Unnatural

Earlier this week I was posed the question, “What do you hope for?”  Hope as in the way a pregnant woman hopes for the birth of her healthy child.  What is it that makes all the pain and discomfort worth it?  What would you like to see birthed in your life?  Dread immediately set in.  I hate questions that I don’t know the answer to because I feel stupid. 

I have no idea what I hope for!  Or maybe it’s just that I don’t want to admit what I dare not hope for. 

I thought I would just sit down with my journal and write out a few things.  You know, sit down quietly alone and jot down a few cleverly devised ideas once I could calm myself enough to find some peace.  No such luck.  The quiet alone time never really came.  I don’t think the cleverness was really ever there. 

I found my answers in the midst of a totally crappy night at work.  As I asked a coworker to help me calm down after a resident got under my skin, I expected to get some comfort or at least good advice.  He told me to ask myself why that kid’s actions got to me so much.  It started there and continued through the rest of the night.  I had to again point the finger at my own heart and ask myself what was so wrong with me that some kid’s arrogant defiance would shake me so much. 

Once again, the answer is heart breaking for me.    I’m scared.    I’m scared of everything from getting hit in the face to simple confrontation.  I hate the unknown.  It is regularly the source of questions that I don’t have answers to.  If I don’t know what to do, I’m paralyzed.  I’m so tired of feeling this way. 

Why out of fight or flight do I almost always pick flight?  What makes it so easy for some people to knuckle up so naturally? 

I hope for God to teach me how to fight and to pick every battle that my heart says is right. 

I hope to be someone completely other than who I am now.

I hope for courage. 

Logic? What's that?

I was sitting in a training update last week where we talked about making sure to check our motives and engage in positive self talk.  When the presenter asked the group of us what things were good to keep in mind when dealing with our residents, one staff responded, "Abandon all logic."

There was one particular resident he was referring to handling who just days before tried to convince a staff member that right and wrong were completely based on "some group of people that just got together and called a bunch of stuff right and a bunch of stuff wrong."  He really believed it too.  There really is no world outside of what he feels to him.  How could logic ever be of aid when dealing with someone like this?

It's a miracle that all of us in the social work field aren't bonkers by now.  Maybe we are and just don't realize it yet because we've had to abandon logical ways of thinking so many times that we've lost track of reality a bit ourselves.  It really is crazy what passes for normal anymore.

Good Grief, Child of God!

Is it possible to experience loss as your soul dies?  By soul I mean the psuche that Jesus says we must let die and even crucify to inherit zoe--eternal life.  If so, is there any possibility that this feeling of loss is holy and a part of what God intends?  Regardless, I know that today I feel as though something is dying and being lost.  I don't know what it is, but I know that my heart is heavy and weighed down.

I once heard it said that dying doesn't really hurt.  It is that part of us that still lives that feels the pain.

It's that whole "sheep to the slaughter" thing that I think is so unnatural to me.  I've heard the comparison of flesh to spirit being the same as a pig dying to that of a sheep.  Whereas the sheep will allow you to lead it anywhere and just stand there while you slit it's throat, a pig will squeal and resist and will often need to be tied up and hung upside down from a tree so that it's throat will remain exposed.  Over these past few weeks, I've seen a lot of pig in my responses.  I don't mean rebellion, active manipulation or anything like that.  It's actually been quite the contrary.  I have asked God to help me submit and that He would have His way in my life many times lately.  What strikes me is that even my attempts to take the correct posture to God have an element of making the pain stop at their heart.  Do I really want to glorify God and do whatever it takes to please Him in His holiness and completely other reality?  Or do I just want to give the right answers on the test and get the passing grade so that I can go home and forget this subject?

I have absolutely no idea where I stand with God because I have not been able to perceive Him at all for some time now.  All I do know, is that something is dying and my soul is grieved.  In the midst of this grief, I remain His son.  His utterly confused and frustrated son, but His none the less.  I wonder if this is at all how Abraham felt as he left the safety and familiarity of all he knew to enter the land of the promise of God.  I do know that he had to cross a desert to get there, but he was called the friend of God for it.

Giles Corey

Most of the required reading in high school bored me a lot.  This was especially true of plays.  On top of the boredom factor, I had to add the anxiety factor.  I hated reading parts in front of classmates.  Luckily for me when it was time to go over The Crucible in eleventh grade, my teacher had a tape series that we listened to collectively.  Even still, I wasn't really that engaged in the story and slept through several days of it.

