Category: Life

“….There’s a war inside of me

between who I want to be

and who I am…”              –Todd Agnew

That’s just the chorus from the song, because it was the part that resonates with me the most.  I was thinking about it last night after I got done talking to Jenny.  Sometimes she really just gets me thinking about things (which is good.  I have been known to think from time to time).  And she humbles me with her faithfulness.

What I was thinking about last night is that I have this really detailed picture of who I want to be in my head.  In the picture, I am so very strong in my faith, and discipleship, and my prayer life is regular, and powerful.  I am a great steward of my finances, and I tithe diligently and faithfully.  I get through my list of prayers daily.  I am a good worker, and will be a good husband, and father.

But that is not always who I am.

The reality is that I am not a tidy package of faith like the person above.  I want to be all those things.

I want to be.

But that is not always who I am.

I am messy, not tidy.  Sometimes my discipleship is weak.  Sometimes–maybe even most times–I am not a good steward of my money, and I do not tithe as I should.  Sometimes I do not pray all the prayers I should, or at all, really.

Sometimes I feel like my faith is not strong enough.

Sometimes I feel like I am not in a state of Grace at all, and I don’t know what to do about it when those feelings come.   

And that is the battle.

How do I become the person I want to be?

Good question.  As far as my discipleship goes, I need to throw myself into the Word, and into God.  I need to chase after Him with all my might

                        “like a deer pants for water…”

I need to truly seek Him, and that’s when I will find Him.  I need to just BE a better steward, and stop talking about it.  I need to give first, and trust God to take care of everything else. I can’t afford to?  I can’t afford NOT to….

I need to set aside more time for prayer.  I need to pray before I do anything else–before I get out of bed, and before I sleep.  If that means I get up at 430 instead of 5, then that is what I will have to do.  I need to trust all of my heart to the Lord, and trust that He will take care of both me and my family.  I need to fight for Him, and fight for them, and the way I do that is to pray.

Pray.

Pray….

That has to come first.  It’s the best way to fight.

And the truth is, Jesus did not call tidy packages of faith to Him.  He called messy people, who were sometimes timid in their faith.  He called fisherman, and tax collectors, and whores.

He called regular people whereever he went, not Pharisees, to walk at his side.

Regular people.

And He’s calling me.  Whether or not I fall into step with Him is entirely up to me.

I am not a tidy package of faithfulness, and I never will be.  I will not always make the best decisions.  I will not always be the best person I can be.  And there will always be struggles.

But still God calls, even with all that.

He calls to me in my messiness, in my inconsistent discipleship, and weak devotional life.

He calls….

Sometimes I get pretty frustrated with the progress I’m making–or perhaps more accurately, with the slowness of it.  I want to be happy, edified, and healed.  I want to have a good job, a home, and a family. 

I want to be rebuilt.

It’s just taking so darn long.  But I suppose I should not be surprised.  It took a lifetime to make me the person I am today, and while God certainly could change me instantaneously into the person he made me to be, then I would miss a lot.

I would miss the journey.  I would miss learning, and impatient as I am, that is something I very much need to do.  But when I think about where I was, vs where I am today, I can see that God truly has wrought a miracle in my life.

where I was:

20 years, relatively speaking, is not that long of a time.  But 20 years ago, while I was young, I was not strong.  I think that was actually when I really began my downward spiral in earnest.  I would hole up in my small apartment, and I would literally stare at the freaking walls sometimes.  It got to the point where I didn’t want to look at just the navajo white paint anymore, so I covered them with movie posters.  Not for your everyday movies, mind you, but for what I liked to call “splatter” movies.  The gorier the better.

I had posters for zombie movies, slasher movies, vampire movies.  Some were campy looking, but many  featured a strong, supernatural element, and some were downright scary.

It was better than looking at paint.

I hardly ever left my apartment, except to go to work.  I had this one friend at the pizza place where I worked, and he would come over sometimes and we would listen to music, and talk about how much the world sucked.  I think it was Travis that first introduced me to death metal.  Bands like Cannibal Corpse, Obituary, Sepultura, and Napalm Death.

I liked listening to that stuff–it was so ridiculously graphic.  It was like watching one of the movies whose posters covered my walls.

