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.

The Scariest Six Words a Christian Can Hear

"What if there were no secrets?"

In my Christian experience, this is the single most terrifying question. Furthermore, in my Christian experience, I can think of nothing which unites the whole community of believers--whether Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Pentecostal, Non-Denominational, Inter-Denominational, or whatever else one may be in this era of fragmentation--more than the fear of people truly knowing us, knowing both our incredible and individually manifest potential for greatness and also the depths of our own inner depravity. In all honesty, I don't know which of those facets of our own humanity is more frightening.

Still, I think the greater problem is the fear we instill within believers which keeps them from acknowledging their sin. One of the trends I've observed in Christianity over the past decade or so has been a movement towards pastors who are more "transparent." Those quote marks are quite intentional. You see, while I can't even begin to count the number of times I've heard a pastor admit his/her weakness of road rage, rudeness, anger, impatience, mistreatment of family members, past drug/alcohol abuse, or deceitfulness, I can't think of even one example of a pastor admitting to struggling with lust, pride (and here I make the caveat that I've not heard them intentionally portray their own pride; sometimes it just bleeds through every word), or other "big" sin. Even hearing a pastor talk about past sexual sin or struggles takes the air out of the room. Say "pornography" in chapel. It's an amazing trick.

And we, like robots, follow their lead. When we're really open and honest and vulnerable with each other, we admit to struggling with the huge spiritual demons of "busy-ness," maybe a lie or two, and, God forbid, not being able to squeeze an hour of prayer, Bible study, and worship into our lives.

I can't speak for anyone else, and any attempt to do so would be incredibly foolish, but I can speak for myself: I've used prescription painkillers just so that I can feel something other than myself and my problems (which are almost entirely trite and adolescent in nature). I've lusted enough that, by Jesus' own logic, I'm an adulterer with thousands of women, if not more.

If you think less of me now, I guess I'd have to say that I'm disappointed, mainly in the fact that I bought into the lie of deceiving everyone around me. Maybe I wasn't successful, maybe I was. But that's irrelevant--the difference is between walking in darkness and walking in light.

God is light and in him there is no darkness.

That's what I thought about today. "What if there were no secrets?" How ultimately liberating and, yet, terrifying that idea is. When everyone already knows, what is there to be afraid of? And, to quote one of my favorite poets, "If I'm afraid and you're afraid, then we don't have to be afraid anymore."