A Deer, a Road, and the Danger of Spiritual Indecision

A friend of mine told me a story the other day that has been rattling around in my head ever since, the way a stone rattles around in a shoe, too small to stop you from walking, but too persistent to let you walk in peace. He was driving down one of those long country roads that seem to exist for no other purpose than to remind you that the world is still mostly trees and sky, when a deer leapt from the treeline and landed squarely in the middle of the asphalt.

Now, this is not, in itself, a remarkable event. Deer have been darting in front of automobiles since there have been automobiles to dart in front of, and presumably they were darting in front of horses and oxcarts before that, and probably in front of Roman chariots before that, all the way back to some prehistoric deer leaping in front of a startled caveman who was simply trying to get home before dark. What made this particular deer remarkable was not that it appeared in the road, but what it did once it got there.

It froze. Not with the noble stillness of a statue or the deliberate pause of a creature assessing danger, but with the wretched, twitching paralysis of a mind at war with itself. Its head swung left, then right, then left again, like a spectator at a tennis match being played for its very life. Every muscle in its body seemed coiled for a decision that its brain refused to make. Left or right? Forest or field? This way or that? The deer, by all appearances, was engaged in an internal committee meeting of the most disastrous kind: the sort where everyone has an opinion and no one has the authority to act.

My friend, meanwhile, was doing everything a reasonable man could do. He slammed the brakes. He honked the horn. He may have shouted something that would not bear repeating in polite company. But the deer, locked in its terrible deliberation, simply stood there, vibrating with indecision, until the laws of physics, which are famously unsympathetic to philosophical dilemmas, resolved the matter in the worst possible way.

The car struck the deer. The deer ruined the car. Both parties limped away from the encounter considerably worse than they had been moments before. My friend spent the rest of his day dealing with insurance adjusters and body shops, and the deer, well, one hopes the deer eventually recovered, though it certainly had cause to reconsider its decision-making process, or rather, its lack of one.

The Tragedy of the Middle

Here is the thing that struck me about this story, and the reason it has lodged itself so stubbornly in my mind: if that deer had simply picked a direction, any direction, both it and my friend would have gone home unscathed. It did not matter whether the deer chose left or right, forest or field, this side of the road or that. What mattered was that it chose. A deer that bolts left survives. A deer that bolts right survives. But a deer that stands in the middle of the road, oscillating between two perfectly good options, gets flattened by a Chevrolet.

There is, I think, a profound and uncomfortable truth hiding in this roadside comedy, a truth that extends far beyond the decision-making capabilities of white-tailed deer. It is the truth that indecision is not a neutral state. We tend to think of the person who cannot make up his mind as harmless, as someone merely pausing to weigh the options, suspended in a kind of intellectual purgatory between action and inaction. But the deer on the road puts the lie to this comfortable notion. The middle of the road is not a safe place to stand. It is, in fact, the most dangerous place of all.

The ancient world understood this far better than we do. The Greeks had a word for the man who tried to serve two masters, to stand with one foot in each camp: they called him a fool. The Romans, with their characteristic bluntness, built their roads straight precisely because they understood that the shortest distance between two points is a commitment to one direction. Even nature itself seems to abhor the lukewarm middle ground. Water that is neither hot enough to boil nor cold enough to freeze simply sits there, stagnating, breeding nothing but mosquitoes and regret.

The Divine Diagnosis

Which brings us, as all roads eventually do if one is paying attention, to the letter to the church at Laodicea, that scorching bit of divine correspondence recorded in the third chapter of Revelation. Here Christ, speaking through John, delivers what may be the most startling rebuke in all of Scripture, startling not because of its severity, but because of its target. He does not rail against murderers or idolaters or blasphemers. He does not thunder against the obviously wicked. Instead, He turns His attention to those who are merely... tepid.

"I know your works," He says, "that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth."

Now, let us pause and consider the strangeness of this declaration, for it is strange indeed. Christ is saying, in terms that admit of no ambiguity whatsoever, that He would prefer outright coldness to lukewarmness. He would rather we be ice than room-temperature water. He would rather we stand against Him with conviction than stand sort-of-near Him with a shrug. This is not the kind of thing we expect to hear from the Almighty. We expect Him to say that cold is bad and hot is good and the middle is at least better than the worst. But He says nothing of the sort. He says the middle is the worst, so revolting, in fact, that it makes God physically ill.

This is the deer in the road, translated into the language of eternity. The soul that will not choose, that stands twitching between commitment and rejection, between the forest of faith and the field of unbelief, is the soul most likely to be destroyed, not because God is cruel, but because the middle of the road is where the traffic is.

