“What you live is what you believe…
Everything else is just talk.”
-Laurie Polich
I live a very routine kind of life. I wake up around 8am every morning, I brush
my teeth, wash my face, use the bathroom, and fix myself a cup of coffee. All the while there’s a fire inside of my
soul being watered down by droughts of doubt, rains of trouble, clouds of
oncoming hurt, and overall surrounded by walls of unawareness-desensitizing my
view of what’s going on.
I sometimes
feel as though I’m being led down a majestic hallway (being told that it gets better if I keep going), and every now and then I’ll
get a peek at the corridors I’m being shoved past, and something inside of me
wants to stop and explore where they lead to.
Something inside of me wants to know.
I want to know. I want to know
the truth. Where am I going?
I think the desire to know is something deep down inside of
everyone, but the ability or the opportunity to know takes too great a risk or
seems hopelessly bad for us (especially when what is shoving us down the hall is telling us we can't stop, and if we do we risk what's at the end of these majestic halls...thinking it's really going to be good...but it's such a gamble!) To know
could mean to reveal something as good to be bad, or to reveal something as bad
to be good.
I just want to know the truth, because the truth …the truth
is good, and as much as I may enjoy some of the lies that have protected me in
some form from the big bad truth, lies always tend to erode away at our
souls. Eventually your feet will tire of passing the corridors, because it will look endless. You start questioning things. You cannot hide from the truth
forever, because the truth never changes.
It is THE truth, not A truth. We
can work our way towards truths in our lives, one truth leads to another lie
that we expose, and then that truth leads us to another lie, and so on, but
eventually we will have to face the ultimate and final truth: God. Is God at the end of this majestic hall we are being pushed down by something? Is God a gamble? Or could we stop and explore the corridors and know something more about the truth, about Him?
All those little truths, the deeper you go the more they
hurt to expose them. And I mean they hurt like the way someone crushes your fingers in a door hinge, or how a deep paper cut feels. The levels of pain range, but they hurt for real. At first it might
be an obvious truth that you need to face like how your addiction to that one
thing is really bad. You have to face
it, and it’s hard, but you kind of always knew it was bad. It’s a truth that you face in order to face
the deeper truth that you wanted to keep it covered because you were afraid of
the way uncovering it would turn out.
Then when you face that uncovered truth, the truth that perhaps you were
weak without it, that it somehow gave you fortitude to face other stresses in
life, you find yourself without that particular shield in hand, still in a
battle against your fears and unknowns. Then that truth takes you
further into another truth: being that you have no shield in hand, and you are left a
little more vulnerable to others. (now,
there could be a number of weapons we pry from our hands—not just addictions,
but our anger or our indifference, work-ethic, schedules, fashion, attention
from others, busyness, etc.—all of these are false weapons we need to drop in the face
of a tumultuous war.)
The hardest part
is that the more we drop our weapons and shields the more we see the
devastation and the bombs being dropped around us. We come out of hiding and we see the truth
more and more, there’s a war going on and it doesn’t look hopeful from our
position. But in order to put on the armor of God we need to take ours off.
The other day I was taking the trash out and tripped on
something that took a nice big chunk out of my Achilles heel. I stammered back into the kitchen to clean
it, and as I stood with the water faucet running over a paper towel, my head
got really light. I felt lightheaded in
a bad way, in a heavy way. My head was
leaving but in its place something heavy was happening. I knew something was wrong, but the fear of
the truth made me fight so hard to believe otherwise. I wanted to be okay, because the truth that I
was not okay was too scary. I started
searching for a way to survive, my mind works well when I’m arguing, haha. So I was arguing my way against the way my
body was not responding, thinking: “you’re fine, this is all in your head
(literally), and you can beat this. You
can beat this because you can! You’re
able to fight this because you can! Stay
alert! Stay ready!” It was overwhelmingly strong and I would
fight it by sitting down. So I made my
way to the nearest sofa, and by that time my hearing was a heavy muffle, my vision
became greyscale, and I was now fighting just to breathe. In that moment of what felt like 15 minutes
(more like 15 seconds in real time), I was stripped of my last dignity:
me. I had nothing left, this was it, and
I was forced to face the truth in my last moments. I remember my thoughts directed somewhere,
maybe to God, maybe just to my defeated self, but I was facing the reality of
the situation. I faced the fact that I
was slipping, that I could possibly die right then and there, and no one would
know until they found my body. More than
that, I faced the reality of the way I have lived my life, it wasn’t that I
started thinking of all my accomplishments or even the people who loved me, but
it was this fear and sadness. Fear that
I had no clue what death would really like…to move on to a world without a body
was completely unknowable, I had no way of preparing myself in the strain of
the oncoming moment. All I knew was that
it felt so strange to no longer have command over my body, the way I saw or raised
my feet or opened my eyes—all of that was gone.
I was just me, somewhere deeper down inside of the body that was
crumpling without my consent. I felt
sadness because I saw my cheap decisions.
I make so many cheap decisions.
Quick-fix-it, microwave decisions.
