Wow, I'm surprised you got this far considering the title. I'm going to test my luck and get going before I say something else offensive.
Or, potentially offensive. Or, offensive, but in a good way. Like the times that you want to be offended. No? That's never been the case for you? Well, here's a new concept then. Your life is a wreck. That should be a sigh of relief. Should be. Why isn't it? Or more importantly right now, perhaps, why should it be? Don't we want to get to a point where we can look at all of the things in our life, a perfect romantic relationship, a healthy body, seamless communication between family, a stable job that you always love where it always seems to be Friday and money overflowing out of your designer jeans? Well, yeah, we want to get that point, most likely. Here's the thing though- that will never happen. And deep down, we know it won't. We know that it impossible to have everything, and I mean everything, clicking in our lives. We will always want a little more romance. A little less stress. A few dollars more. Because THEN, ahhhh, then(!) we will be able to sit back in a recliner and let out the biggest metaphorical sigh of relief of our lives. Picture that sigh of relief. That's a funny request, but seriously, do it. Feel it. Envision the world where you have no weight on your shoulders and everything around you is spotless, and you just can breeeeeathe. Take that deep breath right now and imagine it. Okay, back to reality. What are you feeling now, or more specifically, two seconds after you completed exhaling? You feel the weight of the world on your shoulders again. The only spotless thing around, in fact, is the shirt on your back, and depending on the day you've had, that might not even be true. The difficult conversation you've been putting off is tapping its foot in the back of your brain. The rent payment that was due three days ago is staring at you from your nightstand. The self-degrading thoughts about your love life and capability to hold any relationship is sucker punching you in the gut. Here's the best news I've ever heard, or told myself, even: That deep breath out that you've longed for, it's not dependent on your circumstances. Pain is inevitable. Relationship strife is unavoidable. Unfair conditions will never cease. If you feel like you're getting along fine, you're probably living in your basement with pillows blocking the windows and eating saltines 24/7. Real life is hard. It just is. Not to sound like the therapist that you ditched after one session, but accepting you have a problem is the first step to the solution. Okay, enough with beating the now-brutally-massacred horse. What's the solution? Life can suck, so what? Let's numb it and keep our heads down and press on, right? Well, we can definitely try that. Then we wake up the next morning, or the feeling has passed, or the person has left, and where are we then? What do we do? Numb, numb, keep numbing. Don't feel, so that you won't feel. But we want to feel, right? That's what living is. Feeling. Not just existing. Sometimes I think we're so afraid to experience the bad that it takes us far away from experiencing the good- the true good. Not the quick and fleeting good. This "good"? Enough metaphors or distractions. It's life to the full. It's accepting that we are and always will be messes. God says you are. You probably heard that in a way that has allowed you to never step within 200 yards of a church ground since then. Hear it in a different way this time though. You're a mess, and you're allowed to be, and your mess, sort of defines who you are. Before the Christians reading this give me a virtual passive-aggressive death glare for that statement, let me explain. You are God's beautiful mess. God made you, saw you get broken, and showed you that he loves those broken pieces, and that it doesn't disqualify you from being loved by Him. He made sure of it, in fact... "God demonstrates His own love for us in this, while we were still sinners (Really, REALLY messy), Christ died for us." Romans 5:8 The deep breath out, the sigh of relief we've been searching for? It can be taken at any time, in any moment, whatever the circumstance, because we know that the mess is always there, and God's hope is always there, even more. His hope that He loves us where we are at, and not as we "should" be, because we're never going to be as we "should be". Are we going to want to take a sigh of relief mid-breakup, mid-job-failure or mid-family travesty? Probably not. And that's okay, because the point is not the sigh of relief. It's the knowledge and little voice in your soul telling you that in the midst of ALL the shit ALWAYS, God...loves you. He does. He can't not. He's not rolling his eyes, waiting for you to get your life together. The only getting-together that needed to happen was our souls being paid for. Which He did. Start looking at your dysfunctional self as one that is accepted, and can therefore live life, rather the other way around. We might begin to notice a difference.
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When I was a freshman in high school, during the fall time of 2009, I wanted nothing more than to go to homecoming with a girl.