Why God Prefers Ice to Tepid Water

But why? Why should lukewarmness be more offensive to God than outright opposition? The answer, I think, lies in what each state reveals about the human heart.

The person who is cold, who has examined the claims of Christ and rejected them, has at least done the courtesy of taking those claims seriously. He has weighed the evidence and rendered a verdict. He may be wrong, terribly wrong, but he has engaged with the question. And a person who has engaged with the question of Christ is a person who might yet be persuaded, who might yet be struck, as Paul was on the Damascus road, by a truth too bright to be denied. The cold heart is, paradoxically, closer to conversion than the lukewarm one, because it has at least acknowledged that there is something worth being cold about.

The lukewarm heart, by contrast, has not rejected Christ so much as it has failed to notice Him. It has not weighed the evidence and found it wanting; it has simply never bothered to pick up the scales. The lukewarm soul treats the most staggering claims ever made about the nature of reality, that God became man, that death was defeated, that eternity hinges on a cross, with the same mild interest it might give to a weather report or a mildly amusing anecdote. It says "Yes, yes, very nice" to the Resurrection and then returns to scrolling through its phone. It is the spiritual equivalent of the deer in the road: not opposed to salvation, not committed to damnation, just standing there, twitching, while the consequences of its indecision bear down upon it at sixty miles an hour.

The Modern Epidemic of the Middle

We live, I am afraid, in an age of spectacular lukewarmness. We have perfected the art of standing in the middle of the road on virtually every question of importance. We are spiritual but not religious, moral but not judgmental, interested in God but not committed to any particular God, in favor of truth but unwilling to insist that any truth is truer than any other. We have constructed an entire civilization on the principle of the uncommitted middle, and we are very proud of our balance, our nuance, our refusal to be extreme.

But Christ did not come to establish a civilization of the balanced and the nuanced. He came with a sword, He said, and He meant it, not a sword of violence, but a sword of division, the kind that separates the committed from the uncommitted, the hot from the cold, the deer that bolts from the deer that freezes. He came to force a choice, because He understood what the deer on the road did not: that the refusal to choose is itself a choice, and usually the worst one available.

The Laodiceans were wealthy, comfortable, self-satisfied. They had need of nothing, they thought. They had achieved that golden mean of spiritual respectability that asks nothing too difficult and promises nothing too extraordinary. They were, in short, the perfect modern congregation, pleasant, prosperous, and utterly useless. And Christ's response to them was not a gentle suggestion to try a little harder. It was a gag reflex.

The Mercy Hidden in the WarningSeeker

And yet, and this is the part we must not miss, for it transforms the whole passage from a threat into an invitation, Christ does not leave the Laodiceans in their lukewarmness. Immediately after His warning, He says something extraordinary: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me."

Here is the God who has just expressed His disgust at tepidity, and in the very next breath, He is knocking on the door of the tepid heart, asking to be let in. This is not the behavior of a God who wishes to condemn but of a God who wishes to cure. The warning about lukewarmness is not the final word; it is the diagnosis that precedes the treatment. God does not spit us out because He is finished with us. He spits us out because lukewarm water is not fit for drinking, and He wants us to become something better: either the hot water that heals or the cold water that refreshes, but something, for the love of all that is holy, something with a temperature.

The Deer's Lesson and Ours

My friend's deer, had it possessed the capacity for theological reflection, might have learned something useful from its ordeal. It might have learned that the middle of the road is no place to conduct a debate about directions. It might have learned that a wrong decision made with conviction is often better than no decision made at all, because at least the wrong decision can be corrected once you are safely on the shoulder, while no decision leaves you precisely where you started, which is to say, in the path of oncoming traffic.

And we, who possess rather more capacity for theological reflection than the average white-tailed deer, might learn the same lesson from a somewhat higher source. The call of Christ is not a call to the comfortable middle. It is not an invitation to stand in the road and weigh our options indefinitely while eternity bears down upon us. It is a call to move: to pick a direction, to commit, to bolt toward the light or at least to bolt somewhere, anywhere, so long as it is out of the paralyzing center where nothing is risked and therefore nothing is gained.

For in the end, the tragedy of the lukewarm heart is not that it chose wrongly but that it never truly chose at all. It is the tragedy of the deer that could have lived, if only it had moved. It is the tragedy of the soul that could have been saved, if only it had cared enough to be either hot or cold. And it is a tragedy that need not be ours, if we will only do what that poor deer could not: make up our minds, pick a direction, and run.

The road is no place to stand still. The door is open. The knock is persistent. And somewhere, on a country road that stretches from here to eternity, a choice is waiting to be made.

~The Seeker's Quill