(This being Birthday Part 2 is a continuation of Birthday Part 1)
Some weeks it has been a daily and even hourly struggle to hold onto truth and keep the thoughts of my mind restrained. I could walk you through many dim valleys and high mountains I have traveled through this summer, but for the sake of time, I will save the journeys for talks over good cups of coffee and skip to the last miles of the road that leads to at least some amount of sense and clarity. There were three beacons that served as truth to get me through. The first a beam of hope my heart held onto, the second a truth that acted as rock to stand on, and the third a gift from Jesus that gave life no human could bring.
The beacon of hope was this. In the middle of the whirlwind of mental and soul distress, somewhere down deep, I knew it would all eventually end, that there would be a calming of the storm. Now I didn’t know how long it would be until it came, but somewhere in me, I had a peace that it would all end in something good. It is impossible to fully know oneself and often impossible to even have a vague outline of what you really are. But in these moments when I felt I knew almost nothing, God allowed me to KNOW that it would end well. I clung to this like a life raft, knowing that a good end could only mean that a good God was leading me through the raging ocean. This hope allowed me to keep walking, keep praying, keep searching scripture, until God showed me the second becon of truth.
The truth came out of my prayers to understand if God had intention in all of this, and if the cause was rooted in spiritual warfare or if I had just opened a new part of my brain that wouldn’t allow me to rest? Ultimately I don’t know the cause, and the answer isn’t of great importance, but the thing I found out was this. That regardless of the cause, God was allowing it to happen for some good purpose in my life and for his glory. I held onto the illustration of traveling through a dark, trap-laden cave being scraped up and bumping my head along the ceiling, but a cave that eventually opened into glory. We would be foolish to believe that God does not ALLOW us to travel through such caves to refine our faith. He does so not out of indifference but out of the very opposite of indifference being love. He loves me enough to lead me through dark places to rip out the dead parts of my soul and replace them with light. This picture gave me direction, that as long as I didn’t sit down in the cave and give up that I would reach its end. As long as I kept crawling along the jagged floor, I would reach the opening into daylight. God was not bringing me along this road by random chance, but with intense purpose and love.
(Still not done! Sorry! I promise the next part will be the last and will have a hope filled ending)
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Birthday Part 1
Birthdays are a strange cause for celebration. Not that they are unnecessary, but if you really think about the end for which we celebrate year intervals of a persons life, you will realize we rarely celebrate these days to any end that actually matters. We inflate balloons, bake cakes, and hand out presents, but if we are not careful we will rejoice no further than recognizing our mere existence for another 365 days. We may as well mark every 24 hours that our heart continues to beat and our lungs continue to be filled with oxygen, and truthfully, I hope we do remember every day as a day God has worked and faithfully sustained us, and on a more grand scale, this type of acknowledgment should be all we celebrate on days we link with our births. Not just being, but how we continue to be; By God’s fierce goodness and unchallenged love.
Well today is my birthday and since I find it pointless and stupid to celebrate me alone, because there is rightly NOTHING to celebrate if we are to celebrate good things, I want to celebrate God in me, the only hope of a reason to celebrate; and in rejoicing over God’s greatness, there is much to talk about!
My last blog entry was after week two of camp at Pine Cove. A week later marked the beginning of what I consider to be a God enabled trial of faith. I remember exactly how it began, with me leaning over a washer in a dirty laundry mat in Tyler, and wondering, quite innocently at first, whether my belief on Jesus for eternal life was purely genuine enough to receive his gift. It was a small seed like question thrown onto the soil of my mind that quickly started to take deep roots and grow and consume me at a rate I had no power to control. I suddenly was so overwhelmed with doubt and fear of my eternal security that I had to leave the flurry of social interaction around me and escape to a local park a few miles away, where under the shade of a great oak tree, I prayed and read through John for hours. Gripped by sorrow, confusion, and more doubt, I lay literally incapacitated only able to cry to Jesus for something besides what was happening.
The problem for me was the word “believe”. I didn’t know if I had believed correctly enough to be forgiven. Some may see this as a trivial question thwarted with a simple, assured answer or with effortless faith, and in the middle of my doubt I would have agreed with you, but the means by which to defeat such feelings was not where my problem lied. It was in my minds ability to rest in simple faith. With every assurance of scripture would come ten doubts, every moment of relief and hope would be interrupted with the sound of a thousand lying bees pushing out soundness in the faculties of my logic. I couldn’t escape from my mind. It is a weird thing to loathe the thoughts of your intellect, but to have no power to cast them out or to stop giving notice to them. If you haven’t experienced this feeling of enslavement to your mind, it goes something like this, or at least it worked like this for me.
1)A general uneasiness would roll like a dark cloud over my soul as to the truth of my salvation.
2)I would open up to what I knew to be one of hundreds of passages about salvation through faith such as, “whoever believes in him (Jesus) should not perish but have eternal life.”