Travis did not do drugs, and neither did I.  Never got into them, never even tried them, actually.  Instead, we would listen to metal, and with some of the CDs, would really get into the stories they depicted.  Sometimes, we would be kicking back listening, maybe having some junk food, and the next thing I knew, hours would go by.

I think that was the closest I ever came to feeling totally lost.

But God reached out to me in that place.  It would be years before I would reach out to Him in return, but he sent people to me that would lift me up, with prayer, and friendship, and love.  One or two people at a time.  Some I got to know very well, and some hardly at all.  But I began to realize I did not have to sit in darkness. 

I began to realize there was light, and people like

Annmarie (the first person to really love me as I was, though just as friend)

Holly (the first person who told me she loved me that I believed)

Teresa (literally dragged me out of my apartment on many occasions)

Johnny (would not take my “no” for an answer. I hope he’s well)

Sherry (talked to me for hours when I was at my worst.  My first real adult friend)

and Mike made me realize over time that there was hope.  It wasn’t all dark, or it didn’t have to be.  It was up to me how much light I let in. 

 Mike in particular made a big impact, and he was really just an acquaintance and coworker more than anything else.  One time he said “thank God” about something.  I remarked that God had not done a hell of a lot for me.

“He’s done more than you realize,” Mike said.  I thought about that for weeks afterward, and while it seemed like a load of crap then, I would still think about his words from time to time after we stopped working together.

More than I realize?  What did he know about anything?  I realized what God had NOT done, certainly.

What didn’t I realize?  You know the funny thing about Mike? 

He was right. 

I wonder what he’s doing now? 

And the first thing that happened was that I got rid of all the posters.  Not because they were affecting me (at least I didn’t think so), but because of how they made me think.  I did not realize how old thinking dark, violent thoughts had gotten.

And the second thing to go was the death metal.  It was not healthy–and even before I had Christ in my life, I was able to realize this.  It was maybe even worse than staring at gory posters all the time.  I had to use my imagination, and I had a lot of imagination.

Light began to creep into my life, little by little, person by person.  It took a long time after that before I found Jesus, but it’s hard to reconcile that person with all the gross posters on his walls, and all the darkness in his heart with the way I feel today.  I really had no idea what a bleak place I was in back then, right out of high school, and into my twenties.  I had no idea how depressed I really was.  I did not realize that what I was really doing was just waiting for the next thing to happen.

Waiting to die.  It was just the next thing.

But Jesus reached down into the dark well of my life and pulled me out of it.  He did it by his might, but also through the Grace and love of people on earth, that were able to show me his love in a practical and real way.  He did it by introducing people into my life that had been where I was.  People I could relate to.

People who could feel my pain.

And that made all the difference.  I hope to do that for someone, someday.

The main thing that’s different now from then is that I have hope running through me, and it seems as if a new blessing is introduced into my life nearly every day.  It’s so strange to have hope when all you grew up with was despair. 

Hope.  4 letters. H-O-P-E.

A small word, but so huge with resonance and meaning.  Because I have God in my life, and Jesus in my heart, I no longer am subject to that despair that once owned me.  I don’t need to withdraw into a dark place when I feel the world weighing on me.  And actually, for the most part, it doesn’t anymore. 

The world, after all, is not what is important.  Like the song says, the things of earth grow strangely dim.

I am being rebuilt, and it is a process.  A lifelong process, from what I’m told, and what I’ve been made to know by God.  And that’s OK.

I have time.

Many things have happened in my life since God entered it–since I asked him to.  I have found wonderful friends, and a great church.  A good job, and a healthy family.  And I have found love, or perhaps more accurately, it found me.

But hope was first. 

I needed to know it was out there.  I needed to know that God was out there, and had plans to prosper me, and not to harm me.  Plans to give me hope, and a future….

I saw this cartoon when I was a kid, and it stuck in my head, for some reason. Every now and again, a picture from it will just sort of float up in my mind, like that little envelope that comes up on my office Outlook when I get an email.

I don’t remember if it was a Looney Tunes cartoon, or something else. I don’t remember if it was one of the musical variety, or the more traditional slapstick kind. I just remember this one character–it was a stuffed looking dragon made from many different colored fabrics, and rather haphazardly stitched together (that’s the way I remember it, anyway). In the cartoon, I think it was called a “calico dragon.”

