Month: August 2017

Intimacy with You is the deepest reality. Everything good is a refraction of this, and everything contradictory is a temporary aberration from the true order of things. You are love. I was made for love. These are the main, basic truths.

Is there anything separating us, Lord? No. Your blood erased all boundaries. So why do I listen to the condemning thoughts that pretend to accuse and deride? All things considered, they are obviously from the enemy. So why give in to them, or give ear at all?

Because I am distracted. Because I am not focused on you. Because I carelessly allow my attention to be consumed with ungodly things. But why do I do this? Because I doubt the solidity of your commitment to me. Because I feel certain of my own impending failure, and because, ultimately, I believe that your faithfulness hinges on my own performance, which, though it has been tried, has been oft found untrue, and which therefore presents a foundation of sand.

Jesus, help me to until this knot. Help me to know first and foremost that you are with me, and that you are for me, and that the one who is against me is therefore not you. You have promised this in your Word.

Only with a confidence in these main, basic things can even the slightest actual progress be made. Anything outside the realm of this already-perfect love amounts to law, and law cannot cohabitate with faith. Any attempt at it will produce nothing but an awkward symbiosis, born of fear, and doomed to failure. The true Christian faith is based on faith alone; favor without merit or qualification. It is to this faith that the law and all the prophets always pointed; God, please open my eyes in every way to behold these wonderful things.

I will not be drawn aside, to the right hand or the left, to behold and absorb the characteristics of either extreme. Every place on the spectrum of this teeter-totter religion system is equally in error. It is all down here, based in Earth things, based in flesh. God, your system is up there, and in you, and through you, and therefore in me, but at a level beyond flesh, beyond fear and striving, beyond the fray of whatever this is that haunts us and keeps us here against the will of our spirit (our true self.)

I will be distracted by nothing and no one, nothing will stop me from diving in anymore. Here in the present moment — always here, no matter what or when it is in other terms, I am always here with you, I see that now. Nothing can separate me from this anymore.

Immediately, I deliberately choose to accept your love for me. I choose not to question it, but to simply let it be the primary truth. These other thoughts and qualms, they rise and swirl, and I choose to accept that this is simply the case, too, but I do not let that chaos override the primary truth. You are love. You orchestrated the single greatest act of love that the world has ever known, and you did it with me in mind. Nothing and no one can ever separate that from being the truth. Every accusing and condemning voice that would convince me otherwise, or that would work to cause me to doubt that this love is real, or valid, or applicable…all of those voices are nothing more than arguments that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. I silence and dismantle them, and cast them down, and move forward from this place of peace and trust.

I lay everything else down. All of the cares and concerns, all of the worries and insecurities. All concern for self, and for what a day may bring forth, and every other thing in which there is fear, I put these things away and relinquish my grip upon them. I open my hands, and I let everything fall out of them, and I lift my hands to you in thanksgiving and praise. You have been so good to me. You have been better to me than I’ve been to myself (“well…been to myself…hey…”)

Okay, I’m done.

The enemy wants me to blame God for my pain. He wants me to view unfortunate circumstances as the deliberate orchestrations of a malicious and tyrannical deity, who plays favorites, and who stacks the deck, and who expects unreasonable things from the free moral agency of his creation. For much of my life, I found that thinking in this way just came so naturally. Everything appeared to me deliberately tainted by injustice and woe, and all claiming otherwise seemed crazy to me. This resulted in my having been driven to a level of spiritual frustration that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy.

I have found, though, over past months and years, that by deliberately forcing myself to begin operating according to a different paradigm – one of faith, hope, and love – I have been able to actualize real and lasting change in my mental processes. My thought patterns, once so absolutely negative and out of control that they drove me to the brink of suicide on a somewhat daily basis, are now genuinely becoming subject to designs of my own choosing, and I find that I am finally able to “think positively” and apply optimism to my outlook in ways that have heretofore seemed quite literally impossible. Instead of my thoughts driving the car all by themselves, I have managed to move them to the back seat, and have taken the wheel myself.

It is a simple matter, really, of deciding to believe in the availability of something good in this life, despite the problem of there having been presented substantial amounts of very real evidence to the contrary. Being consistently stubborn in the repetition of this decision – to believe against the reality of my own perception that God is actively singing over me with love, and blessing, and hope – as it has applied to the various events and circumstances of life, has been the simple yet arduous catalyst for an absolutely ridiculous amount of personal growth as of late. In short, I choose to believe God is good, and that he has designed and destined me to experience victory and fulfillment, no matter what the circumstances look like in the present moment.

This whole experience of radical change was precipitated by my spouse of fifteen years abruptly abandoning the marriage, and by the imperative of either continuing to deal with life according to those old negative patterns of habit, or to make a seemingly impossible (and, of necessity, oft repeated) decision to do otherwise. It was a classic sink-or-swim thing, as allowing the latter to take place would most definitely have killed me, under those circumstances, my history of chemical dependency being what it is.

In practice, I have found that, even in the microcosm of day-to-day life, negative perspective and expectation become a sort of self fulfilling prophecy, whereas choosing to exercise unconditional faith in God’s goodness results not only in the inner assurance of having sown good seed, but is always coupled, as well and in time, with there being clearly demonstrable fruit from these efforts. It’s like when someone says something bad about a family member or a friend of yours – someone you know from personal experience to in fact be a person of good character and strong integrity. The accuser may be basing their claims on a truly damning set of evidences, and as such you are unavoidably presented with a dilemma: stand up for the person in question, using what you’ve learned about them through personal relationship as your reason for defending them in good faith…or give ear to the other person’s description of events, and to their opinions on the matter, and then side with them against your ally. Framed in this way, the former course would seem a foregone conclusion, but when bad things are actually happening to you, and it’s your own little world in which the sky seems to be falling, it becomes very difficult to see the forest for the trees (and especially so if you are already prone to worry and rumination.)

It’s something you just have to do, though. Faith. Trust. You have to choose it, or this world will inevitably eat you alive. We need to forgive, not for the sake of the other person, necessarily, but because if we do not then we create an obstruction in our ability to enjoy God on a personal level. We should interact with others in a way that is based on love, because by the very mechanics of the universe itself we reap what we sow, and which of us doesn’t ultimately desire love to find us in this life? We have to move forward in a way indicating trust in the goodness of God, otherwise we move in the opposite direction by default, and, as a wise man once said, “If we do not change the direction we are going, then we will end up where we are headed.”

And that was the best decision I ever made. To change the direction I was heading, and, more specifically, to stop blaming God for everything bad, and to stop feeling as though I were doomed to go on simply reacting to circumstances as they were hurled at me, and to instead take responsibility for my own life and begin to exercise stewardship over it as though it were a gift, and not some terrible curse. This didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t something I mastered all at once, and it’s still not something that I exactly have the best handle on some days, but there was definitely a pivotal moment where I sensed the necessity of making a conscious choice to trust that God is good, and to do it with all of my heart, and that was the crucial first step. Without having obeyed in that moment, I would still be going around in circles. Friend, whoever you are and whatever you are going through, thank you for reading this. Please choose to know that you matter.

“For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” ~ Saint Paul