
It requires a response, a responsibility.
A face calls us to responsibility.
We can't just remain neutral. We can't.
But there's something about the online face that allows us to
feel like we're responding that I feel like feels different when
you're in person. I think we can, we can actually
be shrinking back in the way that we respond online because
because we're not we because there's a kind of buffer zone
between anybody is going to respond to whatever response we
give. We can protect ourselves from
it. And so we can kind of cowardly,
like lob things out there at people and and call them
responses or, but, but that feels very different when you're
really face to face in a room with another live person.
Like you're talking about Christina, you feel, you feel
maybe some hesitation like that. Maybe I wouldn't say what I said
would say online because now I feel different that this real
person is here. And so maybe the difference
between those two, maybe there's a kind of procrastination that
actually is a kind of cowardice that is we're being trained in
by online interactions that we, if we, if we were with people in
real life, it would be, it would be training us to know how to
really show up with an actual person and, and have a, a better
response. I don't know if that's too weird
or vague to. Does that make any sense?
Let me pile on a little bit because that's really
interesting that I can think of another example of that.
So, so you used one example of sort of lobbing the grenade
where you can, you can kind of say the incendiary thing and
then run. But the other is I do this all
the time responding to a comment or a tweet or something, not
with the the good of the person I'm talking to in mind, but with
the awareness that the entire Internet is listening to what
I'm saying to that person. So so which can which can lead
me to self edit in a useful way. But more often it just causes me
to self edit way too much. Whereas if I were just having a
face to face conversation with you on my back porch, I would be
much more a, I'd be much more likely to just kind of say what
was in my mind and let you dialogue back and forth with it
as we push our way towards the truth.
But I'd also be able to spawn and respond in a way that's much
more specific to your situation. And so there's this other, it's
not, you know, necessarily cowardice, but but there's that
that type of interaction that you're describing does kind of
train you to limit the ways in which you respond and the way
it's when you you engage. I also, I think there's
something quite physical that happens when two people are face
to face and next to each other. There's more and more modern
science that talks about the molecules and the electromatic
electromagnetic fields of our bodies interacting and playing
golf with each other. So a lot of people, you know,
like the Asians have been on to this for forever and they have
all these names for that. But, but there's actually
something very scientific about it.
And so obviously when you're interacting with someone face to
face, you are feeling probably very unconsciously or
consciously, except that it's making you uncomfortable, right?
A very real interaction with this person in front of you.
Whereas if there's a screen or if there is another layer,
right, an e-mail that you're answering, it's not, it doesn't
have that same. Oh goodness, they're right here.
I need to really react and I need to do it thoughtfully.
And you know, it's going to matter what I say face to face
when someone's eyes are looking directly at you.
I think eyes really are a window into the soul.
And you can see something in somebody's eyes that you can't
catch or you can't see as well when you're on a screen or
you're sending Twitter messages or whatever.
Or even just like if we're talking about sort of a
generosity and a magnanimity and how we serve people.
Even if you were to just donate to your local food bank, you
know, it's not the same as going to the food bank, meeting those
people in the eyes, giving them soup, letting your hands touch
them, you know, letting them look at you in some of those
weird ways that make you uncomfortable and actually
respond in grace. Like those are very different
things. And I think things just are
different, like physically when you are face to face with
someone. And so I know Matthew, you've
talked a lot about like the eyes and how you can kind of see the
face of God in the eyes of someone else.
So I'd love to see if you have anything to say to to say about
that. But but yeah, that's kind of
something I was thinking of too, is it's not just cowardice.
And it is cowardice in a lot of ways, but it's also timidity.
It's being a layer removed. And I think there's a very
strong reason that our that we feel compelled to act when
there's someone standing in front of us and.
There is a real risk. I I don't want to to mitigate
that part. If we could imagine Martin
staying inside of his home and talking to these three, into
these three encounters from the safety of his home through a
window, what kind of response and what kind of interaction
would have been like? I'm I for almost all of them,
especially the soldier and the young boy.
The story goes that they are. They're expecting the T to be
taken away. They're expecting a hand to hit
them before it even is raised. There is this faith that is
required. It's it's almost like so there's
a lack of faith, there's a failure of faith when we are
pusillinis. Pusillin, Brian.
You are so. Close.
