Gate (9781441240569)

by Stouten, Dann A.

  Ben wrote the Hansons up, filled out the order form, the insurance form, and the shipping forms, and they gave him a five hundred dollar deposit. In cash. He finished the deal up after the office was closed, so he wrote them a receipt and pocketed the money, intending to turn it in the next morning.

  To celebrate the sale, after work he started buying rounds at O’Brien’s, and he used some of the deposit money to cover his tab. Ben and Mary Alice were still married then, and when he got home late smelling like beer, she got after him.

  “Where have you been?” she snapped. “And what were you doing? No good, I’m sure of that!”

  “Shows you what you know,” he said. “I had a drink with a customer who owed me some money!” And with that he threw what was left of the deposit money at her. The next day he realized he had to make up the money, so he hit me up for a loan. Said he wanted to buy Mary Alice something for her birthday. If he’d have just told me the truth I’d have covered him, but Mary Alice and I were like oil and water, and I wasn’t about to help him do something nice for her.

  Ben never did come up with the five hundred dollar deposit, and when the Hansons came in and gave him a check for the balance, he stuck it in his top desk drawer and forgot about it. A couple months later I got a phone call from Lars Linblad at the Volvo Factory in Gothenburg telling me that someone named Hanson was there claiming that he ordered a car from us but they didn’t have any record of it. I told him I didn’t have any record of it either, but when Lars said that the salesman’s name was Ben, I told him I’d call him back. I marched into Ben’s office breathing fire, and he admitted what he’d done and gave me the Hansons’ check, promising he’d make good on their cash deposit. Feeling like I had a little egg on my face, I called Lars back and said to give them a car. The only problem was, the Hansons had ordered green, and the only wagons they had at the factory with American equipment were turquoise.

  “Give ’em a turquoise one,” I said, “and tell them I’ll have a green one for them when they get back to the States.” I was sure we were going to have to eat the mileage and the shipping on the turquoise one, but somehow Ben had it sold before it landed on a boat in Baltimore. His commission on the wagon and a Mercedes coupe more than covered the five hundred, and Al told me to lighten up.

  “Don’t be so hard on the kid,” he said. “No harm no foul, these things happen.” They happened a lot to Ben, but he had a way of squirting out of trouble.

  A few years later when Al remarried, he asked Ben to be his best man at the wedding, and that’s when our friendship tailed off a bit. In Al’s mind I’d dropped a peg or two; Ben had taken my place, and Al welcomed him home like the prodigal son.

  Marriage agreed with Al. It took the edge off him. His wife, Kristen, was a good woman, and I think loving her mellowed him a bit.

  Years later, when Al learned he was dying of cancer, we got together and wrestled with the whys of life. Kristen called me when Al was close to death, and I was holding his hand when he breathed his last breath. At his funeral I said that according to the Bible, “God doesn’t judge by outward appearances but by the condition of our hearts” (see 1 Sam. 16:7). And that’s how I knew Al was in heaven, because I knew his heart.

  ———

  “Bet you’re surprised to see me here,” Al said.

  “No,” I replied, “not in the least. You were always more religious than you let on, soft and tenderhearted, like your mother.”

  “She said to say hi,” he said, getting a little emotional. “And you could say that she’s the reason I’m here. Now come on,” Al insisted. “Let’s take a ride. I think better when I’m driving.” The tires spit gravel and dust as we exploded out of the driveway. It had been a while since I’d ridden in a car that’s sole function was to go fast. We talked about the car, the old days, Ben, and the people we used to know for about a half hour, and then Al shifted the conversation away from small talk.

  “Look,” he said, “you and I were always pretty straight with each other, so I’m going to come right out with it. I always felt a little awkward talking about religion with you. It’s not that I didn’t believe in God, because I did. I just didn’t like him very well, or to be more exact, I didn’t like his brand of justice. You see, when I was eight years old, my dad died, and I prayed that God would do something. I believed in miracles, and each night I prayed for one, but God never delivered. One day after church I asked the preacher why, and he said, ‘God has his reasons. He’s always fair, and you must never question him. Besides,’ the preacher said, ‘he’s not a pull toy on a string. He doesn’t follow you, you must follow him.’

