Peaches

I don't know how it started or why. But when Popa called me "Peaches" as a child, I answered and never gave it a second thought. It's still the name with which I sign his birthday cards.

Ukrainians like to say that they are like coconuts, hard on the outside, unfriendly, but once you crack them open they become sweet and milky, pure, open. In reverse, they say Americans are like peaches, soft and gooey on the outside, kind, but with insides incased in a hard shell, impenetrable.

These two stories didn’t connect until I went to Passion 2011. I am a peach (no pun intended ;)), seemingly sweet and open but firmly resistant to personal relationship. I can’t explain why, I have no damaging past experience to blame, just my pride. I’m “the kind of person everyone speaks well of but no one remembers to talk to.” Why? Because pride scorns vulnerability. The plain truth is I cared more about the person I presented than being personable and allowed pride to suffocate my life. C.S. Lewis describes it beautifully in The Four Loves:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be
wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

This carried into my relationship with Jesus. I’ve always had a hard time with Jesus. God as Lord and Father never bothered me; I was safe and comfortable with Him under those names, but Jesus wanted to get too close for comfort. In my sinful foolishness I thought if Jesus discovered just how wretched I am then he would discard me. Jesus died for my sin, so aren’t I a burden to him? Even if he did love me, it must be due to his obligation to goodness and not real love. Clearly I refused to know the truly overwhelming love of Christ! His love for me is not related to my merit or even my love for him. “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). At Passion, Jesus reminded me that his love for me has nothing to do with the broken human emotion I called love. Again, Lewis puts it beautifully,
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing- or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God- the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven into the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up.

Why? Because loving and perfecting us glorifies the Father. Jesus didn’t die because we were worth it, he died because He was worth it, and that includes loving us in ways we cannot fathom.