kindly useful
Why must we struggle through absolutely everything? Sometimes that question becomes the refrain of a day, the melancholy sigh that sounds as I run out of breath slogging up the hills, as a cramp ramps up in the side of my foot, as I stand in the kitchen cutting chicken with my sharpest knife. Pain shoots through my thumb, my palm. Lament comes real and aching. I ask God for rest–please, remembering again that it’s okay to admit–especially to God, that life hurts. I tell Him the truth, and He tells me the Truth: my yoke is easy.
“Easy?!” My knife smacks against the cutting board.
Riley pauses mid-sentence, and I sigh all over again, knowing now she’ll repeat the entire section. I hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but sometimes my conversations with God become more heated than I anticipate. She has been reading Adam’s report card aloud to me, having self-appointed to the task. I have tried to tell her I would rather absorb the information quietly and on my own, preferably not while finishing the cooking, but whenever I press the point, she feels bruised. Riley, who prefers to do everything with someone, can’t understand my need for quiet reflection.
“Ahem, OKAY,” she’d begun, spreading open the report card pages with her hands, oblivious to my eyerolls and deliberate lack of enthusiasm.
For one thing, in the exceptional world of Autism, report cards function only as necessary documentation of weaknesses and assessment of observable progress. We file them in a thick binder labeled with Adam’s name; they help us when an agency box-checker wants to verify that Adam still qualifies for assistance. Beyond that, I consider them the annual equivalent of a parent-teacher conference; they help me check my own perceptions of Adam’s situation against those of the professional people who spend time with him consistently. Report cards can be weedy, as Adam is (as we all are), difficult to interpret and muddled by the indiscernible boundaries between abilities, efforts, and challenges. In some ways, in as much as they represent a performance summary, they trouble me as a shallow way to describe a human being. I can tell you beautiful, unquantifiable things about my son that will never show up as an average GPA. To their credit, Adam’s teachers try to touch on some of these immeasurable qualities in their comments, but even so, the report feels naturally inadequate.
So Riley reads, and even though I know she does so for connection, the words run together in my mind. It feels to me like a phone book filibuster to productivity of any kind. I can’t quite think; I can’t quite finish my work.
As she resumes, I go to the sink and wash my hands. Cool water splashes on my skin, against the bottom of the stainless steel sink. I dry my hands on a towel, taking advantage of a pause to reassure, “I’m listening,” then pick up my phone to pick an argument with God over that word, easy. It’s not easy. It’s just not.
I put down the knife to pick up a sword.
As I let the Holy Spirit cut down to the core and separate me, I discover that, according to the lexicon, the word translated “easy” in the eleventh chapter of the gospel of Matthew means “usefully kind,” or in other words, it refers to what God defines as kind and thus eternally useful. Further, “We have no adjective in English that conveys this blend of being kind and good at the same time.” I think of David’s poetry, how he writes that the goodness and mercy of God will follow him always, how he writes those lines while he’s being chased by his enemies and his life seems to be falling apart. I wonder if David had been trying to capture the same tension that I now feel. It isn’t easy, but could it still, because of God, be good?
The lexicon says that, in the Graeco-Roman world, humans perverted the use of this word by using it, Xrestus, as a common slave name. They prettied up oppression by calling people kindly useful. I wrestle now with a similar idea, suddenly recognizing it as a twisted, human one. In Matthew 11, Jesus places himself not with a whip in hand but sharing the burden, even more, shouldering the greater share. I don’t know why, but God keeps drawing me back to this. As I read the lexicon, what’s even more interesting to me is that in surviving evidence of the Graeco-Roman world, Xrestus also appears often as a spelling variant for Xristos, or Christus, which became our word Christ. Jesus the Messiah is the good and better servant; his suffering was terrible and yet kind, eternally useful, and supremely gracious to me. From that context, I can acknowledge that life can be hard and hurting and still happen at the intersection of God’s kindness and goodness. The burdens I bear with Christ become eternally useful, too. That’s God’s kindness to me.
I put down my phone and pick up my knife, returning to the chicken, the cooking, the work, the listening. The effort isn’t easy, but it does come as the kindness and goodness of God to my family.
“…and in life skills, Adam’s score is,” Riley drones on, and I wonder where God would rank my GPA if He assessed spiritual life that way. I feel suddenly thankful that eternity rests on Christ’s performance and not on mine, that Christ has really done all the work, even in me.