  “I took that to mean that my father’s death was somebody’s fault, a payment of some kind, retribution for my sins, or my brother’s sins, or God only knows what. The scales of God’s justice had been balanced by my father’s death. That may not have been what the preacher meant, but that’s how I interpreted his words. After that, I never had much use for organized religion.”

  Al continued. “Evidently, it was also God’s will for us to sell off most of the family farm and live hand-to-mouth. My mother worked her fingers to the bone, but each Sunday when they’d take a collection for the poor, she’d put a few pennies in the plate. The problem was, we were as poor as anybody I knew, but we never saw a dime of that collection money. So growing up, I learned two things: you can’t trust preachers, and you can’t trust God to do what you think is right.

  “After that, I decided I’d better look out for myself. I spent my whole life trying to make enough money so that when we got older, Jane and I could enjoy life. But when I finally had the money, the one person I wanted to enjoy it with was gone.

  God doesn’t always answer our prayers as fast as we’d like.

  “For a few years there, I was so angry about it that I’d go over to that mausoleum, sit in the chair by the little brass plate that bore her name, and question God’s fairness. ‘Why Jane?’ I’d ask. ‘And why now, when we had so much to live for?’ Why would a loving God take a mother from her children when they needed her most? Why would he take her from me when I needed her most? Was this my fault? Was God balancing his scales again?

  “He didn’t answer my prayers as fast as I wanted, so I answered them myself,” Al said. “I came to the same conclusions I’d come to as a boy in Indiana: either God’s not really there, or he doesn’t care, or he and I had a very different understanding of what’s fair.

  “So now imagine how I felt when one day, out of the blue, you announce that you’re going to pull a rich young ruler on me and sell everything you had to go and follow Jesus. Can you imagine how that made me feel? The God I was mad at was the same God you were going to give your life to. To be honest, I felt a little betrayed.”

  When Satan is raising havoc in our lives, we sometimes blame God.

  “I’m sorry, Al,” I replied. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “I know that. And there’s no reason to be sorry. I was wrestling with some pretty dark stuff back then, and I’m the one who chose not to talk about it. When Satan is raising havoc in your life, you sometimes blame God. But now I have to talk about it, because I’m not the only one who’s had those kinds of thoughts about God. Besides, in your line of work, you need to know what people are thinking.”

  We had pulled off the road into a pay-to-park lot somewhere in a big city. “I understand that I’m supposed to get you dinner,” Al said. “I never was much of a cook, so I thought we’d get a pie.”

  I hadn’t noticed until then, but as I looked around, it looked to me like we were in Chicago, a few blocks off Michigan Avenue, maybe on Rush Street.

  Wherever we were, the streets were busy. People were moving along the sidewalk in swarms. Buses, bicycles, big cars and small ones wound their way through the city as taxi drivers honked their horns. Little boutique shops lined the streets, and a multitude of languages and music poured out into the street as we passed by. It was an eclectic symphony of sights and sounds
.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Jerusalem. The new one.”

  People were smiling at each other, laughter filled the air, and in the distance you could hear a street musician’s jazz trumpet play “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  “We’re here,” said Al, ducking in a doorway. The neon sign in the window said “Momma Lacarri’s Pizza.” Inside, the waiter in a crisp, white shirt and black bow tie showed us to a table.

  Al ordered. “We’ll have a deep dish with sausage, pepperoni, red peppers, and mushrooms. And bring us a couple of Cokes, please.”

  “How do you know what I want?” I asked.

  “Trust me,” he said, “you’ll like it.” And he was right. We talked about the old Chicago and the new Jerusalem and the excitement of the city, and during our conversation, Al ordered two slices of cheesecake for our dessert.