I was thinking about that last night for some reason. I remember the tongue on the thing flicking out, and thinking the dragon was not frightening, or really even funny–just ridiculous looking. And it occurred to me that I sometimes feel like that stupid stitched together collection of fabric pieces, or at least see myself that way. The dragon in the cartoon did not really seem to fit together the way it was supposed to.

And that’s how I’ve felt in the past, up until fairly recently.

Like I was not stitched together the way I was supposed to be. Like the stitches I did have holding me together were not strong, and I never really felt like I could trust the thread.

Like the pieces of my fabric were too many and too varied to really even make sense together.

Like they could never really fit, not matter how I stitched them.

And I was right.

And that was the problem.

I had always done the stitching. I had always tried to sew up the tears and rents in my fabric. I had taken the thread from wherever I could find it.

But the truth was that I could never fix myself, no matter how much I tried. I could never stitch up the rents and tears in my fabric. I could never connect the pieces of my fabric together in a way that made sense to anyone, least of all myself.

I could not do it myself.

I don’t know if that dragon in the cartoon tried to patch himself together, but when I recall it in my mind, that’s how I see it.

And that’s how I saw myself. Many tattered pieces held together with fine, gossamer thread.

Weak thread.

I needed a thread that was stronger. I NEED a thread that is stronger. And the best part of it, the One doing the sewing will accept me whether or not my pieces are tightly knitted together. Yet He wants desperately to stitch me back up. And Once I accept him as Tailor, once I allow him to hold the pieces of my life separately, work them through his hands, and bind them together with the thread of life, then piece by piece, my mending will begin. That was, and sometimes remains, very hard for me to see, or remember.

And last night, when I heard the men in my group talking about parents, and some of the wounds they’d received from them (and the healing of those wounds for some), I thought of that calico dragon from my childhood. I could see him very clearly.

And remembered he was me. But slightly different. While some of the patches were still ragged, and barely held together, others were bound tightly, with bright shining thread. And while the colors still did not match, the way those pieces fit together made sense. And I was able to perceive with a little more clarity that my mending had indeed begun–had in fact been underway for some time, based on the amount of stitches.

none of this probably makes sense to anyone but me, but I suppose me is who I’m writing this for, anyway.

And God.

And to gather what remains of my thoughts….

I was out in the backyard this morning with Sumo while he was doing his business, and I was thinking about love.  Not just romantic love (though that at last has become part of my life again), but love.  I used to think about it solely in romantic terms, but now that I have that in my life, it’s like it freed me to consider love in the way it was actually created.

I thought about how Jesus was actually the greatest manifestation of love that has ever existed–or ever will.

Consider John 3:16.  “For God so loved the world…”

God loved us enough to do that.  And not just for the people that loved Him, but for those that did not as well.

Especially for them.

He sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for them.

I thought about Abraham, and his unwavering obedience.  Walking up that hill to sacrifice his son, not wanting to, but willing to, able to.

                                     Sacrificing his son.

His son was spared, but God’s was not.  He, too, went willingly up a hill.  You see paintings or images of Jesus all the time, walking the via dolorosa.  You sometimes see stations of the cross (if you’re a Catholic, mostly).  You see Jesus with a wooden beam balanced across his shoulders as  He walks.  Sometimes, even a whole cross.  But the Jesus usually represented in these images, is whole, and hale, and were it not for the crown of thorns you would probably not even be able to recognize Him for who he was. 

 But by the time Jesus climbed the hill to Golgotha, he was battered, and scarred, and bloody, and in pain.  He was near His end in more ways than one.

It was not pretty, nor should it ever be represented that way.

I read somewhere that when the Romans were going to flog someone to death, the punishment was 40 lashes (someone had deemed that enough to kill).  Jesus was to be flogged nearly to death, but…not….quite.

                                             39 lashes, supposedly.

No way to prove this, of course, but the word does mention how badly Jesus was beaten.

                                                          39 lashes.

In “Blood on my hands,” Todd Agnew sings

                                       “each crack of that whip was for my mistakes…”

Mine, too.  But Jesus loved me (and loves me) enough to choose to be beaten, and whipped.  To have thorns twisted onto his head.  To have nails driven into his limbs, on my behalf.  He loved me then, two thousand years before I even existed.

                                                     He loves me still.

I was thinking about that when I was in the backyard this morning with my dog.  I was thinking about what it felt like to be loved.  It feels pretty good.  I have someone in my life now that has only been there for a short while, but she loves me.

