It is tempting to look at the ancients of Israel, as they wandered and grumbled in a desert for forty years, and wonder at their behavior—or else, question the storyline, which leaves a few questions. These people are key participants in mouth-dropping events at the Red Sea, where the God who has chosen them offers a display of all that means. These same people then come to doubt God’s presence among them, God’s power, God’s concern, God’s plan for their lives. Did they really believe they could be as moved and cared for by a golden ornament, molded at their own hands, as they were with the God who split open the Red Sea?

Whether a casual or careful reader of Israel’s story, it is tempting to keep their behavior at a healthy distance, as if in its ancient context, it is wholly un-relatable to our own. But imagining that Israel’s actions are in complete contrast with mine, I repeatedly discover, is a stretch by any imagination. The behavior of the Israelites is still among us; at times, is it frustratingly close to home.

Though the specific events of Egypt could have similarly been held at a distance by the psalmist who was writing years later, the writer nonetheless stood poised to remember the events of Israel’s past so as to see his present situation more clearly. As if forging it in his own memory, the psalmist speaks bluntly of Israel’s experience in the desert: “Then they despised the pleasant land; they did not believe his promise” (106:24).

What does it take to come to despise what once seemed promising? What would it take for you to refuse to believe the one thing you want to believe most? When hopes are dashed in trying places, I don’t believe their reaction to the desert is so far removed from our own. The Israelites were not unusually slow in understanding; they were no more stubborn than you or I am. But they were entirely disappointed; all they longed for seemed altogether unreachable. They could not believe that the wilderness was the way to Canaan. They could not see how their current trouble was consistent with a God who loved them; they could not see how their pain could possibly work for good in the end. Who among us cannot at some point relate?

Whether people of faith or not, we long for someone or something or some place that can make right what is wrong in this world, what is wrong in our lives. And yet, carrying ideas of what that someone or something will look like, and not finding it, we end up doubting the promising thought we once held on to with hope. When the route we see in front of us seems irreconcilable with the place we thought we were going, we come to despise what once seemed hopeful, holding in its place shattered expectations, fear, and anger.

When Jesus healed a man who was called Legion because he was possessed with so many demons, the townspeople had a peculiar response. Mark describes the scene and its aftermath as a crowd began to gather. “When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid” (5:15).

This man was someone they were familiar with; the crowd actually recognized him. He was the one they saw dodging in and out of nearby caves, living as a total recluse, cast out of society, an outcast even of his own mind. Yet, seeing the one they were used to avoiding suddenly dressed and in his right mind evoked within them, not delight or amazement, not thanks or hopefulness, but fear. No one suspected that this was a shadow of all they longed for themselves. Seeing Jesus, the instrument of healing—the one who set right what was wrong—they were simply afraid. And they begged him to leave.

As the Israelites beheld the desert and the townspeople beheld Legion, both missed what God was doing because they were troubled by the failures of their imagination. It brings quiet inquiries to mind. Do we not still oscillate between being too uncomfortable to trust and too comfortable to believe? How do we guard against missing our deepest hope, though we fear? And how do we not come to despise what once seemed promising, though we stand broken or disappointed in the wilderness?

Like the psalmist, we might stand poised to remember, seeing God in history, seeing ourselves, seeing today—with imagination, with thanksgiving. Though I am tempted to keep the behavior of those who have gone before me at a distance, I am comforted by the proximity of God throughout their story, continually drawing them nearer, even in the desert. Though they grumbled and failed and begged God to leave, God continued to lead them, in mercy breaking each idol they would have settled for, prying from their hands the things that blocked their view of the promise God would not forget.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

A New York Times column recently posed the question “Do moralists make bad novelists?” Two novelists, Alison Gregory and Pankaj Mishra respectively, provided brief responses. Though both writers grapple with the question in a distinctive manner, they are unified on one thought: Morality in the context of a story should be inherent, not explicit. The concrete circumstances of the story ought to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. And, both writers agree, ambiguity is usually a more suitable vehicle for such a task than certainty. Gregory sums up this conclusion well: “It’s not that fiction should be written by amoral authors — in fact, I would argue that novels actively unconcerned with which thoughts and behaviors are worth having are themselves not worth reading — but that their methods ought to be suggestive rather than forthright. Fiction should expose us to a conscience, not a conviction.”(1)

Allowing the circumstances of a story to speak for themselves can lead authors, their characters, and their readers in surprising directions, directions that don’t necessarily fit the assumptions of all three. This is when books get really interesting. When an author’s, a character’s, a reader’s assumptions smack against the hard surfaces of reality this can be a means to an enlarged perspective, an invitation to an outlook that is more subtle, generous, and humane. But this kind of undertaking requires courage. We seldom speak of great writers as brave. We should. Telling the truth flies in the face of fashion, ideology, vanity, and self-interest.