  “I don’t think I can eat another bite,” I said.

  “There’s always room for cheesecake,” Al replied. And somehow we managed to eat most of it.

  We walked around the city for an hour or so, window-shopping, taking in the street entertainment, and buying a bag of caramel corn for the ride home.

  As we started to drive out of the city, the sun was setting behind us, and the conversation turned again to the fairness of God.

  There’s evil in the world, but without it there’d be no possibility of us choosing good.

  “Listen,” said Al. “What I didn’t understand, and what you need to understand, is that the preacher was right, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. Good and evil are sprinkled on every life like salt and pepper. We can’t avoid it, and God doesn’t always cause it. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes it’s our fault—we bring things on ourselves. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but it’s a fact. There’s evil in the world, but without the possibility of it, there’d be no possibility of you and me choosing good. The one comes with the other. Each of us is born with the potential for good and evil.”

  “I get that,” I said. When I was working at the state prison in Easton, I saw more evil than I ever wanted to, but even the worst offenders had a spark of good. You’d see it when they talked about their mothers or their girlfriends or even God, but the good was always overshadowed by evil. And the thing I wanted to know was this: Was that always their fate, was it the hand they were dealt at birth, were they simply born bad, or did they have a choice?

  Reading the Bible doesn’t make you immune to temptation.

  Al went on. “Imagine for a moment that there are two dogs standing beside you, a white one on your right and a black one on your left. Each dog has an insatiable appetite. Each and every one of us is born with both of them. As pups, they played with us in our cribs, and as we grew, they grew. Never once, not even for a moment, have they ever left our side. They are fiercely loyal, and outside of heaven’s gate, they’ll be our faithful companions till death. But don’t reach out to pet them, and don’t expect them to fetch your slippers, because these dogs will never be domesticated.

  “Their names are Good and Evil, and sometimes it feels like we’re a rubber chew toy and they’re playing tug-of-war with us in their teeth. Each of us has felt their push and pull at some time in our lives, and most of us constantly drift back and forth between the two. Even Saint Paul struggled with it. ‘The good I would I do not,’ he said in Romans, ‘but the evil that I would not, that is what I do.’

  “Like I said, we’ve all been there, and we’ll never totally control them, but we can control what they eat. Now pay attention, because this is important. Here’s how it works: Feed the one and he’ll grow strong; starve the other and he’ll grow weak. The one we feed will always be bigger than the other, but we get to choose which one.”

  “Listen, Al,” I said, “I know all about the ugly underbelly of evil. I’ve studied it in depth. It was even the subject of my thesis. I tried to integrate what the Bible says about good and evil and what psychologists know to be true about human behavior.”

  “When the stuff of God becomes an academic exercise”—Al held up a finger in warning—“you’re in trouble. Reading the Bible doesn’t make you immune to temptation, and when you start to think that it does, that’s when you’re most vulnerable.

  “One of the most effective cards in the Fallen One’s deck is self-righteousness. When he can get us to busy our lives with the rituals of religion, then we’ve unknowingly joined the conspiracy. When he can get us to think of prayer, or Bible study, or giving as things to do on the holiness checklist, he has us where he wants us. And it won’t be long before we start to think that we’re special, better than everyone else. And believe me, that’s a problem. Pride has pushed more than one person away from heaven’s gate. God wants us to infect the world with his kingdom and kindness, not isolate ourselves from it. In fact, isolation is another one of the Fallen One’s favorite tools.

  “If we had the time, I’d take you to the edge of the great abyss. There, we could stand on the edge and look across at hell itself. No one is allowed to go across, but we can look across, and what we’d see is the torment of isolation. Everyone there is locked away in eternal solitary confinement. They’re separated from God, from the people they love, and from everything that matters. There is no laughter to drown out the constant wail of loneliness, no gentle breeze to cool the sweltering sun, no music to soothe the troubled soul, no flowers to sweeten the foul air, and no food to satisfy the hunger for what might have been. There is nothing there but a sea of shadowy faces drowning in the eternal darkness of regret.

