Be Perfect.

Matthew 5:48 - Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.

When I was young I had one of those sickening Kitty Cat posters on my wall showing a sweet, widdle kitty that had gotten into a basket of yarn. The inscription read: "I'm not perfect, just forgiven."

This is a popular quip of many Christians. It is meant to demonstrate that the Gospel of Jesus is about grace. And this grace covers all the imperfections so that we don't have to be perfect to have salvation and forgiveness. In fact, we don't even have to be perfect once we accept the Gospel. Grace covers all.
Yet . . .

Jesus said the words that many followers don't really want to think about: Be perfect. It was during His famous Sermon on the Mount and He was talking about loving your enemies. He also touched on how these actions of love and reaching out to the unfavorable are an evidence of salvation. This is what He is talking about when He says it. He threw it in like a glandular kid doing a cannon ball into your serene backyard pool. Loving our enemies is hard enough, and what does that have to do with perfection?

I went on a journey to try to decipher some of the mystery behind such a raw and unattainable command. This is a chronicle of that journey.

If you read the commentaries and scriptural dictionaries about 'perfection', you would come across a general consensus. In short: when God says we should be perfect, He doesn't really mean it. You come across explanations that use terms like:

Limited perfection
Relative perfection
Mimicking, reflecting, or a shadow of Gods perfection

Perfection is not so much achievable as it is a "sign", "symbol" or distant reality attained "only in eternity"; "a divine ideal forever shining before us". Not attainable in this life? Whew. That’s good news. For a minute there, I was worried that God was actually serious. I mean, God did say we should be 'imitators' of Him (Eph. 5:1), so that must also apply here. Glad we got that cleared up.

But wait, if Jesus is speaking metaphorically, does that also apply to loving our enemies? Does Jesus go straight from the literal and make a leap into the nebulous?

Now, I may not be a scholar or a linguist, but even I know that there is no such thing as "relative or limited perfection". It's a made up concept! Imagine trying to apply that same principle to life:

"Yes, I did put on my application that I have a perfect SAT score."
"But your score from the transcript says only 1250?"
"Yes, but I happen to be very smart, and I am a good learner. My ability to mature and grow allows me 'relative perfection' on my SAT. There. That should explain it."

I don't know about you, but I was unsettled by the explanations given to me.

The verse says to: Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. The comparison between the perfection of God and the perfection He requires of us gives us our first clue into what is being asked of us. For instance, if the "perfection" used to describe God is different from the word "perfection" used for us, then we can begin to swallow some of the 'relative perfection' theories. If we look at the roots of each use of 'perfect' we can clear this up . . .

(gulp)

The word 'perfect' in this verse is identical for both times it is used; the word is Teleios in the Greek.

(Game, set, match)

Both times it is expressed as an nominative adjective. The only difference is that one is plural and one is singular; plural referring to "us" and singular referring to "heavenly Father". That’s it. No alternate type of perfection ascribed to us. We are asked to the same standard of perfection that God is.

So, how are the scholars so off?

I believe the answer is still found in the standard of comparison. If we are to be perfect like God, then how is God perfect? The scholars assume that God is perfect in such a divine way that to assume that we can be as perfect would be deification of humanity (a.k.a. idolatry). Err on the side of caution.

But, if we were expected to be a different kind of perfect than God, Jesus could have used a different word. Greek and English do not always line up exactly. In the New Testament, there are 11 other words besides Teleios translated as 'perfect' or 'perfection'. There is a significance in the fact that the word used to describe our command of perfection is the same that is attributed to God's perfection.

How is God perfect? The answer to this question unlocks the key to understanding this verse. In the Old Testament Hebrew, the words used to describe perfection were largely associated with ethics. It is not uncommon to stress the definition of perfection as blameless, faultless, flawless, and without blemish. Certainly, this describes God. We all know that Jesus was sinless. It speaks of Him being 'perfect', however, only in Hebrews. And God's perfection is belabored all through the Bible. But are ethics and/or sinlessness the main function of God's perfection?

If the answer is "yes", then we are surely looking at an unattainable perfection and we will need the explanations of the scholars. If the answer is "no", then what are we missing about God's perfection? Surely, God is ethical beyond doubt?

