Afterburn

My last post was a rant.  I won't apologize for it.  It needed to be said.  But know that nothing on this blog is for show.  I post what I am wrestling with.  And I've continued to think about this.  Many points came out in the last post that I think could bear further explanation...Or rather, I want to talk about my history to help create understanding...see a previous post on that...perhaps then I will make more sense to those who don't get it and those who might think they get it can see how my ideas might differ or align with theirs.  Not that anyone is really reading this anyway, so who cares either way.  (Sidebar: thanks to the fanbase, I know both of you are reading.)

Where to start?  If you say you used to be a Christian, then you never were...or you still are.  It's not the kind of thing that can be undone.  It's not a system of beliefs.  It's not a culture.  It's not a bunch of fables and moralisms.  It's not a vague idea of the cosmic good.  It's not a magic hat that makes life good.  It isn't even to simply follow Jesus' teachings.  If you left it, then you never really understood it or if you really truly had hope in it and left over some disappointment, then you still are a Christian. 

You see, you can call yourself anything.  But when a person truly encounters the living God it changes things.  Things inside are different.  I'm not going to theologize and give you "3 signs you know you're saved" or any nonsense you might have heard before.  When you feel that Love call you and recognize who you are hearing, feeling, whatever, you know it.  There's no going back.  The job of the Church, which is people, not place or organization, is to stand beside you until you do know it.  Period.

I was raised in the typical modern Evangelical church.  I was fortunate to receive a good deal of training in the Bible.  I know it well.  I can argue the apologetics.  I was actually trained in persuading someone with the gospel...Literally, "if they say this, you counter with this."  It wasn't evil.  It was simply schooling in the classic sense.  I studied the arguments of great theologians and could cite the verses they used to answer heresies, etc.  The goal wasn't to brow beat people.  We never did that.  Just a principle that prudent study and in-depth knowledge of the Bible were weapons for life and salvation.  Think Allistair Begg, Bill Bright, Chuck Colson.  It's a whole world that you'd have to be in to understand.  I still have great respect for these people.

But I was also a depressive kid.  Serious for my age, with difficulty understanding the stupid kids around me.  Part of it I now know was due to a rare physical condition that was undiscovered then.  But part is simply my nature.  I began to see the fruitlessness of our shallow cushy lives.  I sank slowly into nihilism.  I knew that in the end, nothing we did mattered.  What would happen would happen.  Bad to good people, good to bad people.  Indifference to most.  Nothing made sense, so there was no meaning.  Read Camus' The Stranger to see what life is like from a purely nihilistic perspective.  It's terrifying.  I lived there.  Too apathetic to kill myself.  Pointless to strive.  Just waiting for something to kill me.  I drove my Jeep without doors and no seatbelts.  I laid on the double yellow lines of a bend in the road just hoping.  I sliced my arms and chest up just to feel anything.  I worked at a nursery and dug my arms into rose bushes, carried cactuses with bare arms so the needles would drive in.  This was a double benefit.  It woke up some sensation in me, and hid the knife slices.  I remember once, hanging from the rafters of the stockroom "to clean them".  I had swung out about 20 feet and dangled there two stories up with a broom in one hand.  I didn't care.  I even almost broke a kids neck for cutting in the lunch line.  I don't mean we got in a fight.  I mean he did it, didn't pay any attention to me, but was standing right in front of me where the line doubled back with back turned.  The adrenlaine flowed, my hands clenched and I was reaching for him when I realized what I was about to do and bolted out of there.    I ran out of the school and shivered in cold sweats for 20 minutes.  I used to smash my head into bathroom mirrors hoping they'd break and bleed my skull.  A school custodian caught me once.  He didn't know whether to pray for me or run me off.  Of course to everyone else, I was the perfect responsible kid.  Few saw it, few knew what to do, and few cared as long as I functioned in some fashion.

Somewhere in there I started having spiritual experiences, which you can read about elsewhere on the internet.  Just google cavvvp...all you'll get is me.  I didn't understand these things and it wrecked me.  I could barely hold together.  But in that world, Jesus found me.  He revealed himself as real in a way that was undeniable.  Either I had experienced what I did, or I was psychotic.

