Let's Mae a Deal

Author's note:

This is part of a long story. No part of it is intended to stand alone. I suggest starting with

Part 1

In revising the whole story, I've corrected errors, but also filled in a lot. This has inevitably made it all even longer. My apologies to anyone who read it in the original form and now finds it changed for the worse.

If you're looking mostly for explicit sex, this probably is not the story for you, so why don't you just go on to something else? There is explicit sex in some parts, but even there it's not the focus.

Also, some parts contain religious discussions which will offend some people and bore others. If you're one of those people, again, why not go on to something else?

59.

Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to man.

Scott managed to get out of bed without waking Lynda. He went to the bathroom, then got into the shower. The door opened while he was showering, and someone used the toilet and then went out. Shortly there were a few shrieks from somewhere in the house. As he was drying off, Martha came in. He gave her a quick kiss and turned to shaving, trying to position himself so that his image in the mirror blocked his view and she had some privacy. She finished before he did, and came and stood behind and a bit to the side of him.

She waited for him to hold the razor away from his face, then put her arms around him and hugged him briefly from behind. He leaned into her for a moment. She said, "Scott, always so thoughtful and reliable. Thank you for being the man you are." Then she went out.

He got dressed in the study, and went into the kitchen to find Martha at the stove, with bacon and eggs and toast ready for him. He kissed her again briefly, prayed silently, and began eating. Lynda came in, already showered and dressed.

Martha asked, "Should I be bringing a Bible? I've got one in on the shelves. I haven't even opened it in years. Would I be implying that I read it if I bring it? I know you take yours."

"It would be a good idea. There are Bibles there, but most people do bring their own. There are plenty in the pews for anyone who comes without one, but if most people didn't bring them there wouldn't be nearly enough to go around. So if you can't find it, that's fine too."

Scott rather hurriedly finished eating and brushed his teeth, then collected his stuff and drove off. He needed more setup time than most of the instrumentalists, what with having to tune—he was pickier about it than the bass player, who was the only other one with similar tuning issues. They ran through everything once, stopping a couple of times to go over transitions between songs. Then they all headed off to their different classes.

Scott left Sunday School early enough to check his tuning and run through one or two bits by himself. The others arrived, and they were preparing to start playing the welcome music when he saw Martha and Lynda come in at the back, with an usher pointing to him. He put his guitar down and went up to greet them. He showed them where he was sitting, and apologized for abandoning them until all the opening music was done. He hurried back and joined in. They finished the pre-service music. Pastor Bob welcomed the congregation, and as the instrumentalists began playing everyone got up to sing.

These were all songs that Scott knew well, so he could sing and pay attention to the words, and still look around a little as he played. He kept half an eye on the pianist's hands, arms, and shoulders, making sure they were together, but he did turn his head to look at the congregation, and specifically Martha and Lynda, from time to time. They appeared to be singing, about as one would expect people to who didn't know the songs, uncertainly at first but joining in more as each song went along.

When the singing was over, he went to his place and sat down, next to Lynda.

He hadn't thought to say anything ahead of time about the offering, but it seemed that the women were expecting it. They were ready to put something in, even though up near the front where they were the plates arrived pretty much right away.

When the scripture was read, Scott helped Lynda find the place. Martha found it for herself. It was from Jeremiah 29. When other passages were cited during the sermon, Martha again found them, often a little behind but not too much. In those cases Scott just let Lynda look on in his Bible.

At the end of the sermon, Pastor Bob gave what was generally referred to as the altar call, though normally no one was asked to go forward. He asked everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes. He gave a brief account of the gospel, based in the sermon text, and asked those who responded to raise their hands. Scott was pretty sure neither woman did so, but he kept his eyes closed so he couldn't really be sure.

Scott had to go up and play a couple of times during the service, once in the middle and once at the end, right after the altar call. After the last song, the instrumentalists played briefly as people began to get up. When they were done, Scott packed up his guitar and gear and music, then came back to where Martha and Lynda were. As he'd predicted, there were some people who had come to greet them and stayed with them to talk, mostly people who knew him pretty well. He set his stuff down and listened for a few minutes. When the conversation wound down to a close, he saw them to the door. They went to their cars and drove home.

At lunch, they discussed the service. The women had liked the music, more than Scott did, he thought. They were enthusiastic about Scott's playing, which he suspected almost everyone else in the congregation had been mostly unaware of. Along with the piano player, he drove the beat, but people mostly responded to that without really noticing it. What they heard was the melody.

They all spent a few minutes talking about some points in the sermon. Scott was able to explain some things that they (especially Lynda) didn't understand. Pastor Bob tried not to assume a lot of background in his hearers, but he had to take some familiarity with scripture for granted.

60.

The words have all been writ by one before me. We're taking turns in trying to pass them on.

Afterward, Lynda—to his surprise, it was Lynda—reminded him that he'd said he would try to really explain the gospel to them. Then again, he suddenly remembered, Lynda was the one who had asked in the first place.

