Holy Revenge

We live in a hair-trigger world. The wrong word, the wrong tone, heck – the wrong shift in your facial expression can get you killed. Revenge is swift for the wrong spoken word, the wrong post or tweet.

With instantaneous news, information and entertainment, patience is a rarely demonstrated virtue. But that’s exactly what God commands—waiting and patience.

Waiting is mentioned 223 times in the Bible. Wait on the Lord, the Lord will fight for you. It’s really hard to wait when you’re hurting.

But here’s a little secret: when you’re hurting, Jesus is hurting too. If you’re His, He says that you will be blessed when you’re wounded for doing right, or for doing nothing wrong at all. For people like me who seek God first, with all that I am, in good times and bad, God promises to catch all of our tears in a bottle, to make things right, in His time, in His way.

How so? He fights for you.

Call it holy revenge. And though patience has not always been easy for me, I’ve seen Him wage and win battles for me, time and time again. It’s one of His ways of giving me the spear, when I let Him wield the weapon. And the way He wins is never in the way I imagined. I just have to leave a little room for His revenge.

In the crevice in my brain, where I win every argument, where my logic is always flawless, where I fight with my words, my tongue is as much a sword as the Word of God. No stutters or stammers, no anxiety to empty my brain of any thought, except to flee. But that’s not my real brain. My real brain gets tied in a hopeless knot in times of intense stress. Anxiety is often not a very helpful friend.

So the idea that one of the words God impressed on me for this year is spear—a weapon that can or should be easily be used offensively, not just defensively—is somewhat funny, and definitely ironic. But my God fights for me.

Photo credit: Ricardo Cruz on Unsplash.

Here are just a few of the moments of holy revenge my Lord has worked for me. Interwoven with each of these is, for me, a sense of wonder. But then, most encounters with the power of God leave me awestruck.

In middle school, I was made fun of by the popular girl Shirley, in front of the whole classroom. She and her closest friends in high school and beyond would never talk to me. With my faster-than-a-nanosecond social vision, I could see that she and several of her friends thought less of me, without them ever saying a word. Their refusal to initiate any interaction with me said enough.

So in my turbulent mid-twenties, when out with friends, I sat down at a table in a bar with Shirley and two other women I knew. Several attractive young men who I knew came over to talk to me – not them – one by one. Seeing the looks on the faces of these haughty young women, I knew I’d seen something amazing transpire. Did it rise to the level of miraculous? No, don’t be silly.

But I’ve seen this sort of thing again, and again, and again.

Like the time that a former co-worker said to my face, “Why did they pick YOU to lead the project?” It would have felt better if I’d heard his comment as gossip. I responded calmly that my boss felt I was the best qualified, and soon politely excused myself from his presence. Several years later, when I had earned a couple of promotions up the corporate food chain, his conversations with me took on a decidedly different tone. Miracle? Heck, no. But my God fights for me.

When one of my children struggled with too many things—socially, emotionally and with schoolwork—year after year after year, and some family clearly expressed that our parenting skills were to blame, the autism diagnosis was one part grief and another pure vindication. But nothing miraculous in that. Of course not.

My child on the spectrum endured teachers who said things like “you’re an awful student,” and enticed my child to lie, so he/she would run the risk of expulsion three months before graduation. And then there was the teacher who failed him/her on the year-long senior project – giving 50% credit for ‘diligence.’ When we challenged this grade, the teacher even stated in writing that my child’s support plan – weak though it was – didn’t apply to her class.

So the depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies in my child that I recognized—courtesy of my super speedy social vision—all those symptoms that drove us to a psychiatrist and were ultimately diagnosed and treated correctly: I recognized God’s hand. And I wished I had pushed back against the advice of our former pediatrician, who several years earlier, dismissed my question of whether or not my child should be seen by a psychiatrist. Rudely, and with clear with disdain, I might add.

Jesus revenge.

When my child was diagnosed with a big mess of pyschiatric, emotional and physiological conditions that were gradually untangled with the help of a kind and listening psychiatrist, the right supplements and medications, and a skilled counselor, there was victory. And gratitude to my Lord. When the diagnosis for autism came, I reached out to a school leader to tell her what happened. I never got a response. I felt confident this leader never shared with any other teacher or staff.

But my God fights for me.

So the following year, in the one and only opportunity to interact with former teachers in a way that I never imagined would be possible, I was able to share ‘the rest of the story’ that had happened with my child, after graduation. The two teachers I spoke with had always been kind and compassionate, to me and my family. And I felt confident that in the weeks to follow, news would gradually, and not maliciously, spread that the child that several teachers had openly disdained, teachers we paid tuition to teach and nurture our children, learned the truth. My child wasn’t just ‘lazy,’ or a ‘terrible student,’ or just a liar.

Maybe this is the spear that God gives – the spear that He Himself holds.

My God fights for me. And He fights for you too.