I'm so inspired I might be sick.
Feeling your words like claws
I can't help but smile.
The insanity of it all.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Day 21
"Show your strength, God, so no one can miss it.
We are out singing the good news!"
-Psalm 21:13
I'm not exactly sure what to say or anything.
I want to experience you closer, I want to be closer to you and I would like to sing.
I just feel distant you know?
Kinda like how we can be closer but right now I'm just feeling so bad that it is hard to focus or concentrate.
I'm tired of being worried about nonsense and my hypocrisy...I just want to be clean, I want to be loved, I want to be yours.
I'm exhausted and feel ill.
Please help me to come back.
We are out singing the good news!"
-Psalm 21:13
I'm not exactly sure what to say or anything.
I want to experience you closer, I want to be closer to you and I would like to sing.
I just feel distant you know?
Kinda like how we can be closer but right now I'm just feeling so bad that it is hard to focus or concentrate.
I'm tired of being worried about nonsense and my hypocrisy...I just want to be clean, I want to be loved, I want to be yours.
I'm exhausted and feel ill.
Please help me to come back.
Seriously...?
Identity...I feel like I'm losing it...in a very bad way, identity I mean.
Really, who am I?
I have defined myself by titles, work I was doing, the praise of others, degrees, honors and other menial (and to be perfectly honest useless)things.
It's possible for me to be a chameleon around everyone. Everyone.
I'm not sure who the real me is.
Just whoever the hell he is, I am quite sure he is not a fan of circumstances...but then so what?
So, what?
The basic, good sense advice is to be happy with what I got and with who I am and what things are. If you boil things down I am just your typical middle middle class spoiled white kid who has two pretend degrees, a lot of health problems, an unbelievable amount of room for doubt and self loathing, few real job prospects, no real life aspirations and well... the bed I'm laying on, a glass of tea, U2 playing in Winamp and an increasingly neurotic orange cat by the name of Yoda.
So...story time:
One of the first major errors I made with theology came about partly because of my home life but mostly because I was a confused fourteen year old trying to wrap his head around life, the universe and everything.
Stoicism is a quite ancient form of Greek philosophy that I really do not feel like going into completely but will just hit on two relevant highlights:
-Matter is bad and spirit is good.
-Self improvement and discipline is the route to salvation and happiness.
Growing up in the ever so lovely South Eastern Maniac Christian Themed Land I still live in, I not only regularly heard these ideas but turned them into personal ideals. It went something like this:
"Sexual thought, sex itself, sex in general, the word sex, alcohol, beer, mixed drinks and Harry Potter are all the scourges of society. The utter moral corruption and decay we are facing from can be found in all these horrifically horrible acts. All we have to do is protest, stamp our feet really hard and put our fingers in our ears while humming loudly and we might just change the world. All the horrible things involving abortion, sexual addiction to porn, genocide and boy bands can be stopped if we make a loud enough noise while making sure the spot light is pointed right at us...right?"
Maybe it was just because I wasn't told enough as a child that I was loved but for some reason I embraced the idea behind those two ideas of Stoicism...the physical is bad/the spirit is good and if one works hard enough everything will be okay.
Well, it wasn't that I actually sat down and thought out about embracing heretical ideas...it is just something I was taught in church and the supposed example set for me by adults.
Really it is weird thinking about how greatly my life was impacted by an idea in church that has no legitimate business being there in the first place but if I had a dime for every time I have had one of these thoughts...
*Coughs* So...digressing.
I quite obviously do a lot of thinking and soul searching. One of the things on my mind lately has been trying to understand why I have been depressed and otherwise in a constant up and down state for most of my life. Sure we do have the theory about the chemical imbalance but what if, just what if I have been setting myself up to fail all of these years?
Obviously the idea behind Christianity is quite a good one (regardless if you believe or not).
1.God made a lot of crap and then made man.
2.Satan tempted man and man screwed up by sinning.
3.God in his infinite holy self hates sin.
4.Since God's holy rage is infinite Man is infinitely screwed.
5.Despite being severally pissed off, in a holy fury kind of way, God still loves man and longs to be near him again. Knowing this would happen, God had a plan: Jesus.
6.The Son part of the Trinity comes to earth and is a baby born of a virgin, God in literal human flesh.
7.Jesus lives a perfect life and along the way heals some blind guys, makes some awesome wine for some quite tipsy guys at a wedding and in general loves the unlovable misfits of this world while enraging the religious elite.
