waking up

I just had a really rough week. I try not to complain too much, but this is the first time in a long while I’ve been driven to the point where I felt like I had enough, that I was done, that it was almost time to throw in the towel.

I have been doing this teaching thing close to two years now, the music writing/forming a band thing for a few months now, and the Haven thing for close to two and a half years now… and each has been an amazingly deep and character-shaping experience. But the reality is that there are times when even these good, seemingly healthy things eat away at my life. This week, it got to the point where I was simply empty, and I had nothing left to give anybody. It took all the energy I had just to not blow up, because I felt like everyone was just asking too much… But something inside me kept telling me to give, to sacrifice, to love others. In hurt and confusion, I rebelled against this part of me, because I knew God never asked me to be a hero to everyone. Odd, I think, but I strongly doubted that God would ask His children to be his slaves (yes, the Bible says we are to be slaves, but I’ll clarify later). The pain was unbearable.

I mean, have you ever been there… feeling like God didn’t really love you anymore, but that if He did, He wasn’t really doing anything to help? Or trying to fix yourself, so that everything is “balanced” in your life and you have enough time to manage (read: “control”) everything in your life? Taking control of your life is a lie, and I started accepting this two years ago, but so is the idea that God doesn’t love you because He is not doing what you think He should be doing. So where does that leave us? To tell you the truth, I just feel lost sometimes.

I’ve been having constant reminders in life that God is our Father. I struggle with this so much. When I contrast my experience with what the Bible says about God being a father to me, I don’t immediately think, “Wow, God really does love me like a Father.” I wish it were that simple. It sounds so foreign to me, and at times, untrue… which reveals the extent to which I believe it and act in faith.

So I started reading “To Own a Dragon” by Donald Miller, a reflection on what it’s like to grow up without a father. Having read his previous few books (“Blue Like Jazz” and “Searching for God Knows What,” and his first book, “Through Painted Deserts”), I know how honest this guy is. To not spoil it, I’ll just say I was able to identify with the confusion he reflects on in this one section. He wondered if some father figure or mentor could have delivered him from the tension he experienced as he grew up, the tension between desiring guidance and yet rejecting authority, the same tension that causes us to second guess our behavior. Anyway, reading this part hit me like a ton of bricks, and I was able to realize that I had this disparity in my life… between wanting God to be this fathering presence and yet rejecting it when things go against what I want. Sometimes I just don’t know how to be a son. This is why I’ve ground myself down to the bone trying to please people or “serve God,” be an accomplished teacher, or be a great songwriter… stubbornly asserting an identity that is shaky, at best.

But I feel this “splinter in [my] mind” (a la The Matrix) where as much as I’ve strayed, and as much as I return, I always have to acknowledge God. It’s like God is teaching me to come to Him. That even if He doesn’t fix me when I utter a quick and desperate prayer, the idea that just coming to Him is the point. That He is the one and only. And He absolutely must be so… and now I feel like I have the permission to believe that God can be more to me than this box I put Him in.

Even though I live life like it’s all about figuring people out, figuring out money, and figuring out problems, I still manage to really fuck it up. I can’t fix the world, I can’t fix my church, I can’t fix my family, and I definitely can’t fix myself. I can’t even fix my broken car key remote (sat on it wrong).

But that’s the beauty, I guess, in the grace of God, that it’s not about what we do, but what He does. It means that it’s really about a miracle, and not by great amounts of human effort and striving that I am able to receive the love of God, but that He has made it so… He has broken down the wall. It seems like such a surprise to me that this could be so. I guess I just need to keep waking up from this bad dream where it’s all up to me or it’s all going to Hell. Waking up to the reality of being redeemed, not just taken and left alone in this depraved condition, but being transformed into something useful and even precious.

This comes as a surprise. Totally unexpected. That this God would love me with His whole heart.

“All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”

-Blaise Pascal

I believe this…