I think every guy probably wanted this. No one wanted to feel like the oddball out who couldn't get a date. But it was more than that to me. I wanted to believe that there was truly someone who would say yes to me. Say yes to me for who I was, no ulterior reasoning. To look at me and say "Yep, this will work". Now, while this was in the context of a homecoming date search and might seem a little needy, I think it revealed a deeper pit in my heart. I wanted to be longed for. I wanted to be desired. I felt like I had pretty good self esteem, but looking back, I know it was never truly tested. I had never really put myself out there to get rejected. I had become pretty spectacular at playing it safe. "But no longer!", I thought. I had hid long enough to the point and avoided failure for too much time now, I knew it was my moment to take the risk. So on that shivering cold night in November of the ninth grade at a Friday night football game (sorry for the rambling of prepositions), I took that risk. Now, I had wished at the time it could have been with the girl I was crushing on, or someone I was actually somewhat of a friend with, but it was getting close to Homecoming and I was running out of time. I scanned the bleachers, finally setting my eyes on a girl that I had maybe had one class with all of middle school. PERFECT. She was cute and fun, and if she says no, it won’t hurt that bad. I don’t know her incredibly well. But she’ll say yes, right? I’d just want to go as friends, so she wouldn’t mind going with me. Would she? I’m passable for a date! I walked over to her in the midst of her group of friends, and immediately the sequel to the parting of the red sea occurred. All that remained was me looking up at her, palms sweaty, knees weak (had to), and immediately I began to regret my decision. But it was do or die. Or at least do or not-have-a-date-to-homecoming. So, essentially die. I had to make my move. Fast forward approximately 47 seconds later, I was standing on the edge of the bleachers, pretending like I was intently focusing on the scoreboard, as I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes. “The phrase “Is there something wrong with me?” began to creep around the corner of my mind. You as a reader are safe to make the assumption that she closed the glass casing around the red button and said “No deal, Howie.” I believe we’ve all had this moment in our lives. And if not one moment, then several. Or tons. Or maybe a recurring subconscious principle in our heart. Regardless, something along the lines of… “Am I not good enough?” “Do I matter to anyone?” “What the hell is wrong with me?” Now, maybe an emotional reaction to a rejection from a high school dance is not the best example for this deeper heart issue, but let’s roll with it. Family not treating you well, a scathing comment from a teacher, an abrupt ending to a relationship- all of these and more can cause a moment where we truly question if we’re worth it. Have you not had that moment in your life? Well then, it might not be just a moment for you. Maybe these constant questions are your life: a long series of unhealthy relationships and continual doubt about who you think you are. We start to believe that we are not intrinsically valuable. Once we’ve decided that we at our simplest form are not good enough for others- or even ourselves- things have the potential to go downhill quickly. Then begins the process of trimming and steroiding. We give ourselves a good look up and down in the mirror that reflects our personality, behavior, quirks; and we start the makeover. Suppress the bad qualities. Exaggerate the good ones. Chop. Juice. Chop. Juice. Eventually, we reach a point where we have no idea who we are anymore. We realize we’ve just become a product of whatever we think our friends, community, or world (consumers) want to be around. And this plays itself out in a few different ways. Everyone in the world operates on all different levels emotionally, spiritually, and just in how they deal with struggles. However, I think we can still somewhat generalize people into two groups when it comes to these dealings. The first group:
The second group:
In both of these groups, somewhere along the way, whether through life experiences or a single moment, we came to believe in our heart that what we DO and what we have to OFFER is what will make others love us. To that, I ask this question: Have you ever spent so much time trying to convince someone (subtly, of course (talking to you group one)), that you’re so great, and when they FINALLY encourage you or tell you what they like about you or why they love you… you don’t believe them? Why is that? To quote theologian and author Timothy Keller, “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us." Our souls were designed to be spoken to directly. And that direct access to our soul is not something that we like to hand out left and right. For the most part (again, making generalizations here). But if we don't put ourselves in positions to love others fully or be fully loved, we will never be satisfied with any sort of encouragement or affirmation. No praise will ever be enough. We will hear a compliment and think: Yeah, right. They probably say that to everyone. That’s so general. They’re just saying that. They don’t actually think that of me. They don’t know me. What a twisted cycle! We long to our core to be fully known, yet we only give people a shell of ourselves. Of course we don’t buy into that encouragement we got yesterday- the only thing people see of us is what we DO, not who we ARE. And sadly, that is one of the biggest lies we as a people have stapled into our minds: That what we do is what gives us our value. We try to show others how lovable we can be, rather than being comfortable with just “being”. So, back to the title of this blog, which I feel as if I have not made a direct attempt to address at all. Some of you may have read this and at no point have resonated with anything I’ve said, and I applaud you for sticking around this long. I think it’s possible to not necessarily struggle with any of these insecurities to an extreme extent. You think you’re tolerable. Maybe it’s hard sometimes to believe a compliment, but generally, you think, yeah, people probably like you. However, that wasn’t my original question. Do you believe you’re good for people? Not just that people can put up with you. Or that people can have nice things to say about you. Or that they can room with you for a year in college and not murder you before winter break. That you’ve been made to be good for people. In the movie Hugo, there is a scene where the main character Hugo Cabret is speaking with his friend Isabelle: “I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.” Stay with me here, this is good stuff- “...Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was meant to do... Maybe it's the same with people. If you lose your purpose... it's like you're broken.” The word "purpose" immediately can lose someone’s interest only because it’s been shoved in their face by media and motivational posters a few thousand times a day. "Purpose" is defined as “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.” Now, if we’re not so into the whole God-creating-us thingy, then we have the ability to “create our own purpose”, as we've probably heard, also thousands of times. There’s a catch, though. If you are your own creator and want to make your own purpose from this, then you automatically become a slave to whatever can give you worth according to your purpose. What I mean is that whatever you believe you are supposed to do in this life becomes where you receive your value as a human being from. Everything becomes a means to an end. You are nice to people in order to receive the same treatment. You support others for the support you can get back. The list goes on. What is scariest, though, is that you must continue to be well-kept in these areas. You cannot slack. If your purpose is to be the best (list aspiring career field here), then you must work and never stop or you will be in danger of not receiving the affirmation from that being-best position. This can carry over to wanting to be the most “caring”, “funny”, or “dynamic” person in the room. When this purpose is threatened by someone else who is more caring, more funny, or more dynamic, then your value of yourself is threatened. When your purpose is conditional upon yourself, then your value and self-worth is also conditional upon yourself. Everything is dependent upon your own performance. So, what's the alternative? If we say rather that our purpose is given to us and not self-created, then aren't we just a slave to whatever it is that created us or gave us that purpose? Sounds almost worse, the devil's advocate could say. True, but what if that creator tells us that our purpose and therefore our value is not dependent upon our own efforts, rather that creator itself? That we cannot lose our purpose or value, no matter how badly we screw up. That we are fully known by that creator, the good parts and the bad parts, and we are loved through that. How about that? When we fake who we really are, whether by hiding or over-compensating (group one and two), we aren’t doing what we're supposed to do. We probably feel broken. And like we've lost our purpose. When we begin to realize that we not only CAN be good for people, but ARE good for people, this will change our lives radically. God has offered that kind of purpose. Are you tired of pretending? So, I’ll ask again (with a slight twist): Do you know you’re good for people? A prayer I've found myself repeating somewhat sporadically over the past few years is one in which I ask for Jesus to return again.
In times of our most utter exhaustion and heartbreak it's somewhat natural to let out this cry. I mean, doesn't scripture say "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." (Revelation 21:4)? That sounds like a great deal to me. So let's get those trumpets blaring and have a beam of light zip me up like something out of Star Trek. Why would we not want this? I began this prayer, like I stated, a few years ago for what I think were two reasons. One reason being I saw media spitting out more and more stories of racial injustice, senseless killings and massive terrorist attacks. I also heard the "Jesus, come" prayer echoed throughout churches, groups of friends, and almost anywhere that Christians exist. I thought to myself, "If Jesus coming back means an end to all of those bad things and a hurt-free life for me, then I could get behind a prayer like that." But what about my friends that don't know God? Should I say, "Come back Jesus...but wait like 6 months. Could be a little longer. I'll let you know"? Doesn't sound right, does it? A question I didn't stop to ask myself at first is one that I've been wrestling with more recently. If our world seems to be getting worse and Jesus has the immediate power to put that to an end, why hasn't it happened yet? A phrase I've loosely tossed around myself is one of "Society is going to only get worse before Jesus returns". While I'm not exactly sure if this is true or false, it can cause misguided ideas to be thrust into our hearts. This can begin to make us blind to what we are called to do now as Christians, and reveal a lack of trust in God's plan. Is Jesus just letting shit hit the fan so He can look really powerful when He comes back and overthrows everything? If stuff is only going to get worse, why do anything good now? The Bible does speak of the time nearing Jesus' return to us a few times. One being in the book of 2 Timothy in chapter 3 (speaking of the end times): "Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived." "Evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse". Absolutely. I believe that. Sin has been rotting our earth to the core and from the core, so that makes perfect sense. However, does that mean that more and more believers won't be made? Absolutely not. It is important to note that God is in control of His return to earth, and knows when that will be. Jesus didn't ascend into heaven and years later (No idea how time works in heaven, but for the sake of the analogy, let's