same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.
I am reminded of this precious instruction by my own
great failure to live up to it recently. Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin's God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for
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God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart. "He has a mind of his own,"
Boughton used to say when that son of his was up to something. And he meant it as praise, he really did. Now, Edward, for example, did have a mind of his own, a mind worthy of respect.
I'm not sure that's true, either. Worthy of respect, of course. But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books
as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can't be true. While I was at seminary I read every book he had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read, if I could put my hand on it and it wasn't in German. If I had the money, I ordered books through the mail that I thought he might be about to read. When I brought them home my father began to read them, too, which surprised me at the time. Who knows where any mind comes from. It's all mystery. Still, Boughton is right. Jack Boughton is a piece of work.
Much more prayer is called for, clearly, but first I will take a nap.
My impulse is strong to warn you against. Jack Boughton. Your mother and you. You may know by now what a fallible man I am, and how little I can trust my feelings on this subject. And you know, from living out years I cannot foresee, whether you must forgive me for warning you, or forgive me for failing to warn you, or indeed if none of it turned out to matter at all. This is a grave question for me.
That paragraph would itself amount to a warning. Perhaps I can say to your mother only that much. He is not a man of the highest character. Be wary of him.
If he continues to come around, I believe I'll do that. 125
I have not been writing to you for a day or two. I have passed some fairly difficult nights.
Discomfort, a little trouble breathing. I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox today. This is providential, since it should be a decent game and I don't care at all who wins. So there should be no excess of emotion involved in my watching it. (We have television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting rne watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.) Your mother has sent you off to the neighbors, so you won't pester me, she says, but it makes me wonder about the impression I must be making on her this morning. The poor woman
is very pale. She has not slept any better than I have. They put the television set in the parlor yesterday and spent the afternoon scrambling around on the roof rigging up an antenna.
The young men are terribly interested in these things. It makes them happy to. do a kindness so perilous and exotic in nature. I remember, I remember.
Your mother has brought down my writing materials and
the books she found on my desk, and someone has brought in a TV tray for my pills and spectacles and water glass. In case this is as serious as everyone seems to think. I don't believe it myself, but maybe I'm wrong.
I fell asleep in my chair and woke up feeling so much better. I missed eight and a half innings, and nothing happened in the 126
