My Story: Entry 3, Part 2

The following is a story about me. It's not exactly a journal. And it's not really an autobiography either. I choose to see my life as a long, cohesive story. Everything fits together, and everything is full of meaning. 

Entry 3, Part 2:

When my mom picked me up from school that day, my eyes were still red from crying. Before she had a chance to ask me what was wrong, I launched into an explanation of my schoolyard tragedy. My mom listened, she hugged, she comforted. And that night, she prayed with a new earnestness that God would provide a close friend for me. This prayer had been on her lips since before the school year began, but that day she understood how important a friend and companion would be for me. She could not make me good at sports like I wanted, and she could not make other kids love me like she wanted. So she prayed.

Every recess and every lunch period, I avoided the kickball field. The 4-square courts are on the opposite side of the schoolyard, and there I spent my free time. Except for that Thursday. That day, for reasons that I don't recall, I was wandering the asphalt of the playground. While I walked aimlessly, I happened to see to boys in my grade talking on the basketball court. One had a ball tucked beneath his arm, and he appeared to be speaking earnestly with the other. The second boy shook his head and walked away from the court, apparently uninterested in playing. Dejected, the boy with the ball turned away, his head hung low.

"I'll play basketball with you", I said.

Alec and I spent the rest of the free period playing basketball, the rest of week becoming friends, and the next 12 years as brothers.

Ever since that day, which took place in the very same week as my kickball catastrophe, Alec and I have remained close and dear friends. I have been to 5 different schools, lived in 3 different cities, made many friends, met countless acquaintances, and yet I still remember the phone number of Alec's house in 4th grade. Though my life has changed drastically several times over, my friendship with Alec has remained. That's not to say it has remained constant. We have both changed and grown, the circumstances of life have taken us to different sides of the country, but despite all that has changed, we both remain committed to our friendship. We have carried one another through hard times, challenged each other to seek after good things, and we have shared more happy memories than some have in their entire lives. And neither he, nor I, nor my mother are soon to forget that this blessing was an answer to prayer. 

My Story: Entry 3

The following is a story about me. It's not exactly a journal. And it's not really an autobiography either. I choose to see my life as a long, cohesive story. Everything fits together, and everything is full of meaning.

Entry 3: 4th Grade

Picture a skinny, 9-year-old kid running toward a grass field with a kickball tucked beneath his arm. He started going to this school the previous year, and is still having trouble making friends. He's a little short for his age, more than a little socially awkward, and equally clumsy. Half of the times he steps up to the plate, he has trouble connecting with the ball as it tumbles and bounces past his foot. Even when he does manage to kick the ball, it usually goes straight to one of the infielders, and he's out before he makes it to first.

Still, every day he comes back to play kickball; hoping, waiting for those rare times when he makes it onto the field. Every day he comes out hoping to do something helpful for his team, but most every day, he walks away at the end of recess embarrassed for having missed a catch or missed a kick or missed an out. But sure as the sunrise, he's back the next day, hopeful that a new day will brings with it some small moment of victory.

And this particular day, he's sure of that moment! After all, today he's the one with the ball. Whoever gets the ball from the cart gets to be one of the team captains for that day, in charge of choosing the team. Today, he made a point of being the first one out of class and the first one in line, and it paid off! Triumphantly, he ran to the field to pick his winning team.

Okay, since you got the ball from the cart, you get to choose -- first pick or first ball?

First pick.
Okay, you pick first.

The choice is obvious, it always is. Cory is in many ways the opposite of our protagonist. He's tall, well-liked, and the best kickball player in the grade. Who else would be the first choice?

Just as Cory is about to be picked, he turns around and starts walking slowly away from the field. As Cory gets further and further from the soon-to-be game, the confusion of the 9-year-old ball-fetcher grows. Where is Cory going?

When Cory at last reaches the volleyball courts on the asphalt, he leans back against the pole which holds the net, watching the field and waiting. All at once, it dawns on the mild-mannered boy: Cory is waiting so that he doesn't have to be on my team.

He's a sensitive child, prone to tears. He takes a deep breath. Swallows. Crying only makes it more embarrassing. Only makes it harder to make friends.

He fights off the wave of emotion, and searches for the next best pick. Either Eric or Simon probably, they're both pretty good. The decision is a lot harder when he's choking back tears. In the seconds that it takes him to make up his mind, Eric turns around, and he too begins walking away from the field. Eric only makes it four or five steps when the skinny, sobbing 9-year-old rushes past him, away from the field. He has no ball in his arms, only the tears in his eyes and the hole in his chest.

