Inky Orchard

My heart physically hurts today. It feels like it has been through a fistfight… pummeled by a truck.

Yesterday I made the mistake of following my curiosities where they wanted to go. I seem to have a slight fascination with aberrations in human behavior… the French Revolution, the minds of criminals, that Taboo show on National Geographic. This tendency of mine was solidified last year when I found myself at home watching a tape I borrowed from Coach Todd’s psychology class. On it were a number of face-to-face interviews with criminals. Murderers. Talking about what they had done.

But none of these things measures up to what happened yesterday.

I will not go into the details… because the details are what I am trying to banish from my memory cells. And bringing up the actual discovery would contradict the point of this writing. I do not want anyone to read about this murderer. Not if I can help it.

In talking to my mom last night… after hours of tears and clutching Tuter, recuperating with my favorite song and Margaret Cho’s impersonations of her mom… my mother brought up a good point. She mentioned that I am kind of outside our culture’s desensitizement toward the sick, scary, and evil. Our movie rental stores are flooded with thriller horror movies – artificial scenes of brutality. Entertainment to most. The movie boxes alone keep me away.

I was asked today why I reacted so strongly… why it took me so long to recover. Why. I suppose it boils down to the fact that it was real… there is no convincing illusion here. What I read really happened. The evil there… it frightened me. It sickened me. And I can’t imagine it away.

We need to protect our minds. You can’t recover innocent territory. The space in my head occupied by that crime will never be completely open again.

Yet.

What has my brain spinning the most is thinking about grace. The homeless guys I hang out with Sunday nights have some rough struggles just like me. Some of them smoke marijuana. Some are addicted to alcohol. Some are convicted sex offenders. They are not your typical “clean & pretty” church goers. But they are loved by God. The same grace that is saving me is offered to them as well, no more, no less. And even the most twisted murderer I have ever heard about… he is not excluded from that. Seeing the big picture just blows my mind. Sure, grace sounds nice when it is your own. We think we are pretty clean for sinners. But – God gives us more grace. He has extended it to the farthest reaches of humanity. To the most evil criminal. He is not beyond grace. That … well, that same grace is my own. For one, that makes my sin all the uglier, and two – what a radical thing Jesus has done! Salvation is not for the clean. It’s for the dirty. The sick. The twisted. Just like me. Just like him.