I learned that there were other people like me.  I met a bunch of the craziest punk people you could ever meet because the guitarist at my church also played music there.  In fact, that guitarist had a huge impact on me that I'm sure he doesn't even know.  He was one of the few people in that time who didn't judge.  Didn't put on a face.  He was a former drug addict from a rock band.  His wife was a drug addicted stripper.  He told me once that he'd seen our Elders' record collections, "and man they got all the same stuff we do." said even as they condemned me for being loose and rebellious.  So I began to distinguish the real from the hypocritical.  I saw those punk Christians ostracized when they came around.  I was told by the church next door to ours that "they didn't dispute my salvation, but only associated with churches of like faith and order" when I asked if their kids wanted to come to a party I was having for our kids.

I began to see that so-called Christians were the bulk of the problem!  We were the Pharisees!  So I left mainstream churches and joined the punks.  We packed the house.  Drug addicts, prostitutes, gay, gutter punks, homeless, hippies, new age, transgender, and just plain mentally disturbed.  We even had a church meeting in which we decided that someone was always going to bring a jacket just in case one of the strippers or prostitutes showed up in her work clothes!  I'm not kidding!  The pastor there became a friend and mentor.  He was a wreck of a person.  God love him and so do I.  His warts were apparent and he didn't shy from it. He was saved by grace and openly said what good was in him was from God.  And even now I will stand beside him at the Judgement and claim his as a friend, many of whom are there because of him. 

We invaded dark and sinister places.  We have seen God part crowds in Ybor, open dance floors in clubs.  I once sat in a wiccan coffee house that was run by not the nice kind of wiccan.  I have not experienced more spiritual warfare than in that place.  I could feel the oppression as we prayed for protection of my friends and others in the place...and this wizard was fighting us hard to drive us out and claim these people.  I could see it in his face.  He knew we were opposing him and neither of us said a word or gave an overt sign.  Just sat there silently praying while drinking some cheap brew.

But things change.  People are flawed.  Things run their course.  And this did.  People were lost.  Schisms happened.  Eventually we joined a friend's church.  I hit it off with this pastor who is still my mentor and spiritual director.  But I watched as several iterations of forcing two very different types of people together failed, leaving pain in their wake.  It wasn't for lack of trying.  The "normal" people just weren't comfortable with the grittiness of the others.  They couldn't see us as partners.  We were always projects.  The punks cloistered and refused to integrate because they knew they weren't wanted.  No one likes to be looked at like that, even unintentionally! And emotionally damaged people like many of these can't actually even handle it.  It crushes them, so they drive away good intentions and close the circle even tighter.

Time and time again, I've seen it.  Mainstreamers get some idea that they're edgy or cool and try to step into a world they don't get.  I have seen some notable exceptions.  But they are few and far between.


And not all of this type look weird on the outside.  Many would fit right in.  You eat, shop, and work right beside them.  I've even seen relatively normal people who are starting to discover this real, honest, classless faith continually wounded and turned away by churches.  The churches seek the majority in the "war for souls" and don't have time for the complaints, the dissenters, the ones who fall through the cracks.  Acceptable losses.  I emphatically stand up and defy that mindset.  No, never is one lost, not any are acceptable.  The Good Shepherd leaves the 99 to find the one.  I say the 99 should be looking too!  People will conflict.  But resources are probably there if you'd open your mind to look for them and step aside when it isn't you.  Why not partner instead of compete?  There's churches on every corner and they all act like they're the only one in the wilderness of lost people.  Here's an example of what I mean:

A wiccan couple came in to a mainstream church I worked at and introduced themselves as such.  Now why would they do that?  If they were just checking it out, they would simple come in like anyone else.  No one need know.  The reason they did it is because they were testing.  They wanted something and wanted to see how they were received.  I told people, come get me when they get here.  I'll talk to them.  I know what they believe and can welcome them.  I even pulled a little Paul and cited my qualifications to do so.  Of course, I wasn't worthy to do that.  Instead some "better qualified" pastor talked to them and they never came back.  No doubt he comforts himself that you can't win them all and they just must not have been ready.  Wow!  You sound like me.  I thought you were Evangelical?  If there's a tool in your tool box you have to make use of it!  That's being a good steward, dude!  Leverage everything, remember that sermon?  I even told you I was there so there's no excuse.  You just blew it, they could be going to hell because of it.