When we have a small soul, but it's even harder than that to
have magnaminity, to have a greatness of soul, we have to
have more faith and have reciprocity from God that is
outflowing from us to interact with someone who's going to have
a non reciprocal relationship. They're coming at Martin with
antagonism from the get go. He has to subdue that, and
that's a risk because they can outright reject what he gives
them and how he extends his offer.
It's much safer to stay inside and talk through the window.
And so to realize that we have to get off of our own terms, be
it with these nice parallels with modern technology or just
in our regular days, even with our family members within the
household or when we go to work, that we have to recognize there
is a risk. And we do need to have the the
faith from God to source our courage in non reciprocity
encounters. Yeah, I think that's a like
carrying Christ within us. That's that's a huge piece of
losing ourselves in how we might respond if they do reject us or
if they respond in ways that we like really make us
uncomfortable or regret what we, you know, we're going to do.
But it's that carrying of Christ within us.
I think that it's like that confidence that says, oh, but
it's OK, because this is what Christ would have done.
It doesn't matter how they respond.
You know I have given Christ to this person.
Yeah. And this whole trend of thought
that the pair of you are are digging into here is it's a good
transition to what's the antidote to all this.
And you mentioned it, Sarah magnanimity.
That's the that's the other hard to pronounce word that that the
ancients held up as, as the, the antidote to this smallness of
soul. And it's different from the the
horizontal axis of of self understanding where I'm
comparing myself to everyone else.
Instead, it's this vertical access that's axis that is is
built on my relationship with God.
I'm I'm at the same time radically dependent on God, but
also capable of incredible things through divine
participation. And Aquinas was very keen to
ensure that his his readers understood that this was in
everyone thing. This was not a personality trait
thing, just like we talked about with joviality in our last full
episode, It's it's actually something that you can aspire to
and learn. And just like the shrinking back
can be cultivated and made worse through habits.
You know, you do it once, you make it more more likely to do
it again. You do it 100 times in a row.
You convince yourself that's who you are.
Magnanimity works the same way. It's something that you can lean
into and build towards. And, you know, it's that one,
one small decision that leads to other things.
But for me, the $1,000,000 question is always, you know,
it's never should I define myself by my relationship with
God. It's always the how.
How do I get myself to that point?
And I want to spend the rest of our conversation pulling from a
a newer writer compared to Aquinas, and that is John
Witherspoon, the early American pastor, preacher, university
president. And he had, he wrote this great
sermon that delved into magnanimity.
And he he had five principles of magnanimity that I think are
worth us kind of going into sequentially.
So what does it look like to be magnanimous?
The first. Principle if you want to be
magnanimous, if you want to be generous, if you want to be
someone who just like the jovial person, channels the great joy
of of God and gives it to others.
Magnanimity channels the generosity of God and and is I'm
just a lucky fellow that gets to deliver it and gives it to
others. So principle number one is
attempt great and difficult things.
What do we do with that, Sarah? I, I as a mom, I have a lot of,
I have a lot of kid analogies in my head.
One, I guess the quote from the the concept from Montessori
being that you want your child to be at the edge of their
limitations. Yeah, known of proximal
development. Isn't that the term?
Yes. And I think of when I was a
child, how I felt really attuned to the limits of my body in
terms of what would hurt me. Like you had to fall or jump
from 5 feet and six feet to know how that feels on your bones as
a six year old or 7 year old, right?
And you start to learn, oh, I can make that jump.
Oh, I can't make that jump. Oh, I know how this is going to
hurt and I know I can handle that hurt, whereas I'm not sure
if I could handle the hurt that would come from over here.
And so being, and I know I'm using pain as an example there,
but I think it's helpful when you think of risk and to
recognize you have to do the great and hard things to
realize, oh, I actually can kind of do this.
And I think the one thing that we miss, especially with a lack
of Incarnate life, is that we miss seeing people.
We miss out on seeing people fail a lot.
We see the like polished version of them instead of seeing
someone really stink at guitar for hours on end, for years on
end before they start sounding good.
You know, we need that kind of stuff in our lives.
Yeah, it's funny because Ed Sheeran released a video of
himself when he first learned to sing.
Brian, I think you showed me this video.
And it was a shocker, I think, to a lot of people.
