Poured

"Christians devour each other."  This is a quote I once read in an article by a Christian who was quoting his athiest friend who was observing why he isn't a Christian.  It's very true.

I feel poured out.  Stretched at every point.  People want things and they want more and more and more.  Like my cup is draining faster than filling.  And then some people ask for things they don't really want you to give them.

I do public work.  So what I do isn't just inconsequential money-making tasks.  It's things that enable most of you do your inconsequential money-making tasks, and I do them at a level that is involved in the decisions and planning.  So it is not boasting to say that what I do affects all of you who live in the same area and has lasting impacts into the future.  It's just so invisible to your daily lives that you don't even know it's going on.  But I digress.

My point is that even in this, a coworker was saying today, "It's as if they ask us to make something better because they have to, but they really just want to keep doing the same old thing, so they make it something super difficult to actually accomplish with little resources, and when we figure out a way to do it anyway, they say, 'oh s***!, we never thought they'd actually do it!' So they have to make it artificially difficult."

So I get it from all sides.  And in the place I should find rest and comfort, I find people saying, "well if your joy isn't complete you just have to..."  It's all on my effort.  Even if that effort is simply believing something, or thinking something, or seeing something differently.  I don't know if these people are well-meaning candy-eyed types who have never really known darkness, or if they're just clones spitting whatever script they can access from a motivational poster, or if they are just as screwed up and think they need to mask it by saying the 'right' thing.

Well, I'm stepping out and saying that for some of us, it isn't that easy.  If I were to hound you about running and tell you that you just need to run faster.  You just need stronger muscles, a better heart, more endurance!  You'd look at me and say, "easy for you to say."  Well why is it any different with a mental or emotional condition.  I can't help it!  I know all the stuff you're saying.  I just can't make it any different!  Don't you think I've tried?  I promise you I'm not one of those people who just want to play the victim.  and even if I was, maybe I couldn't help that either!

Why are you so quick to explain and categorize and answer?  You obviously don't get it, or you're a liar.  Either way, you make it abundantly clear that I can't reveal this part of me to you.  So you rob from me a place to find rest.  You force a tired soul out into the night again because there's obviously no room in your inn for the likes of me.

Even still, for your sake, I hope God doesn't lay my blood on your hands because I don't think you know what you do.  And I've been to hell, just went back for a visit actually.  Trust me, you don't want to go.

Loser

Ok, so I have been a bit gripy in the past few posts. It's been a rough month so far. I'm starting to feel like I'm over it though. Certain things really rub me the wrong way because for me, my faith is a very real and active thing. There is a lot of religion that I find silly, or just plain wrong. What I find foolish or misunderstood, I don't adhere to at all. If people want to follow something that only affects themselves, I am content to let them work it out on their own. That stuff doesn't bother me.

But when it comes to things that I do believe, I truly believe them. There is no middle ground on those, just like I have no doubt that I am typing on this keyboard and sitting in this chair. And just as I have no doubt that Japan does in fact exist because I have been there. Just as certain as these things are, so are the things I believe about Christianity.

When someone starts trying to teach others things that I do not believe to be true. Things that go utterly against the character and nature of what I hold dear, I have a hard time. It isn't about intolerance, as I have said above. I respect people's rights to believe and to think for themselves. But just like no man would suffer someone to insult or defame his wife or children, so I feel about my God.

Why is this so serious for me when so many can breeze in and out of churches and it never really burns them down into their core? I don't know. I can speculate, but I'd prefer to speak from what I know.

I am a loser. Plain and simple. The lost sock. The guy who just doesn't get it. The one that stands on the outskirts. The one who doesn't like what everyone else likes, or talk like everyone else talks. I have seen the futility and the wrongs in this world and I have seen my inability to change myself or anyone else. My inability to do anything about the wrongs. My inability to make sense of it all. To someone like me... and I am not alone, there are many of us... there are few choices. Nihilism and hedonism are two of the biggest choices. My dark and ascetic nature leans more toward nihilism, the lack of belief in anything, than toward hedonism, simply because I can't lie to myself like that. To seek pleasure is to live blind to my speeding end and the pain around me.

It is a depressed and bleak existence. But what else is there with no good, no God, no hope. I unfortunately, could not blindly ignore the obvious and hide in my trinkets and drugs and sex and fun. I have sucked on a gun barrel more than once. I know what a knife blade feels like on my wrists. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the simple phrase, "what if the Catholics are right?" What if I did it and there was suddenly a God there condemning me to hell for eternity because of my suicide? I was already in hell, I couldn't take it for eternity, even if there was a glimmer of hope. Give me oblivion or heaven. So I lived in a way that disregarded my health. I would not eat. I would not wear a seat belt, even when I had a jeep with no doors. I hung out in seedy places, just waiting for my number to come up. I cut myself to make the inside pain ease by feeling it on the outside. I carved designs in my skin. I worked at a nursery and pruned roses bare-handed and carried cactus by the stalks, letting the needles pierce deep in my shoulder and hands. I smashed my head into mirrors just hoping they would shatter and cut me. I was walking dead. Then came the psychosomatic illnesses. The feelings of wretching and dying in the stomach. The spasms. The worst pain ever and it wouldn't stop. I probed into the occult, looking to see if there was something beyond this misery and pain. There I met more misery and pain. I began to be tormented psychologically. Demons tailed me and mocked me openly. I even came within inches of killing someone for cutting in line once. My hands shook so bad I could barely hold a fork, so I ate even less. Reality began to unravel. My death was coming, I could tell.

And then one day in desperation, I broke, with a soul scream so deep that it rippled shock waves through the room, crying out for help. I was at the end of myself. And suddenly Jesus was there. He was real. He was holy. His presence like a nuclear bomb. And with a whisper from him the demons were gone, the world blew away, and I was in perfect peace. I thought I was finally in the oblivion I sought, but slowly the world reformed and over years I learned to breathe and walk and eat again in a new world, in a new way. The Bible suddenly made so much more sense. It was informed by my experience. I can hear the depth and desperation in the words...by grace you are saved...I bear on my body the marks of Jesus...mercy, not sacrifice.

The old me is truly gone. I have participated in the regeneration of man by merging with Christ. My soul is his. I gave up myself into oblivion and found that there is no void...only Him. And he gave my soul back to me, repaired. The me he created was reinstalled, my spirit, my soul. My body and mind are still in process. They are still imperfect and still sometimes wracked by the terrors I have known.

But deep in me, when I turn silent and contemplate reality, there is my savior, his holy wind surrounding me. The one that owns me. The one that reformed me from the ashes of my own destruction. There is no sex, no meditation, no flow closer or more complete than this presence. Without him, I am lost. I know the horror of my self and of the world.

So you see, for me, Jesus isn't about making my life happy. It isn't about success, or complying with religious prescriptions. If that were the case, I would have no hope. It's too late for me in that. But as much as someone may believe those things, I know they aren't true. I hang entirely on him. I couldn't possibly deny him. And I would gladly go to my death over it. So I can't bear to hear anyone who claims to represent Jesus say or do things that would turn souls like me away from who He really is.

It's hard to say these things. Hard to commit them to writing. I seriously thought I was psychotic for a long time. But they have been confirmed. They are true. Perhaps this month has been about teaching me just how true and burning off some latent fears about expressing this part of me.