Thankfully, I don't believe it is up to us to save anyone.  So I can easily forgive this man and know that God is far greater than our feebleness.  He doesn't depend on us.  He doesn't.  But by the standard you mete, it is meted to you.  This man's own theology condemns him!

So where does this long ramble leave us?  I am a bridge.  I am an interpreter.  I can communicate across boundaries.  This is my gift.  I am pitbull, donkey stubborn and will not back down from what is right.  This is my gift.  I can love and forgive, but will not participate in what is not right.  I speak for my flock of black sheep.  I'm not the shepherd.  That's Jesus.  I'm just a sheepdog, and I'm not alone.  If anyone comes after my sheep, I'll bite.  If anyone inadvertently hurts my sheep, you'll hear me bark.  And if you're sitting out there lost, hurt, fending off the wild beasts, or being pushed around by the prettier sheep, just make what noise you can...I'm coming...and I won't leave until the Shepherd finds you.

Piercing

The description of this blog is that it is real and raw and unfiltered.  It is an attempt to process things I see, think about, encounter, etc.  As such it isn't really a good read, will never be popular.  But sometimes I look back at what I wrote and can see how it was prophetic...this doesn't mean predicts the future, but illustrates what God is doing.

For instance, I haven't blogged in a while because stuff has been going on.  I cycle through nonexpressive times.  but that doesn't mean all is well or bad.  Just nothing to process in this way.  So today an idea hits me and I sit down to write it.  Before doing it I read the last entry, which I had honestly forgotten about.  Wow!  what I intended to write is the further progression of what I was writing about then.  If there's any doubt that my life is guided by an intelligence other than myself, this is it.  I didn't even remember writing it, so I obviously didn't self-fulfill.

Anyway, I get tired sometimes.  Like brain spirit tired.  I just can't go on.  I want to curl up and sink into nothing.  I'm in one of those times now.  Ironically, it's in these times of not caring so much that I can reveal deeper truths about myself.  For instance the seething hatred for those who try to motivate and seminar Christianity.  I have friends who actually do recognize what Christianity should be, but they go about trying to implement it through motivational seminars, trainings, book jacket facebook posts, etc.  One went so far as to tell the reader to "man up" which meant sign up for the seminar.  Forgive me if you ever read this my friend.  It's not personal, I know you have a good heart and are working the best you know how.  But that just bends me the wrong way.  Since when does manhood, masculinity, toughness, denial of self, or whatever else the term "man up" could mean have anything to do with signing up for some stupid presentation!  That's what Jesus did, sure.  Walked around passing out flyers and getting people to go meet him on the hillside for "two hours that will change your life"..."are you man enough to show up?"  Howl and tear my clothes, man!

Who are these people trying to reach?  Unless there's a group of self-help junkie guys who are insecure in their own manhood, who else is going to get anything real out of that?! You certainly won't get the gay 20 year old who was abused by his father and keeps posting pics of big ol' **** on his facebook page!  Or the kid sitting in his closet slicing his arms with a pocket knife...yeah they just need to "man up"!

I'm just picking on this example because it was the steel striking my flint right now.  But there are countless others.  I've heard many pastors give a great sermon about using your talents, finding what God wants you to do, only to ruin it by ending with, "that means you need to stop by the sign-up table out in the lobby and fill out an interest card."  F***in' cereal box Christians!  I want to go turn the table over like Jesus in the temple.  And if a bleeped out word from a Christian blogger throws you off, what are you gonna do with the lady who sleeps with your pastor to get closer to God!

