Unpleasant
Don’t call me Tonya anymore. My new name is Anus. And I worship Satan now, by the way.
If my husband didn’t already know he was no longer teaching in a rural South Dakota school, this early morning announcement by one of his seventh graders jerked him to reality. You teach in the city now.
The name you get when the doctor holds you upside down by your feet and thwacks your backside to see if you can cry is the name someone else wants to call you. (Do doctors still do that? I was, erm, too preoccupied to notice when my boys tore out into the cold.)
But it may not be the name you’d choose.
So it makes me wonder why, when given the chance to choose her own name, a girl would choose Anus. Even if she was planning to worship Satan. (Which she was not.)
For that matter, why would someone named Pleasant up and decide to change her name to Bitter?
That’s exactly what Naomi, chafed and afflicted, broken into pieces by a God she saw as mischievous at best, chose to do.
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Orpah returned to her own people and Naomi, with the friend-like-no-other Ruth at her side, returned home to Bethlehem. Longtime friends recognized her at once, though they hadn’t seen her in years, exclaiming, “Can this be Naomi?“
Rather than receiving their welcome, Naomi snapped at them.
“Don’t call me Naomi, ” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” (Ruth 1:20-21)
Why call me Naomi? Why call her by a name that calls to mind delight and splendor? Why attach to her grace and beauty? Why call her Pleasant?
Naomi saw no need to be called any longer by a pleasant name, not when God had crushed her into dust.
Call me Mara. She would say, along with Westley, “Life is pain, Highness. Anybody who says differently is selling something.”
After the loss of her husband and two sons, she found life bitter, harsh, unrelenting.
Bitterness had so transformed her life that she chose a new name to lock in her new identity.
And in so doing, she asked all those who once thought of beauty and grace when her name left their lips to taste that same bitterness when they spoke to her.
Call me Bitter.
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Naomi, Mara, had possessed — and she had lost.
In her bitterness she blamed God, accusing Him of evil in afflicting her. He once gave her a full life. Now He left her empty.
So blinding was her discontent that she seemed unable to see the fullness God began to restore to her in the incomparable gift of Ruth.
Another, in the face of devastating loss, also saw that the Lord had given and allowed to slip away. But rather than shrouding himself in bitterness, Job erupted into worship.
At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship, saying:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
may the name of the LORD be praised.”In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing. (Job 1:20-22)
Make no mistake: Naomi’s loss was great.
Holding tight to bitterness, refusing to look back up, made the loss far greater still.
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Photo: Joshua Tree National Park, Rinske Blok-van Middendorp
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Where to Host Your Next Pity Party
When David and his men came to Ziklag, they found it destroyed by fire and their wives and sons and daughters taken captive. So David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep. David’s two wives had been captured—Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail, the widow of Nabal of Carmel. David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him; each one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters. But David found strength in the LORD his God. (I Samuel 30:3-6)
I think that Sanchez swallowed a cricket.
One that hasn’t thought to die yet.
This is a cat that has never learned to meow properly. For the longest time she made no noise at all aside of purring and the crazy snorting she would do when she tried to breathe. (Perhaps in sympathy with me for my allergy to cats, she was determined to be allergic to us as well, and has spent much of her short life with chronic nasal congestion.) We’ve speculated that perhaps because she was abandoned at such an early age, she spent too few days with real cats and has no idea how cats sound when they talk.
Eventually she learned to make noise, but it sounds much more like a cricket than a cat. Like the cricket in her belly keeps singing.
Or perhaps a toad with a really high voice.
A high-pitched toad who sings for her supper.
All day long.
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Her food dish happens to be on the way to almost anywhere in our house, so any movement by any person triggers her hunger dance. She hops off the couch, charges for the food bucket and begins her warbling. Absent an immediate response, she tosses her head sideways toward the bucket, signaling the location of the food, in case we forgot where we left it.
The warble turns to a yodel as she nears hysteria at her deprivation.
Understand, she likely ate just twenty minutes ago.
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Unless it’s actually feeding time, it ends the same every time. Failing to provoke the desired response (a heaping scoop of the nastiest smelling food I’ve yet to find), she climbs into her toilet to pout.
No kidding.
She has prime real estate to host her own pity party. The mother of all pity parties. An enclosed litter box where she can get a little alone time and sit around in a pile of poop.
What better way to celebrate her deeply held belief that the world has just pooped all over her?
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She doesn’t live in a world where she gets her way all the time. She doesn’t get to eat whenever she wants. She gets scolded when she hangs out on the kitchen table or in the sink. People don’t want to play with her whenever she wants to play, even when she smacks us in the head to try to entice us to join in her fun. People want to play with her when she’s not in the mood and since she’s small enough to hold, she can’t do much about it.
She’s not in control of her world. She is not the mistress of her own destiny. She doesn’t always get her way.