But even to me, you know, I was like, oh, oh, that that that's
could not even be considered singing, like, really.
And it's great, right? You want to see that.
And but because, you know, so many people and the musicians we
know are on stage or on Spotify, we don't see that that work.
And like, I'm sure that was hard for him to release, but he did.
And God bless him, for it gives the rest of us hope.
That was on a talk show and the, and the the host was was
complimenting him on his talent and he said, Oh no, this was
this was not my voice is not natural talent.
My voice is 10,000 hours of work.
That's right. That's right.
Yeah, yeah, I can think of how encouraging it was for me.
There was, there were a couple of music festivals I went to
years ago and called Escape to the Lake that under the radar I
used to put on. And there was kind of the part
of the concept of the festival was that there was no backstage.
Everything was backstage. And so you got to, I got to be
around a lot of people that I admire, a lot of musicians I
admire. And I got to see them trying to
have breakfast with their kids and I got to see them, you know,
in all these normal situations where they, they weren't on
stage and they weren't polished and they weren't perfect.
And it was so helpful to me to see like, oh, they're real
people and they're learning and they're growing and they're,
they're shooting. They're aiming at good things.
But they didn't just start there.
They, they're, they're working through processes as well.
Something else I thought of was thinking about the magnanimity.
And here goes. I'm going to try it.
OK, I got to get it in front of me.
It's pusillanimities. I.
Think I did the worst. See, we're all, we're all
working on it. We're not perfect.
We're a tempting, great and difficult thing.
We. Are we're we're trying to do the
thing that we're talking about right here.
But you know, looking at the, we've talked about this, but
the, you know, the, the prefix like paucity, you know, it's
this like shrinking or of spirit.
And then magnanimous is like the magnifying of spirit.
So I was thinking about like magnification of the soul.
The soul is growing and becoming stronger and more substantial.
So I was thinking of the vine and the branches and like, if I
don't have enough, where are my resources coming from?
And, and Jesus saying that you can do no good thing apart from
me, I don't even do any good thing apart from the Father.
And so if I'm abiding in the vine that I'm being supplied
with the thing that causes the fruit to swell, the soul to
swell and to grow on that vine. And then the sort of result of
that is that I want to become a person whose relationships,
whose face to face encounters are are feeding and enlarging
the souls of other people. You know, I want to bear, bear
good fruit. It's kind of the idea of bearing
good fruit, but this magnification of soul.
Yeah, which links to this idea like what does great mean by by
Kingdom standards, right. You're we there's there's
certain things we associate with the word great and the in the
Kingdom version they might be fairly, fairly small.
Martin's still a cobbler at the end of the story, yeah.
Brian, you shared with us the the Witherspoon sermon and the
second, the second point is to aspire after great and valuable
possessions. And I think that's what you're
talking about. Matthew is what is the valuable
thing, the Pearl of great worth, right?
Yeah, and the Bible's pretty clear on this.
It's not. The Bible doesn't, you know,
think about all these things, in particularly the writings of
Paul, in the accounts of the words of Christ and the Gospels,
they don't say don't aspire to glory, don't aspire to a great
inheritance. They say aspire to glory, aspire
to a great inheritance. It's just.
With the least of these. Yeah, well it's it's the the
inheritance is much bigger than the the non Christians around
you are actually shooting for. Or they're necessarily even
aware of. Yeah.
Yeah, I think I was reading in First Thessalonians the last
couple of days and he talks about like, what is our glory
and our joy? Like you, You are the people
that we've loved, the people that we've that we care so much
about, you know? Yeah, that always gives me heart
warming feelings too. It's like, oh, if there was
someone who encountered Jesus that way and was talking to me
and my people or my church, right?
And saying you guys are what we're striving for.
You guys are the valuable ones that God sees and God loves.
Like, what a powerful thing to say to somebody.
I mean, that's cool. I'm just saying, reading Paul,
it's amazing how much affection and love there is in in his
tone, you know? Yeah, anyway, he manages to get
very affectionate. I think about that could be
another whole topic. But you know, he was, he was a
hard ass before, you know, he was like, I am going to convict
people. I don't give compassion, I give
law. And so that, yeah, that it is
when you, when you know his history and you see where he's
coming from, like that's a pretty big shift.
But where I was kind of going with that.
