TD Jakes - Coping with Complacency
When we look at this text today, we understand that this particular young man has had paralysis all his life. From his mother’s womb, he has been lame. He doesn’t know what it is to walk; he doesn’t know what it is to ride a bicycle; he doesn’t know what it is to run and play with other kids or go swimming in the brook. He doesn’t know what any of that is like. All his life, he has been in a state of paralysis. When I looked at his paralysis, I looked at our world, and it was like, without any warning at all, as if God told everybody to go to their rooms. Over a third of the population went into total paralysis—shut up in the house and completely shut down.
Imagine, if you will. I never thought I would see a time when Times Square would be closed, that there would not be the ringing of the bells at the casinos in Vegas, that Broadway would shut down, and Hollywood would collapse, every beach would be empty; everything was shut down in a state of paralysis. Like any paralysis, the longer you are paralyzed, the more territory it takes. What started as a medical problem evolved into a sociological problem, then into an economic problem, and finally into a political problem; and the whole world was in crisis. If you had a way to escape, there was nowhere to go.
If you bought a plane ticket, there was no place on the planet you could go to escape the problem. Everybody was stuck and shut down. They were much like a third of the 8 billion people on the planet in their homes, and they were much like the ankles of this man—they didn’t work. There was no place to work; they couldn’t go to work; they couldn’t move anywhere; they couldn’t do anything. Even though two-thirds were still mobile, one-third was shut down, and the world was lame in both its feet. Anytime something doesn’t work long enough, you develop a survival system. It doesn’t matter what it is; if it doesn’t work, you adapt. If you and your daughter don’t get along, you learn how to cope.
You might moan or feel upset about it, but eventually, if people hurt you badly enough for long enough, you learn to cope. As my grandmother would say, you learn how to «feed them with a long-handled spoon.» If your marriage doesn’t work, you learn how to cope with that. If your car doesn’t work, you learn how to deal with its quirks. When I had a raggedy car, I carried a long-handled screwdriver to get it going whenever I needed. Other people would ride with me, shocked, saying, «Oh, what’s wrong with the car?» I would say, «Oh, don’t worry about it; just hand me the screwdriver.»
You learn how to cope with what doesn’t work. This man is lame in both his feet, but he has developed a system of sustenance. Let me tell all of you out there who don’t have a system of sustenance—you’re fooling yourselves. You can’t stay at your mama’s house forever; you can’t stay with grandma forever. Sooner or later, you have to stand up and make a system that sustains you, even if it’s not what you dreamed of. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. This is not what the man dreamed of, but necessity is the mother of invention. He learned there were a couple of people that would carry him every day, pick him up out of his bed, and lay him at the gate called Beautiful. His problem was his ankles, but if you wallow in your problems, you’ll never see a shift in your situation.
So, he had to find a way to cope with the problems that would not go away. They laid him daily at the gate called Beautiful—not once a week, but daily, every day, whether it was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Every day looked the same. I want to talk to somebody whose days all look the same. You wake up in the morning, and it doesn’t matter what you put on or do; you have the same thing to deal with. You have to cope with the same lying people, the same kids in their situation, living in the same community with the same neighbor next door, dealing with the same frustrations and economic consequences—the same Monday, the same Tuesday, the same Wednesday, the same Thursday. This is just another day; it could have been any day.
They told us what time it was but didn’t tell us what day. They say it’s the ninth hour of prayer, but they don’t tell us what day of the week it is. They told us what time, but what difference does it make what day it is when every day is the same? They don’t tell us what the man’s name is; they don’t tell us what the day is; they just mention what time it was. Now, to all of you who are trying to figure out your next steps because you have been paralyzed by a pandemic, terrorized by fear, and ostracized from groups of people with different opinions, you find yourself backed against the wall, trying to find your way out. When you walk by faith, you don’t always have the benefit of a strategy. Sometimes, things just happen.
What I want you to understand is that when God orders a change in your life, He doesn’t always announce that the change is coming. When God gets ready to take over, He does so the same way COVID took over. It didn’t announce itself; it didn’t give us a 90-day warning. Boom! Everything shut down, and it didn’t matter what your opinion was about it or the color of your skin; it just shut everything down. This man was going about his routine, his ordinary cycle as a paralytic man; he is neither weak nor strong, to be admired or resented. He is doing what paralytic people do. People do what people do. There’s nothing really exceptional about it. Everybody thinks they are exceptional, but the reality is, if you boil it down, people struggle with what other people struggle with.
People do people things. I don’t care what planet, country, culture, or language; people do people things. This man was doing what any other paralytic person would do if they were trying to get something to eat. That was his job description. When he woke up in the morning and brushed his teeth and combed his hair, he knew he was going to do what he did yesterday. He woke up paralyzed; he woke up stiff; he woke up normal. He dragged himself over to the side of the bed where they could lift him and hand him his cup, so he could beg. They set him at the gate called Beautiful. I want to talk to you about the gate because the gate called Beautiful presents an ugly situation in a beautiful place.
Here we have this broken, flawed, impotent, incomplete, paralyzed individual stuck at a gate called Beautiful. What a strange place for an ugly problem to exist! I want to talk to people who have ugly problems in beautiful places. On the outside it’s beautiful, but on the inside, it’s paralyzed. On the outside, we take great pictures; on the inside, we’re not speaking. On the outside, we’re prosperous; on the inside, they’re about to repossess everything. Oh my God—the gate and the man; what an amazing oxymoron—a beautiful gate and a broken man. They laid him daily at a beautiful gate; perhaps it was to accessorize the agony of being paralyzed. We all have ways of glamorizing our agony. We all have ways of fixing up our surroundings to accommodate the pain of reality.
Anesthetizing our pain is why the alcoholic gets drunk—because life looks better when I’m drunk. It’s why the drug user gets high—life gets better if you let me get a couple of hits first. Oh, I’m talking to somebody. The man is laid daily at the gate called Beautiful, but the problem with the gate is that, as beautiful as it is, it is neither here nor there. If you’re at a gate, you’re in a nebulous, indescript place; you’re not in or out, you’re not with it, you’re not without it. There were people who didn’t believe in God down at the marketplace, people in the bakery buying bread, and people in the synagogue having church.
He wasn’t with the world; he wasn’t with the church; he was stuck at the gate. I want to talk to somebody who feels stuck—stuck at the gate. A gate doesn’t have an address; it doesn’t have a mailbox; it doesn’t receive bills. A gate is a nebulous place because it is neither here nor there. The gate is neither hot nor cold; it’s neither black nor white; it’s neither rich nor poor. It’s ambiguous—almost fixing to, could have, would have, should have. Oh God, have you ever been at the gates where you could see what was possible, but you couldn’t get to it? Where you could turn your head and look back, but you couldn’t go back? He couldn’t go backward; he couldn’t go forward; he was paralyzed in a nebulous place, a place of uncertainty.