waking up

Right now, I am going through a rough spot in my life. I think I used to write more upbeat things here. Spiritual discoveries, encouraging things I had worked out in my mind about life, whatever I could muster from my personal victories and revelations.

I feel like these days there is this constant battle, a cognitive dissonance between believing God is somehow displeased with me versus disciplining me. I guess I interpret the general malaise of growing up along with the new stresses of the band, the acute troubles that come with getting sick, and the negative results of my own sin as one big blob of dark times that must somehow mean that God is not happy with me. When I am not careful, I can interpret it as God punishing me for choices I’ve made, or trying to squeeze the life out of me whenever He sees me running too far off, like some kind of choking leash.

Interpreting someone’s intent by their actions is always tricky, though. To a child, a spanking or a scolding means that they themselves are all bad, or that the parent is all bad. They can’t distinguish any good intent of the parent when the experience of discipline suggests nothing but pain. But a good parent doesn’t withhold discipline, and uses it from time to time as an expression of wanting the child to learn right from wrong, to provide guidance and shape behavior, and perhaps even to reinforce the idea of who knows best. If a parent left a child to themselves, to be raised by others or something worse like TV, most would agree that the parent is negligent.

So a good parent will discipline a child even if the child completely misunderstands the good intent. Ever told your mom or your dad that you hated them? Ever wish terrible things on loved ones out of anger when you were little? I did. Haha. I was such a horrible kid sometimes. I felt so right and so entitled to have my way. Little did I know how much my parents gave up to give me a good life. Little did I know that the discipline was out of a very pure love, and the desire to see me grow up right.

Elton shared during our service yesterday about how it feels like some of us in Haven are paralyzed by fear. And yet whatever we interpret as failure or disappointment doesn’t indicate how God feels about us. He is pleased with us, and delights in us because of what Jesus did on the Cross. God’s pleasure over us cannot be earned, and cannot be increased or diminished by anything we do, because it was never based on our actions to begin with, but solely on the work of Jesus. Auntie Luanne also shared a verse from Isaiah 55, which is my favorite chapter from Isaiah, about how we are called by God to come and buy food and drink that satisfies without money, without any of our own cost.

Anyway, my simple point is that if God is good, we can be completely confident in how He chooses to deal with us, even the evil He allows to happen to us. And the flip side is also true, that if God were not wholly good or didn’t exist, we would have absolutely no certainty and no belief that bad things ever had a good reason behind them.

I’m holding on to this idea, that God is good, and that evil serves a purpose greater than we can understand. I’m sure I’ll feel better too once this cold is gone and my voice comes back and my car is fixed and the demo is finished.

Fraught with failure, ground down into the dust, heavy-laden, how much can one man bear? Standing victoriously, happy, secure in his identity, does this man know what it means to truly live?

I want to make a point. The point is that beyond all hope and love, success and failure, pain and confusion there is something concrete that all in one way or another end up choosing whether or not to lay the bedrock of their lives upon it–faith… an illogical response of courage that dares to believe in a better world, a worldview that stretches from Sunday School to existentialism to what I choose to do tomorrow when I wake up. Faith in the wrong thing is dangerous. Faith is the right thing is blinding and scary as hell, yet somehow better because it yields fruit according to rules that no man can ascertain, no data that can be measured and synthesized. Something higher than any human’s thoughts, reality is so simple yet unattainable. We live in the mess of conflicting paradigms and strong emotions that react and over-react and avoid this reality, and yet some are able to remain centered in the mess.

This is what I want. Centering faith. Not a detachment from the world, but a way to stand up in it.

I don’t know what else is worth wanting.

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. … I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835