The lies I tell myself to keep from facing the real hard truth. The stubborn things I do out of convenience. It all looked so cheap in that moment, because
here I was facing the actual reality of possibly dying, and I wasn’t ready, I
was so unprepared. So I made some cliché
promises to God, things like “I’ll stop doing all the bad things I do that I am
aware of!” Really what I was saying was
that I would stop making cheap decisions.
I was telling God that I would face the truth. I was desperate, and desperate people say
very desperate things.
I thought I passed out on the floor, but thinking about now,
I think my body sort of unhitched itself from my command and I was consciously
quiet as I lay on the cold marble floor of my kitchen. I had nothing left to think about or say. All
I could do at that point was wait. I
remember my eyes closing for what seemed like 5 seconds, and then I was
back. I was back to my usual self…meaning
I had control over this body of mine. I
still lay there a little dumbfounded, but it wasn’t long before relief took
over my entire self.
I didn’t die.
It’s not unlike- letting the weapons we hold against the
truth about the war going on in our lives- go.
I was facing the reality of the absolutely ZERO control I had, and the
oncoming death before me. It was
frightening. But it was the most
truthful moment, more true than the moments we have with the ability to raise
our feet off the ground or see something in front of us. The fact that we have control over our bodies
in some way is quite deceiving, because we all know that at death these bodies
will no longer be anything. Yet we bank
so much on them…what they do, what they look like, where they go, etc. We see them as ours rather than as
vessels. They are bodies but they have a
purpose too, and the truth I faced was that they actually have a really grand
purpose. My body was being slain by the
cheap decisions I made, and the truth was that as I hid one truth I also hid my
body’s purpose. Hiding my body’s purpose
also hid part of my courage. I mean it
all gets affected. The more we cloak
ourselves in lies, the more we veil our faces from the ugly truth, the more we
distance ourselves from all that God is for us and has for us. The farther away we are from God the closer
we are to isolation. We just let ourselves be maddeningly led down a seemingly hopeful hallway, but really we don't know much of what's really at the end. And you don't know until you're near the end: death.
God is not about endorsing your lies, He’s about you getting
closer to the truth, to Himself. To the
reality of what’s really going on, and let me tell you, it’s the same for
everyone. We are all closing our eyes to
the devastation before us because it’s painful to see, it’s heavy, and on top
of all that we have no control over what we see, feel, or do. All we have is the truth: that we are so vulnerable and naked in the
midst of bombs dropping, people killing each other and death crouching around
every corner. Doesn’t that sound
terrible? Because it is. Once we face the truth with open eyes and
take it all in with our frailty in hypersensitive mode, then maybe we will
actually trust in God with all our hearts, minds and strength. Because at this point, it’s exposed for what
that is: nothing. It’s all God. He sees us trying to dodge bombs with
blindfolds on, and we reject His voice to take off the false protections, and
even then...even when we reject Him, He takes the hit for each of us.
He is bombed and shot at, knifed, and hit where we were supposed to
be.
That is the gospel.
That while we were still sinners Christ died
for us the death we were on the way to getting.
This is the truth of everyone’s life: we are in a battle and Christ won it for
us. So it’s okay to see how naked and
vulnerable we are. We are free to seek
out the truth in our lives. To let go of
the fears that blindfold us or the anger that seems to threaten our sense of
self. My and your sense of self is the
same: we are all riding into battle as naked children piggybacking on Jesus.
If this is something you can't believe at all or it just sounds completely ridiculous then that's that. The bible doesn't promise that everyone will be saved, but if you feel the desire or the curiosity-even if just as an ember- fan that baby into flame!
It’s messy. The part
about facing the truth is messy because there are so many lies. Things hurt us, people hurt us, we hurt
ourselves, and in the process we put our feelings as truth, rather than as
directors. Feelings direct us to the
next lie. They do not define the lie, but
they DIRECT us to the truth if we use them to search the root projecting
them. God created us to feel for a reason.
We can do this because of the
gospel. It is finished and our freedom
is in knowing the truth by ridding ourselves of the lies. It is for freedom that we have courage to face the truth.
We mess up because when we expose one lie,
the next lie is there already! The battle
is fierce, but underneath it all is the courage and the grace and the power we
are given through the finished work of Jesus…to face it, to mess up, and to cry
like a child on the back of Jesus.
And we band together in this process with everyone else…because
Jesus’s back is actually a lot bigger than what we think – metaphorically. We are more like His entire body. He is the Head and we are all together His
body, and the more we acknowledge one another, the more we acknowledge Him. We see the value in one another. The need for the other. We love one another.\
Perhaps we begin this process:
Think first,
Talk less,
Listen more.
(repeat)
“So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as He is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. WE love because he first loved us.” – 1 John 4:16-19
Do you still feel fear? Let the Word of Truth show you that you are thinking of punishment...in some deeper root your fear has to do with punishment. You are loved. Fight for perfect love, fight against the fear, and open your eyes to the truth.
All I can do is open my eyes to love more,
-Jmegrey
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