What Must I Do to Be Saved?

I mentioned in the opening sentence in my last blog that one of my favorite texts as an evangelical was Acts 16. It was a text I used in evangelizing. At that stage of my journey I had some very simplistic notions of salvation.

When the jailer asks, “What must I do to be saved?” he wasn’t asking, as I thought then, how to go to heaven. He was asking, “What must I do to be made whole, to be healed, to be put right.” The word “saved” could be translated “to be made well, to be made whole, to be made complete.”

When Paul says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” what he is saying is: Trust in and be faithful to the Lord Jesus. Transfer your trust and allegiance from the Empire of Rome to the kingdom of God as embodied and lived by Jesus, whom God has made Lord. Paul is telling this Roman citizen to transfer his allegiance. He wasn’t saying, “Here’s this doctrine about Jesus you have to believe in order to go to heaven.” He was saying, “Rome is no longer your lord. Caesar is no longer your lord. Jesus is your Lord. Be faithful to Christ and you will experience true healing, you will be made whole, you will discover what it means to be fully human.”  

I think it is instructional to note how the slave-girl in the passage prior to the incident in the jail describes the message Paul and Silas were proclaiming: “These men are slaves of the Most High God who proclaim to you a way of salvation” (Acts 16:17). Salvation is a “way” of life.

No one is made whole in an instant, no one is completely healed or restored to completeness in a moment, no one is totally converted or transformed through a single experience. It may well be a dramatic encounter with God that shifts our worldview and changes the direction of our lives. Certainly Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ set him on a new course that turned this persecutor of Christians into a propagator of the gospel of Christ. But that one experience didn’t completely transform him.

The interworking of divine grace and human responsibility may forever be a mystery, but there is no question that conversion requires effort, faith, discipline and the pursuit of love on our part. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul tells them:  “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” – fear and trembling may mean something like “in awe and wonder,” or even “in trust and humility” (Phil. 2:12). In his correspondence with the church at Corinth, Paul says that the message of the cross is the power and wisdom of God “to those being saved” (1 Cor. 1:18). It’s not those who have been saved, but those being saved. It is a process.

The message of Christian salvation may be simple, but it is not simplistic, and I hope more Christians indoctrinated into simplistic explanations the way I was will recognize how such descriptions can breed real misunderstanding, false confidence, and arrogance.

Too many Christians think they are God’s chosen because they believe the right things. It’s hard to imagine why God would make belief the key to being saved. 

What we believe is important to the extent that it leads us to trust in God and be faithful to God’s loving will. God is not after correct beliefs—God can’t be that petty and small. God wants people who can experience and respond to God’s love and, in turn, love others. That’s pretty simple, but “working it out” requires the best of our humanity.

The Power of Authentic God Experience

The conversion of the Roman jailer in Acts 16 was a favorite text of mine in my evangelical beginnings. What was it that compelled the jailer to become a follower of Jesus?

I hardly think it was the message itself. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the jailer’s conversion had anything to do with the reasonableness, truthfulness, logic, coherence, or appeal of the message itself.

What made the difference was the jailer’s experience of the message lived by Paul and Silas. It was the earthquake and what transpired afterward. Paul and Silas refused to flee. Had they fled the jailer would have been held accountable for their escape. It may have cost him his life. The jailer is emotionally, psychologically, and physically shaken. He comes trembling: “What must I do to be saved?” It was his experience that changed his perspective, that opened and readied him to receive the good news Paul proclaimed.

It has been fascinating to observe the cultural shift in perception and opinion in recent history with regard to gay marriage. When President Obama publicly endorsed gay marriage, he called it being on the right side of history. There has been a kind of historical shift. The question is: What prompted it?

Do you know what it is? Do you know why the tide has changed? Do you know what has changed peoples’ minds? People’s experiences. Some years ago, before there was a historical shift, a mother told me that when her son came to her and confessed that he was gay, she knew right then that this was not a choice, that her son was simply being true to who he was. That kind of experience is fueling the fire of change.

It’s not the theological, psychological, or social arguments, as important as they are. More sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors and loved ones are openly and publically acknowledging their same-sex orientation, and as a result, more and more people are seeing the issue through the lens of their experience. New experiences are changing people’s thinking.

For the jailer, it wasn’t the message itself that made the difference, it was his experience of the power of the message that he witnessed in the lives of Paul and Silas.