Is God ethical?

My search for the meaning behind Matthew 5:48 drove me straight into this brick wall of a question. The verse is based on a comparison with God. But God is God. I mean, come on. How is anyone supposed to compete? No wonder the scholars were shooting for moon only to land in the stars. God is sinless.

Wait, Jesus was sinless. But is God sinless?

What does it mean to sin? I mean, we all know that sin is when we screw up. More technically, sin is when we do something God told us not to. Even more technically, sin is not just doing something, its anything that is offensive to God. Stealing is bad because God told us so. He set up the system, so He makes the rules. There are certain things (i.e. the Ten Commandments) that are big no-no's. They are because God knows the system and He knows what is better and worse. But God lives outside the system. When we sin, what makes it 'sin' is that it is something that is an offense against God. Is God sinless because he has never offended Himself? Can God offend Himself? Is God ethical? So, if I murder someone, I am in BIG trouble. But God kills people all the time and we don’t really have any problem with it. We don't call God unethical, we attribute all knowledge and omniscience to Him. Its okay that God kills people because we expect Him to know when death can be right or even good. Because God is God and He has those 'god-like qualities' of omniscience and omnipresence and such, it is not seen as the same kind of 'wrong' as when we kill.

I propose this: God is not ethical. Nor is He unethical. He is above the very system that defines those ethics. Jesus was sinless because He operated inside the system. God is not a sinner, nor is He sinless. He is not defined by that standard, He is just God.

But Erin, what about the fact that God is good? Doesn't that denote sinlessness or ethics?

God is good. But I don't believe that this revelation makes Him ethical. The 'good' we attribute to God manifests itself in all realms. So in our realm, God is good in many ways (i.e. the sinlessness of Jesus). But that does not change the fact that in the spiritual realm, God is still enacting good in a way that we could compare to our realm as unethical. God can kill and still be good. We are bound by a different standard.

So what am I getting at?

I think that in my search to find an answer to Matthew 5:48, I realized that we get stuck because we are trying to measure the length of a piece of paper with a kitchen measuring cup. We are trying to measure the volume of a swimming pool with a yard stick. We set out to be perfect by ethics. "Be ye therefore ethical as your Father in Heaven is ethical." This is where we get discouraged. We can never be as 'good' as God. But if God is not ethical, we are missing the comparison. So how is God perfect?

Our definition of 'perfect' is the lynchpin to this comparison, and the comparison is the key. The word 'perfect' (as mentioned above) can have many different definitions. The one used in the verse in Matthew is used 3 other times in scripture. A look at the way it is used in these other verses may shed light on how we are to view it in Matthew 5.

Colossians 4:12 is talking about Epaphras who is praying for the Colossians that they may "stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God."

James 1:4 is talking about endurance having "its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

From these two verses we can infer that this perfection is associated with "full assurance" and "completion that lacks nothing". To really seal this image we go to the final reference in Matthew 19:21. This is the story of the rich young ruler. Ironically, it mirrors our journey to this point. The young ruler is telling Jesus how ethical he is and how he has followed all of the commands. He calls Jesus good and Jesus asks why he would call Him good. The young ruler has done all these good things and lacked none, but He is looking for an answer about salvation. Jesus reply: "If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.".

For our purposes, we will just focus on the first six words of Jesus remark: If you wish to be complete. This translation of the verse is New American Standard. It uses the word "perfect" interchangeably with "complete".

There is a concept in mathematics called The Perfect Circle. This circle is perfect in the fact that it is complete and is lacking no aspects attributed to a circle. Its diameter is exact on every point that you could measure it. In the ultimate definition of what makes a circle a circle, it lacks nothing.

How is God perfect? I submit that the answer is ontological. God is perfect in the sense that he is complete.

How does this apply, then, to us? Be ye therefore complete as your Father in Heaven is complete. James touched on our completeness being tied to endurance. What does completeness look like in the Christian life?

Here is my conclusion: the trick to understand this falls on the word "be". "Be perfect (complete)". There are two ways to 'be". We talked about one earlier when we were trying to "be" sinless or ethical. That is the verb tense of "be". Its an action. It is part of our linear lifestyle. We look down the road in hopes of doing enough to attain perfection. There is also the noun tense "be". This is to "be" in terms of being, not of doing. I can sum up the difference by saying that I can be angry or I can be sad, but I can never cease to be Erin. Anger and sadness are exponents and outpourings. They are actions. My essence is an identity. It is a state of being. So what tense is being used in the verse?