3)But what does believe mean? I have believed in the sense that on a deep level I have asked Jesus to forgive me, but how do I know that belief is genuine? Would not the true test of that believe be changed action brought about by the new belief?
4)When I look at my life, I see struggle, sin, fear, and apathy in many areas, so is this proof that my belief isn’t really genuine?
5)On the other hand I have overcome certain sin and changed in how I relate to people, but how do I know this was from the Spirit of God at work in me and not just my own will power?
6)This brings up the question of how in a given situation, I can know I do things by the Spirit and not just out of a desire for self advancement. Maybe my reason for love is deeply rooted in knowing I will eventually receive love back from that person or from an admiring onlooker who sees my “noble” spirit.
And on and on I would go thinking in irrelevant circles leading to more unwanted doubt, but not seeming to be able to stop. It is quite pathetic to read back over the way i was thinking, but this went on for some weeks until God finally through obvious situations in my life that pointed to his active preserving of me as his saint, allowed me to find some solid rock to stand on to catch my breathe. But the new enemy of my un-baptized fleshly mind has continued to haunt me throughout the summer at times, always leading to doubt in different areas of my beliefs, not just my salvation. My mind at its darkest moments was coaxed into questions about the very idea of God and absolute truth.
(I know its kind of a downer so far, but I'm being called to go eat my birthday dinner at a some fancy restaurant…can’t complain! But I promise to tell of the glorious part of all this tomorrow :) )
Well today is my birthday and since I find it pointless and stupid to celebrate me alone, because there is rightly NOTHING to celebrate if we are to celebrate good things, I want to celebrate God in me, the only hope of a reason to celebrate; and in rejoicing over God’s greatness, there is much to talk about!
My last blog entry was after week two of camp at Pine Cove. A week later marked the beginning of what I consider to be a God enabled trial of faith. I remember exactly how it began, with me leaning over a washer in a dirty laundry mat in Tyler, and wondering, quite innocently at first, whether my belief on Jesus for eternal life was purely genuine enough to receive his gift. It was a small seed like question thrown onto the soil of my mind that quickly started to take deep roots and grow and consume me at a rate I had no power to control. I suddenly was so overwhelmed with doubt and fear of my eternal security that I had to leave the flurry of social interaction around me and escape to a local park a few miles away, where under the shade of a great oak tree, I prayed and read through John for hours. Gripped by sorrow, confusion, and more doubt, I lay literally incapacitated only able to cry to Jesus for something besides what was happening.
The problem for me was the word “believe”. I didn’t know if I had believed correctly enough to be forgiven. Some may see this as a trivial question thwarted with a simple, assured answer or with effortless faith, and in the middle of my doubt I would have agreed with you, but the means by which to defeat such feelings was not where my problem lied. It was in my minds ability to rest in simple faith. With every assurance of scripture would come ten doubts, every moment of relief and hope would be interrupted with the sound of a thousand lying bees pushing out soundness in the faculties of my logic. I couldn’t escape from my mind. It is a weird thing to loathe the thoughts of your intellect, but to have no power to cast them out or to stop giving notice to them. If you haven’t experienced this feeling of enslavement to your mind, it goes something like this, or at least it worked like this for me.
1)A general uneasiness would roll like a dark cloud over my soul as to the truth of my salvation.
2)I would open up to what I knew to be one of hundreds of passages about salvation through faith such as, “whoever believes in him (Jesus) should not perish but have eternal life.”
3)But what does believe mean? I have believed in the sense that on a deep level I have asked Jesus to forgive me, but how do I know that belief is genuine? Would not the true test of that believe be changed action brought about by the new belief?
4)When I look at my life, I see struggle, sin, fear, and apathy in many areas, so is this proof that my belief isn’t really genuine?
5)On the other hand I have overcome certain sin and changed in how I relate to people, but how do I know this was from the Spirit of God at work in me and not just my own will power?
6)This brings up the question of how in a given situation, I can know I do things by the Spirit and not just out of a desire for self advancement. Maybe my reason for love is deeply rooted in knowing I will eventually receive love back from that person or from an admiring onlooker who sees my “noble” spirit.
And on and on I would go thinking in irrelevant circles leading to more unwanted doubt, but not seeming to be able to stop. It is quite pathetic to read back over the way i was thinking, but this went on for some weeks until God finally through obvious situations in my life that pointed to his active preserving of me as his saint, allowed me to find some solid rock to stand on to catch my breathe. But the new enemy of my un-baptized fleshly mind has continued to haunt me throughout the summer at times, always leading to doubt in different areas of my beliefs, not just my salvation. My mind at its darkest moments was coaxed into questions about the very idea of God and absolute truth.
(I know its kind of a downer so far, but I'm being called to go eat my birthday dinner at a some fancy restaurant…can’t complain! But I promise to tell of the glorious part of all this tomorrow :) )
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