The Ticket.
Remember that speeding ticket the officer gave me in response to Phil’s… outspokenness? I pondered that ticket for a long time. The rest of that night was a write-off, even coffee. I kept looking at the ticket. I’d fold it up and stash it in my wallet only to pull it out five minutes later. I kept it at hand for weeks afterward. I still have it. Now it’s secured with other mementos from the past. From time to time I take it out and read it again. Simple advice that may seem cliché to some, but it sentenced me to life.
“Don’t fall into love. Let Love lift you. If truth sets us free how much more should true Love? It’s the look you had in your eyes that paid for this ticket. I understand your hurry; I’ve been married twenty-one years to the love of my life and no law could have kept me from her. It didn’t have to. The law could not keep us apart (1 Cor. 13). The sooner you tell her what you have to say, the sooner you’ll be less inclined to be in such a hurry, and more apt to squeeze every moment from every second she’s beside you and, consequently, the more you’ll see the sense in the good that presently seems obtrusive. This is your ticket of proof of Love’s redeeming nature. Hurry up and slow it down.”
I personally feel safer with officers like him patrolling the streets. Not because he let me off the fine and points… ok, maybe that plays an insignificant bonus in the story, but because I know what he fights for and I can believe in the law he upholds and the principle that is its foundation.
If it gives you a sense of justice or retribution I have been the recipient of speeding tickets since and have never tried to use love as an excuse. I don’t think of love as an excuse. I don’t think there are excuses in love. You can’t assign blame for an action motivated by love, because real Love is a God-given grace, undeserving and largely inexpressible… it upholds the highest, purest standards; no evil can be spawned by a truly loving design. On the flip side however, wherever the capacity to love exists, a choice has been extended, thus it is only through the choice available in the execution of love that evil is possible.
It all goes back to Eden. Regardless of your take of the validity of the story, the insight into human nature is so beautifully woven into the illustration of humanity’s struggle with will, that I can’t help but bring it up. But that last coffee with Frosty, I didn’t even have to bring it up. He read the ticket and his first words required no explanation; we’d been through this before.
“We were set up.”
Phil couldn’t get beyond this idea that the Creator of this depiction was a sadistic domino mastermind who after setting up his pieces, waited for the inevitable bumping of the table that would send them toppling over, and was thereby the cause of all the crap in the world… and why serve such a being?
“Without the facet of choice, love is impossible; God is love, so the ability to choose was a necessary aspect of God’s perfect creation.”
“That’s a cop out so you’ll be justified in your miserable life of constraint and moderation… I know, I grew up in it, I’m affected too.”
“I think it would be more comforting to dismiss it all as nonsense and live without the burden of consequence, either by a lack of authority, or the one I create for myself…”
“There aren’t any absolutes, Fost. No capital T truth.”
“Is that an absolute?”
“Shut up.”
I think we usually ended in stalemates, one telling the other to shut up.
“Not this time Phil, this is important. This is love and death… this is the essence of life… the gift of will and the grace to exercise it and choose between right and wrong. This is what makes it all worthwhile, the pain, because it opens the door to the possibilities of acquiring real joy and peace and comfort.”
He let that sink in.
“How.”
“It gives every decision we make power through our intrinsic worth as humans being.”
“Human beings.”
“No, humans being. We’re actively responsible in our fates through our being, whatever we may be.”
He looked at me and tried to quell whatever it was that I stirred up in him. He failed; it boiled over. I probably looked too smug to let it slide.
“That’s too much.”
“Too much what?”
“Too much hypocrisy from a guy who’ll sit through the movies you sit through and listen to the music you listen to and worst of all sit idly by musing over a stupid ticket while the girl of his dreams is off doing God-knows-what with God-knows-who God-knows-where by whatever grace God has bestowed upon this God-forsaken world with this so-called gift of choice. It’s too much.”
Ouch.
“Shut up.”
We passed some minutes in silence before he asked me that question that incessantly echoes throughout my mind as the big one where I dropped the ball.
“What would you die for, Foster?”
Sometimes I feel like a question asked is a trigger pulled. Words have power. I don’t know how much and that’s why I’m so wary of what I communicate vocally. I always made it a point to watch my mouth and speak as honestly as I can. There are degrees of honesty and I have no difficulty in telling people what I think, it’s sharing what I feel that kills me. I lied when I spouted off all of that rhetoric garbage about abstractions and their worth only because it was a plausible emotional deception. I should have just said what I felt like saying. I find myself in that predicament far too often.
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