I mentioned before that the word Teleios was an adjective. Adjectives define nouns. We are talking about nouns here, not verbs. This goes back to the measuring the swimming pool with a yard stick. We are trying to apply this verse about perfection by doing instead of being.

The Gospel tells us that when we accept Christ as Savior, we are new creations. We have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It grants us new identity. We often forget this identity. We live out of an orphan mindset and continue to scratch in the dirt despite our ability to fly. To be complete is to remember the Gospel; to remember who we are in Christ. To remember that the victory is won; that all power is given to us; that grace covers all and that in Christ I am complete.

Suddenly, this verse seems a lot more attainable. I can be complete by remembering that God is complete and that His Spirit dwells in me. It's about identity, not ethics.

So, be perfect Church, as your Father is perfect. And don't worry about those ethics. If we align our identity, our actions will be a representation of our completeness. The inevitable result will be a that our actions and lifestyle parallel the desire of our Father.

So remember who you are in Christ.

And be perfect.

You can do it.

Really.

The DNA of Suffering

Today, while walking back from the grocery store, I read a section out of Tim Keller's book The Reason for God. He was addressing the common argument against God about how or why a good god could allow so much suffering to happen. In his answer he finishes by explaining that the reward of Heaven is not some consolation for our earthly suffering, but a transformation and reconciliation of that suffering that makes it new. He emphasises with a quote from C.S. Lewis:

"They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not
knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that
agony into glory."

Something familiar about this caught me. I stopped reading and in a moment I knew what it was; Darkness and Light.

In prior posts I have used certain analogies and language given to me by God in scripture such as: turning deserts to gardens and darkness becoming light. These references have haunted me and caught me in a place where I had to review my position on suffering. As I have explained, I have a past that continues to wreak havoc in my mind. Through the years I have healed to an amazing level of functioning, but never felt fully healed. When challenged by God to revisit this past and imagine the possibility of a new level of healing, I was resistant, defiant and confused. As you journey through my posts, you may notice that I have been learning a lot. And though the visitation to some of my darkest places was (to say the least) unpleasant, a pattern of theology has emerged that I could only know through watching the transformation of my darkness into light.

"Impossible," I said. "Darkness and light are mutually exclusive. Evil can have good come out of it, but it does not become Good. They, like light and dark, are mutually exclusive." Perhaps a bit like agony becoming glory as Lewis mentioned. How does this happen? How can it be? Today, I was bestowed a culmination of my questions into answers provided by this journey. I would like to share with you what I found.