Ironically, I had someone come very seriously to ask me if I would lead a home group for her kids since she had seen how together my son was and she couldn't think of anyone she'd rather have teaching her kids.  I must be doing something right.  Wow would she be in for a shock.  How do you let someone like that down easy?  I just had to say I'd consider it and hope a convenient excuse comes up before she asks again.  What else was I to say?  Sure, I'll lead the group.  First thing I'll tell them is the best person to teach kids is THEIR PARENTS!  Then I'd tell them to read their own Bible and question everything anyone ever tells them about it.  I'll tell them to stand on their own, that they were strong and powerful and could take down cities if God told them to.  I'd tell them to get into fights if that's what it takes to defend the defenseless.  To give up everything including life itself to meet a need laid before them.  I could keep going.  She'd run for the hills!

If my kid is any indication of my parenting, I can tell you it's by the grace of God and not my own skill.  But, just recently two kids got off his bus in the neighborhood and one swung on the other.  A fight started.  He dropped his stuff and ran back to break them up.  Jumped right in the middle.  The next day a parent came and asked who had stepped in.  My son admitted to it.  Next thing the principal of the school called him in to give him accommodation and tell everyone they need more people like him.

Which brings me to my intended point.  We have become a nation of sheep, passively walking in line, not stepping on the grass, wearing our bike helmets and getting out of the water when thunder is heard.  All great safety tips, right?  Sure if you want to manage a huge populace...make them milquetoasts, make it seem morally honorable to follow the letter of the rules.  I even saw a PSA that said kids should wear life vests and water shoes even if walking near the water...just NEAR it!  How about toughing their feet by running barefoot and learning to walk carefully, swim well enough to save not just yourself, but someone else!

Climb the trees, walk in the grass, get dirty, and do something real.  How can we expect Christians to do amazing things when we train them to be model linewalkers!  That's what God wants...good little do-bees who sign the papers, and sing, but not too loudly, wave their arms, but not really let loose.

You are what you practice being.  Are you willing to get dirty?  Do you even know what that means?  Here's a paralell: you run in the gym, maybe on the paved trail...I'm sitting here covered in bits of leaves and spiderwebs stinging from splinters and scratches.  The difference between those two is a comparison of the distance between your seminar Christianity and the real needs.  You wouldn't know what to do with the people if they started showing up!  Do you know what the Wiccan Rede is?  Ever read the Koran?  Had coffee with the lady who runs a non profit to promote sex-worker rights against "those Christian organizations" who force them from "an ancient and esteemed traditional role into menial factory jobs"?

I'm tired of not speaking out about this.  You decide who you want to be.  If you want to break the norm, you have to break the norm.  That means taking some real risks.  If you're faithful in small you'll be faithful in much.

You know, you may not ever be equipped to deal with the kind of people I've described.  That's ok.  Young upwardly mobile preppy types give me shivers, myself.  But know for every type, there are people who can meet their needs.  Just get rid of your delusions that you have the answer for everyone and stop making it harder for those who are willing and capable to go where you can't.

Enough

OK.  Enough is enough.  Something has got to change.  Something in me.  Something in the world.  Something surrounding the world I see.

I don't have it figured out.  I don't know what it is.  I don't know how to start.  But God you won't let me stop thinking about it.

There is something missing.  It can't be filled by any made up group.  It crosses any category I place it in.  It scares me to death and yet it's totally necessary.

Take me out of myself.  I can't sort it out any more than Isaiah could describe what he saw, but You look at me with those piercing eyes and I scream, "Here I am, send me!"  Ruin my life, my self conception, my image of my self.  Only take me where I should go.

Kill what inhibits You in me.  For all my sins and flaws and insecurities, I still want to go. The metanoia is approaching.  When I have turned, fire me off in the direction I should go.

I have the skills to fill the void.  I will speak for them, give them a place and an identity.  Give me your eyes and burn up my pretense.  Help me to live true and open.  Help me to free the beast.  Send me to those who need me and bring alongside those I need, those you've prepared for this work.

There are lost ones all out there.  I have caught the scent of the ones I am to find.  I'm straining at the leash.  Let me loose and I will fly straight into the jaws of hell to bring them back.