Asked if he is religious, author Jeffrey Eugenides responded, “I don’t think you should be interested in searching for the truth if you don’t think maybe you’ll find the truth.” One of the characters from his latest book, The Marriage Plot, discovers this first-hand. With a last name that is every bit as dramatic as his author’s, Mitchell Grammaticus sets his sights on Calcutta, India, where he plans to volunteer at the Sisters of Charity, Mother Teresa’s home for the sick and the dying. The year is 1982 and Mitchell has just graduated from Brown University. Mitchell boards the Calcutta-bound plane clutching a tattered copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God, his heart inflated by lofty ideals of charity and sainthood. The trip is a fascinating failure.

“Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. He’d never nursed a sick person, or seen anyone die, and now here he was, surrounded by a mass of dying people, and it was his job to help them die at peace, knowing they were loved.”(2) Crowded by this unremitting destitution, Mitchell is pushed well beyond his limits. What is especially confounding to him is his seeming inability to marshal the kind of regard that Mother Teresa and her sisters have for their dying guests. His inner resources simply aren’t up to the task.

The breaking point arrives when Mitchell and another volunteer are trying to bathe a man’s cancer-ravaged body. “Not for a moment did Mitchell believe that the cancerous body on the slab was the body of Christ. He bathed the man as gently as possible, scrubbing around the base of the tumor, which was venomously reddened and seeping blood. He was trying to make the man feel less ashamed, to let him know, in his last days, that he wasn’t alone, not entirely, and that the two strange figures bathing him, however clumsy and inexpert, were nevertheless trying to do their best for him.”(3) But Mitchell’s resolve is fatally weakened. The hard surface of reality is unyielding and simply won’t crack open to reveal some liberating spiritual principle. There is only the slab, the failing body with its failing organs— the whole recalcitrant body of facts that register Mitchell’s impending failure. The ordeal concludes with these stunning sentences: “And Mitchell began to move. Already knowing he would regret this moment for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life, and yet unable to resist the sweet impulse that ran through his every nerve, Mitchell headed to the front of the home, right past Matthew 25:40, and up the steps to the bright, fallen world above.”(4)

Is this a disparagement of the Christian ideal of love? Has this incident simply woken Mitchell up to the sad fact that a human being is nothing more than a sophisticated animal bound to the same fate as whales, mice, and amoebas? Is that all there is to us?

Mitchell shares more than an exotic last name with his author. Following his graduation from Brown University, Jeffrey Eugenides made the same trip to Mother Teresa’s home for the sick and dying as Mitchell. Eugenides’ own experiment in sainthood also ended in failure. What drew both Mitchell and his maker to this humble little nun and her perch in the squalor of India’s poorest slums is the same thing that inspired Malcolm Muggeridge’s unforgettable words as he bade her farewell at the Calcutta railway station: “When the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as though I were leaving behind me all the beauty and all the joy in the universe. Something of God’s universal love has rubbed off on Mother Teresa, giving her homely features a noticeable luminosity; a shining quality. She has lived so closely with her Lord that the same enchantment clings about her that sent the crowds chasing after him in Jerusalem and Galilee, and made his mere presence seem a harbinger of healing.”(5) Is this “shining quality,” this “noticeable luminosity” real? Or does the “bright, fallen world above” expose Mother Teresa as a fraud?

Eugenides doesn’t answers these questions for the reader. What he does do is offer a concrete demonstration of the fact that it is manifestly impossible to muster this kind of love on our own strength. Mother Teresa and her Sisters of Charity are seeing things in these decrepit bodies that Mitchell just can’t see. Something that doesn’t seem to fit into the “bright, fallen world above” is guiding their hands and feet.

Flannery O’Connor says that the “chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.”(6) Confronting the limits of this world, Mitchell appears to be on the threshold of another world. True, he flees, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t brushed shoulders with a deeper reality. And besides, not everyone flees… Mother Teresa is proof of that. Jeffrey Eugenides is portraying a larger universe in this scene. It would have to be a larger universe in order to accommodate Mother Teresa and others like her. And there are many others like her if we would only have eyes to see.

Cameron McAllister is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra, “Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?” The New York Times (July 7, 2015), Italics mine.

(2) Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: Picadore, 2011), 297.

(3) Ibid., 319.

(4) Ibid., 321.

(5) Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1971), 17-18.

(6) Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Sraus and Giroux, 1957), 175.