What do followers of Christ need to learn from this? As important as it is to articulate a transforming vision of discipleship to Jesus, it is even more important to live what we believe and embody what we say. As important as the contents of our message, how we live and validate the message through our experience is even more important.

Persuading people of the goodness, truth, and power of a life of discipleship to Jesus will take more than expounding on the reasonableness, logic, coherence, and beauty of the message itself – though, I certainly believe that the message we proclaim must be a good, beautiful, coherent, credible, compelling message. But that alone is not enough. The message must be lived, fleshed out, incarnated, and validated through our experience.

When Jesus came proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, he also came healing, restoring well-being, and welcoming all manner of sinners. The power and truthfulness of the message of the kingdom was confirmed in the many experiences of people, as Jesus made people whole and radically welcomed and accepted them through the practice of table fellowship. He lived and demonstrated the message.

When the good news of God’s love expressed through Christ is validated through our life experiences, it demonstrates the power of the good news to incite hope, to bring about a new sense of identity and belonging, to make persons, families, and communities whole.

The Most Important Word in the English Language

Richard Rohr says that we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.  He also observes that people who consider themselves to be morally superior are often the last to learn this. The demand for the perfect is often the greatest enemy of the good.

Brennan Manning tells a wonderful story from India about a water bearer who had two large pots. Each pot hung on opposite ends of a pole that he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it. So while one pot always delivered a full portion of water after the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

The perfect pot was proud of its accomplishment, but the pot that was cracked was disappointed and ashamed. After two years of this the cracked pot said to the water bearer, “I am ashamed of myself and want to apologize for my failure.” The water bearer responded, “As we return to the master’s house, I want you to notice the beautiful flowers along the path.” 

When they arrived at the end of the trail, the water bearer said, “Did you notice that the wild flowers were only on your side of the path. That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I planted flower seeds on your side of the trail, so that every day, as we walked back from the stream, you have watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the master’s table. Without you being just the way you are, we would not have had this beauty to grace the trail and flowers to grace the master’s house.”

We are all wounded, broken, and cracked. God dwells in and works through human imperfection and weakness. People who have spent their lives wearing disguises and protecting their egos fight this. They invest heavily to keep up appearances, so much so that they often end up believing their own lies. Have you noticed in the Gospels that Jesus’ harshest words are reserved for the self-righteous, those who are secure in and proud of their self-professed spiritual superiority?   

We grow spiritually by dealing with our imperfection and brokenness in healthy, redemptive ways. We all have our demons. The worst thing we can do is deny them because of some high and holy quest for perfection or out of a need to appear righteous or holy or superior.

In the film Silver Linings Playbook there is a scene where Pat faces his brother, who never came to visit him when he was in the hospital in Baltimore dealing with his bi-polar disorder. His brother apologizes for not coming; he tells Pat that those places “creep him out.” His excuse is that he has been busy helping his father with the restaurant and dealing with his own stuff. He tells Pat that he is going to make partner at his firm. He says, “I don’t know what to say to you anymore. You lost your wife; I am getting engaged. I want to be able to tell you about these kinds of things. You lost your house; I’m getting a new house. You lost your job; things are going great for me at the firm.” This guy is clueless.

At this point their father interrupts and says to Pat’s brother: “Stop talking about all the stuff that’s good for you and bad for him. Leave it alone.” His brother says, “I am just goin’ to stop talking; I’m just goin’ to shut my mouth.”

There’s a long pause as Pat stares at his brother. He has ever right to be upset, but then he says: “As my friend Danny would say, ‘I’ve got nothing but love for you, brother.’” He hugs his brother and the conversation resumes.

A few sentences later Pat says, “People like Tiffany or Danny or me [These are people who have had to face the consequences of their addictions and problems; they have all been in some tough places]. Maybe we know something that you don’t. Maybe we understand something that you don’t.”

What they understand is that there is no real spiritual growth until we face our spiritual poverty and destitution. It is by doing it wrong that we learn to do it right. But there is a catch: We have to confront our demons. We have to acknowledge our addictions, our negative patterns, our faults. We have to be honest and truthful, and find the inner strength and courage to deal with our failures and admit we did it wrong.

The most important word in the English language is “Help.” It’s not easy to say. We have to swallow our pride and admit we need it. It opens a door to our heart and provides a way through all the defense mechanisms, illusions, deceptions, and appearances we have employed to hide our humanity. 

