It’s been a while since I wrote. Not because I’m not writing, not because I’m not still working on being who I am not who I became, but because we have been living life. It’s in that living that things begin to come into focus, that day to day being, reading, praying working on the house spending time with family, playing slobber ball with the dog, drawing, coloring, writing, and sculpting with cardboard, photo’s all sorts of things that focuses me on what matters.
Just about 10 years ago, give or take a few days, I took a trip with Amberly and some of the people in my wife’s family to help one of them move to Idaho. I was the driver. We had that special experience of making memories. I have often thought of writing a book that detailed parts of the trip, I even started it, who knows perhaps it’s time to get back to that, anyway it was a great time and it brought Amberly and I closer.
Fast forward ten years and I took a trip with Zoey, oddly enough to move some of Amberly’s stuff to Florida. The day that we left, we did so after a full day of stuff being done. Got up did the work that it takes to get moving towards leaving, went to counseling, talked and talked, which was a good thing. Then when it was time to go Z and I loaded into the jeep and headed south. It was strange to be going again. To be living in a space where it was doing something that I was doing with the family, and that I was totally present in.
The trip down was rather uneventful. Something that’s a good thing on many fronts. Z and I listened to music and some podcasts and talked about some of the fandoms that she is into. We talked about school I think, and live in general. All of these things were good things to do. As we pulled into this town about an hour outside of Nashville to break up the trip a little bit, we found that the area had been overrun by little leaguers. There must have been some sort of tournament, we ended up crashing at this Motel Six that had all of 4 rooms left, all of them smoking rooms. Needless to say we slept and then got out of there as soon as possible. The sign on the door to the check in area when I dropped the key said there were no rooms left, this was underlined and bold. No place to lay your head if you didn’t already have a reservation. Sounds so familiar, or reads as such.
We finished the trip to Florida the next day. It really didn’t seem like it was all that bad, or hard to do. Easier than I had ever remembered it being, until Z reminded me that this time there were not three little kids and an adult woman along that all had to stop at different times for different reasons. It’s funny how growing up changes how travel happens, funny and melancholy. My mind would flip to the last time we drove to Florida, that trip played out in my mind as I remembered the times with all three Girls, the beach and Universal, and Disney for a day. I still have in my minds eye the picture of Josie holding that HUGE 7/11 tumbler I found a smile as wide as the Grand Canyon turning the corners of her mouth. I thought of Amberly unknowingly sitting next to a dumpster that was ringed by buzzards, her fear of birds a constant source of entertainment to myself. I remembered walking out to city walk from Universal sliding into the movie theater and watching with Z, a respite from the heat as well as a cheaper way to get parking, and to get a movie along with it.
The mind is such an interesting and scary thing. It can lock away memories and keep them safe, it can let go of things that get in the way, it can rob you of who you really are if you’re not careful…or maybe it lets out who you really are when you least expect it. It can be beaten into a place of pain hurt and anger, all that mess and ugly building and building till one thing trips the explosion of who you have become when you didn’t realize you were becoming anything.
Scripture talks about taming the tongue, it tells us that man can’t tame the tongue. We also read that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. I have always looked at that from the standpoint of course language, crude jokes, stuff like that, and while those things are absolutely a part of what comes out, I’m realizing more and more that it’s not the bad things that we have to tame out of our tongue. The occasional expletive that has been rendered a bad word simply because a group of people don’t like it is not what really matters. No the things that the mouth speaks are not always just spoken in words.
Our hearts and minds do interesting things. They sync up. The longer our mind fixates on a thing the deeper into our heart, our soul it burrows. Once there it has a chance to grow. To take on a life of its own, to become something that begins to change who we are. If we aren’t careful that change will end up being permanent. It will be taken into the core programming of who we are and the code will be written and instead of being one thing we will then be another.
The hard part, at least from my vantage point, is when things get into that source code area but there is no commit part on either side of the equation.
The lack of a commit phase reminds me of what James said in James 1: 6-8
6 But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. 7 Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.
I messed this up for a long time, at least my thinking did. I had it all wrong. The whole asking God for things is just a small part of what this is about. It’s about so. Much more. This verse speaks to the whole importance of the commit that I talked about earlier. God tells us in Revelation that he wishes people were hot or cold, that they would’t be so wishy washy. That they would be what they are and lean into it, no matter what it is.
