Inseperable Companions
by Tim Lien
Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever!
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,
whom he has redeemed from trouble.
Psalm 107:1-2
There are things that almost always appear in duos. You rarely find them alone.
If peanut butter appears, grape jelly materializes. Salt, pepper. You’ve already thought of other examples while reading this.
And then there are things that work so closely together, they are said to be in tandem. On the face, they are quite dissimilar, but their companionship necessitates the working existence of the other. For example, the heart and lungs work in tandem with each other. The absence of one is the demise of the other. It can be said that both are separately vital, and yet vitally necessary in their companionship.
Sometimes it is easy to spot dynamic tandems. Like the heart and lungs. Sometimes they are camouflaged. It’s the disguised ones that will teach you a thing or two.
A disguised tandem: hate will always be present with real love. Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is the opposite of love. Ask any therapist: the husband who sits aloof, unengaged—caring little if she stays or goes— has all the markers of anti-love. But when both of them flash, flare, and shout, there is hope in the counseling session. Why? Because they care. They love each other, and the hate is merely expressing something that threatens the love.
While moseying through Psalm 107 recently, another disguised tandem emerged. And that means I was about to learn a thing or two.
Need, with its pathetic grimy outstretched hand, always has his other hand clasped with the ever-cheerful Gratitude. And where you find Gratitude bubbling on about good things, Need’s grimy hand is locked to hers—even when she’s overly expressive with her arms, Need does not let go.
They always, and I mean always, appear together. A real dynamic tandem.
If you have some time, you really must read Psalm 107. If you don’t have the time, you really do need Psalm 107.
Ostensibly, it’s about thanks and saying it out loud. It’s about remembering how God gives, rescues, redeems, and fixes broken situations that seemed irretrievable, unsalvageable, irreparable. Every contour of His story (and your story) has His thumbprint on it. That’s why Gratitude is effervescent and won’t be quiet, because the need was so great and grimy. That’s why Need is so loud, because everyone has finally arrived at the realization that a plan, a slide deck, and staying up later won’t do a damn thing to move the needle or advance the mission or achieve desired goals with quantifiable metrics. Human plans and overtime have never changed the human heart. Not once.
But there’s more here. If you hear someone gush about how grateful they are for God-and-life-and-success-and-blah-blah-blah, and you don’t see Need clasping onto Gratitude’s hand like a first-time parent clutching their toddler at a state fair, then you’d be right to smell something fishy, false, and pretended.
That’s not Gratitude; that’s Superiority sneakily telling you that all his ideas have been working out while all the morons around him should take a course in common sense and workin’ harder.
And it works the other way too. If Need is always expressing needfulness and sadness about lack and luck and licking the undersole of life, and you don’t ever hear Gratitude chiming in about God’s goodness like a chattering fourth-grader explaining to you why Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban IS THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY ENTIRE LIFE, then you know that the Need is still in its pretended stage—where it’s looking for pain-killer or a fix that can be realized come morning alarm, or at least by next week. It’s not real Need yet—the kind that is bereft of anything save that open, grimy hand. Because, of course, if it was real Need, there would be Gratitude finishing Need’s needy sentences gushing about the God that raises dead things and gives grimy hands rich food and wine without price (Isaiah 55:1-2).
But a nagging question lingers intuitively, deeply: how does one evoke Need or Gratitude? How do I get one of them to show up so that they drag along the other? What if you feel neither? What if you feel too numb, fatigued, or competent to pretend to be one or the other?
As it turns out, we can’t force them to arrive in our lives. We can’t try to be needy or grateful. Need and Gratitude only show up when someone tells a very big, good Story—filled with both horrifying despair and good news. Like Psalm 107. Or—even better— if someone lives the story of Psalm 107.
Listen to this one:
You may not have heard of it, but there is a video game called NieR: Automata (2017). It has all the trappings of normal video games: robot machines turned-bad that need to be shot and violently disassembled, a plucky hero with just a sliver of odds, and a saved-game mechanism that allows for all your accumulated awesomeness to be stored for digital posterity and fame. And repeated attempts.
Yes, it has a final boss—who is more final, and more difficult, and bossier than most games. And it will drive you to something close to raging madness, if you’ve ever encountered something like that in a quest to connect with your sons. Fifty-year-old reflexes playing video games resemble your grandmother fighting an MMA match. It ain’t pretty.
There comes a point in this final battle, where you know you can’t win. You just can’t. Your life bar is too low, your reflexes are too slow, and the boss has just too much firepower remaining.
And then.
These swirling lines of texts start appearing on your screen, completely integrated with the contours, explosions, and relentless debris. Like they were meant to be there. And they say happy things that seem a little too positively sappy: “You’ve got this! Don’t quit!” And they are all authored by gamertags like CornyChick_13 and Lam3dUck!wut. Straight out of an inspirational assembly at a middle-school: “I think you can do it! You will win!” And your health-bar gets a bump with every one of them. And, behold, you did get this. You do win. You do, do it.
But that’s not the end of the game. A strange post-battle screen presents you with a decision: You, too, can be a Helper to someone battling the final boss— pushing them on to victory in their hour of despair and hopelessness. With one catch: To do so means that your own saved-game files will be permanently deleted. You will lose all your progress. Or, you can save all your awesomeness, but you cannot give aid to someone else.
To experience this firsthand is quite stunning. You replay those final moments in your head. What seemed at first like sappy positivism becomes an emotion-laced gift. Lam3dUck!wut gave up his game so that you’d win out. “You will win!” only happened because Lam3dUck!wut lost everything. It is one of those rare moments in video games where Grace stuns you more than the digital gunfire.
And when you finally snap out of this very-lived reverie of amazement, you realize Need and Gratitude are standing right there beside you, holding hands like line-buddies in kindergarten. Grimy and grinning.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.
Then they were glad that the waters were quiet,
and he brought them to their desired haven.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of man!
Psalm 107:28-31