Not as the World Gives

Jesus says to his disciples in his farewell discourse in John’s Gospel, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and not let them be afraid” (14:27). This bestowal of peace occurs in a context where Jesus promises the gift of the Holy Spirit (14:26). The Johannine community (the church/community out of which the Gospel of John emerged and to whom it was primarily written) clearly associated God’s gift of peace with God’s loving, dynamic presence.

On our part, the gift of God’s peace is inseparably connected to our capacity to trust in the provision and sufficiency of God’s loving presence. The phrase in our passage where Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid,” recalls an earlier statement by Jesus at the beginning of this chapter, where he says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me” (14:1). Can we trust in the provision of God’s love? Can we believe that God loves us and makes his/her home in/with/among us, no matter what?

Ethicist John Kavanaugh spent three months “at the house of the dying” in Calcutta. At the time he was seeking a clear answer as to how to best spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, “And what can I do for you?” Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. “What do you want me to pray for?” she asked. He said, “Pray that I have clarity.” She firmly retorted, “No, I will do that.” Of course he wanted to know why. She answered, “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go.” When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”

Can we trust God’s love? Can we trust that we are loved by God unconditionally and eternally? Can we firmly anchor our identity — “who we are and how we see ourselves”—in God’s love?

God’s peace is not subject to human forces. If we are secure in God’s love for us, we can still have peace even when we become the target of criticism or the projected fears and anxieties of others. We can still have peace, even when we become the object of malicious attack or are betrayed and abandoned the way Jesus was by his closest friends. God’s peace can endure all of that. 

When we trust securely in God’s unconditional love, we will not be manipulated or influenced by human opinion. So often the ego inflates or deflates on the basis of human approval or disapproval. We allow outside influences and cultural forces to affect our sense of self-worth. We have a tendency to be up or down on the basis of whether we are blamed or praised, accepted or rejected, adored or condemned.

As we learn to rest and trust in the Divine Love that calls us the beloved and names us as sons and daughters of God, we can become so firmly anchored in the Divine Presence and acceptance that the waves of human criticism and condemnation will not drown us. They may tear at us and we will feel the wear, but we will still be anchored in the larger story of God’s love and purpose for our lives.

As we grow in God’s love and peace, we may even get to the place where we can give ourselves to others without expecting or needing anything in return.

As I have written before, I’m not suggesting in any way that one remain in a place of victimization or dysfunction. But I am saying that when we know that we are fully received by God, that we are God’s chosen, then we will be able to give ourselves more fully to others, without having to be acknowledged for it.

If we are dependent upon others, in hope that they will give us the love we need, if we try to get from others what only God can give us, then we could well be setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment, frustration, and growing resentment. When we give ourselves to others more out of our own need for love, then our giving can easily become manipulative and even coercive.

But when we learn to rest in God’s presence and trust in God’s love, knowing that we are received and cherished by God, then we can give to others according to their capacity to receive and we can also receive from others according to their capacity to give. We can flow with the river, and will have no need to push the river or fight the river.  

The more deeply we can rest in God’s acceptance and love, the more freely we will be able to give “generously and ungrudgingly” the way God gives (James 1:5), without any sense of superiority or pride or need to be acknowledged for our generosity. At the same time, we will be able to receive gladly and gratefully from others without any sense of being short-changed or any sense of indebtedness. Maybe you have noticed that some people appear to be good givers, but not good receivers; maybe you are one of them. I tend to be. By trusting in God’s love, by allowing God to dwell in our hearts, we learn what it means to freely give and freely receive.

To love deeply means that we will hurt deeply, we will feel the pain of others and make it our pain. Loving the way God loves makes us vulnerable. Relationships will be very important to us, so when those relationships are broken we will feel the pain of that brokenness deeply. But when we trust in God’s love, we allow the pain we feel to connect us to the pain and suffering of the world, and in the largeness of God’s Story and God’s Spirit we find peace.

When we look for peace exclusively in the world, when we try to find peace in a job or career, in a marriage, in our families, in a church, in a religious or political movement, in a relationship, in a dream, or some sought after experience, we are going to be disappointed and frustrated. I am not suggesting that these things are unimportant; they obviously have varying degrees of importance in our lives. But all these things are unpredictable. When we rest and trust in God’s loving acceptance and presence, we are connected to the eternal source of love and life who can give us a peace that passes understanding and who can sustain us when all the other things in our lives are not going well.

