Someday I'll See Clearly

I don't get it.

There's so much bad in me still. Don't get me wrong: there's some good in me, too, and much more than there used to be. I think that side's winning.

But the fight's not over, I guess.

This is probably a weird post to come back on, after the whole Sentence for September experiment, but I guess this is where I'm at right now. And I wanted to write, so this is what you get.

According to my sidebar, there are only 65 more days until I leave this chapter of my life. I thought it'd be different than it is. I thought I'd spend four years at a Christian school, confront the sin in my life, and walk away victorious and unconquerable. That's just not the case.

I wanted to find a book on my shelf tonight that would give me hope. There are books that I turn to when I feel especially useless or lost or confused, books like this and this. But they weren't here tonight. (They must be in Colorado...)

So I grabbed a new book, one that I had bought for the chapter in it about homosexuality for my senior paper. This book has one of the greatest subtitles ever: "How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel." It's by Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo for those of you who didn't click the link (but I'm going to make you work for the actual title).

Anyway, I opened the book up to the chapter on sin, and I stumbled across something that really struck me, especially in such a time as this. (In case you haven't heard, things are a little tense here at the ORU) Here's how it goes: (this is, btw, from Tony Campolo's response to the chapter by Brian McClaren)

A decade or so ago, when television evangelists right and left seemed to be falling by the wayside, I spoke at a denominational meeting of mainline pastors. Before I was on, the master of ceremonies said something like this to the audience: "We must distance ourselves from the likes of Jim Bakker. Men like this have disgraced the church, and we must make it clear to our people that we are not like that."

His words infuriated me, which explains why I started with words to this effect: "The difference between Jim Bakker and the rest of us is that they haven't found out about the rest of us yet. This is no time to distance ourselves from Jim Bakker, but to acknowledge that what was in him is in us all. The line that separates good from evil does not separate one group of people from another, but runs right down the middle of each of us. Each of us has a dark side--and if the truth were known, each of us would have to run away and hide."

I often find that the times when I am most outspoken about the evils of society or culture or the Church or whoever else are also the times when I am faced with the strongest evidence of my own dark side. I don't know if seeing the specks in other people's eyes just sets me up for walking into a log, or if it's the other way around; I expect that it's the second. It sounds much more like me to run away from my own failures by reminding everyone of someone else's.

Either way, I guess this is where I'm at.

Always striving.

A Sentence for September (24/30)

I'm mainly pulling for everybody to get into the kingdom 'cause I'm acutely aware of how messed up I am, and if I have any hope than so do they.

all of everything must be wrong ~or~ 1

Surrounded by failure
the future
and everything seems

different now. I thought
I knew it
but now I'm not sure.

I'm just scared
I suppose
But if I'm scared then

all of everything
must be wrong.
How am I ever going to

to find a job in
ministry?
I can't save you

I can't even save myself

Herein lies the problem:
If I could
I probably wouldn't anyway.


Peace, love, and joy to you all.

A Metaphor

I sat down to write an epilogue to close off the Coming Home series. This came out instead. And I don't know where exactly it came from, but I like it very much, and I hope you find something of value in it.

***

Last night as I drifted off to sleep I contemplated running away. Running away from home, from school, from church, from ministry, from friends even. Hoping that I would find God, I guess.

This morning I woke up with a mouth full of blood. Life's like that, sometimes.

When I first woke up this morning, I didn't even realize it. As I was washing my hands, I happened to look in the mirror and spot a little bit of dry, crusty blood attached to my beard where my lips meet on the left side of my face. I opened my lips to survey the damage.

My teeth were this faint, dull brown, and dried blood filled the gaps between my teeth. How blood dried inside my mouth, a place known for its moistness, I don't really know. And I don't really care to either. All that matters is that it was there.

I checked the sutures I can see. From my count in the chair there are somewhere around two dozen in my mouth right now, one-third or so holding together the two ends of a gap on the left side of the roof of my mouth and the rest holding a piece of flesh from up there to the spot where you used to be able to see a screw right at the front of my bottom jaw, just beneath those mostly real teeth. One of the sutures actually connects the gum tissue on the front of my lower jaw to the tissue on the back by stretching over the teeth. It's really very annoying. But the sutures were all solid and no new blood seemed to be entering my mouth.

It tasted awful. I have this bizarre obsession with taste...that's where the whole Listerine thing comes from. The taste thing--if I'm honest and a little bloody in front of y'all right now--I think comes from some article on kissing I found on some dating advice for teens website back when I was in my second or third year of high school. There's a lot of jokes in that sentence just waiting to be formed. Ultimately, I can't decide which is more pathetic: a 16-year-old turning to the Internet for a how-to guide on making out or a 22-year-old remembering it and, in fact, building a whole set of compulsive behaviors on it. Either way, the article had some line written in the language called trendy that said something like "If you can taste anything other than minty-freshness, don't even think about trying to kiss her."

So I became a compulsive gum chewer. It's not that I constantly had girls wanting to kiss me until they experienced my halitosis; I guess I was just motivated by the fear that "The One" would come along and I'd screw it up unless my mouth was screaming FreshMint. Or CinnaBurst. Or WinterFresh. Or MintWinter.

That was a long diversion, the point is that I can't stand bad tastes in my mouth (this has, I think it's safe to say, progressed far beyond this boyhood fantasy of random attractive women wanting to make out with me and developed into an independently paralyzing compulsion; in other words, just because you smell Lister, don't assume I'm looking to lock lips). Morning breath is made significantly worse by the presence of blood. So I walked into my kitchen, grabbed a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water, and began to rinse out my mouth.

