Portrait of Mark Olmsted by Ian Allen
Nathaniel Penn’s gut-punch May 20th piece for GQ is titled The Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die. It’s riveting, and has moments of despair, sadness and shake your head frustration at the hurt and desperation in this world.
There’s ten directions I could’ve taken with various thoughts. Our incessant need to prove ourselves at all costs comes to mind; or sibling rivalry; or how we set our sights on succeeding in an industry; and the boundaries between hope, wishful thinking and outright fraud. The story is tragic, it reminds of the late 80s and early 90s AIDS epidemic, which hits close to home for me. My first cousin died at 28 from the disease, he was a year older than me at the time; and it was not a peaceful passing by any stretch of the imagination. Like Luke Olmsted in the GQ story, my cousin was not promiscuous, and his life was cut short. So easy and disgraceful to point fingers and say his same sex preference was the cause. Hmm, well what about my hetero lifestyle and cavalier recklessness with my promiscuity? It’s never a one-to-one binary outcome when looking down our noses. Life ain’t fair, and countless don’t get what’s deserved. Most of us live like fallen angels when honest.
With Memorial Day providing a brief moment to reflect, I was thinking of mankind’s history of war in relation to the internal biological battle of Olmsted. No century or people group escapes the fact in terms of military escalation. The US had large-scale wars, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Iraqi War. Those are only ours. Pick pretty much any country, and they have their own litany. The Troubles in northern and southern Ireland from the 1960s to Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Or the 70-hr fight between Israel and the Palestinian independence, which Biblical scholars claim stems from real estate discussed in the Old Testament book of Genesis, Deuteronomy and Leviticus. That’s simply the tip of the spear with the Middle East. As a friend of mine said over the weekend after discussion of HBO’s amazing new miniseries Chernobyl, “What is WRONG with us!?” Yessir, we do like us some fighting and control of the narrative, don’t we?
In the GQ piece, Olmsted has ongoing struggles with his T cell count, the common killer of men and women with HIV and AIDS, “HIV progresses by invading and destroying the body’s T cells, which fight infection.” That got me thinking: at our deepest core, at a DNA level, there are “invasions” occurring. There’s always an enemy to refute. Why is that??? How many small battles do you fight everyday? Not just traffic or your team, boss, clients, kids and spouse. Everything about our life is a battle. Do we stop and think why at every level there’s a war raging. Think of movies: whether it’s relationships, Westerns or science fiction, we have good and evil battling. The Outlaw Josey Wales seeks justice, Luke Skywalker battles with the dark side of the force manifested in Darth Vader. Sound like baloney in real life? How about the battle to count calories? The fight to get out of bed each morning? The constant onslaught of anxiety and fear?
Not Who’s Your Daddy… Who’s Your Enemy?
Galatians 5:17 perfectly captures the onslaught, as scripture so often does.
“For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
I’m fascinated at how blindly I march through life at times, not realizing the havoc raging internally. All those teeny little frustrations that lead to headache and fatigue; all the life events not going as hoped. Our modern culture doesn’t like the word “sin,” but that’s of what Galatians and the entirety of scripture speaks. Let’s call it “mistakes” instead, a more palatable word. All the mistakes, whether the small frustrations of life, to cells inside our body duking it out to keep us healthy; to a person committing fraud to keep dreams alive; all the way to full-scale war. Yes, they ALL stem from the original sin/mistake of Adam and Eve. Uh, whuh!? Yes, any problem you find in this world stems from a massive fracture that originated in Genesis 2 and 4. Read it and wrestle with it. Find and study the writings of scholars who unwrap the meaning. Process what Romans 8:22-24 means when it says “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” The conflict rages in every cell of every person in every country. Nope, not a con, this is truth.
See ya next time. ML