changes V: Help wanting help

Sometimes we receive without giving anything back. And sometimes we give. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My favourite American book is “A River Runs Through it” by Norman Maclean. The Redford film is also wonderful. It is a beautiful, though sad, story about our own limitations in helping others who won't or can't accept our help. This idea is fleshed out in the conversation Norman, writing as himself, has with his father about his brother who has gotten himself into serious trouble. Norman's father tries to make sense of the elusive hope of loving someone without knowing if it does any tangible good.

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. “So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, 'sorry, we are just out of that part'.” I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn't have to be anything that big.” He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?” “She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.” “Do you think you help him?” he asked me. “I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don't know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don't even know whether he needs help. I don't know, that's my trouble.” “That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed? I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”

Sometimes, even if we want help, a human doesn't have the ability or strength to reciprocate it. If we, like Norman and his father, are the ones extending love, we might take some redemption in the idea that the limitation we experience might be like what God knows before we know His love. If we are the broken we can perhaps only be lucky enough to feel this love manifested in human form, because just maybe if we survive we will do so to know what love is better than anyone else. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I suppose this is how one might find the strength to appreciate a season of gain against a season of pain: only against a dark canvas could such light be cast. Like flowers from ash, this too might become strangely beautiful.