Lies My Brother Told Me
I don’t think I was yet in kindergarten when my brother told me that he was going to fold me up like a towel. Actually fold me up. In my pre-operational stage of cognitive development, I kept trying and trying to wrap my mind around how he could do that to my body and what it would feel like to be folded into halves and thirds and put under the bathroom sink. I fully believed he was capable of human towel origami.
Playing church with my towel-folding brother. My sister is singing into a candy cane microphone while my dad and grandfather look on.
I promise you that my brother isn’t a pathological liar, but clearly I hadn’t figured out how to disregard his threats and dishonesty when I went on a hike in an Illinois state park with him several years later. We took our bikes over the rough terrain and wondered about the various animals that might inhabit the woods. Being four years my elder and always smarter than me, Micah knew the type of wildlife which took up residence in state park woods. “You know they have tigers and lions in these woods, don’t you?” I’m not sure if I protested or not, but it took little convincing for me to fully believe that the great cats of Africa and India had made their way to Illinois and were lurking close by to the two campsite stragglers. I stood on the trail and refused to go on, but was too terrified to go back. I did the one thing a nine-year-old girl knows how to do in moments of dire danger.
I screamed.
I screamed in hopes that my brave, Quaker-roots, never-even-killed-a-deer family, would hear us back at the campsite and come to help rescue and protect us from the crouching felines.
No such luck.
Family devotions, back at the campsite — never suspecting that wild cats were on the loose.
Perhaps you’re laughing at my childhood inability to discriminate truth from lies. Perhaps you understand why, as an adult, I have trust issues. But before you laugh too loud, you might best look at your own journey and note all the moments when you’ve believed ridiculous lies that have bred fear and distrust.
We all grieve at the scene of a snake subtly slithering in the foliage of a green, forbidden tree. We long to step across the chasms of space and time and scream at Eve as she stands in the shade between the two trees — the Tree of Life on her one side, the Tree of Knowledge and death on her other (Genesis 2:9). And she lingers and listens to the lie, “Is that what God really said?” Mistrust is bred and Eve plucks the forbidden fruit.
We’ve known this story all our lives, yet we find ourselves in the same position — standing in the shade between two opposing forces. Sometimes we paint the good and the bad with a wide chasm separating the two. But I’ve found that my hardest battles have not been fought in store aisles or big cities with flashing lights or in atmospheres that were Satan’s playground. My hardest battles have been fought around altars and on church pews and at camp meetings and on church platforms. And the ceaseless lies that have been hissed in my ear and the years of distrust and doubt I’ve lived through have led me to believe that the lies I’ve bought into have given birth to the fear that had me fettered.
And Satan slithers close to the Tree of Life. His lies linger at the edges of our houses of worship and lap at our institutions of training. He tells our young people a lot of half-truths about Who God is.
I know this because he’s lied to me. And I listened for way too long.
Satan tells us that God does not hear us pray. He tells us that, yes, God is omniscient and all-powerful and transcendent, but what if He isn’t imminent? What if He isn’t concerned with the daily and infinitesimal and insurmountable? Sure God knows. Sure God is able to do something. But does He care enough to do so? He tells us we have to work to earn God’s mercy and approval and that no amount of working can help us quite measure up.
We live with fear and anxiety because we live with lies.
Satan is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). Nothing can change that. But I can change me. I can move closer to the Tree of Life and taste its sweet, satisfying fruit.
And fear’s grip loosens and the lies lose their luster and this fruit is so sweet.