A New Commandment: Love Beyond . . .

In his farewell discourse to his disciples in the Gospel of John, Jesus says: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).

Jesus creates community, not on the basis of purity codes, levels of holiness, or degrees of worthiness, but on the basis of a transcending, inclusive, loyal love.

The command to love is itself not new, but what is new is the emphasis and centrality Jesus brings to it. The duty of humankind toward God and toward each other can be gathered up in the command to love. If there is one virtue that is foundational to all other virtues, if there is one quality or attribute that stands above all the others and is the source of all the others it is love. This is the essential mark of Christian discipleship.

The commandment is also new in the way Jesus makes God’s love tangible, visible, and concrete. Theologically, the word we use to talk about this is incarnation. Jesus fleshed out God’s love in the nitty-gritty of life, through his words and deeds, through his attitudes and actions, through his conversation and conduct, through his reactions and responses. In his teachings, relationships, and interactions with others we see what divine love looks like, how it functions, how it relates to all kinds of people, and what its priorities are.

The context in which this teaching appears in John’s Gospel emphasizes the constancy of God’s love. It is a loyal, faithful, steadfast, enduring love.

Just before this instruction, Jesus takes a basin of water and a towel and washes and dries the feet of his disciples. This is a daring, extraordinary, audacious act. All Palestinian homes had basins of water for the washing of one’s feet; after all, they walked along dusty, dirt streets and walkways in open sandals. This was commonplace. However, not even servants of a household were assigned the task of washing someone else’s feet.

But Jesus is making a point. He washes their feet and then tells them to do likewise. This is how they are to express their love for one another—through simple, humble acts of service. When the divine love saturates the faith community, when the community is immersed in God’s love no task, no service, no ministry to another is beneath us. In God’s community everything is reversed and turned upside down. One leads by serving, and no task is to small or menial.

Yet, these very disciples will be the ones who deny, betray, and abandon him, leaving him alone to face his tormentors and killers.

But Jesus does not desert them. Even after their denial and desertion, after their betrayal and breach of covenant loyalty, Jesus refuses to withdraw his love; he remains loyal to them.

At the beginning of Jesus’ farewell instruction, John’s Gospel reads, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (13:1). Then, in the very next verse we are told that Judas had already made his decision to betray Jesus (13:2). Jesus never withdrew his love; he loved Judas and the others to the uttermost, to the end, beyond their betrayal and failure.

Very few of us have the capacity to love this way. Loving someone beyond the breach, beyond the denials and betrayals takes a large, magnanimous, steadfast love.

But let’s be clear. Loving beyond the breach never means continued victimization. Everyone reading this should be aware of the toxic nature of co-dependency and enabling behavior that may, on the surface, look like steadfast love. But it is not real love at all. Steadfast love will involve letting go rather than hanging on to a relationship that enables addictive behavior or a dysfunctional relationship.

But letting go does not mean abandoning the person, though the relationship may take a completely different form. Jesus gave his disciples the complete freedom to choose. He did not cling to them. Yet, he did not dismiss them either. How this works out in the actual inner-workings of our relationships can be complicated, but disciples of Jesus never withdraw their love and commitment to the good of the other.

If we are to love the way Jesus loved, we will need to nurture a rich, deep experience of God’s love. Jesus was the perfect receiving station. He could say, “I and my Father are one.” They were on the same page; they were one in intent and purpose. His experience of divine love empowered him to love.

This kind of intimacy and intuitive, inner, spiritual knowing of God is available and accessible to all of us. One does not have to have any special gift or calling, or go through any special ceremony or ritual, or believe certain doctrines to be qualified to know God intimately and encounter Divine Love.

Jesus embodied God’s love. Now he says, “Just as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. Tag, you’re it. It’s your turn. As the Father sent me, so I send you to be channels of divine love.” It is a love large enough to include everyone and strong enough to withstand and endure all failures and betrayals. It is a love beyond all boundaries and breaches. 

Knowing Christ

In John  10:27 Jesus says:  “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” Eternal life in John’s Gospel is as much about quality of life as quantity of life. It is not merely life without end; it involves a particular kind of life that is without end.