There had to be a paradigm shift. I viewed suffering as many of us do. I, as a follower of the Way, wanted God to rescue me from suffering. We see it scripture all the time, right? Deliverance from the fiery furnace, shutting the jaws of the lions in Daniel's den, and so many others. What happens is that we 'tunnel vision' ourselves on these examples. So when the lions start working their way up our legs we begin to wonder: "Why has God not delivered me? Is He a bad god? Am I a bad follower? What went wrong?"
OR
We opt for tunnel #2: We see that suffering is sometimes allowed in scripture. Job suffered, Christ died, Elijah was banished, but in the end all things are restored. We see that the suffering is justifiable so long as we get something good to make up for it. Suffering without explanation or tangible restoration is unacceptable.
OR
Tunnel #3: Suffering must have meaning. Sure, Paul was beaten a lot and Stephen was stoned but it was not in vain. Keller mentions this in his book as well. We always try to make things like suffering and death be 'not in vain'. Meaning must be brought to suffering or else what was the point?
We opt for these three common viewpoint because suffering is just plain old suffering. Just like darkness is just dark and deserts are not gardens. Suffering does not change. You either make the best out of it or it is pointless. Good can come from it, but there is nothing that changes Evil into Good, right? I thought so, too. I knew that all the Evil in my past was never going to be anything more than just pure Evil. I could remove and better myself, but nothing would ever change the essence of what I was or did. The past is the past. Suffering stays the same. The cheese stands alone.
I'm sure you may have heard the concept of 'freedom' in Christianity applied to suffering. Yet, so often, we make it to be "freedom from suffering" and not "freedom in suffering". I wanted to experience freedom FROM my past because I figured there was no way to experience freedom IN my past. The difference is simple but crucial. How in world can something so mutually exclusive as darkness and light be made into each other? Darkness gets a new DNA. Suffering gets a new DNA. God works on a whole new level and creates new realm of possibilities. Even agony BECOMES glory.
We get so stuck on measuring God by our circumstances. I do this all the time. God is only good when he rescues me FROM suffering or at least gives me some restoration or AT LEAST an explanation. If I get none of these, then God is just a bad god who doesn't give a damn. But He has opened my eyes. I got to journey back through some of the most painful and gut wrenching times of my life so that I could learn this lesson: like water into wine, God has changed the DNA of my suffering. Freedom IN suffering is like nothing I can describe. It is other worldly. It is a concept so foreign to our humanity that we miss it constantly in scripture.
Keller and Lewis are suggesting that what God does to our suffering is different than just rewarding us later or making it up to us with Heaven. Its as if God, by giving us His Spirit and bestowing on us abilities to transcend the rules of cause and affect, transforms our suffering and darkness into the very thing it can not be: joy and light. Not just making the best of it, but changing it.
This explains so much when you think about it. The disciples, apostles and martyrs, those listed in the 'hall of faith' (Heb 11) and others; they found a way to somehow transcend their suffering. It was as if they had a secret. The way you do when you get old enough and spankings don't really hurt anymore, but you try not to let on so that the parents don't change tactics. Okay, lame analogy. But I just see all these guys (and gals) looking into the face of their earthly suffering and NOT saying "This is gonna hurt, but at least I get to go to Heaven". They seem to look at it as if it DOESN'T hurt. I know they suffered. I know it hurt. It killed them. But they had a manner about it as if they knew something their captors did not. Suffering was not just suffering. They had joy. A joy that freed them from the despair brought on by suffering. It was more than hope and more than optimism; it was peace. It was joy! It was everything suffering is not and yet the suffering happened. They knew something, like the kid who knows the spanking won't hurt. They took it because darkness while remaining darkness was also light.

So, are you confused yet? This is some pretty incredible stuff. Impossible really. I wish I had better analogies or a magic way of providing clarity. All I can do is tell you what I saw. I went back to darkness. Nothing changed about my past. All events and outcomes stayed just as they were. The only thing that changed was the threat of the outcome. I am no longer afraid of the dark. Who can be afraid of the dark when enlightened to that fact that it is actually light? My past is still a wreck. It will forever remain a tangle of awful and terrifying experiences. But I no longer feel the weight of it. The daggers of shame, grief and depression that have loomed over my healing have burst like fireworks into butterflies. Agony becomes glory. When Christ transformed me, He transformed my sin and suffering along with it. I do not have to default to the "old rules". Suffering has a new DNA. It is made up of Joy.

Lemon Juice

I accidentally cut myself last night while I was trying to slice a lemon. (Ouch! I know, right, a lemon of all things!) Probably does not help my situation that I was using a steak knife to cut it. (I like the serrated edges because they grab the skin.) Well, this time it didn't grab the skin and it just slid right down the side onto my index finger. Its a relatively small cut. Deep enough to be beyond a paper cut, but short enough to be less then noticeable. It liked to bleed, but I eventually got it under control in just enough time to make and enjoy the hot Toddy I was preparing.

So, this morning, I woke up and noticed the cut. It had that familiar tightness around the skin and twingy way of smarting when touched. Surprisingly, it also had guilt. (This is the point in the blog when you begin to realize why I decided to write about a small, kitchen cut.) Why guilt? What was I feeling guilty about? Then it arrived to me. Every so often, some unseen force, benevolent or malicious, bring me gifts from my past. Sometimes just trinkets but other times its an all out field trip. Today it was a trinket.