There is one moment in that story that has always stood out against the background of excessive Goodies and witches.  Giles Corey is one of the few men in the story who actually stood up for truth.  Ironically, he had a reputation for being involved in lots of lawsuits and being very feisty.  In the end he is one of the only voices of reason, and it costs him his life.  He refuses to confess that his wife is a witch during her trial.  He is held in contempt and pressured for a confession by having large stones placed on his chest while lying on the ground.  He not only sticks to the truth, he delivers one the most memorable quotes from any story that I have ever read:  "More weight."  Those are his last words as they pile more stones on him and he is crushed to death.

Lately, I've been determined to see through whatever challenges God allows to come my way, but the pressures of life have been wearing me thin.  I've been telling myself all the same things that I tell other people when they go through rough patches:  God won't leave me in the fire too long, He is good and whatever He does is for my good, or the only way to strengthen endurance is to be pushed beyond my perceived limits.  That worked for a couple weeks, and I was fairly focused on having the best day possible today and not worrying about tomorrow.

Today, it wasn't enough.  After some personal failures over the past few days, going back to a job I can't stand anymore almost snapped my mind in half.  I was very overwhelmed emotionally.  Now, the way I see it, there are two ways that a force can overwhelm something, immediate and totally or gradual and incrementally.  That's what made me think of this story today.  Every day when I walk into my staff changeover between shifts, I feel the pressing begin.  Actually, most days it starts at home when it gets close to being time to leave for work and increases during the drive in.  By the time two o'clock rolls around, my mind is mush.

So what can you do but push through it?  By the end of my work night, I usually have found some way to have fun with the adolescents that I work with.  I even went to youth group tonight with four guys. That's right.  I got payed to go hang out at a church for a couple hours.  It still sucked.  So on my drive home, I cracked.  I stopped thanking God for whatever good He is doing through all this mess and started asking Him to make it stop.  Almost immediately I was confronted with a dilemma in my paradigm.  If I believe that God is allowing uncomfortable things to take place in my life to bring about some greater good, why would I ever ask Him to make it stop.

No, God!  Don't reset my broken bones!  It's too painful!  Not to mention that I am sure there are many, many times that I have prayed for God to have His way in my life and do whatever it takes to work His plan for me.  

So I did the only thing I knew to do, I asked God to kill me.

 Not literally.  I'm not suicidal or crazy.  I absolutely love my family and friends.

I'm just that tired and exhausted.  I don't have anything left.  I would rather have my flesh killed so at least one way or another this can be over.  So God, I say the only thing I have left to say, "More weight."

Attributions

Yesterday, I learned about the role that attributions play in the life of an addict.  In the world of addiction, an attribution is whatever the blame is placed on for the addictive behavior when the addict is called to account.  I.E.:  when a drunk driver hits a tree they might say, "Well this road really should be four lanes instead of two and that tree shouldn't still be there.  If these road crews would do their jobs, I wouldn't have hit it in the first place."  It's the crew's fault, or the tree's fault for being there.  

It could never be my fault, and it most definitely could not possibly have anything to do with the fact that I was drinking.  I know how to hold my liquor!  I only had a few.  I've driven this way hundreds of times and never hit anything.  I was going perfectly straight.  That breathalizer must be defective.  There is no way that I was drunk.  

Anything is possible except for accepting blame.  Anything except for admitting that you are at fault.  It's not just for the sake of dodging consequences, though it seems that way.  Most addicts that have been at it for any length of time have amassed huge penalties for their screw ups, but just keep at it anyway.  No, the blame shifting has something much more basic yet subtle at its heart.  

If I haven't done anything wrong, then I don't have to ask myself why I did it.  I don't have to search for the cause of the dysfunction.  I don't have to search my heart for wrong motives, and above all I don't have to admit that my drug influenced me to do something detrimental or even harmful.  

As an addict that is what I simply cannot do:  admit that my drug is bad and causes me to make bad decisions.  

As soon as that reality is unleashed, the entire illusion that everything is just fine falls completely apart.  If I have to admit that there is something most definitely wrong with my current amount of use of a certain drug, then I must admit that stopping that use is in my best interest.  An addict will always seek to protect their addiction until this denial is broken.  

I recently watched a movie where a woman stood in front of her friends next to her husband of fourteen years and announced that they were getting a divorce with a smile on her face.  She just kept telling her friends that everything would be alright, even as her husband was in obvious distress right next to her.  How could someone be that dense?

The answer is found in a further examination of her story and derived identity.  She was a successful and renowned therapist, author and speaker.  She was used to helping all of her friends solve their problems.  She placed the burden of perfection on her own shoulders so that she would be “qualified” to help others.  It became her entire identity.  Years earlier in her story, she lost her son in a car accident.  She had not properly buckled him in the car seat.  She blamed herself for the death of her son and could not deal with that grief because it was in direct opposition to her identity of the stable and perfect one.  She was the one that had to have it all together.  How could she tell others how to be better people if she had to admit serious problems in her life.  So instead she stuffed it and denied it. 

