Flicking Walnuts

“If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?”

—Proverbs 24:10-12 (ESV)

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It is comical—and wonderful, sometimes—what people will do when they are tired. I don’t mean the dreary, grumpy stage of “tired”; I mean the “tired” that has come from, perhaps, too much time spent doing a good thing, the “tired” in which joy expresses itself in a loopy blur of consciousness and laughter is far more contagious than it usually is. This is the “tired” in which comedy and wonder can unite.

I remember a night a few years ago, a night tucked into a season in which a friend of mine had probably led more worship services with his band than he could count—a good season, without a doubt, but an exhausting one. I had attended one of the services where he was leading with his wife and daughter, and afterwards the four of us (thankfully) found a restaurant that was, somehow, still open. We sat down to dinner, drained but filled with joy. Likely none of us remembered the next morning what in the world we found to talk about—and to this day, my friend himself can’t even recall the night—but one memory stuck out to me.

After dinner had ended, the waitress came with dessert. My friend was excited for the dessert itself, but there was a road block: walnuts. He’s mildly allergic, and, being more than mildly tired, he began to flick them, good-naturedly, off the dessert, sending them flying at the wall. Some of them fell on the table; some disappeared into the dark-colored cracks of the old booth at which we were seated; others needed to be quickly dodged before their trajectory turned them into a new hair accessory. But he continued to flick them, laughing, until he had cleared enough of a path to safely eat the dessert beneath.

On a normal day, mind you, my friend is meticulously neat and deeply respectful. When I reminded him about this story years later, he was laughing in disbelief. But when you’re tired, and there’s a road block, sometimes you just flick it. We all have those days.

Despite the silliness of this event, this is a memory I cherish. Why? I learned a really valuable lesson that night from his delirious walnut-flicking. That lesson has come up for me all over again in the present season of my life, and a reading in Proverbs this morning resurfaced it too. And so, here I am, sharing it with you.

That lesson, in simple terms, is this: Sometimes, when there are walnuts in your life, you need to flick them.

Let me explain.

Have you ever hit a patch of life in which you felt like things were “bad”? You know, those patches where it seems like you’re running in pointless circles, beating your head against a wall, walking the same doomed roads day in and day out and wondering if anything will ever change?

I think we’ve all been there. But something I learned far too recently was this: We don’t have to stay there. Sure, sometimes we can’t change our circumstances; there are real difficulties in life that may not be eliminated, no matter how much we wish (or pray) that they would be. But even in these, there is a small but mighty hope in a realization that sounds simple but is immensely packed with power: the realization that we can control one thing, and that’s our attitude. We have a choice, regardless of circumstance, to respond either with negativity, complaint, and hopelessness or with truth, thanksgiving, and hope.

In the proverb quoted above, something that stood out to me was the reality that I have been able, at various times in my life, to see myself “being taken away to death,” “stumbling to the slaughter.” I’ve sat down on my floor, fallen on my face, and moaned, “Is there any hope? Why does life feel like death? What am I doing? Why do I keep running in the same stupid circles?” But what I didn’t realize until later was that it was my own refusal to choose life that was keeping me stuck. What I didn’t realize until later was that I actually had a lot of opportunity to choose what I was allowing in my life: how I was spending my free time, how I was filling my thought life, who I was around—even what job I was working, what attitude I had while working it, what environments I was putting myself into each day. What I didn’t realize until later was that “No” is a powerful word and that I could have said it to an awful lot of the things that I was letting infuse misery into my life.

It all made me wonder, reading this proverb, whether there may be times when its warning doesn’t just apply to others. Jesus said as much: “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matt. 7:3-5, ESV). Maybe there are times in which we know we know that we’re the ones headed towards death. Maybe God wants us not just to do the work of drawing others back onto the path of life; maybe there’s room for us to take note of our own path too.

Another proverb: “Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (Prov. 4:26-27, ESV).

I think probably all of us have more room in our lives to recognize the work that God Himself has done and still does to save us and make us holy; surely, there are vast numbers of ways He saves us that we don’t even realize. And the fact that we’re still breathing is repetitive testimony that He is still sustaining us, giving us reason and ability to live.

But, at the same time, I think probably all of us also have more room to recognize that we ourselves have responsibilities in this regard too. We don’t just plop down on a couch and let God do all the work of sanctifying us, do we? Is there not every chance for us to grow, to learn, to decide, to fail, to try again, to partner with what God is doing, to strive for godliness with all the strength with which He has filled our veins?

So we must, with the Lord, ponder the paths of our feet. We must take an honest look at our lives and ask, “Are there any walnuts here?” Is there anything sitting around, influencing who we’re becoming, that’s actually toxic to our health? And are we just leaving it there, for the sake of social “grace” or laziness or whatever other excuse comes to our mind? Or are we ready to say, “Lord, I know this thing is leading me into death. I know this thing is sending me stumbling to slaughter. I know you know it too. I’m ready to flick it out”?

That, my friend, takes a lot of strength to say. How much more frequently are we prone to echo Augustine’s oft-quoted, ironic prayer: “Oh, Master, make me chaste and celibate—but not yet!”¹

It’s so much easier to pretend like we can eat walnuts and get away with it. Sure, our tongues get a bit itchy; maybe it’s slightly hard to breathe. But at least we avoided the social embarrassment of launching them across the table, right? 

I’m learning, slowly, that I’d rather breathe. Maybe it is socially embarrassing to admit I’ve been up to things that haven’t been good for me. Maybe it will take a great deal of effort to rewrite my thought patterns and change my ways. But maybe that’s all worth it. Maybe it’s worth it to be able to say, “Yeah, I may have looked like a fool trying to get out of this swamp intact, but I would have been more foolish to just keep drowning in it.” More eloquently, here’s proverb #3: “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it” (Prov. 22:3, ESV).

So, then, the questions I know you knew were coming: Are there walnuts in your life? Are you ready to start doing some flicking?

I’m not saying you can boot out every little thing that causes you pain. I’m also not saying that the weight of your holiness, your becoming, rests entirely on your shoulders. Only God can change our hearts. But what I am saying is that we’d be pretty silly to blame God for allergic reactions to walnuts we had every bit of power to remove.

Maybe it’s time we flick off what we can flick off. Maybe it’s time we actually take the plank out of our own eye. Maybe it’s time we take responsibility for the state of our minds, choose a different response to our circumstances, and craft a life that genuinely reflects what we say we value. Maybe our ability to obey the direct message of that first proverb—to rescue others we see stumbling toward death—depends on our willingness to ponder our own path first. Food for thought.

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¹ Translation by James J. O’Donnell, as qtd. in “Fleshing Out St. Augustine” by Brian Morton, SundayHeraldReview (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/sundayheraldreview.html).