He was a sinner and so wasn’t allowed in my parents’ house, if.
He was a family member too—beloved, much-cherished by me. I came to understand through my family that he was a sinner, but also somehow different than the rest of us sinners. We could sin—say terribly cruel things, cultivate haughty minds, gossip and slander—and still go to church and spend time with our families. We were allowed everywhere, encouraged, praised, and told that our failings made us human and God loved us anyway.
But his sinning was different. More public, perhaps? More embarrassing? Harder to hide than the lies we all told (and said sorry for, and then sometimes repeated) or the superiority we felt (and pretended we didn’t, and never asked forgiveness for at all) and the gossip we spoke (somehow without ever thinking of it as sin at all)?
We loved him, I was told, repeatedly. We loved him so much. We loved him exactly as much as Jesus loved the church, except he wasn’t welcome, if. The “if” was always nebulous and I could never parse it out: if he was still sinning, period? If he was doing the sinning right in front of us, in our house? If we could discern evidence of the sin? If he wasn’t repentant enough about it, or at all?
My mother fretted over it endlessly, the spiel she would have to give the next time he showed up on the doorstep. We love you so much, she planned to say, but…
What followed the “but” changed but always looped back to the “if.” You have to stop this. You have to start this. You have to do or not do this or that. You have to prove. You have to promise. You have to understand. You have to repent.
She never had to give the spiel. He never came.
I’m sure he knew the family’s feelings. He, too, was a person of faith, well-educated enough in his own church to know well enough what some people thought of him. So, he stopped showing up. He responded periodically, of course, to calls and cards and innocent queries. But, perhaps sensing he was unwanted as-is, he removed himself from the equation.
I mourned his absence. I was told he was the one losing something, for turning his back on God. But I, too, felt lost.
Alone and adrift, he suffered. Infrequent responses turned into no responses at all. He lost contact with us and with everyone. When he reemerged, we found ourselves sick with shock. He was still the same sinner to be disallowed from the house, but now despair afflicted him too. He was in the grips of a raging addiction, hollow and sick, barely able to function.
The scolding tone of “We love you so much, but…” disappeared, and became a series of questions instead. Where are you? Do you have food? Do you have a house? Can we mail anything? Do you have an address? What do you need? Come home. Just come home for a while. We’ll help you; we’ll get you help. You need help. God loves you. God loves you. God loves you.
At a loss, and after he stopped responding to anyone at all and disappeared again, I started writing him emails. Hundreds. Emails to the only known email address I had for him, absent any other way to communicate. Sometimes news about the family, often pleas for him to come to his senses. I tried to write them in the style and manner in which I had grown accustomed: mentions of love and affection always attached to the gentle reminder of what was lacking in him. I never realized it, but the message I sent every time was some version of what he had heard much of his life: we love you, but only want you back so you can be sorry and God can finally fix you.
Years passed.
I still wrote the emails, albeit more infrequently. They didn’t bounce back, but I was equally sure he didn’t read them. No one had heard from him in ages. In dark days we worried he had died and we would never know. And I wondered, one snowy afternoon, why I ever thought he’d bother reading them anyway. Who wanted to read an email that only reminded you of what everyone thought you lacked? That told you home only wanted you if you could measure up? If even at your best you had been too much of a sinner to be allowed in the house, why bother for welcome, redemption, or grace now at your worst?
How much can love matter when it only ever comes with but or if attached?
And still I resisted the email I wanted to write him, what I intended to be the last one I ever wrote him. A thousand internalized voice warned: you love the sinner but you have to make sure that you condemn the sin. You can’t let him think everything is fine. If you gloss over his sin, if you remove the but or the if, then are you really being truthful? Is God really okay with that?
And yet—
And yet.
I stumbled on a truth that has served me since. If I must err, I decided, I would rather err on the side of grace. On the side of mercy. On the side of compassion. If I am too free with my forgiveness and affections, if I represent God as somehow over-soft, God can surely add his own justice to my lacking measure. He can make up for my shortfall. But that is better, far better, than to pretend myself God, to guard the door to love or hope, to dare refuse grace where he might scandalously extend it.
My email was short: I have only ever sent emails saying things like “I love you, but…” or “I love you, if…” I’m sorry. What I want to say is just this, now and for always: I love you. So much. And I miss you like crazy.
I sent it. I asked God to do with it what he would. To forgive me if I was wrong to write it.
My phone rang twenty minutes later.
He had been reading, turns out, the whole time. But it was only that email that prompted him to respond, that pulled him from the depths of melancholy to dare reach out. We talked for two hours—not about his sins or his failings, but about our lives. Memories. Old family stories. We laughed a lot. Cried a lot.
I love you, he said, before he hung up. I love you too, I told him.
There was no immediate miracle. More years passed, with him in and out of touch intermittently, rehabs that didn’t take. I grieved for him and prayed for him but no longer felt that hideous, gnawing sense that I had failed him. Come what may, I thought, he knew he was loved. And through that love, I hoped, felt God’s love, too.
Then, two years ago, an email. I hope you see this. I have so much to tell you. I don’t have my old phone anymore. What’s your number?
I picked up to the voice of a healed man. A whole man, sober and steady—and talking nonstop about the love of God. A year ago, he sent me pictures from his baptism. And he is still well and whole, still in love with God, still transformed. I can barely believe it. He is a walking, talking redemption story.
And I’m telling this story to say this:
It is okay to remove the but and the if. It is okay, it is okay, to look at someone broken in every measure—regardless of how repentant or unrepentant or sinful or holy they are—and simply to say: I love you. God loves you. More than anything, that is the tonic, the transformation, the call and response of the heart.
If I have to err, let me err on the side of grace.
God will handle the rest.
Samaritan's Song 