Unlocking Love with Vulnerability
Bess Truman could be a bulldog. Indeed, the butler who served her breakfast in the White House was often asked by the other house servants, “Is she wearing two guns or one today?” Maybe when you are married to a President whose reputation is “Give ‘em hell Harry” you have to be, at times, part pug with pistols smoking.
But first impressions are impactful. Here is J. B. West’s sense of Mrs. Bess Truman upon meeting her privately for the first time at Blair House. J.B. West directed the operations of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for 28 years first as assistant to the chief usher, then as the chief usher. In his fact filled best-selling book “Upstairs at the White House” he writes about his first sit down with the new President’s wife.
“As I entered, she indicated a comfortable chair, and smiled. It was the smile of an equal, not of someone who considered herself of superior rank or status. When she spoke, I was aware from her words, from her tone of voice, that there was no distance of class or background between Bess Truman and myself. She seemed like an ordinary person, like someone from Creston, Iowa, or Independence, Missouri. I felt at ease and liked her immediately.”
Do you set people at ease with a similar kind of loving vulnerability in spite of your authority? Do you communicate to others irrespective of social class, gender, or ethnicity that the ground is level at the cross? That we all are sinners saved by the blood of the Lamb? That grace truly is amazing to you!?
I wonder if this might be the key for each of us, to play our own part, in moving past any racial or social inequity we might be guilty of to greater harmony. Let the love of Christ compel us to a loving vulnerability to serve others while setting aside our prideful clinging to authority. After all, we are drawn to powerful people who embrace their vulnerability. When someone once accused the famously homely yet still very Presidential Abraham Lincoln of being two-faced, he immediately responded, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”
How is a secure setting aside of authority with loving vulnerability lived out practically? Well, Jesus said it like this: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 - Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 - and whoever wants to be first must be your slave - 28 - just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:25-28).
THINK SERVANT NOT MASTER. “Not so with you.” With those four simple words Jesus radically broke the ambition of thinking up and to the right is where I’m going no matter who I step on to get there. Do you want to exercise authority? Be the one on top? Win baby? Pick up a towel and wash feet. Go low. Or in simpler fashion surrender the need to have the last word on Facebook or with your spouse. Own up to faults. Claim forgiveness in Christ. Admit there is another opinion. Treat those beneath you in structure like Bess Truman treated J.B. White - who became to her like family. And for heaven’s sake, look at the life of Christ, often.
SEEK TO SERVE AS HE SERVED. In The Power and Vulnerability of Love, Elizabeth Gandolfo reminds us, “The incarnate life of divine love begins in a pool of blood… The blood-borne origins of the Incarnation (God becoming flesh) remind us that the invulnerable nature of the divine love becomes not only possible, but also vulnerable in the crimson waters of Mary’s womb.” Did you know even today nearly one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage?
The Cosmic King made himself so very vulnerable to bear our sin and grant us freely his perfection. Now he serves us with his love each day granting us grace upon grace in all his authority. And in the end heaven is ours as well by faith in him. So now, in the words of the hymn writer, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all…” If serving Jesus is vulnerable loving slavery for others - chain me to the wall!
But does this loving vulnerability mean we never act in authority? We never call out? Insist on something right? Not at all. There was always an authoritative sign on President Truman’s desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” After two presidential terms of serving the Trumans this is what J. B. White wrote about that sign. “However, we all knew the buck didn’t stop there. President Truman packed it in his brief case every night, took it upstairs, and discussed it with ‘The Boss.’”
Loving vulnerability is all the more appealing when authority is rightly used. One day, one day soon, Jesus will rightly use his authority most definitively with his loving vulnerability and if you can believe it, we will love him even more. So now we serve - by unlocking love with vulnerability.