Her addiction was perfection. She was addicted to her image.   Her attribution was that she had to be perfect and she blamed everyone that she perceived expected her be perfect. 

By believing that she had to maintain that “has it all together” image, it protected her from having to face her painful reality.

So what are my attributions?  Maybe I don’t eat healthy because the FDA doesn’t force food companies to put out healthier food, right?  Yeah, I’ve seen Food, INC.  It’s their fault.  Or maybe it’s because healthy food is too expensive and my job doesn’t pay me enough.  Bastards!  Yeah, it’s my employer’s fault.  Maybe I don’t exercise because gyms are too expensive and full of judgmental meat heads.  Yeah, my employer’s fault again and the jerks at the gym.  Maybe I don’t engage in free exercise because it’s too public and other people look at my jiggly self in a judgmental way.  Jerks!  Now it’s their fault.  Anything is possible to protect the addiction.  My addiction is not food.  It’s laziness and comfort.  And maybe some acceptance still.  I hate rejection.

Not to mention all the excuses I’ve used over the years to justify looking at porn.  I could easily double the length of this post just listing those. 

 There are so many more unhealthy things that we just don't want to give up or refuse to allow ourselves to even see as unhealthy.  Codependent relationships, dysfunctional family traditions, manipulation to get our way at the cost of those we love are just the few that pop up right away.  My point is, the same way that the drunk  guy really believes that it's the tree's fault for being in the wrong spot, maybe we have things that we actually believe that are just as far off that have been developed as some sort of defense mechanism.  

So what are your attributions?  What do you absolutely refuse to admit just might be true because you can’t possibly bear to face the implications of that reality.  What are you so afraid of dealing with that you would rather deny it all together?  What is your whistling in the dark covering up?  

This is my prayer:

Psalm 139

  ²³ Search me, God, and know my heart; 

   test me and know my anxious thoughts. 
  ²⁴ See if there is any offensive way in me, 
   and lead me in the way everlasting.


And God give me the strength to face whatever you turn up and the grace to move beyond all shame.  

A Day Meant to Break Me

So today started horrible.  Lot's of residue from an uneasy ending to my yesterday.  I went to bed and couldn't sleep.  As has been the case a lot of the nights lately, not only could I not sleep, but my thoughts were full of temptations of acting out in regards to lust.  i consider myself to be living free of this sin and to not struggle with it anymore than any other victorious Christian man.  That said, the years that I spent not living in victory in that area make it an easy target with some extra pull for the enemy to use against me.  Oh yeah, I had a bad night at work last night as well.  Does this sound like a set up to anyone else?

About mid-morning I realized that my day was starting off really crappy and judging by my wife's responses to me, I was being really snappy to her as well.  Great, now on top of being miserable, I'm feeling extra helpless and guilty for being a crappy leader to her today.  Maybe I'm just really immature, but what would you do?  Take it out on some random person, just keep stuffing it for the sake of those around you, or maybe grab some comfort food?  Me?

I suck at asking for help.  Today I did it anyway.  I texted a friend and let him know that I was under some kind of attack and that I needed prayer.  Guess what?  Life still sucked for about seven more hours.  Out of nowhere it just started to get better some time between six and seven.  I don't know why God's responses to us aren't what I always consider logical, but I know He didn't let me down.

All I could think about on the way home was the verse Psalm 46:10.

 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; 
   I will be exalted among the nations, 
   I will be exalted in the earth.”


Context is everything here (as always right?).  The preceding verses talking about all manner of disturbing things happening in the world around us and that at the voice of the Lord even the most daunting of them "melts."  The most intriguing part for me is that phrase, "be still."  I've thought of it often and shared it with a lot of my friends, but here goes again.  Some translations get closer to the root by saying cease striving.  When you dig into the Hebrew, some other possible translations are:  fall, faint, don't have enough strength.  


Give up and let ME handle it.


Come to think of it, it wasn't too long after I just stopped trying to feel better that the grace started to come.  My coworkers picked up my slack and were very understanding about it.  I actually started to enjoy the kids at work again.  Not to mention that coverage for a vacation day just kinda fell into place so that I can go to a training in the morning and have the evening off to be with my family and friends.  


My day started off terrible, but ended being a reason to give glory to God.  Take that worry!  Even when you dealt me some of your best shots and made me feel horrible, God still gets the glory before it's over.  I love it!