Is this new?

After my recent cycle into darkness, I am starting to feel better.  Not 100%, but better.  I'm still working out some things about causes, triggers, etc.  No major metanoia either though.

But I did have one realization as the light started to dawn in my world again.  I've been faking things pretty darn well.  I actually do it a lot.  It probably started as a survival mechanism somewhere.  But I remember coming to a point years ago where I had to let things out.  It helped me stay out of the dark.  But I developed a reputation for being really angry.  I kept my head pretty well, but I would verbally rail about things that upset me and there were lots of them.

Overtime, I had thought I'd gotten rid of that. Calmed down.  But recently I've found that same part of me still there, still as angry.  It hadn't come back.  It just never left.  I guess I'd been repressing it.

Actually, I hate being angry.  It's really just a sort of snarling out of fear and frustration.  See, it all comes back to cages.  I hate being pent up.  I don't know why.  I'm not claustrophobic or anything, it's more an internal sort of thing.  When I'm being boxed in, given a situation where there's no way out, I start to get like any intelligent animal in a cage gets.  They either get mean, go crazy, or give up.  And mean is the most conducive to survival.  Crazy just means they've won, and giving up feels worse than anything.  That's where the demons are.  So anger it is.

But anyway, my point is that I had become pretty good at faking the right attitude.  Even in my spiritual life, I know what a mature Christian should exhibit, and I can put that on.  I can also pull off just the right mix of humility and power to make people think I'm pretty darn holy.  I even learned to mix in a good deal of truth with it such that I flat out tell people I'm bad, but do it in a way that they don't believe me.  I'm serious about this.  I know how to pause, tone my voice, phrase my words and make what I want to say seem wise or mysterious or even beyond my years.  I even fooled myself into believing it.  Seriously.  That's what I've just learned.  I haven't really grown much at all.

Now in some ways I have, sure.  I could go into those but that would make this over-long.  But in this deep root area, I have not changed much at all.  The fruits of the spirit are just not there.  I know how to make them look like they're there, but that's not the same thing.  It's not.  What's real is the natural outpouring of the heart when we're not trying.

What's been coming out of me lately means I'm either possessed or have just opened up a dark corner of my internal house and found it has been rotting in there for a long time.  I don't want to go into what made me realize this, but suffice to say you'll probably imagine it worse than it was outwardly, but if I told you, you'd imagine it far less than it was inwardly.  So I won't say.

But this made me think of how that could happen.  How could I pursue virtue and good character and not find even a little of it?  I think it's because I'm pursuing the wrong thing.  You see, any time we Christians lay an expectation on another, we force them, be it insidiously slight or brashly overt, to ACT like we tell them they should.  It's all about the DIY.  Fruits are love, joy, peace, patience... So I'll just be more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient.  I won't be perfect, but heck, we're all sinners saved by grace, right?  It's the try that counts and the more we try, the more we actually become.  Fake it till you make it!

This is wrong.  God wants us not to love him from obligation or expectation.  He wants us to genuinely love him.  He'd rather us reject him than pretend.  This is the only explanation that makes sense.  So if I'm doing something good that my heart's not into, I might as well not do it.  Better to be bad and honest than good and a liar because the first leads to real life, while the other leads to white-washed tombs.

So this part isn't new.  I've blogged about it before.  But what is new is the realization that I am one of the tombs.  If it took a trip to hell to open my eyes to that, then I thank God for it.  I've got to quit this, but I can't.  So I have to re-learn it all from this perspective.  He does the work.  I just grow however he grows me; I can't, sow, hoe, water, and prune myself.

So if you think I've fallen off the deep end, you were just one of those I duped.  Please don't try to draw me back in.  It's hard to stay honest in this.  And I'm faking it enough already in writing this so cleanly.