Beast

This is likely going to be a dangerous post.  We'll see if it even gets published.  It might end up deleted.

Sometimes I feel an urge rise in me to tear things up.  To jump up and rip my way free from the invisible chains, the padded cell of office, house.  I know it probably wouldn't last long once the pain from that endeavor started to set in...it's harder to seriously break stuff than it seems.  But the urge is there.

I've never acted on it and my reasons quickly stills the beast and switches my attention elsewhere.  But sometimes I wonder what would happen.  How would life be different.

I've seen the beast flare to the surface on occasion.  When someone turned against the traffic light and I had to jump back from being hit, close enough to hit his window, which I slapped with all the force I could get in a split second reaction, and then he had the gall to stop and yell at me!  I was charging him down.  Even in business attire and with coworkers.  They pulled me away.

Another time someone punched through my apartment window.  When I ran out to see what happened I saw who I thought was a drunk boyfriend retaliating for our making his girlfriend pay for our car window which she had broken, I charged him down with true murder in my mind.  I was going to throw him off the balcony.  Fortunately there, my neighbor came out at the same moment and saw my intent.  He was closer and beat me to him.  He pulled his delirious and bleeding friend into a full nelson and positioned himself between me and him yelling that he was drunk and didn't mean to do it.  That quickly calmed and resolved as well.

But these were provoked reactions that I bet many men would have.  What I don't know about are the swells in the midst of other activities.  No doubt, my wildness trying to get out.  Pulling at the chain, shaking the bars.  Do others feel this?

I know I need wildness.  I need my time of pain and wearing down in the woods.  It is the physical expression of my spiritual discipline.  It keeps me sane.  But ow normal is this?  How do I give voice to it in healthy ways?  Will there be a time when it has a rightful place...my moment on Perelandra where I learn what this is truly for?  do all men feel it?  Is our mask of civility so thin?  Are we lying to ourselves and others when we pretend to not have these aspects?  Or do I contain a wild beast in the iron bars of my will and reason?

Behind

We often react to situations based on our emotion or perception.  Is it possible to step back and withhold reaction until we know more?  Can we take the time to step inside someone's head and see what motivates them?  Perhaps it would enlighten us greatly.  Perhaps we wouldn't be so quick to take offence or to come to our own defence.

Maybe we would see what makes another person take the shape and tone they do.  Maybe then we could regulate our reaction to be appropriate.  If we could see inside people we could perhaps bypass the outward and seemingly magically speak to the real issues.

Today I watched this happen.  I saw someone melt down over a very frustrating issue.  We had both been tense over these things beyond our control, but not with each other.  I had been reacting in my usual way...perhaps a little more loosely since I consider this person a friend.  But in this moment, the frustration turned on me.  I was not sure where it was coming from but I could see several things.  My friend's facial muscles were giving away the depth of his emotion as he tried to assert control over me.  I realized it as an attempt to grab control over something in a situation that had overwhelmed him.

I thought of reacting in defence, but forestalled it miraculously.  Instead we retreated to a private place and talked.  Apparently, he had been taking my verbal expression of frustration as personal attack.  This surprised me since it had never even crossed my mind that these things were his fault.  I had never even directed comments at him.  in fact they had all been calm and rational comments to the effect of, "I wish we had a different way to do this.  I hate being locked into a single path and dependent on ___ conditions."

So again, I could react with anger, point out his wrongs, or I could dissuade his frustration.  To my surprise I found myself doing the latter.  He calmed and we worked it out.  He even seeing that he had taken things too personally.

But then I began thinking of how he had arrived at that moment in the first place.  I tried to further understand his perspective, using the facts I knew.  Gradually a picture is forming.  I'm beginning to see how to communicate with him.  How to shape my flow to his in an edifying way.  To come alongside and build up as we move forward.

But this requires that I step outside myself and find the truth behind this facade.  In how many other ways can I do this?  What will be the effect?  Can I become as collected and cool as Card's Speaker for the Dead?  Knowing how to speak truth into any situation and gently manipulate myself for the betterment of the people I interact with?  To shape people and situations by reshaping myself?