8.The aforementioned religious elite get together with other figures and eventually plot out how to get Jesus to look bad and be able to kill him.
9.Jesus is 100% God and 100% man. This concept gives me a 100% headache but at the same time is still true. Jesus allows himself to be arrested, beaten and horrifically tortured and executed.
10.This death was a deliberate act meant to take the place of man before an infinitely holy rageful God that had been offended by the sins of his creation.
11.In other words, because Jesus is God, God essentially chooses to die to redeem his beloved people from the mess they put themselves in.
I know I missed some bits here and there...but that is what the gospel means to me. It means that I am loved in spite of myself, my actions and my mistakes.
Christianity is not about earning salvation. God isn't the spiteful prick we try to make him into. He created us to be joyful, to enjoy love with him and each other. But at the end of the day life is not about us and our little plastic dreams. It's about Him and the fact we are incurable unless we go to Him.
Sexuality, alcohol and Harry Potter are not the reason why the world is so messed up. It is messed up because human nature is broken. But despite that there is love and real hope...but there is a tension between my recovering self and the love of Christ.
The big problem is that I do not think that I follow this very well. I might be mistaken and could be next in line for pope but at the end of the day I see the me that no one else does.
I tend to focus on the negative more then the positive.
The negative is that the world is messed up.
The positive is that there is a Love greater then I can understand but wants to know me on a personal level.
It may seem like self delusional crazy talk (do keep in mind who is writing this after all) but in all sincerity there is something deeper to this then mere placebos. Religion may be an opiate of the masses but real Christianity is meant to set fire to the soul and force us to look at the ugliness of ourselves but in the light of a forgiving love from one begging us to accept His love.
Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books of the Bible. It was written by Solomon after spending a life of being the worlds richest king that had over a thousand women. Long story short the fame, the money, the sex and the life left him empty, hung over and wondering who stole his wallet.
The book acts as a deep reflection over the life he lived and how little value exists in so many things we place priority in. Similar to Proverbs it offers a lot of wisdom chunks here and there.
"I've seen it all in my brief and pointless life - here a good person cut down in the middle of doing good, there a bad person living a long life of sheer evil. So don't knock yourself out being good, and don't go overboard being wise. Believe me, you won't get anything out of it. But don't press your luck by being bad, either. And don't be reckless. Why die needlessly?
It's best to stay in touch with both sides of an issue. A person who fears God deals responsibly with all of reality, not just a piece of it."
-Ecclesiastes 7:15-18
Balance is the key.
Finding a balance between where I am and where I am going.
Who I am and who I could be.
Finding a reasonable hour to go to sleep at.
I would dare say a lot of my pain has been needless because of trying to be something I am not. This doesn't excuse the bad but it does mean I am lovable as myself, in ways I'll never understand.
Really, who am I?
I have defined myself by titles, work I was doing, the praise of others, degrees, honors and other menial (and to be perfectly honest useless)things.
It's possible for me to be a chameleon around everyone. Everyone.
I'm not sure who the real me is.
Just whoever the hell he is, I am quite sure he is not a fan of circumstances...but then so what?
So, what?
The basic, good sense advice is to be happy with what I got and with who I am and what things are. If you boil things down I am just your typical middle middle class spoiled white kid who has two pretend degrees, a lot of health problems, an unbelievable amount of room for doubt and self loathing, few real job prospects, no real life aspirations and well... the bed I'm laying on, a glass of tea, U2 playing in Winamp and an increasingly neurotic orange cat by the name of Yoda.
So...story time:
One of the first major errors I made with theology came about partly because of my home life but mostly because I was a confused fourteen year old trying to wrap his head around life, the universe and everything.
Stoicism is a quite ancient form of Greek philosophy that I really do not feel like going into completely but will just hit on two relevant highlights:
-Matter is bad and spirit is good.
-Self improvement and discipline is the route to salvation and happiness.
Growing up in the ever so lovely South Eastern Maniac Christian Themed Land I still live in, I not only regularly heard these ideas but turned them into personal ideals. It went something like this:
"Sexual thought, sex itself, sex in general, the word sex, alcohol, beer, mixed drinks and Harry Potter are all the scourges of society. The utter moral corruption and decay we are facing from can be found in all these horrifically horrible acts. All we have to do is protest, stamp our feet really hard and put our fingers in our ears while humming loudly and we might just change the world. All the horrible things involving abortion, sexual addiction to porn, genocide and boy bands can be stopped if we make a loud enough noise while making sure the spot light is pointed right at us...right?"
