Somewhere between the halls of elementary school and junior high, an insult began to circulate among us kids—a pejorative moniker that was only offensive because of the tone with which it was wielded; but wielded it was—and with the kind of zeal for indifferent cruelty at which children often excel.
“What a try-hard.”
It looks awfully silly written out. I’m sure it sounded even sillier to any adult ears that might have overheard it. After all, perseverance, hard work and a willingness to risk are all positive attributes that maturity requires. Trying hard is generally a good quality. Perhaps this is why “try-hard” only enjoyed a brief—and perhaps geographic—season in the sun of childhood insults; falling far short of other 90’s favourites like ‘butthead’ and the ever ubiquitous, ‘loser’. But I find myself thinking about that long mothballed insult and wondering if perhaps we were onto something without knowing it. Because inherently, the charge was not about perseverance or hard work, or risk taking—but rather, it was about inauthenticity.
And, if we’re being really honest, we all know that even when we’re trying to be authentic, the counterfeit sneaks in to parade around its phoney credentials. Like that stubborn wheel on the shopping cart that persistently sends it careening into the Stovetop Stuffing display, the imitation is always ready to sneak in to subvert the authentic article. We hear it in our voices when we say that we’d love to get together to catch up when we know that it will never happen. We know it in our hearts when we fein feeling more concern about a situation than we actually do. We can all feel it—and we feel guilty about it—so we try harder.
Nothing irritates my inner curmudgeon more than a smear of Christian syrup to gild an unpleasant pill. It irritates me because, like the old adage that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on, the counterfeit has a way of rushing in ahead of the real.
“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9)
We wouldn’t need a reminder to have our love be genuine, if there wasn’t going to be a real and continual temptation toward insincerity. This knee-jerk insincerity isn’t ill-meant; it is just easier than roughing it through the discomforting wilderness of emotion, critical thinking and spiritual wrestling required to test and approve that which is both true and good. And usually, it doesn’t feel like we have time for all that. So, we wrap up our difficult conversations with banal statements like, “Well, God is going to do what He’s going to do…” and promise to pray and often never think about the matter again;—except to know that we don’t want to think about it again.
And then, there are those situations where genuine love feels downright impossible. What then? I can either try real hard and produce a syrupy forgery of love, or disobey the command to love my enemies altogether. The answer to this conundrum requires spiritual pursuit; discernment and a humility that acknowledges that I have no love for my enemies on my own. Loving one’s enemies requires nothing short of a miraculous work of divine intervention. The genuine love that God desires isn’t sourced in me at all, but rather in His character. It can only be supernaturally supplied.
Human love is only a shadow; a reflection of divine love. On its own it is as dim and two dimensional as all shadows must be. Instead of being try-hard Christians seeking to generate a pseudo approximation of love, we must instead be receive-hard saints who acquire the genuine love of God spiritually and are then able to give from that same love in a supernatural exchange. We were not called to what was possible in our own strength, but rather to die to our own efforts and live supernaturally through His. If we forget this, we’re in danger of relegating ourselves to an impotent and inauthentic faith.
And if we choose that? Well, as the kids used to say, “What a bunch of buttheads.”
(A version of this article was published in the Jan/Feb edition of live magazine. Check them here.)
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