I haven't played kickball since.

My Story: Entry 2

The following is a story about me. It's not exactly a journal. And it's not really an autobiography either. I choose to see my life as a long, cohesive story. Everything fits together, and everything is full of meaning.

Entry 2: (5 or 6 yrs. old)

I remember turning my eyes to look at the back of a beige couch. The fabric bore a pattern too complicated to think about all at once. The basic color was had just enough brown that it couldn't be called white, and it was covered by a dense, criss-cross pattern of dull reds, blues, oranges, blacks, and yellows. These splashes of color were so abundant that the pattern taken altogether just seemed a solid beige, unlike any of the colors composing it.

Moments earlier, Mom had asked, "What are you looking at?"

"Um... the couch," I lied. Well, I suppose I wasn't entirely lying. By the time I answered, I was in fact looking at the couch. But when she had asked the question, I had been looking at the TV while hiding behind the couch. In retrospect, this was a pretty bad hiding place in that I was in no way hidden. My toddler logic went something like: if I can barely see the TV, then people can barely tell that I'm watching it when I'm not supposed to.

My brother, Josh was playing Super Nintendo with one of his friends, but I had already used up my weekly allowance of time on the TV. Those two boys were tall as giants. Their video game skills were a sight to behold, and all I wanted to do was watch! But I wasn't allowed to. Hence, the bad hiding place, the question from Mom, and the subsequent lie.

Mom just laughed a little at the obvious fabrication, and told me I could go watch. I understood that she knew I had been lying, but it that didn't give me pause. It only made the watching all that much sweeter. My mom gave me the best gift; she gave me the one thing I wanted most in that moment.

Looking back on this helps me to realize that being a parent is hard. Imagine that your kid, upon getting caught doing something wrong, lies straight to your face. What do you do?

A. Tell him to read a book or something so that you can talk to him later about lying (again)
B. Scold him right then and there for disrespecting you and the rules that he is well aware of
C. Let him do the thing that he wants to do anyways because you love him, and this one time of letting him get away with it won't spoil him.

In this particular instance, Mom chose C. I know that more often she went with A or B, and sometimes I even thought that I hated her for it. But this is the time, she chose C. And this is the time that I can still remember.

My Story: Entry 1

The following is a story about me. It's not exactly a journal. And it's not really an autobiography either. I choose to see my life as a long, cohesive story. Everything fits together, and everything is full of meaning.

Entry 1: (3 or 4 yrs. old)

I remember crawling up the stairs. At the time, I didn't know that the stairs belonged to a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Valencia, which is a suburban town in the Santa Clarita Valley of California, which in turn is one of fifty of the United States of America. At the time, all I knew was the crawling and the climbing. I didn't have to crawl up the stairs; I was old enough and big enough to just walk up them. But there was something appealing about pretending that I had to. It's an accomplishment to climb a flight of stairs, but it's a tiresome chore to walk up them.

Nothing in this world, and no experience in life is inherently meaningful. The significant moments of our lives are only memorable when we see them as being important. I would argue that we only find such moments important when we see that they are connected with something bigger than the present, when we see them as part of a larger context.

When I look back on my life, I see a string that leads from one memory to the next, and it tells a story. But there are so many strings and so many stories to tell! As I jump from memory to memory, you will trace a different string, you will hear a different story, and Lord-willing you will find new stories in your own life.  

Worth Fighting For, Worth Living For

To those who don't care to read posts that are too long, here's a heads-up: the meat of it really starts with the 4th paragraph (counting this one). Everything between here and there is pretty much just context for everything else I say.

Spring Break Camp is what we call InterVarsity's annual week-long retreat that takes place during spring break. For Cal Poly students, that means the break between quarters. In many ways, going to this camp can be a significant sacrifice: people sacrifice time with families, physical rest, the money for the camp. However, in every case that I know of, no one has regretted these sacrifices. Essentially, the retreat is defined by scripture study within an amazing community. Without fail, God meets people through His Word, and they leave with a renewed passion, a fuller understanding of Christ, new revelations of their own identity, or who knows what other lessons.

