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.

Drug-Induced Again...

I'm getting more serious about seminary next spring.

If anybody ever tells you that they're going to perform a gum graft on you, expect lots of grossness and pain. Seriously, of all the crazy things I've had done to me in the past year or so, this is both the grossest and most painful. I've come to the conclusion that I'm a bungee jumper, my mouth is the cord, and vicodin is the bridge--I keep on jumping away, but this stupid tooth just keeps pulling me back.

I hate the fact that I am always looking for somebody to love me regardless of whether I care about them even a little bit. Here's hoping that I can get past the approval of others.

I have summer plans. This makes me happy. I'll write about them later, I have to get through the list of people I need to tell face to face while I'm home before I cast the bottle out into the sea.

Justin Timberlake is not cool.

I probably shouldn'tpost when I'm on vicodin, but whatev--

I don't think it counts as trusting God if you know exactly how it ends. I was listening to Power 88 the other day, which has actually restored my faith in the notion of Christian radio that doesn't blow, and they were talking about the story of Daniel in the lions' den. The speaker was talking about how Daniel didn't just throw in the towel and say "Oh well, I guess God wants me to die this way," but that he trusted God to preserve his life. And I think he was wrong.

Daniel trusted God by doing what God had told him to do with a blatant disregard for material consequences. Here's an example of what I'm trying to get at: My mom loves making cookies, and she's very good at it. Imagine that she has just concocted some new type of cookie and sets the still steaming cookies in front of me with the simple instruction to try one. Trust would have me eat one--it's the opposite of trust for me to ask her exactly what's in it and what it's going to do to me.


OK, well, it's time for another round of my buddy vic.

Peace, love, and joy to you all.