I sit here and finger the small cut and muse on my inappropriate feelings. This cut represents something very familiar to me. Today when i cut myself, its an accident. I don't intend it; and when it happens, it hurts and i don't like it. But, not so long ago, i cut for pleasure. I would cut for release. It was my "savior of Sundays". This was the day I cut on the most. It was a friend to me. However, the next day, I would feel the familiar tightness around the skin and twingy way of smarting when you touched it. Guilt would follow. If there was enough guilt, it would evoke enough overwhelming emotions for me to need to cut again. I was trapped.

I have been clean from Self-Injury since 2002. Sounds like long ago, but on mornings like this, i feel as if it were breathing at my shoulder. My past is a monster that can run up from miles away at the smell of blood. I can smell its odor as it drools and heaves at my back. It is hungry to devour me again, even if it has to slowly take me piece by piece. It watches me now as i write this, wondering where I will conclude.

Today, I am free. Today, I have a will to resist. Today, i am in my right mind. I am sound enough to cry out for strength and feel its God breathed power in me. Today, I am not at risk of being eaten. My monster is disappointed. It slumps away, and I am happy that it has been defeated for now. But I am disturbed by its ready presence. It continues to exist, and it is still hungry. The threat looms over me, impending. I still live a life where I can be stopped still by a whiff of drool and a thought of hearing heavy breathing. Is it there? Will it come tomorrow? What minor instance will bring it calling next?
Today, I am free. Today, I can relax. Today, all I have is a small, accidental, cut on my finger.

Origins

My past has a thesis: "Its all my fault."
It's one of those cement statements I have held to after so many years of reflection and healing. Some people have things that happen to them. Some people have shit that rains on them from birth. Some people have air and light, but choose to bury themselves in the earth instead. My past has one agent: me.
I have known without doubt that all that is terrible and dangerous in me is because of me. I am not arguing original sin. I am saying that, with the portion of evil and grace inside of us, we are also given choices. I took mine. I let evil in the door, pushed out Christ and good sense, and (with volition) made choices I knew in my heart to be wrong. I created my monster. This mantra has never been in question,
until now.
I had never been truly challenged with the idea that I am not to blame. Honestly, this comes from a striking lack of choices. There is me and then there is me, but also, there is Evil.
I've never been one to blame the devil. I've seen enough devil in myself to recognize a difference. Never have I sensed a "possession" of external spiritual compulsion. Yet, there is some connection, because there is Evil.
The idea behind reexamining these origins is to correct some possible ideas that spring from my blame. You see, by blaming myself for my monsters I might also feel a great responsibility to "fix" myself. Though years of healing have taught me that only God alone can be my healer, it still might be a propensity and is worth looking at. Also, if you don't diagnose the disease right, you might have issues with the remedy.
So I took the challenge and took my time.
This is what happened:
I sought God and meditated on these questions and waited. After a few days I got a song. (Yes, a song). An old song. A song I had written when I was about 12yrs old. I was startled to recall it for a few reasons.
a) I hardly remember ANY songs I wrote between the age of 12 and 19.
b) It was a song that I used to sing to myself all the time when I was in my deepest depressions.
This was a song that I sang when I was still fighting. So, as the tune came back to me, so did an old image of myself, sitting in my room, playing the song, staring at the phone, trying not to cry, praying for it to ring. I used to hope that God would do me a miracle and invoke someone to call me right at that moment, and if they did, I would get help from them. I used to do this over and over again for years.
So the next morning after recalling the song, I blocked off some time to ask God about what it all meant. We sat and rolled it over. I thought about those moments when I would pray so hard.
Side note: Why didn't I just call someone or ask my parents or someone I trusted for help, you ask? The short version: Fear had always kept me from opening my mouth. I was afraid that in voicing my fears, I would only get validation from someone about how wretched and screwed up I was. Also, my best friend at the time was a girl who for the most part was useless in this situation. I had once asked for help from her. It was the day of my first suicide attempt. My first and only cry for help. I told her what I was feeling and planning to do. She laughed at me.
So, back to the phone. When I still had the will to fight my pain, I would sit, play my song over and over, and beg God to intervene. I rolled this over and over. "Why did I want someone to call?" I asked myself.
Because I was lonely and thought that if God would do that for me, then I could have the courage to trust the person on the other end of the line.
"How would that have helped me?"
I would have tried to get help. I may have even avoided so much of the pain and darkness I invoked over the years.
"But the phone never rang."
The phone never rang.
That's when it hit me. It hit me hard, but it was as real as anything. I actually don't blame myself for all of my darkness . . . I blame God.
It all became clear! Forever I have struggled with faith and remained mystified as to the origin. This is it! The phone never rang! Thus, I felt left to my own vices and my own sickness. I felt helpless without intervention from God. I blame HIM for all those years of madness because when I asked for help from Him, He didn't make the phone ring.
It all makes so much sense if you know me. I have so little faith in asking God for anything or ever getting anything but "screwed for my own good" from Him. This is why. I never knew. It was those heart shredding hours of staring at the phone that darkened my faith. I never knew.