As I mentioned in my last post, this year I had the God-given opportunity to explore gender relations in the biblical and modern day contexts. We started with the creation of Adam and Eve, followed them through the fall of man, observed continued brokenness between genders throughout the old testament, watched Jesus interact with women in revolutionary ways, and wrestled with the portrayal of women in the epistles. In the evenings we took a break from scripture study and watched documentaries or had discussions concerning the existence of gender inequality in the world, in America, or even in our local context specifically.

So what was the purpose of all of this? What did I and the other students take away from this week? We all came into this week from different upbringings and contexts, and I believe the work that God did in our hearts was equally varied. In effect, I think this week served to show how the way that we hold gender is broken. That is, we as individuals, we as college students, we as Americans, and we as people in this incomplete world live in the reality of gender brokenness. And not only do we know that this brokenness exists, we also see its effects.

I'm sure that if you asked other students about their experience with this spring break camp, they would present the main ideas in a very different way. I understand the lessons of the week as a reflection of the general pattern of brokenness that I understand to exist:
Brokenness exists both internally within our hearts and externally in the world. We simultaneously create brokenness in the world and are broken by it. Such a cycle of brokenness would be unending without God, who is perfect, unbroken, and endlessly loving.

This week has left me filled with grief, because my understanding of these ideas is being deepened. They are becoming more real. Particularly, I understand more than ever before that I contribute to the brokenness of the world. The objectification of women is a seemingly universal issue, and it lies at the heart of crimes of rape, sex trafficking, prostitution, the misrepresentation of women in American media, and so, so many problems that I don't have the heart to list. But the truth is that this same issue that causes endless pain in this world doesn't only exist out there in the cultures in the world, it exists in me. My struggles with lust and pornography are, at their core, the same as these crimes whose existence I can hardly bear. Surely, this is what Jesus meant in Matthew 5:27-28. It is not some clever metaphor when He says "commit adultery in his heart". When I visit a pornographic site, I participate in the exact same brokenness that causes the sale of little girls into prostitution. It is this deepened understanding of my own sinfulness and my own depravity that motivated the poem in my last post.

So where am I now?
I grieve, I cry, I ache, I yearn.
I grieve for depth of brokenness that still exists in this world. I cry because I can hardly bear that this brokenness exists in my own heart. I ache and yearn for something more to deliver this world, and me along with it from our plight. A deeper understanding of one's own sin precedes a deeper understanding of the wonder of God's grace.
So I'll wait. In my grief and as I try to share in the pain of the world, I'll wait for God to lead me into another level of faith, a deeper level of love and relationship. In the meantime, I take comfort in knowing that God is raising up champions against these injustices, because gender equality is worth fighting for and worth living one's entire life for. I take even greater comfort in knowing that God has already raised up a champion for my own soul. Somehow, some way, I too am worth fighting for, worth living for, worth dying for.

When Innocence Died

I just got back from a five day retreat that we like to call Spring Break Camp. Intense scripture study, awesome community, good food, a zip-line -- it was quite a week. This year, I and 13 other students walked through a series of scriptural texts, documentaries, and conversations in order to learn about the history of gender relations. To say the least, it was emotionally intense. I had my heart broken for the sheer breadth of the chasm between how men and women should interact and how they actually do interact. Sometime soon, I hope to collect some of the lessons from this past week into a post, but for now I want to share a poem written in the midst of emotional distress. My heart was broken after watching a film called Miss Representation, and in the midst of my tears, I asked God to help me write something to distill the emotion of that night. This collection of thoughts is what came out, and to me it is a way for me to re-enter the emotions I experienced that night.




When did innocence die?
        Not the bend of the bough
        Nor the snap of the branch
        Nor the bite of the fruit.
        No
        It was a gleam in the eye and the silence of a man
        The first crack in the glass

        He looked into the mirror
        The reflection gazed back
        And together they whispered:
        "I am like God."

When did innocence die?
        There's a monster in the glass
                But I am like God!
        He has a scar on his face
                But I am like God
        His smile is crooked
                I am like God?
        A hammer in his hand
                I am like God!
        I am like God...
I am like God

        This cry, his plight, his protestation
        Through rotten teeth, with forked tongue
        He whispers still.

