Opposites Attract
By Ron Hickerson
Late one night, I asked the Lord to do a
scary thing: show me my sin. My body
responded to the answer with a twitch
that crept through my limbs and swelled into a
shaking I was always taught, as a good
Southern Baptist boy, was not from the Lord,
just charismatic exaggeration.
Laying down in the aftermath, amid
aftershocks, I thought of the magnets my
girls play with.They like to turn them so the
like poles face each other and then they inch
one magnet toward the other, making
it scoot until it reaches the tipping
point, shaking and spinning and exposing
the opposite pole so the two magnets
fly together. I try to be holy,
because God is holy, but I forget
God’s holiness is completely other
than what I expect it to be, and my
constructed notions of what holiness
should look like push me away when the Lord
inches closer. God isn’t interested
in my holy side, God has plenty of
holiness. Instead, God wants that
other side, my opposite pole—the weak,
ugly, problematic face—and one turn
flings me to the holy magnetism
where I’m caught and made part of a new field.