So now I know. And this is where it ended. I kept waiting for a further revelation. Something that would comfort me. Some clue God would give me that would help me understand why the phone never rang or why it looked like I had been ignored. But there was nothing else. I hit a wall.
I am like Much Afraid at the Precipice Injury, staring up at dizzying cliff and seeing no way up. Like her, I hope that The Shepard will point out to me the Hart and the Hind and their secret, but fluid path up the cliff. I hope He will give me my strong guides, Sorrow and Suffering, to rope me in and lead me up this cliff away from my pursuing enemies. I have Sorrow and Suffering, but I see no trajectory. Perhaps I am being led up in my sleep, like Adam, when Eve was constructed. Without his help, or input or capacity for worry, he was placed in a pleasant suspense, and when he awoke, all was revealed without mystery.
So what now God? We can't go back and make the phone ring. We can't alter the past. So what does all this revelation have to do with my future? I still feel abandoned and I am no more prone to trust You with this fresh wound re-opened. What now? I am with You. Take me to the next steps. Make my feet like those of the hind, and bring me safely over the mountains. (Hab 3:19)

Fear and Faith Introduced

I have a good friend who once experienced a really hard summer. I know, because I lived right down the street from her that summer in between college semesters. It all came back to a guy. A guy who cut her so hard to her core, that it shattered who she was. This is when the fear came. She could not be alone. She could not even get through a shower without crying, even though we were right outside in her living room. I remember, she started reading this book called The Gift of Fear. It was new then, but I found out that it got pretty popular. She read it, and it kinda helped her. I did not read it, but somehow, as I meditate on my current situation, this recollection of that summer comes back to me.
I have lived with fear for a long time. I have had many days of my life that were just like my friend's that summer. Some days where the fear shows up in the guise of anxiety and I just can't seem to get out of bed or function at all. Fear has been a crippling instrument to me. And in a way, it has had its "gifts" for me. The true root of all of this is "the object of my fear". This object sucked all the fear out of every other part of my life. To many people, it looked as if I feared nothing. I would prove this by carelessly putting myself in situations that others would avoid. My mantra seemed to say "There is nothing anyone can do to you that is as bad as what you have done to yourself". So many of my hollows were not filled with fear. But one cistern of my soul carried it all.
What am I afraid of, then? What is the crippling agent? Nothing external to me; just myself. Only God, myself and my four walls have ever seen the madness that lies within me. It saw the years of my darkness. I reflect on this with a shutter that runs down me. I know myself and I have seen my own potential for evil. An evil that has a complete disregard for others or myself. An evil that is in allegiance only to itself. It was a very dark time. So now, the object of my fear is "me". I carry it with me always and can never escape it the way one can run from a snake or spider. The memory of it is my haunting. My "gift of fear" has almost kept me from marriage, friendships, life and now, parenthood. I do not trust myself. It is a hard employment. Do I allow myself to function out in the world while knowing all along how much I can F everything up? I chose yes. So now, here I am, living among you under the guise of a normal citizen. However, I have a secret red "A" that is lashed on my skin underneath my priestly frock. Only I know it well.
Fear has held me hostage. Now Christ comes to set me free of it. Free to live without it. But as long as those images of my past and their realities remain in my mind, I can not. "Okay", He says, "Then we will walk through it together. I will show you its beauty". But I fear this even so. I repel at the thought of having to walk back through what I have worked so hard to get past. And yet, I can not even conceive of what He is offering me. A chance to live without this spine numbing fear. It is too good to be true. I have never even dreamt of the possibility.
