HERBIE'S COMMITMENT & MINE
So the nine or ten year-old Herbie has heard that God needs volunteers to fight the war against the satanic and demonic forces that sweep the world into moral lunacy, cruelty and heartlessness and impurity! It’s going to be a long hard brawl with a lot of pain and loss but it’s the right war and it’s a war that God and his companions will win! Sensing that and with the beauty and innocence that can be found in the hearts of children the boy writes: “Dear God, count me in! Your friend, Herbie.” *
There’s commitment!
I don’t know that my commitment was ever that pure or innocent but like millions of others I can’t deny that whatever was in me I gave it and whatever is in me I give it still. Mine wasn’t and isn’t Herbie’s personal commitment for his personal commitment was wrapped up in and shaped by his unique personhood and heart—only he could give his “count me in.”
Why is it then that his words move me so? Why do I want to make them mine? And I do! I really do! However wretched I feel myself to be at times there is something down in me that admires such a Herbian commitment and for me to admire it says something about me. I am one of the very many people whose inner wiring makes me more than reluctant to believe or say anything good about myself—it isn’t humility—it’s unhealthy; but it’s there and it is what it is.
[I don’t say God can’t or doesn’t use me for his good purposes—he does though for some people what I say on a couple of subjects is blasphemous or close to it. That might explain why the number of visitors to this site has dropped truly dramatically. In any case, some people think God uses me for good. My point is that God can use any of us for his good even if we don’t care for him or if we're truly unprofitable servants as I almost always see myself as being. Luke 17.10 is saying more than I'm saying here but that's for another time.]
Back to Herbie and me. I don’t at all like me [even though I believe God loves me and uses me for good from time to time] and yet I so admire the spirit of Herbie and that kind of thing delivers me from total unbridled self-dislike and the paralysis that that generates in some of us. There’s something down in me that admires something morally beautiful, something that I want to imitate, something I may not be able in this life to match but something I’d dearly long to be part of me, something I would love to be able to claim is mine also. I’ve given and do give what I’ve got but I admire more than I’ve given, more than I’ve been able to give. Still, what does that admiration or longing for what is better and lovelier say about me?
My commitment to God is real but it comes short of the purity and loveliness and innocence of a gallant little boy. I’m saying that because I am proud of him when I look at his gallantry and I hunger to be like him and that says something about me that can't be bad. God has been at work in me--there's no denying that.
In the movie As Good As It Gets, the dysfunctional and compulsive Mr. Udhall is centered on himself and is abusive to all around him. He recognizes his insolence, his crass selfishness and isn’t capable of caring much about these traits…until he meets up with Carol the waitress. Getting to know her makes him aware of what he was already aware of and didn’t regret; now he doesn’t like himself; she and her way underscored his miserable and miserly persona. Later in desperation he gate-crashes his therapist’s office and gets no help there but Carol continues to influence him and while he isn’t “cured” he wants better and some of his speech and actions express that. As the movie closes Udhall feels some inner rays of hope, maybe he’s really changing for the better and just before they go into a cafeteria [him still skipping over the cracks in the pavement] he tells Carol that he sees fine things in her that other don’t see but the very fact that, “I see them says something about me.” For him it was a sign that maybe down inside there was something more than weakness, rudeness, self-centeredness and such, something had wakened in him and he was glad to see it and he was going along with its flow.
I want to believe, can’t help believing that because I so admire Herbie and the glory of his commitment that that says something about me; maybe I'm not as wretched as I constantly tell myself I am. I want God to count me in, I want to call myself His friend. If there’s any truth in any of the above and it says something about me, it must say something about you too.
* See "Herbie's Prayer".
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