Here’s one from Paul Walker, via his most recent sermon:
There is a moving scene in Peter De Vries novel called The Blood of the Lamb. The narrator, Don, grows up in a strict religious family. As he gets older he struggles with doubt. He needs a God who is bigger than the moralistic entity of his childhood. As an adult, he encounters deep suffering. His wife is mentally ill and finally commits suicide. He is left alone with his young daughter, Carol, who is the joy and love of his life.
Don and Carol share the wonder of life together. They love old, slapstick movies and comment on the scripted way characters get pies thrown in their faces. Carol remarks,
“Have you ever noticed, Daddy, that after the one guy throws his pie and it’s the other guy’s turn, the first guy doesn’t resist or make any effort to defend himself? He just stands there and takes it. He even waits for it, his face sort of ready? Then when he gets it, he still waits a second before wiping it out of his eyes….”
Tragically, Carol contracts leukemia. She and Don go to a hospital in New York City for treatment. Over the next few years, she experiences alternating bouts of remission and sickness.
When Carol turns 14, Don brings a birthday cake to the hospital, thinking he is finally going to be able to take her home. The evening before, the doctor gives her a good report. But during the night, an infection takes over Carol’s body. Don sits at her bedside as she dies.
Blind with grief, he stops by a nearby church to try to pray. Enraged, he takes the cake and hurls it at the face of Jesus in the crucifix hanging over the church’s doorway.
“Then my arm drew back and let fly with all the strength within me…. It was a miracle that the pastry should reach its target at all…the more so that it should land squarely, just beneath the crown of thorns.
Then through scalded eyes, I seemed to see the hands free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face. Very slowly, deliberately, the icing was wiped from the eyes and flung away from the one whose voice could be heard saying, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me….for of such is the Kingdom of heaven.’”
Don collapses on the stone stairs beneath Jesus. He concludes, “thus (I) was found… at the foot of the cross.”
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2 responses to “A Pie in God’s Face”
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An incredible illustration! And for the record, Paul Walker is my favorite living preacher. 🙂
Powerful! Great stuff.