And there is someone else that has always been in my life, and loved me even before I knew it was possible to know him intimately, passionately, and with all my heart.

I am loved.

Loved.

It feels amazing.

I used to feel like part of me was missing. I could pretend to be a complete person all I wanted. I could walk around like everyone else. I could work, I could go to the mall, or to the movies. I could go to church.  I could do whatever I wanted.

But something was missing.

I felt like an imposter.

Like I was pretending.  I looked like I felt OK, and I usually said the right things, and to anyone that wasn’t inside my mind, things would seem

                                          just perfect.

But during these times, it felt like I was yearning for something, and I didn’t know what.

                    Like I was searching, and not finding. 

                          Like having an endless thirst, and not being able to slake it.

It was like there was a hole, right through the center of me. I could almost feel wind whistling through it. It was cold, and it was painful, and it seemed there was nothing I could do about it.

Except try to fill it.

And nothing fit.

Nothing fit because this hole was not shaped like anything on earth.

It was shaped like Jesus.

I believe now we were all made with this emptiness, with this hollow place in our centers. A place designed by our maker to be filled–with light, and love, and completeness. You can stuff it with anything you like. Some things will even work for a time, but eventually, they will begin to come loose around the edges, and things will begin to stream in again, and eventually, what you have stuffed into the hole will come flying out, and there will be the emptiness again.

Because only one thing will fit there, and stay.

My tendency has always been to try and fill the emptiness with things other than what was designed to fit there–things other than Jesus. For a time, it was food. That worked best of all, so far. It made me feel better to just pig out. Later, it would be the same with alcohol. Binging was fun, and easy, and when I did it, I didn’t have to think about anything, and it was great.

Except when it wasn’t. When the party was over, or the meal was over, and I was left with myself, I was not happy at all. The truth is, I was disgusted with the “wonder” of me. And what I had tried to fill my emptiness with was gone.  The food, the fermented malt beverages, the empty relationships

                       all gone.

And I was empty again.

Maybe it isn’t those things for you.  Maybe it’s something else-like drugs, or sex, or pornography.  Maybe it’s video games, or maybe you adopt a lot of cats.

And none of those things work.  You still feel hollow.  Not all of the time, but when you really sit down, or when you lay down at night, or when you ask yourself if you’re really happy, or really feel complete, the answer is almost always no.

Something is missing.

I was hollow for 32 years.  I spent my life trying various things to fill my emptiness.  I nearly ate myself to death, literally.

And it didn’t work.

I became not an everyday drinker, but a serious binge drinker.  I would pound beers until I was sick, and the result was always the same.

It didn’t work.  After the buzz was gone, and the sickness was gone, and the hangover was gone, I still felt hollow.

And then I discovered that sometimes empty relationships felt a lot like love, or what I imagined love would feel like.  But when the person was gone, and I had to think once again about my life, I had to admit that it wouldn’t have worked if I had a new person in my life every weekend.

And I was still hollow.

And then there came a day where I absolutely couldn’t do it anymore.  I was on a trip with my friends to see a baseball game, and our intention was to eat as much bad food as we could, and drink as much beer as our stomachs could handle.

Instead, God spoke to me on the first night of the trip, before we even got to Peoria.  I remember standing on the dock leading down to the river, holding a beer cooler in each hand, and just feeling overwhelmed with so many different feelings, and memories.  I remember thinking that I could no longer fill the emptiness through my center, that I never had been able to.

I did not even want to try anymore.

So for the first time in my life, kneeling on the rough wood of the dock, I asked Jesus to fill that emptiness, because I was tired of being hollow.

And I was filled.

And it was good.

The difference between my life now, and my life then, is that now I have hope.  Now I have help.

I am not in it alone.

How can an entity I can neither see nor touch give me hope?

I can’t explain how, I only know that He does.  And it changed my life.  I am the same person as before, but I am also different. 

When I begin to feel like my old self, when I begin to feel hollow, now I can turn to Jesus.  Now I can reach out for His touch, and grasp the edge of his garment, and be healed.  I don’t have to reach out for food, or drink, or anything else, though that temptation will always be there.  Now, I don’t need to fill that emptiness with anything else, because it isn’t there anymore.

Jesus is.

I am no longer hollow.