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