I think this is possible.  In yielding there is strength.  In gentleness there is power.  It's not the same as slimy kowtowing or political manipulation.  It's a fresh wind, a folding brook.  It's the essence of the Spirit Lord.

Real Act

I just read an article citing statistical characteristics of kids who grow up in church and don't leave it when they get older.  This is a huge phenomenon, if you don't know.  Kids grow up going to church, doing good things, then leave either quietly or not so much, or fall into problems that most Christians think they should have been insulated against such as drugs, pregnancy, atheism, etc.

This article cited three main characteristics of those that stay. 1. they have had a conversion experience. Makes sense because those who simply grow up there can talk it and walk it, but it isn't necessarily a real thing for them.  So can they truly be called Christians in the first place?  As the Supertones said, "if you say you used to be a Christian, then you never were."

2. they are equipped to deal with life and not just entertained.  Again makes sense because most contemporary protestant churches and probably many of the nonprotestant bent focus so much on drawing them in that they lose all but the merest shred of content and become nothing more than "clean" social clubs. Which apparently aren't that clean either given the ways in which so many I've known have fallen out.  There's an infamous case (which could be rumor, though I don't doubt it could well be true) where a girl got pregnant in the church I grew up in while playing a youth group game...it resulted in a ban on any games that left us out of sight for more than like 5 minutes...which interestingly enough didn't stop any of those who fell out in my day from doing so...hmmm.

3. they are taught at home.  Again makes sense.  If a family is leaving their children's spiritual education up to professionals and volunteers who see them maybe 3 hours a week...c'mon.  But even still this is not fool-proof and I know several very stable families who did everything right to no avail.

This struck me.  I don't disagree with the article.  Makes sense, right?  But still doesn't seem to hit the nail on the head.  So how many will read that article and try to engineer these traits?  The thing is, I can point to many of my own friends who have had a so-called conversion experience who now reject the faith utterly, even those who came and left it far after their teens.  I know people with advanced religious education who have done the same.  These ought to be "equipped", yeah?  And as I pointed out, even the best families can't control everything.  I've seen the controlling ones who drive kids away and the more moderate who lose them still.

I don't know the answers here.  But I do know I am one of those kids who didn't leave, and I know why.  I did hit a wall in my faith as a teen.  I shouldn't say wall...it was more like a desert.  I had the so-called conversion.  I had the equipping and the family training in the form of hours of formal discipleship and biblical training as well as the fortunate gift of logical training and reason.  But it still all just seemed pointless.  As my questions deepened and broadened, the answers I was getting were mostly insufficient because people who were teaching me didn't understand or couldn't articulate themselves.  I naturally began to explore other things after my own peculiar flavor of poison.  But in my case, God pursued me.  He broke through my reality in seen and unseen ways.  He brought notable people who would speak powerful lasers of truth into me...sometimes just one statement at a critical time.  He sent me dreams...vivid visions.  And he allowed me to break myself so that I would be receptive when he stepped in for a greater revelation.

That was when real conversion happened.  Oh yes, it happened.  But it isn't something that can be engineered in a building with lights and music and retreats.  It is a deeply personal, tragic, painful sort of conversion in which I had nothing left and was given a new hope...a new life.  This is why I say like CS Lewis, I was drug in kicking and screaming.  In reality, I was more carried in after I had passed out and given up, but I was kicking and screaming up to that point in that I would accept nothing less than reality, Truth.

A few years after this, a mentor of mine posed this question that reveals for me how I felt prior and after.  He said, "If you came to a fork in the road and Truth went one way and Jesus went the other, which way would you go?"  My answer was a resounding "Truth".  But here's the trick of the question:  I've found that every time I perceive this dichotomy, it's because I have a false conception of...Jesus.  (I bet you thought I was going to say Truth.  If so, you need to stop drinking your evangelical koolaid.)  You see, every time I went toward what I saw as Truth and left Jesus behind, I'd find a clearer, brighter, realer Jesus standing right around the bend.  I couldn't get away from the guy!  And Thank God!  Because when I was utterly undone, he brought me back.