I think it's a great point. Matthew is into the concept of
Witherspoon's sort of third principle, which is encountering
dangers with the resolution, the resolution being that we know
whom we're serving and we can believe the promises that he
offers about the rewards we really save and whom we are
serving. The story of Martin gives me
chills every time I hear it, but that line is very convicting.
Now, you do it to the least of these.
You do it to me. But it's also really bracing, I
think is the word I would use 'cause if you go out and you're
like, I don't know how I feel. Should I, should I approach this
person? Should Ioffer them this
generosity? Should I, you know, like roll
down my window and give money to this, you know, beggar, you
know, on the side of the freeway.
If you have that verse in the back of your head and you know
that Christ's confidence is carried within you and saying
you are serving me when you were serving these people, that gives
you all the freedom in the world.
You have that resolution. You're encountering these
situations and you know exactly what Christ says about them.
You don't have to second guess yourself.
You know what Christ would do in that moment and in being who He
would be to these people. You are doing to Him what He
would do to you, doing to others as you do to yourself.
Anyway, I think that's really, really powerful.
And that's just a verse that's been really coming back to me
over and over again. So I really liked that, that
idea of encountering this kind of situation in a danger,
knowing that there's a resolution you can count on,
even if the resolution, the first resolution is not a nice
one. Like you're nice to someone and
then they steal all your stuff. That's not so nice.
But you also know that you just loved Christ.
Yeah, well, and the, I'm noticing a pattern here that the
the principles feel like they're getting harder as we go to to
actually execute attempt to great and difficult things.
OK, maybe that's hard to start, but you can imagine yourself
sitting down with a blank piece of paper and to do listing your
way and to getting started. And so, so you have, you know,
you have that question perhaps of, you know, what Kingdom work
are you avoiding because it doesn't feel great enough or
because it feels too great. Then you have principle #2
aspire after great possessions. OK, same, same idea.
Well, you can ask these questions of, you know what,
what would I stop holding back if I knew I would inherit the
Kingdom? Or would I be fearless in
pursuit of if I didn't mistake fear for humility?
But then, yeah, you get to, it's hard enough there.
But then you get to principle 3, encountering dangers with
resolution. And you're now you're asking
yourself, you know, what battles am I shrinking from fighting
because I think I will lose something or because I think I'm
being humble or I'm afraid of what people will think?
Yeah. And then it only gets harder
from there because then you get principle #4 struggle with
perseverance. Well, to me, the way that you
can struggle with to persevere is when you, like Christina was
saying, you are braced and you have this resolution like you
need #3 before you get to #4. And one way that I really love
to think about doing something despite the risk of getting it
wrong is the concept. It's the quote from GK
Chesterton in your Orthodoxy where he's talking about
children's desire and vitality to do it again, do it again.
And he says it's possible that God says every morning do it
again to the sun. And what what changes if we see
God responding to us like that, even when we get it wrong in
this in this category, in this context, there's this beautiful
poem that's I guess anonymous, but it's called a New Leaf.
And it's all about, it's about this boy who with a quivering
lip, asks his teacher for a new sheet of paper because he
spoiled this one. And this, the last stanza of the
poem says, I went to the throne with a trembling heart.
The day was done. Have you a new day for me, dear
master, I've spoiled this one. He took my day all soiled and
blotted and gave me a new one all unspotted.
And into my tired heart he cried.
Do better now, my child. And it's that.
Do it again. Enjoy not do better next time,
but I think you need in order to go through the struggle and the
difficulty with perseverance. Yeah.
And and again, that's something you can make a habit of going,
going up with the blotted piece of paper and saying I need a new
one. I can, you can.
You can build a habit of showing up in the small things.
Yeah, I think too. The, the thing I mean I've
noticed over my lifetime is the showing up for the small things
that you really are just like, but why?
And every week you think maybe I'll quit or maybe this is the
last time I'll do this or this is really tiring or this is
really taking too much of my time and energy.
Sometimes it's, it's when you push past that point, Not
always. Sometimes you really do need to
give a certain thing up. But sometimes when you push past
that point, it's the place where the Lord says, yes, but did you
notice? And someone comes up and says
something or there is a reward that someone tells, I guess
should be I, I should just be more specific, But just say that
you've been, you know, serving a youth group, right?