just roll with it) say: "CRAP. Things are getting pretty bad, I didn't think this was what would happen. I should go back!" Ultimately, I'd be wrong to say it's bad to ask for Jesus to return (check out the very last verse of The Bible). It is absolutely fair and a praising testament to God's character to desire Him to come and fix what we've horribly train-wrecked. But do I have a trust that there's a reason He hasn't come yet? Or am I just sitting on the sidelines and cowering about the darkness of this world? I believe it's important to focus on my heart behind praying that prayer. In Paul's letter to the church of Phillippi, in the first chapter, he writes about his inner turmoil of wanting to be with Jesus or wanting to preach the gospel to those on earth who haven't been saved. He is torn, and even seems to contemplate taking his own life because of how much he hates living in a broken and fallen world (ESV, verse 22). Paul's conclusion is astounding, and one that I want to adapt into my own heart: "I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith..." "Convinced of this", Paul states. While he understands that to be with Jesus now is our definite hope (Titus 2:13), he knows that he has been kept alive for a reason. He knows that Jesus hadn't returned yet for a reason. Most importantly, he knows that Jesus is soon to come, so we must hurry (1 Thessalonians 5:2). A man in my life much wiser than me proposed a question to me when I first entered college. "What can we not do in heaven that we can do on earth?" "Well, sin, I guess. Pain or suffering won't be there either," I answered. "True. But there's one good thing," he said. "One good thing on earth that we can't do in heaven. And that's tell people about Jesus who don't know Jesus". This is what Paul is convinced of. He had prodded himself to understand that there is NOTHING good for him on this earth that he can't and won't one day experience in heaven EXCEPT one thing... Telling people about Jesus. But, honestly, what the hell does that mean? Do we say "Hey, everyone suffering across the world, just pray this prayer and everything will be fine one day! No more tears or pain! Just accept it!" I don't think that's how Jesus operates now or when he was physically on earth. He clearly cared for the sufferings of people and the tenderness of life (Feeding the hungry, healing the lame, weeping with the brokenhearted). So, what WAS His message? What do we need to be telling people, especially when it seems like stuff is getting worse? Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher who passed away in 2013, had this to say when asked what the Christian gospel truly was if it's not just about how to get into heaven once we die: "It's how to get into heaven before you die", said Willard. "That's why the New Testament routinely treats you as if you've already died...because it is that you've made a transition from a life on your own to a life that God Himself is living in His kingdom, and you get to be a part of that..." "...what He preached was the availability of the kingdom of God to everyone, wherever they were, and whoever they were." After hearing this, I let my thoughts loose in my journal: ...Where do we believe heaven to end, if God is truly everywhere? Jesus says 'whoever keeps His words will not taste or see death'...how can this be? We all must die one day. A true look at the Christian life brings understanding that death has already happened to us all, and we have been chosen to be resurrected along with Christ. Therefore, our heart ceasing to beat will be no more than a mere transition into a more physical heaven, a more glorious one, but still as real as we had the opportunity to experience on earth. "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven". We must strive to grasp His longing for us to view our lives now as more than a waiting room...our hope is what we will receive after our body's physical death, but also what we can choose to receive right now: Heaven on earth. ...So, what must we tell others? We must tell them the availability of the kingdom of God. Show them that they are worth that reality. That God wants them to believe they can experience heaven before they die. Heaven on earth. "A little faith will bring your soul to heaven; a great faith will bring heaven to your soul." These words of the late British preacher Charles Spurgeon have a lot to teach me in regards to our immediate purpose. Let us not settle for a faith that believes that Jesus was only concerned with our afterlife, and not our current life as well. Let us believe the whole Jesus. Let this belief spur us on to take action with this prayer we've been discussing. If we desire to pray for Jesus to come back, we MUST be willing to tell others about WHY we want him to come back. Praying that Jesus would is great. But if that's the only reason we were still here, is to pray that prayer, then I doubt we'd still be here. God has bigger plans. I've been called into action. Are things supposed to get worse or better before Jesus comes back? I'm not entirely sure what either of those would look like. Do I know when He is coming back or have a general clue? Not in the slightest. But this should press me even MORE to run with what I do have- His words at the end of Matthew: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” And into Acts: And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” I believe that Jesus knew we'd be asking these questions of how to pray for his return, and it's probably similar questions to what the disciples were thinking when they were gazing into heaven. "Is He coming back? When? Do we just hope and wait in the meantime?" The angels that come to them are what I believe to be God's answer to our long winded guesses about what to think of this (hence this rambling blog post). Why am I just standing and waiting? Trust that He'll come when the time is right! There's work to be done! |
AuthorSenior at The Ohio State University. Full time idealist and part time realist. Archives
January 2017
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