That's oddly put - let me explain.
When you answer incorrectly on a test, you're wrong - but that's not really a difficult position to be in. All you really care about is the final grade. If that grade is what you expected, or better, then you really couldn't care less about being wrong on that question. Let's call this type of wrong Type One.
Maybe you make a judgement call on something and later realize that you were wrong. That's a little more difficult. There's no test to pass, other than the moral test that is within all mankind. Normally, this test doesn't "average out" - though we pretend that it does. So, we make a wrong judgement on something, learn we're wrong, and then attempt to explain (to ourselves and others) our judgement as some sort of "right, but not right" issue that provides a salve to our wounded sense of understanding. We're more familiar with this type of "wrong" than we might realize. For example - we judge harshly the mistakes of others until we find ourselves at the incorrect end of the same sort of mistake. That's when it's hard. That's when we have difficulty adapting our previous judgement to our current situation. This is Type Two.
But then there's another sort of "wrong." Type Three.
This is the wrong that you believe with all your heart as right. You think you know it, you think it's right beyond a shadow of a doubt, and you're willing to lose everything and to be persecuted endlessly over it because it's right! You know it in your very core!! In fact, you begin to build your very identity and purpose on the foundation of this truth. You see God in it - it can't possibly be wrong!!
And suddenly, it becomes obvious that it is wrong. That, folks, is a hard that not many of us will ever experience, much less understand.
I want you to watch this video - it's 10 minutes long, so if you don't have that kind of time, let the video buffer up and then skip to about 5:45 - that's where I want you to really watch:
His name, if you didn't already know, is Robert Fitzpatrick. Harold Camping is the man who runs Family Radio International and who is now infamous for running an expensive campaign to inform people of the (now false) prophecy that the world would end on May 21, 2011. The man in the video is not Harold Camping.
Instead, Mr. Fitzpatrick is the author of "The Doomsday Code," a book that was printed to spread the message of Camping's prophecy. Well - more like a mathematical calculation than a prophecy I suppose. I digress...
Do you hear his hurt? Maybe not - because there's always a little monster in us that wants to cackle at those who are in a difficult position and secretly revel in the fact that it is not us... but can you see this man's confusion? Can you hear his faith shaking?
Do you feel sorry for him or the thousands like him?
Because, aside from the obvious blunder of trying to speak with certainty on a topic that even Christ Himself said no man could be certain of, I believe that the greater lesson in this is what it teaches us about our LACK OF COMPASSION. All we can do is laugh, scoff, and scorn people who make mistakes. What happened to feeling sorry? What happened to compassionate understanding that could say, "wow - that was a mess-up, but we can move on past it and be better for what we're going to learn." What happened to the fellow sinner who beat his chest before God and begged for forgiveness?
No... we're all too often the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like that foolish sinner. We're too busy celebrating that we're not "him" that we fail to see that we really are. We blind our eyes with worldly things and convince ourselves that we look like the rest of the world and that God will have to judge us on the average, even on the curve, and we'll be okay then... We even begin to preach this and write books about it. Just like Mr. Fitzpatrick. "Hell is not real," we say, "Everyone goes to heaven." We start to believe it. We start to build our very foundations upon the truths that we have created and we being to know, in our very core, that we have a hold on something true!
Maybe we too will learn just how wrong we really are about a whole host of things.
And being wrong is hard.
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