"Lynda, would you please come and sit in my lap for this? I'm not being cute. My choice of example may stir up unhappy memories, and if it does I'd rather have you here already. If it doesn't, so much the better, of course. And I'll be addressing some of what I say to Lynda, just to make saying it less cumbersome, but this is for both of you. It's just that if I keep saying 'she' it will sound like I'm talking past you, but about you, to Martha.

"OK, let's all think back to a night just a few weeks ago. I looked up to find you crying, inconsolably. When I asked you what was wrong, you completely lost it. You couldn't control your breathing enough to form a coherent sentence. We all remember this, right? And Lynda, there is nothing whatever wrong with that!

"When you got to the point of being able to explain, well, there were a few things, but really there was only one that had you in such a state. Am I right? I'd entrusted you with some money, telling you what to do with it, and you'd taken it instead.

"So. What if I, or someone else, had come to you and said, 'Hey, why are you making such a big deal out of that? It's only a couple of dollars!' Or if you'd confided it to a friend, who we'll assume was not Martha, and she said, 'Well, if you don't say anything, Scott will never know. Just don't worry about it.' Would that have been satisfactory for you, at that point?"

Lynda at least wasn't crying. Scott hoped that she had really put it behind her well enough that this wouldn't be devastating. He remembered how just calling him 'honey' had triggered memories, from much longer before, that had her crying.

She said, "No, Scott. I'd just promised complete honesty with you, and then gone right out and stolen from you. When I really realized what I'd done, what hurt was knowing that I'd freely promised you that and immediately done the opposite. The amount of money wasn't what was wrong. Although I guess that if it was a thousand dollars or something, that would have made it a lot worse. And I was afraid you'd call the whole deal off if I told you. And I desperately wanted you not to do that, but I don't think I could have lived with knowing that I'd broken it that way, if I thought you were only going on with it because you didn't know."

"So. You asked me to spank you, and I did, and for reasons I think we'll get to soon I've regretted it ever since. We agreed that this would take care of it. You haven't let it bother you since then, have you?"

"Well, sometimes when I think of it, I just want to start crying again, because I'm thinking, how could I ever have done something like that? But no. You said that took care of it. I know you meant it."

"So it's OK because you trusted me, when I said that was all it took?"

"That's right."

Scott looked straight at her. "Honey, are you OK? Right now I mean? I wouldn't have made you go through this like that if I didn't think it was important."

"Scott, I'm fine. You're right, I trust you. Not just to not hold it against me. I trust what you just said, and I knew it before you said it."

"Good. You can stay here or go back over there, whichever you prefer. I was just afraid I'd be really hurting you." She didn't budge, except to snuggle against him a little.

"Anyway, my point is this. That's pretty much analogous to the position we're all in, in relation to God. God made people to be in fellowship with him. It wasn't an equal partnership, of course, but it was intended to be close and intimate. He put one very specific restriction, one command, on them, on us in the person of the original people he created. And they disobeyed it. And, maybe making it worse, or maybe just a symptom, but at any rate their first reaction when they realized what they'd done was to try to cover up and to find someone else to blame. Adam, the man, blamed the woman, but listen to how he said it: 'The woman you gave me gave it to me, and I ate.' So he didn't just blame her, he blamed God for what he'd done.

"Oh. You do know that the command they broke was to not eat the fruit from one specific tree, don't you? I've actually met people who think that they sinned by having sex in the garden. That's completely inconsistent with what the account says. The people I've heard it from myself have all been nonbelievers, but I've read that this was actually a view held by some Christians in the nineteenth century, and it probably still is. But it takes considerable, even willful, ignorance of scripture to think that.

"Now, God's true intention was that people were to live forever, and he had warned them that the result of disobeying this one command would be that they would die. So one of the results of this disobedience is that we all die, sooner or later. But more, they came into a kind of spiritual death. And in choosing to disobey, to sin, they also chose for us. So another result of this is that we are all prone to disobedience and rebellion to God. And so we all, each one of us, continue to choose to disobey, every day of our lives. And there is nothing we can do to somehow make it up to God. We owe him obedience and doing what's right and good, at every step, so if we do something good, we're at best doing what we owe him anyway. It can't make up for all the times we don't. And worse, our nature being what it is in the world as it is, even when we are doing everything we should, externally, our motives are always mixed. So even our best is corrupted.

"He didn't leave us in this situation at its worst, from the very beginning. Think about it. If life had continued to be very good all the time, wouldn't it tend to make us think, hey, no problem, I'm doing fine? So in a way the whole world was changed so that life wasn't so easy. Then, there are also all those other rebellious, disobedient people around, so life is full of problems. And he in various ways made sure that we knew right from wrong, so we could see all this. The details of that are way too long for one afternoon.

"So we're all in the situation you found yourself in, on a much bigger scale. If we look and think about it, we can see that things aren't what they should be, and that most of it is directly rooted in human nature and behavior. There's no way we can do something good enough to get back to where we ought to be—to pleasing God and to fellowship with him. If we're ever to get back to that, it has to be his doing, not ours.