And it takes so much of your time.
But one of the kids comes up and says, you know, Missus Brown or,
you know, Mr. Clark, when you were talking about this couple
months ago, it saved my life. And you know, and all of a
sudden you're like, OK, all of that was worth it.
And you start to see like the bearing, like the struggling
with perseverance, right? It's the habits that you were
talking about and the habit of showing up.
Sometimes when you push past that, the person, you know your
perseverance. It's it's where God says yes.
But let me show you what your perseverance has done for the
Kingdom. That generosity of giving of
yourself when you definitely did not want to.
Guilty as charged. All right, we got to squeeze in
our last principle. This is an easy one.
Bare sufferings with fortitude. No problem.
He's got that one covered. No, just kidding.
We've all got that bastard moving on.
No, no, not at all. What I love about this pattern,
though, this is this question of how do I train myself?
Even if you set aside the word magnanimity and you just think
about the broader word generosity.
How do I train myself in generosity?
Making a habit of attempting great and difficult things,
aspiring after real glory, great possessions, encountering
dangers with resolution, building in yourself this image
of not I am a insert negative thing, but I am someone who
responds to dangers with courage.
I'm someone who responds to struggles with perseverance.
You can, you can motivational speaker your way to that if you
want, but it's hard. What's much easier is showing up
again and again and again, and then you get to bearing
sufferings with fortitude and wait a second.
I don't want to make a habit of sufferings.
Wait, what? There I was just listening to
this interview with someone from the Voice of the Martyrs and he
put it, I'm paraphrasing him, but he put it something to the
effect of this, this woman who went to prison for going to, you
know, being persecuted and going to prison because she was
sharing Christ with people. She said it was a wonderful
time. And and you know, he talks about
like wanted to make sure the translator understood the
question and that she understood and she was answering
appropriately and she said, no, it was wonderful.
The Lord was with me and the way that he kind of put it was this.
This woman, she was willing to go where the Lord was going to
use her and she said if that's prison, then I will go there
with you. And that's just such a mind
blowing example for someone as an Eucilinomous.
But to be patient and trust that God is at work, even in
limitation and pain is to embody the courage she had and that
Joseph of, you know, has in the Genesis story that there's
nothing so bad that can thwart the living God and his plans,
you know, and and yeah, I, I think about that woman a lot and
how she responded since hearing that that interview.
That's really interesting. Well, we are winding down for
the day. Christina, Matthew, any final
thoughts? I know we kind of buzzed through
the last three relatively quickly.
One of the the one thing I thought it was, I remember
somebody asking the question kind of this connects to what
you just said, Sarah, what did the early Christians believe
that that gave them the ability to be martyred with joy?
And the guy said, no, that's the wrong question.
Not not what did they believe, but who did they love?
Said who did they love is what gave them that mag, that
hugeness of soul, that magnanimity.
And so I think I think kind of for me, it all comes back down
to this has been a big theme in my life, like who who has faced
me? In what ways have I been loved
by a soul so huge by a by a a heart so massive that that it
has begun to actually change the way I think and feel about what
it's like to be in the world and to be with other people.
And by this magnanimous God. Do you know this God who has
loved me so deeply? So I think it all comes back to
that We're loving as we've been loved.
And I was reading Exodus this morning and he talks about, you
know, remember what he's talking about in Deuteronomy, excuse me,
not Exodus, Deuteronomy. And he's saying, do these things
forgive debts at the in those years come for debt forgiveness.
And so don't don't forget that you were you were slaves and I
got you out of all that trouble. So you can afford to be good to
each other, you know. And so that's kind of my last
thought. That's beautiful.
I guess I would just end with like a note of encouragement to
our listeners, which you know, if you if this is just sounding
like a lot and a challenge, you're not alone.
So that's all of us here. We're talking about it, but we
all feel it. But but I as far as
encouragement, the thing that can help me sometimes is
remembering that even just one single soul gathered up into
Christ's arms because of something you did is worth
everything. And if we can think about our
situation and our circumstances and how we encounter people and
the acts of generosity and the fortitude and all these habits
that we build, it can sound really hard to accomplish.
It can sound really like, where do I start?
And if you just think of that one soul, who is that one soul
that Christ might be asking me to serve?