This Gospel offers a rather simple, but profound explanation of what it means by eternal life. In John 17:3 we read: “This is eternal life,  that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” From the perspective of the Johannine community, eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ whom God sent into the world.

This “knowing” is not simply knowing about, it is not information based knowledge. It is intimate knowing, experiential knowing, relational knowing, intuitive knowing; it is deep, innate, inner, spiritual knowing.

Faith, of course, is vital in nurturing this kind of kind of knowing. It is critically important, however, to understand that faith includes both belief and trust, but these two aspects of faith are not the same thing. We enter into an intimate knowing of God, not through belief, but through trust, through a living faith. When John’s gospel issues a call to believe it is actually calling the reader to trust, not simply give intellectual adherence to certain beliefs.

What we believe, however, is important. What we give mental assent to, the way we imagine and think about God, the ideas, perceptions, and images we have about God can be helpful or harmful to this process of actually knowing God. What we believe about God greatly impacts our capacity to trust God.

For example, if one images a God poised over the smite button ready to smite us for our sins, if one  thinks of God threatening us with eternal torture, then frankly I can’t imagine why anyone would be drawn to such a God. How could you trust or love that kind of God?

So what we believe about God makes a difference. This is why in the first book I wrote, The Good News According to Jesus, I have an entire chapter on “Imagining God.”  And what can be said about our beliefs about God can also be said about the religious systems wherein we develop these beliefs.

Unhealthy religion sets up roadblocks and fosters a false confidence and security that actually prevents us from knowing God. Toxic religion disguises our wants and desires, dressing them up so they look holy, but are still rooted in the ego and saturated with selfish ambition. Unhealthy religion blinds us to our real motives and intentions. We call our sins holy. We think we want God, but what we really want is power and control and to feel morally superior.

Good, healthy religion leads us into an intimate relationship with God. It provides some boundaries and guidelines that help us get to know God and experience God in the inner self where God resides. It provides a context that inspires a genuine desire for God and one that is conducive to hearing and following the inner voice of the Spirit/the living Christ.    

For Christians the voice of God is the voice of the living Christ. We see God through the lens of Jesus. The only way to hear the voice of the living Christ is by spending time with Christ. One has to invest time with Christ to be able to discern the voice of Christ.

John Ortburg tells about a friend of the family who became really upset when her daughter told her that someone at school had been talking to her about God. This woman wanted nothing to do with God, or so she thought, and didn’t want her daughter to have anything to do with God. That night, however, she couldn’t sleep. For some reason around midnight she got up, went downstairs, and picked up a Bible. She couldn’t remember the last time she had even held a Bible, let alone read one.

When she opened it she noticed it was divided between an “old” part and a “new” part. She decided to start with the new part. So, in the still of the night she began to read the Gospel of Matthew. By the time she had finished all the Synoptic Gospels and was half-way through the Gospel of John, she realized that, in her words, “she had fallen in love with the character of Jesus.” She said a prayer: “God, I don’t know what I am doing, but I know you are what I want.” This marked the beginning of her spiritual journey.

A spiritual life begins with desire. One must want to know God in order to know God. I suggest spending time in the Gospels—reading, meditating, reflecting, questioning, probing, pondering—until one falls in love with the character of Jesus. If you invest time with Christ, you just may be irresistibly drawn to him.

To know God intimately is to experience real, meaningful, abundant life—eternal life. It’s all about intimacy of relationship—a deep, inner, intuitive knowing, connecting, communing, and cooperating with the living Christ who loves us more than we love ourselves.  

The Freedom to Love

In John 21:1–19, Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Peter is singled out not because Peter is more noteworthy than the others. Peter functions in a kind of representative role. He is the one who tends to talk the most and shout the loudest.

The three times that Jesus addresses Peter corresponds to Peter’s three denials (18:17, 25–27). All the disciples betrayed Jesus and fled in fear, but Peter was the most adamant in his claim to loyalty. He had insisted that he would never desert Jesus.

It was painful for Peter to have to respond to Jesus three times, each time remembering his betrayals. Jesus holds no grudge; there is no retribution. We need not fear condemnation, but we all, like Peter, must be led through a process whereby we face the pain our betrayals and denials and failures have caused those we have hurt. Without such a process we cannot enter into the new covenant of forgiveness.

