The Space In-Between

The Atonement of Christ is the Only Answer

One of my clients told me the story of when he first killed someone. He was a part of an outlaw motorcycle club, and he was ordered to carry out a hit on a guy that stole from them. He was supposed to meet another member of the club and then carry out the deep, it being his first time and all. He jumped on his bike and took his time to his destination. He recalled feeling terrified, but trying his best not to look it. He pulled up to a stop light and, while waiting to turn left, spotted a mini-van next to him. The van was full of kids, and they were blasting Disney music. That small detail had zero significance to the overall story, or the crime he would soon commit. But I found it odd that he shared that specific detail, about the kids and the Disney music. It was puzzling to me. A van full of innocent children were 15 feet away from a soon to be murderer, and they had no idea.

I was reminded of this story the other day on the way to the park. I was giving my wife a break by driving my two young children to their favorite park. We were listening to a song from the Cars movie. My son was singing the words, my daughter was screaming them. Then, suddenly, just like my client had told in his story, a biker pulled up next to us at a stop light, about to turn left. I recognized his patches. He was a member of an outlaw motorcycle club. I thought of my client in that moment, then I returned to the biker next to me. “I wonder what he’s about to do,” I thought.

I finally got the park but my mind was still dwelling on my client and that biker. After several minutes, my son befriended a kid who was riding on this zip-line thing. The kid’s father was retrieving the zip-line. All outward observation would declare that this was a good father. He was with his son. His son was clearly having a good time with him. He even helped my own son with the zip-line. The only problem is that I know what prison tattoos look like. The father was, or at least used to be, Aryan Brotherhood.

I wasn’t particularly alarmed by this. I have met a hundred of them, and most of them just join for protection anyways. I didn’t go yank my son away and tell him to move along. I just watched and even chatted with the guy in passing a bit. I don’t know why, but this has been on my mind all week, so I decided to write about it.

We often talk about the “grey area” in life, and to be frank, it does not exist as much as we claim that it does. At least in those moments it doesn’t. Things were pretty black and white. Me and my kids were very much in the white, while the guys next to me were (likely) very much in the black. Yet, we were 10 feet from one another.

There is this switch in my mind that never seems to shut off because of the things I am exposed to almost daily. When you go to the park and see 10 kids having fun, I see 7 having fun and 3 just happy to be away from their abusive household. Almost all of my child-abuser clients used extreme grooming techniques on their future victims, which sometimes consisted of going to amusement parks and such. So now, every time I go to Disney Land, or a County Fair, or something of like nature, I just look around and wonder how many kids are being groomed. The fact that those things are happening obviously bother me, but what bothers me even more is that I know it is happening and can never pin-point which child it is likely happening to.

This thought is irrational. Obviously, I have no way of knowing which children are which (besides looking for the obvious signs). But again, this causes me to think about the complexity of life. How am I supposed to make sense of this? What do I do with this small space in-between? We call it the “grey area,” but I don’t really see it that way anymore, especially in these extreme examples mentioned above.

I have touched on this in earlier writing, as some of you may remember, but I had to take a mental break. My head was hurting from how hard I was thinking about this. Nietzche apparently thought like a hammer. I feel like I have been thinking like a pickaxe. Some of my clients have outlived their victims. An innocent person died before their perpetrator. Some of my clients enjoy a mental freedom that their victims never get to enjoy, living in their own mental prisons, sentenced there by the abuse. They act as their own jury, judge, and executioner, all whilst my client is on a beach in Florida sipping a drink poured by his own denial. I don’t understand.

Life is extremely messy. Where is justice? Where is mercy? That must be what lay in the space in-between. It is not “grey area” that separates us, but justice and mercy—only, in a way we do not recognize with our mortal eyes. The longer I do this job the more I have come to the conclusion that there must be a difference between the temporal justice of our world and the eternal justice delt from above.

Even as I write this I consider how extremely naive it is to say that that those things “separate us,” as if there are truly two group of people in this world, some good and some bad. We cross that space throughout our lives, at times in the black and at times in the white. It was Solzhenitsyn who wrote that “the line separating good and evil passes…right through every human heart.” I feel like he would no better than I, being a Gulag survivor and all. But this just makes things even more complicated!

My boss had a plaque on her wall that wrote, “Every complex problem has a simple solution that does not work.” Although I agreed with her most of the time, it isn’t so with the Gospel. The solution to this ever-complex problem is simple. It is the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t know. I know that when I push the button on my phone, it turns on; though, I don’t know how. The only thing I can feasibly think of that would make sense of all this—my clients outliving their victims, victims living in more of a prison than their abusers, the black and the white always seeming to be just 5 feet apart—is the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I know I just told you not to ask me how it works…but now I am curious. Part two coming soon.