And it's worth it. You think like one soul at a
time, one person at a time. And that might make it actually
a lot easier. That's what I found anyway.
Christina I I love that and I have this poem I actually want
us to read, which I think goes beautifully with your
encouragement, though it doesn't make us look so good.
The first person, a viewpoint that the poem is in, the whole
point of generosity isn't to go and say, hey, look, look how
wonderful I am. I can do this.
In fact, if we look at Martin there, we could kind of
criticize everything he did that it wasn't enough.
He did very, very little and he gave out of the abundance of his
heart. And then this poem, the first
person viewpoint is not giving abundantly.
He's holding back. And yet in both circumstances,
the other felt loved because ultimately it was Christ who was
loving the least of these through both of them.
Matthew, do you mind reading it for us?
You just have such a wonderful voice and.
No, I'd love to. So this is called Columbia MO
slash Jerusalem by Philip Igen. Winter has settled in for its
long occupation. Each morning, what grass
survives offers the dull glisten of shaded frost.
It will be like this until April, sunlight rationed to our
latitude and clouded portions. We've all responded in kind,
trundling from garages and basements, cartoons of coats and
sweaters. As I leave the house for work,
the wind chime complaints against the stucco, having
learned from the dog which notes best convey the misery of being
left outside. Later, I head to a local deli
for soup and see Jesus, his hair whipping around his face as he
walks stiffly across the parking lot.
Plastic bags and paper plates scuff past him, getting caught
in bushes and shopping carts. Jesus is wearing jeans and AT
shirt advertising a bowling alley, long derelict.
He sees me approaching my car and takes small quick steps to
catch me, lest I get in and drive off before he can accost
me. Hey man, I hate to bother you,
but do you think you have an old shirt or anything to help with
the cold? Maybe next year I'll make it to
Cali, right? He grins at his attempt to be
disarming and glances at my coffee cup.
It's steam vanishing like a contrail.
Hold on, let me check. I say, though I know the
contents of my trunk perfectly well.
I have one of my favorite old Carhartt jackets and a purple
long sleeve flannel shirt. Demoted to rag status after a
knee injury Changed my exercise habits but not my diet.
Recently washed, it's still stained with gashes of grease
and oil from periodic engine work, but it's still in one
piece. He stays near the front of the
car and I walk around and open the trunk, where I pretend to
rummage and push the car heart under a blanket before I pull
out the shirt and close my trunk.
Sorry man, this is all I have. Jesus beams.
He reaches out slowly and taking it by the shoulder seams, holds
it up briefly. No ironing will ever remove some
of the creases. Jesus laughs and immediately
puts it on his blue fingers, struggling with the buttons.
Thanks so much, man, God bless you.
You too, I say. Have a great day.
I pause, grab my coffee, and drive away.
A week later, on the other side of town, I see Jesus pushing a
shopping cart up the sidewalk. Oh God, he's wearing it.
He sees my car and instantly recognizes me.
I'm wearing my old car heart. He waves wildly and I weakly
wave back with exaggeration. He points to a shirt and then
does a little shimmy. Even through the glass I hear
Jesus yell. Thanks again, man.
The light turns green and I wave again with a twitch of the mouth
that might have been a smile in different circumstances before
driving away any shimmies once more showing off for anyone
looking his coat of many colors. I love that touch at the end.
Wow, his coat of many colors. Yeah.
Wow. Well, on that note, I know this
is a hard one. I know we can all find ourselves
in seasons where I feel like maybe, maybe this is a season
where it's OK for me to be fed a little more than feeding.
And all of that is true. However, in general, Witherspoon
was very clear. Magnanimity is something that
not only are we all called to, but through the grace of God we
are all capable of, We can be made by God into more and more
magnanimous people. Just as with joviality, we can
learn to be more and more abundant distributors of divine
joy, with magnanimity we can learn to be more and more divine
distributors of or distributors of divine abundance.
So as we head out, I'll just leave you listeners with these
questions. Where is God inviting you to
attempt something great? What divine abundance are you
holding back because you think you don't deserve to carry it?
And where can you build the habit of showing up to be face
to face? And regardless of how many times
you miss, you make mistakes, I I pray that you hear God's kind
voice saying do it again. Try again.
Yeah, becoming a great soul that we might become great hearts and
great souls for good. Let's go do it.
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