  “If people really knew what waits there, they’d avoid it at all costs, but they don’t understand. Christians talk about heaven, but we’re squeamish when it comes to hell. We’ve bought into the lie that such uncomfortable subjects must be avoided, or at least sugarcoated, in the name of evangelism. Like I said, the Fallen One is good at this game. The black dog may rest, but he never sleeps, and he’s always hungry. I know this makes you uncomfortable, and it should. But remember, it happened to your friend, and it could happen to you too.”

  “My friend?” I said, somewhat surprised that Al knew what had happened. James Harper had been a very prominent figure in the psychiatric community and the Christian community. The day before his wife discovered his affair, he had been speaking at a conference for Christian broadcasters. Everything had been kept hush-hush. As far as I knew, no one but James, his wife Kathy, and I knew anything about it. He dropped out of the public eye, and the two of them were trying, with my help, to put the pieces of their marriage back together again.

  “You know who I’m talking about,” Al said. “He was your teacher, your confidant, someone you looked up to, respected, admired, even envied. Clearly, he was a tool in God’s hand. Because of him, a lot of people have put their trust in Jesus. He soothed their worries, comforted their sorrows, taught them how to live godly lives, and extended God’s grace when they didn’t. Everyone who knew him would say that he was a good man, but secretly, in the kennel of his soul, he’s been feeding the black dog.

  Surprising as it might be, the world’s natural drift is toward evil, not good.

  “The Fallen One served his kibble one bit at a time, in an online chat room, as his computer screen dimly lit the darkness. And as he did, the black dog slowly grew. On the other side of the kennel, the white dog yelped out a warning, hoping that he’d be fed instead. But he was ignored. Like DL, and Sampson, and God only knows how many other good men, he fed his lust a little bit at a time. And each time he did, he told himself that he was still in control. He thought he could handle it, but of course, he couldn’t. Typed words and temptations spilled into telephone calls, and eventually there was a clandestine rendezvous.

  “That, of course, was later followed by guilt and pleas for grace, but the black dog was still hungry. There were more typed words, more telephone calls, and more submission to temptation. As it always does, infidelity led to deceit, but even that would not curb the blac
k dog’s appetite. His hunger was not satisfied until it erupted in scandal, disappointment, and shame. And the point I’m trying to make is that nobody wakes up and says to himself, ‘I think I’m going to go out and ruin my life today.’ But it happens.”

  Al continued. “You see, contrary to popular belief, the world is not inherently good. In fact, the opposite is true. The earth is the Fallen One’s turf, and it has been for a very long time. Surprising as it might be, the world’s natural drift is toward evil, not good, and theologians have been telling us that for years. Augustine called it original sin, Calvin coined the term total depravity, and in Galatians Paul said, ‘The sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other.’

  We should try to infect the world with goodness whenever and wherever we can.

  “What they’re really saying is what I’ve been trying to tell you: humanity is all part of a corrupted gene pool. It’s the poisoned fruit from Adam’s tree. Left to our own devices, we’ll persist in destructive behavior. We’ll cheat on our taxes, we’ll waste time at work, we’ll lust after our co-workers, we’ll snap at the people we love, and we’ll question God’s goodness and love. And every time we do, we feed that black dog, and the world gets a little darker. Like I said, life is all about choices. Some good, and some not so good, so be careful. Be careful what you choose to do.”

  We pulled into the driveway, and Al put his hand on my shoulder. “That’s what cancer taught me,” he said. “And this is what I have for you: Sometimes things happen that we don’t understand. When they do, we can shake our fist at God or we can lay the blame at Satan’s door. Do the latter. Feed the white dog. Repay evil with good. Infect the world with goodness, whenever and wherever you can. In the end, that’s what really matters.”