When did innocence die?
        Bright paint over broken glass
        A holy charicature
        hides the ghastly corpse
        Ready for show-and-tell


But when the lights turn off, fearful tears betray
        "I am not like my god"
From deepest depths, He calls back
        "You are not like your demon"

Insights from a Dream

I really like dreaming. Generally speaking, I'm a pretty inhibited person. We all have inhibitions and filters, but I don't really know how to turn mine off. I'm not simply talking about our verbal filters that occasionally keep us from saying stupid thoughts aloud. There are feelings and thoughts that I've taught myself not to notice. Quick example: I was taught to never say anything bad about someone else. I internalized that lesson to the point that I seldom allow myself to think negative thoughts of another. On the plus side, I tend to see the good in people and it helps me to empathize. On the other hand, there have been times when I've turned a blind eye to problems in relationships that have needed attention.

All that to say, when I dream, I don't have the mental capacity to live with the same inhibitions that I carry with me in life. Thus, my actions and words in a dream often hold insight into my heart that I can't get anywhere else. Of course, looking at dreams for meaning is nothing new, I guess I'm just explaining to you and to myself my reasoning for looking for meaning in dreams. 

I don't remember the context, but last night there was a young man in my dreams who I've never met. I doubt that he exists outside my dreams, but when I woke up this morning, I realized that I he has been in my dreams multiple times. He is tall, dirty blonde hair, and almost always smiling. He speaks often of the Holy Spirit, and is defined by passion and zeal. The way he talks and prays is always somewhat airy, as though he lives more in a lofty world, barely tied to this physical one. 

In sharp contrast to all of that, his eyes are piercing, sometimes blue and sometimes a disconcerting red. In my dreams, I'm always afraid of him.

Who is this man, and why do I fear him?
I think there are a few things that can be taken from his presence in my dreams. I grew up in a church called Faith Community Chuch, under the evangelical-free denomination. Though I consider myself a generally open person, I think this young man, we'll call him Joe, shows that I still harbor misgivings about more charismatic walks of Christianity. When I recall how I felt about Joe in my dreams, I recognize that I did not trust him. I felt afraid partially because I wasn't sure how to respond to his expressive nature, but I was also afraid that his loud and exuberant worship was only an outward act, a poor replacement for honest worship.

Strange, I am more willing to accept soft singing, hands raised, eyes closed as honest worship than I am willing to accept dancing, off-key singing, and a wide smile. Intellectually and theologically, I do not value one over the other; I know that there's beauty in the diversity of how we worship God. But when the rubber meets the road, I still find it hard to trust those who are different from me. If I limit the way that God interacts with others to the same way that He interacts with me, I place a limit on God Himself. Such a limited god is an idol, and an idol that looks a lot like me. When I project my own form of worship, my own walk onto others, I create the gospel in my own image.

Shoot, that's a scary thought. My misgivings about those who I might consider charismatic are an indication of my own self-worship. By taking a closer look at someone I dreamed about, I stumbled upon my own deep brokenness (again). There are so many stones to turn over in my head and in my heart, how much brokenness is hidden underneath?
Thank God, that God is God. I need Him desperately, because without Him, I'm worth nothing. It's at times like this that I can see most clearly that without the redemption and love of God, I truly have nothing of value to offer. 

Crash -- an adendum

Just finished watching the move Crash for the second time. And let me tell you, it's just as poignant the second go round; I'm still reeling. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's available on Netflix, and I highly, highly recommend giving it a watch. Just log in on your own account or steal a buddy's login info, whatever you need to do.

Based in Los Angeles, the movie does an incredible job of showing the intertwined stories of at least 8 characters. They're characters are the astounding part. The movie seems defined by complexity. The way the characters are presented, you find yourself able to identify with every one of them. You see the good and the bad of nearly every character, and by the end of the movie no one is idolized and no one is demonized. People are just people.

The events of the movie are heartbreaking and at times horrifying, and they carry the weight of reality. Scene after scene, we see displays of injustice and racism and we're forced to see that as much as these exist in the fiction of the film, they are reflections of reality. The audience is left with a greater awareness of the depth of the world's brokenness, but without concrete answers or concrete resolution.

When the credits begin to roll after the last scene, I feel a deep need for more. It's a feeling that I recognize as God's invitation to be a part of the resolution that is still happening. The movie is left unresolved, because the reality is that the issues of racism that it portrays are still unresolved in our world. In my mind, the response that this movie demands lies in God. As broken people, we are constantly inflicting our brokenness upon each other. Despite redemptive acts of kindness and compassion, we cannot simply undo the brokenness around us, nor the brokenness in us. What this world needs is beyond us; this world needs God.

