It has always been difficult for me to fake things. I fake things all the time. My whole life has been difficult because of this. At some point a person gets tired of being fake. It is more difficult for me, when I have been faking things for so long that I actually believe these things about myself. It is painful when the facade I have built crashes, when so many people see the more real me. When in the process of discipleship I am being stripped of my EGO PROPS. The patterns of behavior I use to protect my big and fragile ego.
I am not smart enough to maintain a lie, even when consciously I am not sure if I am lying. So often my viewpoint changes quickly and something I believe today I might not believe tomorrow. Or, as I type, I rethink my original thought for typing the idea. So much, or maybe all of life, I believe, is trying to figure out who I am or what I believe. What I am living for, is it worth dying for? That is what I am trying to figure out. I type here with that in mind, and will post this for people to read. The gall. Shouldn’t I clean this up, at least proof read it, maybe send it to an editor so I don’t offend anyone? So I don’t misrepresent someone else’s agenda? I’ll say quickly, if this were being edited, I probably would not post a blog.
I guess, if I were being paid to write, I would have to write something that tickled everyone’s ears. Maybe something I don’t really believe, but, hey, it pays the bills. I love the emails and comments I get. Some people love it, some people hate it, the IT being words on a screen that flow from my mind. Sometimes these words are venting, sometimes it is processing, sometimes I believe God is leading my hands, or at least has not struck me dead for what I have typed. Sometimes, while I type, I hope God is taking a nap, maybe not paying attention. Sometimes when I write the last thing I want to come out is honesty, sometimes the last thing I want is to even think about God. I don’t want people to know I am struggling with stuff like other people, marriage…life…death…orphans and starving children…blogging.
The difference between Jesus Christ and the institutional church which claims His name.
I struggle. And I will struggle on…I struggle with people who have quit the struggle. I hope my struggle encourages others who struggle, that at least someone else is struggling. There is hope in the struggle, the struggle to hope.
I love the products from the ‘Life is Good’ company. I believe LIFE is GOOD. God created it and said it is good. My life has been awesome. Sometimes, I think, we hear life is good and struggle with that definition. What is good? Because life is difficult, that is a fact. Sometimes life seems to suck. Suffering, is suffering good? How would a good God allow suffering?
I believe God is good, life is good. I believe, as Max Lucado says, that God loves us just the way we are, but he refuses to leave us this way. That life is a pilgrimage, an initiation (to eternity, I believe), and God does not seem to desire to leave us with our egos intact. Our weird world views unchallenged, our even weirder self-concepts, our beliefs that our feelings and emotions and opinions actually matter to life. I don’t believe God has a plan for us to strengthen our false selves, or our self reliance. I don’t believe God cares too much about our ‘self-actualization’.
So God shakes us up by bringing us through an initiation. A painful and humiliating celestial form of hazing. (Jesus Wedgies?)
Jesus totally shook up the disciples, radically changed their world views. Destabilized them. Probably really offended some of their sensibilities. Jesus obviously offended someone to get himself crucified. In Matthew 10:1-33, Mark 8:31-10:45, and in Luke 10:1-24, you can read how Jesus did this.
Richard Rohr (in “Adam’s Return”) writes that the first step in the male initiation is facing the fact that ‘Life is Hard’. I wonder how many T-shirts I could sell if I started a ‘Life is Hard’ company. Maybe show people from around the world begging, holding a cup, filthy, eye balls white and blind. Or a little child with the bowling ball stomach, brain lacking necessary nutrients for proper development. The child too tired to wipe the flies from the corners of his eyes. What about a picture of a young girl hopping around on crunches because she went pee in the wrong place and stepped on a land mine? Or ‘Reality Show’ (one of my favorite shirts, that I wear all the time has that statement with a view of a sunset over a river and a mountain) with a picture of a refugee camp, full of people who have not eaten in two weeks who come out to look at a truck load of over weight and over whelmed white people, overwhelmed because we really have no idea what to do with it all.
When we as men believe that pain is anything other than necessary, (from Rohr’s book)
1. We will become inflexible, blaming, petty as we grow older.” (I think of that as becoming more religious)
2. We will need other people to hate in order to expel our inner negativity.
3. We will play the victim in some means of false power. (dwell on these)
4. We will spend much of our lives seeking security and status as a cover-up for lack of a substantial sense of self.
5. We will pass on our deadness to our family, children, and friends.
When I read this list, I see me.
I hate this about me. I hate my ego, my false self, my need to be right, my defensiveness.
I don’t believe I can change simply by hoping it. By wishing it. I prayed that God would change me, and He led us to the World Race. He led us to the people here at AIM. In the past year he has put people in my life (Mark Fee and his group also) who have brought me to a different paradigm, a different view of myself, of life, of God.
That is one reason I am sitting here in Swaziland typing. We left family and friends that we love. (again family and friends, I am sorry if reading these blogs don’t always convey how much I love you all, part of who I am trying to be is someone who actually knows how to love and does not need to protect my ego all the time) We left a dog that we love. We left a nice lifestyle that I loved. A job I loved. Clients who I loved.
We had to leave to reshape who we were, what we were living for.
And it has been painful.