It’s not that God withholds forgiveness, it’s simply that we will be unable to realize it, experience it, know it on a spiritual, emotional, and social level. We cannot experience forgiveness relationally unless we enter into the relationship anew through confession. And what is true in our relationship with God is just as true in our relationship within the community. For we should know full well that our relationships with others are inseparably tied to our relationship with God.

This Gospel tells us that on the night that Peter denied that he knew Jesus, he was warming himself by a charcoal fire (18:18). In John 21, as he joins Jesus on the shore of the lake for breakfast he is standing beside a charcoal fire. The place of denial and betrayal becomes a place of forgiveness, a place of reconciliation. The place of failure becomes a place of restoration and a new beginning.  

There is an interesting detail given in 21:7: “When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea.” Do you find that strange? You would think it would be just the opposite—that he would have his clothes on in the boat and then take them off to jump into the water.  

I don’t know if the writer and the community that gave us this Gospel intended anything by that little detail, but I see some rich symbolism in it. Part of the human condition is that we are always putting on certain kinds of clothes. We are concerned about appearances aren’t we? We are afraid people won’t love us or accept us if we just stand before them without pretenses or masks.

When we stand before the Lord we stand naked. There is no need for any disguises, no need to conceal who we really are or what we have done, what we are actually feeling or thinking. The Spirit within us knows us better than we consciously know ourselves and loves us with an eternal love.

The Spirit that draws us into relationship with God is always trying to get us to strip ourselves of all appearances, disguises, illusions and the defense mechanisms that we use to protect our fragile egos.

The depth and quality of the forgiveness we experience will depend on the depth and quality of our confession. Our readiness and willingness to name our demons, to confront the darkness within us, will determine our capacity to see our faults, insecurities, fears, and all the life diminishing attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that hold us in bondage. We are all attached to destructive patterns and habits that we have difficulty facing and admitting.

In the movie, The Flight, the pilot Whip Whitaker performs an amazing maneuver to land a plane. Four passengers and two flight attendants are killed, and others injured, but his ability to rotate the plane saved the rest of the passengers. The irony is that he did this phenomenal maneuver while legally intoxicated.

He is an alcoholic and a drug user, but refuses to admit he has a problem. It has destroyed his marriage and he has no relationship with his son. Though he was intoxicated the day of the crash, by all appearances his professional legal council will be able to get him off. He has found some loopholes. All Whip has to do is tell one more lie.

At the hearing it is pointed out that two empty alcohol bottles were found in the trash on the plane. Whip knows they are his. His interrogators know that one of the flight attendants was intoxicated. Whip had slept and drank with this woman the night before the flight. All he has to do to get out of this whole mess without any liability is deny that the empty bottles are his, though it will probably cost the flight attendant her job.       

He hesitates. He takes a sip of water. He whispers, “God help me.” He can’t do it. He finally comes to a place where he can’t lie anymore. He confesses that they are his bottles and that he was flying intoxicated and that he is even intoxicated now at the hearing.

Next, we see Whip in prison, sitting down in a group with some other prisoners. He is telling his story. He has been in prison for over 13 months. He says:

“That was it. I was finished. I was done. It was as if I had reached my life long limit of lies. I could not tell one more lie. And maybe I’m a sucker because If I had told one more lie I could have walked away from all that mess—kept my wings, kept my false sense of pride. And more importantly, I could have avoided being locked up with all you folks for the last 13 months. But I am here and I will be here for the next four or five years and that’s fair. I betrayed the public trust—that’s how the judge explained it to me. I betrayed the public trust. FAA took my away my pilot’s license. And that’s fair.

My chances of ever flying again are slim to none, and I accept that. I have a lot of time to think about all of it—doing some writing. I wrote letters to each of the families that lost loved ones. Some of them were able to hear my apology, some of them never will. I also apologized to the people who tried to help me along the way, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t listen. People like my wife—my ex-wife, my son and again, like I said, some will never forgive me, but at least I’m sober. I thank God for that. I’m grateful for that. And this is going to sound real stupid from a man locked up in prison, but for the first time in my life I’m free.”

Our freedom to love is tied to our willingness to be honest with ourselves, admit our addictions, face our entrapments, and trust a greater power, a greater love, a greater forgiveness and grace. When we know who we are, with all that is broken and beautiful about us, when we can authentically face our compulsions and negative patterns and experience forgiveness and love, then we are free to give ourselves more totally and freely to others.