Without a God who is beyond limit and without fault, the cycle of brokenness that Crash portrays will continue. I hope that you will join me in recognizing that we are being invited to meet this brokenness, and by God's power to be part of the work of healing our broken world. I have yet to find a more compelling reason to live this life.

I feel as though I'm being redundant, but apparently this is the best I can do at 2 a.m.

The Question of Theodicy: From the Head to the Heart

In my last post, I mentioned some difficult times that I've gone through. It's a little weird to say that, because there was no great tragedy, no single life-crushing event that made life hard. Nonetheless, my struggles and the pain I experienced were real. Throughout the past two years, I've been on a journey that has significantly changed my worldview and self-view. I've grown so much, and I can't imagine who I would be without these experiences, but the journey to get here was honestly a difficult one. But that's the way it is: you can't build a new and healthy worldview without sacrificing your old one.

This portion of my journey began in Fresno, the summer between my sophomore and junior year. Through God's direct leading, I was part of a summer project called the Fresno Urban Internship(FUI). It's a 5 1/2 week program that gives college students the opportunity to learn about the inner city and poverty-related issues, to experience working and living with people from different cultural backgrounds, and to simply be challenged in profound ways to live for God. The program tends to meet people in different ways, bringing different challenges to different individuals. For me, the single most important thing I took away from FUI was an understanding that this world is deeply broken. Prior to that summer, I think I would've said that the world wasn't so bad off. But spending weeks learning about institutional injustices and interacting with the disenfranchised on a daily basis, after that how could I continue to believe that the world is OK?

I learned a lot of stuff that summer, but the realization of the depth of the world's brokenness is what set the stage for the coming year. As you might imagine, when your worldview changes drastically, so must your view of God. The God that I knew at the time didn't fit into a world of suffering. I was engaging with the age old question of theodicy in an immediate, personal way. If God is good, omnipotent, and omniscient, why does suffering exist?

Answering this question was once something of an intellectual exercise. An important question because it was part of my witness. But that year, the question went beyond the intellectual level and cut to my core. I was wrestling with the idea because I felt that I no longer knew who God was. At Urbana, I attended a seminar led by Kent Annan and Enel Angervil, called Suffering and Faith. They opened with two simple premises:

1. We do not have a God that prevents suffering, we have a God that is always with us in our suffering. 
2. We ask a theological question: "Why is there suffering?" God responds with a practical and ethical answer: "Go, be with those who are suffering."

The full audio of the seminar is available here. These two truths are beautiful in their simplicity, and yet humble in their reach. I want to answer the question of theodicy in full, but it really isn't a puzzle that I can solve. There exist some theological answers, and some of them may even be right. But I believe that as long as we live on this earth, we'll never be satisfied with the existence of suffering. There's something poetic about that, right? We're never satisfied by our answers to suffering and brokenness, because deep down we know that they should not exist! 

Which leads us to the punchline of our second premise: Be with those who suffer. What once seemed an order sent down from on high has become the very purpose of my life. In the face of brokenness, at first I ran and hid, looking for the safety of an OK world. By God's grace, He changed me, took me out of that world that doesn't exist. Now, with a fuller (though still imperfect) understanding of the world, God has brought me to a place where all I want to do with my life is participate in its healing. I don't always know how, and when I do know how I often don't do so well. But that's the journey as far as I can tell: as I am being healed by God, I am participating in God's healing of the world.

Apathy and Anesthesia

I have loved college. I'm not graduated yet, but the end seems to be approaching with haste. As it nears, I find myself reflecting on what my college experience has been like. In the quietest moments of reflection, I'm overcome with awe. All the individual experiences of excitement and joy, laughter and love, grief and pain, peace and upheaval, they all have been used by God to bring me to where I am today. I wouldn't trade any experience, good or bad, because they were all a part of the whole.

I don't know what the rest of life holds, but I imagine that there are many aspects of college life that I won't see anywhere else. Will there ever be another time in life so full of self-discovery? Will I ever belong to another group of people so idealistic and so open to the world? Not to say everyone's lenses are oh so rose-tinted. It's interesting to me the way that cynicism and apathy are celebrated. I think that such attitudes are often just a way of distancing oneself from the pains of life.