No matter how backwards that all seems to her.
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When she climbs out of her box, she smells bad. Like a cat toilet. Sometimes she has . . . um . . . stuff stuck to her. And even though she might suddenly be in the mood to play or hang out, folks don’t want to be around her just yet.
The smell of misery sticks to her a little too long.
She needs a little time to air out.
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David faced a stark choice when he and his men returned to find that the Amalekites had attacked his people, destroying their homes and taking the people off as slaves. People that included two of his wives. People that included the wives and children of his men.
They wept until there was nothing left in them to weep with. Strength gone, unable even to continue their mourning, the men became embittered. Needing someone to blame, they spoke of stoning David.
David had the choice to crawl into the litter box, blame God and the world for all his troubles. He could have jumped right into the stink with his men.
But he didn’t.
We won’t pretend this wasn’t a devastating circumstance. We won’t suggest that the other guys just overreacted.
But David chose to respond differently. He sought, and he found, his strength in the Lord.
He found his hope. His only hope.
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Raiders did not just burn my house down and make off with my family. Even so, my life doesn’t always go the way I want it to. People don’t always do the things I want, and certainly not when I want. Circumstances don’t always work out in my favor. I don’t get all my questions answered. And some of the answers I do get aren’t what I was hoping for.
I can become bitter about that, crawling inside the toilet and scratching around in the poop clumps.
And then I can smell bad so folks want to keep a lot of room between them and me.
Or I can stay out of the litter box, face the disappointment and find strength in the goodness of my God.
That’s where I’ll find my only hope as well.
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Those Who Can’t, Coach
At that time I pleaded with the LORD: “O Sovereign LORD, you have begun to show to your servant your greatness and your strong hand. For what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do the deeds and mighty works you do? Let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan—that fine hill country and Lebanon.” But because of you the LORD was angry with me and would not listen to me. “That is enough,” the LORD said. “Do not speak to me anymore about this matter. Go up to the top of Pisgah and look west and north and south and east. Look at the land with your own eyes, since you are not going to cross this Jordan. But commission Joshua, and encourage and strengthen him, for he will lead this people across and will cause them to inherit the land that you will see.” (Deuteronomy 3:23-28)
In my house full of athletes occasionally we’ll hear the expression, “Those who can’t, coach.” The suggestion, of course, is that a guy may have taken up coaching because he loves and knows the game but may not have the ability, or may not still have the ability, to actually play it. Jokes aside, a guy in that situation can be angry and bitter that he’s not on the team, or he can do what the coach would do and find a way to help others be successful. Just as God challenged Moses to do with Joshua.
Moses’ whole life was about bringing the Israelites out of Egypt and into the land God promised to them. From the day that he was born and his godly mother chose to protect his life to the moment the daughter of Pharaoh herself took him as her own, from his flight into the wilderness to his encounter with the living God in a burning bush, from the first confrontation with Pharaoh on his return to Egypt demanding that Pharaoh release God’s people to his leadership of the people across the sea on dry land and to safety, it was all about God’s plan for him to lead His people.
But along the way, as it worked out, God ultimately told Moses he would not be allowed to go across the Jordan and enter the land. How heartbreaking that must have been for Moses. Everything he’d worked for, all he’d dreamed of, wiped away when God spoke. The rug pulled out from underneath him. Seeing the land would have made putting up with the burdensome, stiff-necked people all worthwhile. But right along with all those who were adults when they left Egypt and insisted on whining and complaining and doubting God, Moses was told “No, you will not be going.”
You can see his desire in the opening of this passage, where Moses pleads with God to let him go and see the land. As he continues his review for the people of all that has so far transpired, he reminds them of his desire to go over and see the land. But the best he was allowed to go was to go to the top of a mountain and look.
As God tells him he won’t see the land from anywhere but a great distance, He also tells him to commission Joshua, for he will go and he will lead the people.
Commission Joshua. Encourage Joshua. Strengthen Joshua. He’s going, and you’re not.
Joshua would take Moses’ place and experience that moment that Moses had lived for. He would be the one setting foot on the other side and leading God’s people straight into the promise. Moses could have been bitter. He could have been angry. He could have taken that all out on Joshua and refused to help.
He didn’t undermine Joshua. He didn’t mess it up for him. He did exactly what God asked of him. He commissioned Joshua. He turned the people over to him. He turned the dream over to him.
Moses didn’t get to go. He didn’t get to realize the most treasured part of his dream. But he did graciously and generously take the role of the coach for Joshua. He helped to equip him to carry on the dream. He passed up bitterness and instead, with a servant’s heart, chose to help Joshua have what he himself wanted.
He commissioned him, encouraged him, and strengthened him. He did what he had to do to ensure Joshua’s success.
He knew he couldn’t, but he was willing to coach.
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