You see, it isn't a choice.  It isn't a point of decision...though I guess that exists somewhere or for some people.  It's an acceptance of what is.  A giving up to what I couldn't change.  The point of decision for me, has come multiple times after that as I am forced to decide whether my experiences are real or if I was/am psychotic.  But when I think about it, I can't choose otherwise.  There is nihilism, the nothing of no meaning, no caring, no feeling, emptiness of unrequited existence, or there is God who has revealed himself to me in the man Jesus.  Psychotic or not, I'm not going back in the pit...probably couldn't if I tried.  He'd just pull me back out again.

So, is Calvin right?  Am I just Elect and these kids, men, women are not?  I'm not building theology, here, just asking a legitimate question.  Or are they just not at the point yet?

Really, this question isn't what we should focus on.  Rather, what are we going to do about it.  If Calvinistic, we don't know who is elected and have a duty to relieve the suffering of all anyway.  If Evangelical, they're just not ready and no amount of coercing or engineering will change that.  So I suggest we start with one thing.  Be real.

Shed the pomp and hoohah.  Cut the bright lights and fancy marketing tactics. Get off the rockstar pedestals and deeply search.  Find out what's real.  I'll help you.  Come talk to me one on one, I promise I won't pull any punches.  You'll walk away questioning things you never thought you could.  Then, once we're gates of hell, standing in the burning pyre, flayed alive sure of what we believe, we simply act.  In the moment, in the real, act.  Feed, clothe, pray, comfort, support, help, encourage, love, bleed, cry, die in proportion to the faith we each have.

This is Jesus, by the book, man.

Jesus Prayer

It's been a long time since I've blogged.  This is because I've entered the busiest season for me.  This one was made more busy by a certain conglomeration of circumstances: family, work, illness  Not the least of which was surgery on myself.

But now I am back.  I'm still in the throes of activity, but find a spare moment.  Honestly, there's not much to tell, since I've been preoccupied there hasn't been much time for examination.  Perhaps this is a good thing.

Two things I have noticed.  One, I'm developing a fondness for Canada caused by a long spell of recovery in which I became fascinated with Canadian TV.  While this is silly, it's worth noting since I previously viewed it as pretty much a frozen wilderness with a fringe of basically American culture.  While obviously TV isn't a full or necessarily accurate picture, it is a window, and a careful observer (which I consider myself) can pick out elements that transcend the showbiz of even educational TV.  This is what has led to the fondness.

The second thing of note is the Jesus Prayer.  As usual, I won't quote it, go look it up (can't make it that easy; knowledge without even 30 seconds of effort is devoid of value.)  It's basically one line, packed full of meaning, said repeatedly as a means of focusing our attention.

I've tried various forms of discipline in the past. They work for a bit, and then the newness wears off and they become hollow.  Some people may find them more valuable, but for me they fade in favor of ever more real interaction.  But lately, this prayer has been good.  It has helped me stave off wandering thoughts, and quiet my mind.  This is a big problem for someone like me whose mind wanders leagues afield and at the pace of an overstimulated ferret.

But most notable is that while I was prepping for surgery in which they would essentially hollow out my face from the inside...not a pretty prospect...I kept saying this prayer.  It was easy enough to remember and pick right back up after an interruption.  As I was being put under, it was my last thought...I wonder if it might have even become audible as I was fading.  But then most astonishing to me was that it was my first thought upon regaining the slightest bit of consciousness.  Almost as if it had been rolling through my subconscious mind the entire time. 

Of course I can't say that to be the case as I was totally unaware of it.  But I was happy to find that my thoughts were not of monkeys wildly gesticulating behind the nurses or other such half-dreamed impressions.  Instead it was this one solid line of truth echoing through my reality.  Even when I could least control my mind, this razor sharp prayer cut through and remained strong.

Thank God, and thank all the saints who crowd around me whispering this line from across the centuries.