"And he did it. He arranged things so as to be born into this world, as a human being, but without this whole built-in sinfulness. He did this in a way that showed that this was what happened. And in the person of this baby, who grew up into a man, he lived out the life of perfect obedience that we are just plain unable to do. And then, look: here is the one man out of all the world who did not do anything to incur that death penalty, and he allowed himself to be put to death, the death we all deserve, in fact a remarkably brutal, painful, and lingering death at that.

"Se he paid our penalty. To begin, here and now, to enjoy the fruits of that, and in the end to enjoy an eternal life of fellowship with God, we have to accept it. We first have to accept the bad news: we deserve what we've got, and we can't whitewash over it. We're face to face with someone who is perfect and perfectly just, whom we've offended in pretty much everything we've ever done. And we have to accept that God's solution is to offer us as a free gift—free to us, infinitely costly to him—forgiveness. And we have to be willing to completely give up on making ourselves good enough that we don't need that forgiveness, and trust what God has told us, that this is something he offers for free. Free to us, that is. But if we try to accept it while still hoping that someday, somehow we'll find Plan B and save ourselves, we're still in denial and in big trouble, forever.

"Finally, there is nothing you can do to earn forgiveness. You don't earn it by believing, either. That doesn't make you worthier, that's what accepting it means. But this doesn't mean that your actions aren't related to it. Remember that story? 'Doesn't the suddenness and magnitude of the response surprise you?', 'No, my faith was as strong as an elephant.', 'Then bring forth our largest state umbrella.', 'But it never occurred to me . . . '. If you really believe, you're going to have that umbrella with you and ready, right? If you really believe that your sins are displeasing to God, and that he's forgiven you at great cost, then you can't go on sinning the way you used to.

"Um. I said, 'Finally,' but there's really one more thing to stress, though I kind of already got to this. There are things you have to believe, which I've been outlining. But at bottom, what saves you isn't some kind of faith in a set of truths, but knowing a person—God—well enough that you trust him. You believe the truths because he tells you they're true, and if you don't believe them that shows that you don't really know him or don't really trust him. Earlier, you—Lynda—told me that when I said that spanking cleared up the matter, you believed it because you trusted me, so you didn't keep worrying about it. And how many times have you—" looking at Martha this time "—said to me, 'I know you well enough to know that you would never do such-and-such?' Martha, sometimes you've been wrong about me. I'm human, so I'm unreliable. But when we learn to know God—and he's given us a lot of ways to do that—we find him completely faithful.

"Does that make sense?"

They both looked at him. Finally Martha said, "I pretty much understood it already, I think. As you said, the real question is whether I can believe it. And the, the analogy you made may help there, but I'm still going to have to think about it, a lot."

Lynda hugged him, hard. "Scott, she's right. I don't think I ever really did understand it before, but I'll have to think about it too. But I really see what you mean, and . . . thank you for explaining it that way.

"I have a question or two, though. First off, you said you'd get to why you're sorry you spanked me, and you never did."

"That's right, and I should have. It's relevant. I did it for two reasons, really. Or three. I'm ashamed of the first two. I was taken by surprise, and hurt and angry, so part of it really amounts to my wanting to hurt you back. If you hadn't surprised me like that I'd have realized it and thought better. And I have already told you about a second thing. I enjoyed doing it, it's exciting and arousing, but in a depraved way. And you really, really need to understand that those two things are signs of my own sinfulness. God's anger for our sins isn't like that! I had reason to be angry with you, but my anger actually, in the end, was from my own bruised ego, from my pride, which made it hurt and made me just want to get back at you. And then, as I said, add to that a kind of twisted sexual desire, that really comes from pride, too. I was wrong, and I hope you really see why, and that you'll forgive me.

"But the big problem is even more directly related to all this. If you'd been, say, my four year old daughter, spanking could have been appropriate, done to teach you that there are painful consequences to doing wrong. And that's analogous to the state of the world we now live in, to some degree. But you're

not

my daughter, and you're

not

a small child.

"What I did might have, may have, encouraged you to think that somehow getting punished was enough payment for what you'd done. Or that if it wasn't, it just meant you needed to be punished more, maybe. And that's not the way it works. I needed to forgive you. Spanking may have relieved my feelings, but it didn't restore the relationship—in this case, the deal we'd made. I had to say, yes, you did something that broke that relationship, and hurt me, but I'm willing to continue in spite of that. And not because I wanted your body, either! I did forgive you, but I didn't make that plain, in fact what I did obscured it. I'm sorry, it was wrong. I hope that, seeing that, you'll forgive me for it." Scott was the one crying now.

She held him tightly, then pulled back to look him square in the face. "Oh, Scott, I didn't understand. Of course I forgive you."

"The thing is, I could see that you needed to be reassured that the deal could go on, and you really did realize that something needed to be done. You suggested spanking, and I just did that without thinking enough about what it meant. But I missed the chance to teach you something different and important, that forgiveness is what's required."

He took a deep breath. "OK, you said you had two questions."

She took a few moment, apparently thinking about what to say. "I guess the other question is, why didn't you tell us all this before? I've met Christians before who are really rude about that. They insist on telling you how bad you are and how you need to be a Christian. And what comes across is that this is all they want to talk about, they don't care about who you are or what you might need, it's all about them, really. But you never even really spoke up. So why?"