Skip with me now to faith. I have never had it well. It seems, no matter how many miracles God does in my life, now matter that He has never once let me down, I still feel as if He is going to screw me at every new trial. I have such little faith. Reason alone, should lead me to faith at this point. I can look back on my life and make a strong case for belief in the goodness of God. But I don't do this. I never have.
What happens instead is that I look at the possibility that I may fail or that things may not work out, or that God would let me lose everything and everyone and send me to die. There is no guarantee in the whole Bible that tells me that things will always work out for me. So I look at this and see that I have two options:
A) Choose to believe that everything God does is motivated out of love for me and so NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, it is good and right and best for me, and I am never alone. OR . . .
B) Choose to accept that if things don't work out for me, its probably an indicator that God does not really care for me, and wait in fear of the impending doom, hating all along you have to rely on such a power-hungry God.
Believe it or not, I always choose B. Always. I am disgusted that I have little to no control and that I HAVE to rely on God. But you know what. I am not all wrong. God never does guarantee us good things and success. What I do with this, though, is mix it with fear and live in it. Every situation like this is an excruciating experience for me. I go through it with fear and pain. Why would I do this to myself? What is the incentive? Good question.
The answer is one that only came to me recently and is the prompt for this essay. I realized the other day, that I don't want to seem ignorant. This is my view of faith. Faith is something people use when they are out of "warm fuzzy answers". They can't guarantee that God will make everything successful and "right". They can't say that it will all work out fine. At this dead end, they use faith. They say that, even with all of these bad possibilities, they will trust in God. I look at them and laugh. I say that what they are doing is eating sugar when they run out of candy in hopes of getting the same good feeling. Faith looks like a delusion of truth. Its looks like a refusal to accept that God may not help you out. That you may fail and crash and burn and lose everything and what would that say about your God. It's like those words from Job (13:15) that I can never understand: "Though he slay me, yet will I will hope in him." Hell, no! If God is going to screw me, you better bet that my anger and challenging distance will be ripe and ready.
But, you know what . . .
He never has screwed me.
On the contrary, He has always shown me His utmost goodness. Not everything has always gone the way I wanted, but God has ALWAYS restored me with some great act of goodness.
So what the hell am I doing!
Its about fear and faith. Attributing too much to one and not enough to the other. I have only just realized what they both really are. By misunderstanding faith, I make fear my only viable option. Faith is not a delusion of truth. It can very much accept wholeheartedly that God never promises us success and freedom from suffering and failure. It can look at those options and say "Yep. Things may end up bad. This may suck.", but what faith gives now is not a rose-colored pacification. It is the hope of the possibility of goodness. There are two options: things may end up very bad, or things may work out good. No one can predict which will happen. The choice we have is how to live in the time up until resolution. I have always chosen to live with fear over faith. But I am only realizing now, that faith does not insult my intelligence. It is a way for me to choose freedom from my crippling fear until God preforms His sovereignty. Faith is a sober acceptance of all possibilities, but a choice to live with peace and hope in the meantime.
I have never done this.
So God offers me this lesson. He is giving me a way to live without crippling fear. The Bible says that "Perfect love casts out fear." (1John 4:18) My problem is that perfect love is an exponent of God and His goodness. I have never let love cast out my fear, because I never let myself believe that God is motivated by love when it comes to the hard times. I have to actually trust in that love for it to affect my fear. Does this all sound simple? I can hardly believe it has taken me almost 2 decades to get this. For the first time in my life, I am resolving to live without this damaging fear. I am tired of being afraid. I am ready to walk back through my debilitating past. I am ready to be free. With every part of me, I swear this. I am ready to be free.