I hadn't thought anything of it until I started typing up this entry and thought that it would make a killer hook to write: "I woke up with a mouth full of blood." Connecting it to my thoughts of leaving everything last night just made the hook better. Maybe they'll think I'm a drug addict, or I got the crap beat out of me, or that I did run away. Then they'll read.

And then it all seemed so clear.

I have wounds. We all have wounds which we bring with us on our spiritual journeys. Mine don't really come from before I was "saved," since life before I was four was pretty peachy, but I think we can pick up wounds after that, too. Maybe we're even more likely to--I don't know. A lot of Christians give off the impression that that's not the case, that salvation is just some big healing moment and no longer are we capable of anything negative; I guess I just think they're wrong.

I think of salvation more as sutures...the metaphor could even expand. Salvation is this soft tissue graft. Something from above gets sewn into us--when they do it, they have to harm the tissue their attaching the graft to. Last time they scraped and cut and burn...this time they just cauterized it with a laser. This way the tissue will start its natural healing process, grab onto the graft, and grow together.

Unfortunately for us (maybe, I'm still not sure), this takes time. And what we get in the meantime is these sutures. They hold everything in place, but it's not perfect yet. The tissues are still independent, growing slowly into one flesh. Jesus set up the relationship between us, the Father, and himself as "I in them, you [the Father] in me, that they may become perfectly one." I think we're just in the suture phase.

And sometimes, because these tissues haven't all connected yet, there's blood. There's pain. And, more than occasionally, I look at myself and I see the blood in my mouth. The failure. The disconnect between the me in me and the One towards whom I claim to be ever trying to progress. That's where the blood comes from, the pain; it's not from the new tissue, it's from that spot where the old tissue and the new tissue haven't yet come together to form one tissue.

Last night, I saw the disconnect in my life as clearly as I saw the blood in my mouth this morning. I wanted to give up. I wanted to leave. I wanted to hold it in, close my mouth and run somewhere where I would never have to smile, so that no one could ever see that inside of me was blood and a chaotic jumbling together of string and flesh.

This morning, the first step was so obvious: grab water, rinse out the blood.

Tonight the first step is so obvious.

The title of this blog is transparency|inaction. In that spirit, then, I just want to say that while my mouth is disgusting, and sometimes the sutures can't quite hold, and some days I'm going to wake up with blood in my teeth--while all that is true, I'm proud of my sutures, because they speak to a hope for tomorrow rather than yesterday's failure. I smile wide, bloody teeth and all, because they speak to a grace that I can't at all comprehend. And as for my disgusting mouth: a day is coming when this will be a finished work, and God himself will cleanse me from all the guilt of my sin.

Please bear with me (as I promise to with you) until then.

Peace, love, and joy to you all.

Fiction, History, and a Blank Line for Thought

|| The "Fiction"

"Do you ever feel like you're a failure?"
"Most always."
I sighed. I suppose deep down somewhere I knew this had to be the answer, but I had hoped that there was another life which I had forgotten about.
"What about expectations?" I asked, hoping that there was, indeed, such a thing as hope.
"They suck. What do you mean?"
"Well," I stammered, "I can't ever decide whether I want people to overestimate me or underestimate me. Like, I like to think that I do a lot to play myself down so that people just celebrate the little things I do right. But at the same time, I can totally see the posturing that goes on behind the curtain," which was an allusion to "The Wizard of Oz." "I'd like to think that I don't care what other people think of me, or that I set them up to have such low expectations of me that I seem amazing; of course, all that that really means is that their expectations of me have just gone way up and out of control. Does this make any sense?"
"Not really," I replied, "but I'm not entirely surprised, given the context."
There was a long pause. I knew I had just done it again--there was some posturing, some I'm-a-college-student-so-I-now-need-to-use-semicolons- everywhere-and-words-like-context-or-zeitgeist-or-absurdist- or-whatever, and I hated it. Or at least I thought I did.
"I guess I just feel trapped by people's expectations."

|| The "History" (otherwise known by such names as 'Fact,' 'Non-Fiction,' and 'Truth;' unfortunately, all but one of those monikers fail to apply here)

from The Old Blog (which really now feels like I'm an impoverished immigrant telling a story about life in the Old Lands)

2/24/06

What in the name of Emily Dickinson does this have to do with Silence? I'm in love with the concept of silence, but the practice thereof is certainly lacking. (A great parallel to this is found in my love of girls.) I would love to spend days at a time silent.

Here's the problem. As much as I love silence, I know I can't do it.

Look, some people are statues. You keep them around cause they look nice. Some people are bullet proof vests. They make you feel safe and protected whenever they're around. Some people--these are the lucky ones, and we, who've known a few, are lucky by association--some people are your blanket...you know, the one you grew up with and would throw a fit if you couldn't have. These people--they're more than people, really, they're divine comforters ((which is a play on words))--they make you feel like you're somewhere warm and familiar, somewhere you're loved and protected, safe and hidden away--mine was yellow. After my parents took it away, I didn't take another nap for 15 years.

On my best days, I'm a radio. I sit in the corner, maybe not the prettiest package, but I occasionally make interesting noises--a funny comment here, a story there, a political theological philosophical discussion every now and then.

On my desk in front of me are two clock radios. One of them has no casing, it's contents just randomly strewn about my desk. I never listen to either of them. They're pointless. They're useless. They just gather dust.

Nobody needs a silent radio. Nobody wants a silent radio.

|| The "Blank Line for Thought"



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Peace, love and joy to you all.