Maybe it was just because I wasn't told enough as a child that I was loved but for some reason I embraced the idea behind those two ideas of Stoicism...the physical is bad/the spirit is good and if one works hard enough everything will be okay.
Well, it wasn't that I actually sat down and thought out about embracing heretical ideas...it is just something I was taught in church and the supposed example set for me by adults.
Really it is weird thinking about how greatly my life was impacted by an idea in church that has no legitimate business being there in the first place but if I had a dime for every time I have had one of these thoughts...
*Coughs* So...digressing.
I quite obviously do a lot of thinking and soul searching. One of the things on my mind lately has been trying to understand why I have been depressed and otherwise in a constant up and down state for most of my life. Sure we do have the theory about the chemical imbalance but what if, just what if I have been setting myself up to fail all of these years?
Obviously the idea behind Christianity is quite a good one (regardless if you believe or not).
1.God made a lot of crap and then made man.
2.Satan tempted man and man screwed up by sinning.
3.God in his infinite holy self hates sin.
4.Since God's holy rage is infinite Man is infinitely screwed.
5.Despite being severally pissed off, in a holy fury kind of way, God still loves man and longs to be near him again. Knowing this would happen, God had a plan: Jesus.
6.The Son part of the Trinity comes to earth and is a baby born of a virgin, God in literal human flesh.
7.Jesus lives a perfect life and along the way heals some blind guys, makes some awesome wine for some quite tipsy guys at a wedding and in general loves the unlovable misfits of this world while enraging the religious elite.
8.The aforementioned religious elite get together with other figures and eventually plot out how to get Jesus to look bad and be able to kill him.
9.Jesus is 100% God and 100% man. This concept gives me a 100% headache but at the same time is still true. Jesus allows himself to be arrested, beaten and horrifically tortured and executed.
10.This death was a deliberate act meant to take the place of man before an infinitely holy rageful God that had been offended by the sins of his creation.
11.In other words, because Jesus is God, God essentially chooses to die to redeem his beloved people from the mess they put themselves in.
I know I missed some bits here and there...but that is what the gospel means to me. It means that I am loved in spite of myself, my actions and my mistakes.
Christianity is not about earning salvation. God isn't the spiteful prick we try to make him into. He created us to be joyful, to enjoy love with him and each other. But at the end of the day life is not about us and our little plastic dreams. It's about Him and the fact we are incurable unless we go to Him.
Sexuality, alcohol and Harry Potter are not the reason why the world is so messed up. It is messed up because human nature is broken. But despite that there is love and real hope...but there is a tension between my recovering self and the love of Christ.
The big problem is that I do not think that I follow this very well. I might be mistaken and could be next in line for pope but at the end of the day I see the me that no one else does.
I tend to focus on the negative more then the positive.
The negative is that the world is messed up.
The positive is that there is a Love greater then I can understand but wants to know me on a personal level.
It may seem like self delusional crazy talk (do keep in mind who is writing this after all) but in all sincerity there is something deeper to this then mere placebos. Religion may be an opiate of the masses but real Christianity is meant to set fire to the soul and force us to look at the ugliness of ourselves but in the light of a forgiving love from one begging us to accept His love.
Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books of the Bible. It was written by Solomon after spending a life of being the worlds richest king that had over a thousand women. Long story short the fame, the money, the sex and the life left him empty, hung over and wondering who stole his wallet.
The book acts as a deep reflection over the life he lived and how little value exists in so many things we place priority in. Similar to Proverbs it offers a lot of wisdom chunks here and there.
"I've seen it all in my brief and pointless life - here a good person cut down in the middle of doing good, there a bad person living a long life of sheer evil. So don't knock yourself out being good, and don't go overboard being wise. Believe me, you won't get anything out of it. But don't press your luck by being bad, either. And don't be reckless. Why die needlessly?
It's best to stay in touch with both sides of an issue. A person who fears God deals responsibly with all of reality, not just a piece of it."
-Ecclesiastes 7:15-18
Balance is the key.
Finding a balance between where I am and where I am going.
Who I am and who I could be.
Finding a reasonable hour to go to sleep at.
I would dare say a lot of my pain has been needless because of trying to be something I am not. This doesn't excuse the bad but it does mean I am lovable as myself, in ways I'll never understand.
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