Listening

On the long drive back from North Carolina this Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I sat in a morbid silence as we listened to the audio recording of the book "Tuesdays with Morrie". If you have never read (or listened) to it, I highly recommend you do so. But this was our first time and we were spellbound by the last thesis of a dieing man. Morrie was a sociology professor dieing of Lou Gehrig's and as he slowly wasted away, he decided to chronicle his thoughts of life and death in order to make the most of it and send its message out into the world. Morrie said many profound and wonderful expansions on life and culture, but one in particular echoed through me: "People do not know how to live, because we do not know how to die. If we knew how to die, we would then know how to live."
Now, Morrie is not talking about our methods of dieing; he is talking about our attitude and approach to the reality of our own death. I had never soaked in the correlation with the two but its miracle went deep into me. Morrie was meditating on death because he was staring into it's face and he wanted others to benefit. I, myself, have always had a haunting problem with death. I am not afraid of it, in fact, through much of my life it has been an obsession. I used to meditate on it endlessly; not just for myself but projected onto others and their deaths. I have always been painfully aware of the finality that is in store for us all. I have never cried at funerals, and I have spent an unhealthy amount of free time in graveyards alone. To top the cake, (and I can't believe I am sending this into cyberspace) but I have attempted several forms of death known to us. Fortunately, I was (obviously) unsuccessful. But I was a very different person back then. I was very dark and I embraced my darkness with sick fascination. It was only recently when I began experiencing a renewed obsession with death. It shook me up to be experiencing my old thoughts. The good news is that none of them are suicidal, just sickly dark and twisted. I have always abhorred my secret obsession and I am mortified to find it resurrecting after such a long absence. It was things like this that led me to realize that God is taking me back. He is taking me back to places I have not been for oh so long.
So here I am listening to Morrie and on the edge of my seat. Our project for this week was listening. We were asked to listen to the groaning's of creation, God, others and ourselves. So all week I have been exceptionally attuned to wonder what I would hear. I have heard many things this week, but the most profound message came from Morrie. Morrie meditated on death and showed me that a courageous dialogue with death is actually a large piece of experiencing life. Especially as a Christian, my attitude toward death and my own finality are a key into my eternal, spiritual reality. And my understanding of this, puts life and living into perspective. Its an eternal, Godly perspective that hovers above time and space.
Are you starting to see?
Do you realize what it is that I got when I discovered this?
I hate my past and have ran from everything that was. I see nothing but sickness, insanity and death. I have striven to be a normal, functioning human being. Now God leads me back into the darkness because He calls it light. I say 'bullshit'. But here I am. I listen to the words of Morrie, realize that God has higher purpose for my obsession than just a dangerous, sick hobby. He cracked an old door and showed me a glow behind it, not the void that I had remembered. My sickness can be turned around for good. My darkness can lead me to revelations that will enhance my ability to live! And as I stared into the vast dessert of my past, behold . . . one small white flower trembles out of the sand.

Seeing

I was asked by my husband just a few nights ago, "If you could have any one question answered, what would you ask?"
There are SOOOOOOOO many that fall into this category, but after a few minutes of sorting through them, I came up with this one on the top: "What am I missing, Lord?"
After answering, it occurred to me that there is nothing stopping me from asking this question in reality. Imagine my surprise when I was faced with a similar challenge in the next weeks lesson of our workbook.
This week is important for two reasons. One is, I have been having bad days. Not the kind where stuff goes wrong, but the kind where I can't seem to handle anything, even if it goes right. My emotions have been way close to the surface. I find myself in fits of extreme anger and anxiety. I then look for any available place to spew them. This is an occurrence that used to be quite common in my life, but has not been for many years. Imagine my alarm.
Day after day, I felt more and more afraid of myself because i was unable to control the intense, irrational, outbursts of my emotions. It has been embarrassing and frustrating beyond measure. So i come upon this first exercise which asks us to contemplate the nearness of God throughout our day. So I did, and no shit; it worked.
The only thing that has centered me for days was the challenge to look beyond myself and feel Him when I was on the brink of explosion. And I felt Him. I felt Him and He was bigger than everything I was feeling besides Him.
It reminded me of college. I went through some very intense emotional healing during those years, and I recall now that when I was losing control of my mind, i used to drive out to the enormous fields that filled our campus. I would go lay on the hood of my car and stare at the infinite. I did this because it was very healing to be reminded how small I am really. It put things back in perspective. It allowed me to share a moment with something very constant and large. It was wonderful, until campus police found you and told you to get off the grass.
I am trying to become aware of Him. I am trying to do what I have so long preach at others to do. I am trying to pray without ceasing and resurrect the voice of God in my life. Now, what He has to say is another matter entirely.