It's a concept that we're all familiar with. Have you ever been really excited for a movie that was coming out? I was invited by a friend to see the midnight premier of Spiderman 3, and in the weeks prior I started to get pretty hyped up. The night of, I donned my Venom shirt as we went to the theater. If any of you saw that movie, you can probably guess that I was not quite so ecstatic by the end of the film. This let down, in addition to the crushing disappointment that was the Eragon movie, taught me to be careful about looking forward to movies. If I don't expect much from a movie, I won't be disappointed when it isn't any good.

Now take that basic logic and apply it to life as a whole. What you get is a person who has learned that the best way to avoid pain is to not care in the first place. This defense mechanism is effective in avoiding pain in the way that anesthesia is effective when you get a cavity filled. You remove yourself from a majority of the pain, but you also remove yourself from all other sensation. We all do this at some level, and there is a wise way to separate oneself from pain. But I also know that this is possibly the most slippery slope that has ever existed. If a practice of separating oneself from pain turns into a lifestyle and a mindset, you can live life without actually living. I would argue that if you don't allow yourself to hope for good things or to love others for fear of being hurt, you're avoiding life altogether. This is the hardening of the heart and the walking dead.

I say these things from experience. In the past couple years I've had seasons of apathy and mediocrity -- the grayest of grays. Upon reflection, I can see how those times directly followed times of great struggle and pain; I was reacting to that pain by trying to never feel it again. But looking back, the seasons of apathy have been my absolute worst times in recent memory. In hardship, I was learning, growing, and was deeply aware of my dependence on God. In times of gray, I break ties with the God who encourages me to engage with my pain, I distance myself from others who might break my heart, and I even distort my relationship with my own self as I ignore the reality of my emotions.

I can say whole-heartedly, that self-protective emotional distance is a far worse option compared to honest interaction with painful trials. But I know that at some point, I will once again choose wrong. And when that day comes along, I know that God will not have forsaken me. Because I have never gotten myself out of the graves of apathy that I have dug, but it has always been God who has jumped into the mud with me to push me out. So time and time again, I will choose death, God will remind me of life and freedom, and I will have grown a little wiser, a little more humble, and a little more like Christ.

Why am I writing this blog?

I started my first post going in the direction of talking about a desire for attention and recognition, but that kinda devolved into rambling about the false self as a whole. I think I ended up straying away from the original topic in part because I don't want to call attention to my insecurities and my struggles. I don't know when I first got the idea to write a blog, but the moment the idea popped into my head, I came face to face with a very familiar struggle:

Can I rightly initiate something that should be God-driven?

Can I be humble and also believe that I am wise enough to say anything important?

Can my actions be anything other than sinful if my motives are partially selfish?

These questions aren't so much the thoughts that I am thinking in the midst of struggle, but they are the best I can do to represent the tension that I feel in my heart. I spent like 15 minutes trying to word those questions well. It's a helpful exercise, because instead of becoming lost in the tension that I feel as thoughts circle aimlessly around my head, I can turn a critical eye to the state of my heart in a way that I'm familiar with. If someone were to come up to me on the street and ask me these questions, I would probably point out that every one of those questions has some fundamental flaw or flaws. They're not difficult because their answers are hard to understand, they're difficult because they make flawed assumptions in the language used to ask them.

“Can I rightly initiate something that should be God-driven?” An unspoken implication in this question is that if something is God-driven, then it is not from me. The question plays into our tendency to see things from a 'this-or-that' perspective. Here, even before I can put words to what I'm feeling, I'm feeling a tension brought about by the assumption that something is either from me or it is from God. I feel some peace just in realizing that even though I haven't felt God leading me in a direct way toward creating a blog, that doesn't mean that I can't do it.

That being said, this question is not unimportant. I know from more experiences than I care to count, it's far too easy to turn a gift from God into an idol for myself.

“Can I be humble and also believe that I am wise enough to say anything important?”

I'm sure that for many of you, this question didn't sound right in your ears or left a bitter taste on your tongue. The idea of humble, the idea of wise, and even the concept of self are probably distorted in the way they are presented in this question. I don't feel like I have a great handle on the definition of humility, but I can be reasonably sure that it does not exist to make us doubt our gifts! As far as I can tell, this question could easily applied to pretty much any spiritual gift, not just wisdom:

Can I be humble and also believe that I am able to serve so-and-so in a meaningful way?

...to connect with God through prayer in a deep way?

...to lead others in studying the Bible?

...to provide care and compassion for others while they are hurting?

If I believe that I have something to offer, am I no longer being humble?

