A Letter to Kimberly Smith (Assignment)

This letter was assigned as a response to this book:

Link

The prompt was "Write a letter to Kimberly Smith, the author of Passport Through Darkness that reflects on what you have learned about faith, hope, and love through her story. It is meant to be a significant reflection on what this book compels you to consider about how one lives out faith, hope, and love and the cost for doing so."

Dear Kimberly Smith,

When I picked up your book, I was expecting to trudge through yet another artifact of Christian pulp. I was expecting to read stories about miraculous healings, knowing that the unhealed were omitted. I was expecting to find allusions to hardships, but nothing more emotionally difficult than I would find in my aunt’s Daily Inspiration for Christian Mothers devotional. I was very wrong. Before I continue any further I must apologize for judging your book based on my prejudices, and I must thank you for allowing me (along with however many other people have read this book) to follow along with you, vicariously encountering a kind of darkness that most of us have only heard of in whispered implications in newspaper headlines.

A bit of my story: I grew up wanting to be a missionary. This desire led to the consumption of enough Christian pulp novels to make a body sick. As I grew older I began to see a distinction between the stories that missionaries told in their books and powerpoint presentations, and the stories they told when you got them alone. In 2009 I was given the opportunity to interview a number of missionaries all around SE Asia, and my suspicions were confirmed. Suffering for Christ feels the same as suffering for anything else. Depression on the mission field is just as debilitating as depression at home. Thirst, hunger, grief, pain, death; these things do not become more bearable or less penetrating because a person carries a Christian standard. This is the secret that the missionaries imparted to me, and this is the secret that much of the Church simply isn’t interested in.

The Church wants those it sends out to come back with stories like the ones in Acts, which is to say stories they’ve heard before, stories that take place in a different kind of place and time entirely, stories that have already been interpreted by other people in ways that make us feel good, Christian pulp. And, although my cynicism must be coming through quite clearly, I cannot blame them. Although nothing in your book was new to me in a technical sense, it was a very hard thing to read. I live in the information age and my generation is especially awareness-minded. I knew what was out there in the darkness. Thing is, it’s much harder to know who is out there in the darkness. Not cognitively, but emotionally, relationally. It’s hard to see the faces of suffering innocents. It’s hard to hold someone else’s story and feel helpless.

The Church wants its Christian pulp because the truth is hard. We want our faith, hope, and love without the difficulty. We want the light of the world without the uncomprehending darkness. I really get it. Christ would be much easier to accept if he had expelled death and pain from existence, rather than dying painfully. Your story has reaffirmed what I have suspected about the truth of the Gospel. That it is a deadly thing; that the love of Christ, when lived into by Christians, can and will lead us to torture and death the same as it did Christ. Love drives us into the gates of Hell, or the darkness, or the depths of human suffering. Whatever you call it, we cannot go there voluntarily without the imperative of love. Once in the darkness, it seems like we are stripped of everything safe and comforting. All we have left are these ideals: the imperative of love, the bold foolishness of hope, the brief respite of faith.

If we are confronted with the true cost of our faith we must feel pain that is not our own and make it a part of ourselves. We must be confronted by faces that we spend so much energy hiding from and identify with their tears. Who in their right mind wants that? Who in their right mind willingly gives up comfort and wealth for pain and poverty? Who in their right mind hears a man say, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will have eternal life” (John 6:54, New International Version) and bases a life on this man’s teaching? We people of faith, we are not in our right mind. “For the word of the cross is foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:18)…

This may sound nihilistic. I do not intend it to be. If I do sound defeated it is only because, in light of the emotional impact of your book, I only continue because I believe that God is good. This truly is foolishness “to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God” (Ibid). Perhaps none of us can only truly live out a life worthy of the title “Christian” except exclusively by the power of God.

I do not know what to do with a story of such pain except to hold it. I do not know how to act out in love except by weeping. I do not know how to hope except by crying out against injustice. I do not know how to maintain my faith except by lamenting God’s inaction. And yet, I am inactive as anyone else. I find myself waiting for injustice to come into my world before I act. I can wait no longer. I must do something, I just don’t know what. In the meantime, I will read your story and I will cry. I will try to hold the pain that I see. I will try to hold tight to the faith, hope, and love that will kill me, as it killed my master. I will look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. This will sustain me, foolish though it may be.

Tyson J. Conner