My mind, my heart for the longest time was in this space of no commit phase because I just couldn’t see a way to do it that made the most sense, and that promised some sort of relief. In thinking that I had to hold it all together, to take care of everyone around me, to ignore my own mental and spiritual health I fell hard. This is not anything new. It’s not some secret either. What is interesting and what gives me hope, is actually the fact that I didn’t have a full commit phase to the messed up me. No one will ever really understand just how close I came to not existing any more, no one but me. They may see it and they may feel bad about it, they may shake their heads and look down on me for it. It’s okay to do so. I have looked down on myself for a long time. The thing is when your brain is the problem, it’s very easy to look down on yourself, it’s easy to feel like no one loves you, no one gets you, no one will ever see you, no one will see that you are hurting and that you are lashing out and that you just want to feel something, anything but how can they see, really see the extent of it when you don’t let them in, when you lock them out of anything meaningful. The worst thing is that even when people did see it, even when people did reach out, I denied that there was that big of a problem, all because of that stupid I part of me. The Big one that’s up there that is full of pride yes, but also full of fear. Fear of losing everything, fear of losing the creation that had been Frankensteined together for the sake of self preservation and the twisted desire to shield people from what I knew was going to happen eventually.
Why am I writing this now? It’s been a long time and I’m in a much better place, I’m getting back so much of who I really am. The person that leans into God, and Family. That enjoys being creative and that likes to spend time with people.
I wish I had a better answer then; “I’m processing and this is where I am right now.” I’m sure that it has a lot to do with the meetings that are happening over the next couple of days. The breakfast with old friends that I find myself keeping at arms length. The meeting with denominational officials that I’m struggling with out of a place of fatalism that says “what’s the point?”
And yet there must be one. That thrice born person that I am has to follow through with this whole thing. I’ve moved in my faith from, initial faith, to blind/brittle faith, to gnarled and weathered faith. In my estimation that last kind is so much more important, authentic, and real. I’m glad that I’m in that space now, well usually, there are times that I wish for the others. The excitement of initial faith, the care free blind faith that in reality is brittle, easily rocked and broken when life does what life will always do, go south, sometimes horribly south .
My mind, my mental state was in such tatters that there came a point when I cared but couldn’t if that makes sense. I cared about what was going on around me, about the things that I was doing and saying, about the person that I had become. I cared but couldn’t care at the same time. I didn’t want to be there but I was because I was unstable. I was working hard at being in God’s camp, while at the same time being so angry at God, so jealous of those that seemed to have a better grip on the bad things, so very sad, feeling so betrayed that, I cared and I couldn’t all at the same time because God deserved to be punished for my hurt, my pain, my choices. The crazy thing is he was. He had been over 2000 years ago he was punished for the broken thing that my life had become, for the shattered thing that the earth had turned into. God never promised me that things would be easy, on the contrary he said very clearly “you WILL HAVE TROUBLE.” I just never took Him at his word, not really. I gave lip service to it, but the truth of what I had been holding in my heart, that second born part of me came out when the doctor told me Josie was gone. “But I serve you God.” What I meant there was simple. I serve you vocationally, therefor there’s this contract that I’ve written in my mind that says you’ll keep the really big bad things away. The strange thing is, there had already been tons of really bad things and I had internalized them, they fed my depression, my PTSD, my nightmares, I just didn’t recognize it, or maybe I did and just was sticking my head in the sand so that I didn’t have to face the fact that I was trying to jam the square peg of my faith into the round hole of my broken messed up mental state and bad choices.
What all of this means now is hard to explain. Maybe because I’m still coming to grips with it all, and will be for the foreseeable future. I know that this gnarled faith that I now have is better than the other two. It’s letting me lean into the hard things and realize that I have someone and something to walk with me through them. Yes I’m putting God into the something category but not because I don’t believe, respect, and love God, I put God in the something category because I will never understand or be able to grasp what and who God is. Not really, see we are made in the image of God. But it’s just his image. And while that may sound like I’m being dismissive I’m not. If we were made just like God then we would be God. We would not have need for anything that happened to repair the relationship that was broken between God and Man. The fact that we did and do need that atoning work. Shows that being made in the image of God, while amazing, does not mean we have the same attributes or power that God has, and while that my be an elementary view of all the things that God is and that I am. Sometimes we need that elementary view to inform us.
I still have no idea what the weeks and months and years ahead hold. I am getting a picture of what they don’t and that’s going to be okay not because I want it to be, but because it has to be. There is nothing else for it. We fall down, we get up we walk a bit more and then we trip and fall again and get back up again. The bruises and scrapes serve to teach us, the scars they leave remind us and so we become more of what we were meant to be and less of what we are.
Stay safe my friends.
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