What a shame it would be if we all questioned our spiritual gifts this way! Such questions threaten to take away what is good about those gifts; they make us leery of our God-given talents. On another note, this question also calls attention to the way I overvalue wisdom. I don't question all of my talents and gifts this way, so why do I do so here? I think it's largely because I've elevated one of my spiritual gifts above all others. Part of why I feel presumptuous in calling myself wise is because I've made wisdom the best thing man can have. 1 Corinthians paints a much different picture of how we should treat spiritual gifts.

Lastly, this question also shows how I try to remove God from the equation. I often trick myself into thinking that when I do something good, I'm the only one responsible and that I deserve any recognition that I get. Instead I should rejoice that God has helped me to participate in the good work that He is always doing. Isn't it better to simply be part of something bigger than ourselves than to hang on to our trophies as they rust?

“Can my actions be anything other than sinful if my motives are partially selfish?”

The short answer? Yes.

First of all, it's very rare that our motives are ever pure. Secondly, who ever said that selfish motives are inherently sinful? God often gives us reasons why following Him is good for us. Half of Proverbs is about why doing good things is good for you. To some degree, I think we will always be vaguely me-centered people on this earth; after all, we only ever know our own experience. Where this becomes an issue is when my ends become more important than God's ends.

Just as those three questions were all different expressions of the same tension, so is there a unifying theme to answer them all. After all this processing, I feel as though I've made another step in learning how to navigate a struggle that that will be present as long as I live. There will never come a time when I will be able to live without checking my heart for pride and mixed motives. Furthermore, there will never come a time when I won't find some remnant of pride and self-focus. But that shouldn't stop me from moving forward and pursuing good things, even if I don't fully know how. It is only because God accepts and loves me that I can learn to accept myself as I try to live life. 

Masks in the Mirror

I think I've always been driven by recognition. To some degree, I think much of my actions are partially motivated by a desire to be seen by others. Such desires are of course common, even possibly innate. How many times have you heard a child say "Hey, look at me!"? However, I've recently realized that my childish longing for attention did not leave when I left childhood. I've simply gotten better at hiding it. In some ways, this blog is itself a cry for attention.

Not to say that I haven't matured at all since childhood. God has and is continually growing me and healing me. But now and then, some new revelation occurs and I'm reminded that I am still a very broken person. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that I should be perfectly in control of every aspect of my life. I learned that if I acted the right way, I could fool everyone into believing that I've got life pretty well in control. The more people recognized me for my accomplishments and successes, the more important it became for me to be successful. Eventually, it wasn't just others who thought I had life pretty well figured out. Wear a mask long enough, and you'll forget that the face in the mirror isn't actually your own. The story of my childhood and adolescence is a story of the creation of such a mask. Growth into adulthood has been a story of finding the man beneath. 

What I've described so far is what has led me to the journey that I will be on for the rest of my life. From the very first moment that we come into contact with this broken and hurting world, we are broken and hurt by it. But what lies ahead is restoration! God invites me into a healing process that both brings me back to my own authentic identity and brings me back to right, wholesome relationship with Him. This process is often difficult, challenging, and painful because it requires that I remove my masks and unveil my deepest wounds. But it is always, always worth it. It's a story that we're all familiar with to some degree: the only things worth reaching for in this life are not free, and we must choose into the work to get there. This choice is always the hardest. God invites us on an adventure, but it is our choice to join in and engage with the opportunities in front of us. True, I wholly believe that choosing into God's healing is always worthwhile, but when the rubber meets the road, it is never to say yes to a difficult journey. 

So, here I am. On blogger. I guess I hope that this can be a public journal for me. As I live life alongside you all, as God continues to invite me into new challenges and new healing, and as I continue to struggle to say yes, I hope to share a bit of that story. I want to share my thoughts and my struggles as authentically as I can, because I believe that God will speak to me as I write, and that He may speak to others through my journey. We are already walking this journey together, but this blog may hold opportunities for us to encourage and challenge one another. So join me; engage, comment, email me! My hope is that there can be conversations created from this blog.

God bless,
Jason

Psalm 139:16
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.



P.S.

Some of you may recognize much of the above as a discussion of the 'false self''. If you're unfamiliar with the term, I highly recommend you find out more. Here's a link I found off of a quick google search that explains the true/false self much better than I can: http://www.neomysticism.com/false-self.html