These last few weeks have been incredibly revealing to me and the way that I have been living my life, this quarter especially.
After a tough winter quarter, then coming home to 707 and becoming re-centered on a few things, I could approach the end of the quarter with a bit of a better view on the decisions I needed to make, and how to look at the rest of the weirdness that happened towards the end. It helped immensely, just that bit of a refresher, and being around people who believe in me makes a huge difference I'm learning.
Coming home after a pretty relaxing finals week (I passed accounting! No more of it ever again!), and visiting 707 once more, there were so many revelations that my eyes became open to that I had been blinded to before. The most important one being that sin, no matter how much I can beg for the feeling to go away, completely traps me, 'entangles' me, until I am lost in this web, with what feels like no escape from the cyclical nature of the terrible attitudes, habits, actions, and view on relationships into which I had gotten myself this quarter. I learned that I cannot be free from it, from the web of ugliness, until I let Jesus into it. So often I just want to fix it myself, and become right again before I move on with my relationship with God, myself, and others, but... (and my ignorance amazes me), I don't know why I think I can do that on my own. I need God's strength to help with these revelations because I am the person who got me into this sloppy mess, so I certainly would not be able to reverse it by myself.
I am learning that the sadness and broken attitude that I had acquired over the last couple of months is just a natural reaction to the selfishness that I had been dwelling on this whole year, starting in the summer. At 707, Andy was talking about the definition of sin; that the second we take our eyes of the Lord and focus on our own junk, that is the beginning of the sin, and that is the start of the web that entangles. It's basically.... pride. Pride in a simple, yet poisonous form. Self-aware, self-engaging, self-encouraging, self-pity, self-love, self-hatred, self-etc. etc.... As soon as those terms can apply to anything that I had been thinking or feeling, I had turned from God... and looking back, I can see where this web had started.
This summer, when I was working three jobs to raise enough money for the now-cancelled trip to London, I had focused all my energy on getting there, preparing myself, because, sure I maybe thought that's what God wanted me to do, but it turned into a beast that overtook my focus, and while there was amazing spiritual growth in Eagle River over the summer with a lot of the people there, I was not very supportive of them because I had been focused too much on myself and my one goal, which didn't even turn out to be what God wanted. When that goal was taken away from me twice, when all the other things that had gained my focus, (boys, slipping grades, failing friendships, self-image, etc.) were being taken away, I was left empty, because those were what I had placed so much of my attention, care, worry, definition, everything into and I was stuck. I remember telling Andy and my friend Jeff that I didn't know the next step to take because I had been so abruptly halted. But, that attitude was still only focused on Makella.
What step should I take, what do I need to do next, what decisions should I do... its cyclical, and its the web that I brought upon myself. These are only a few examples of how entangled I had become, it goes deeper then these few examples...
Sitting up at the board at 707 last weekend, Andy and Bryan were saying these words and in one of those moments where it felt like someone walked up to be and whacked me on the forehead, I realized...
well hey.... maybe all this sadness in me is because of something else... not just the crap that happened... but because of me! I dug through my stockpiled memories of the last year, and like a camera zooming in, I saw myself stooped over a toilet working at one of the jobs from the summer saying to myself 'this is for London, it's gonna be great, I'm gonna have such a good time...' when what I should have been saying was 'this is for the Lord, if this is what He wants, this is what I will work for...' but never once had I said that the whole summer. Never once!
Throughout all of the entangling, and the removal of plans this past quarter, I began to slowly slip away from the good God I had once clung to so tightly. I was losing faith in the great plan he had for my life and my major, and I was growing blistered and cold to the idea of a God who cared enough about me to stop these things from happening at once, to stop the what I thought was neglect. In one moment in my kitchen I remember, slumped over the countertop, I had warned Him that if this stuff kept happening, I would become cynical to Him, untrusting and cold in regards to trusting Him. Threatening the God of creation...
Throughout all this, I had also been struggling with self-image problems (see the theme of selfishness?), reassurance was far off in my mind.. all of this because I had taken my view off of the good God who created me with Love. Why would I turn away? I never want to go back to that place again, that broken place where all I could see were my own failures, my own destruction, and how it was affecting those I cared about.
Andy said that week that "Jesus is the only hope I have to stop trusting in myself." God doesn't want me to be entangled, He has this race marked out for me, and I want so desperately to be free to run it. I can imagine that freedom, forever, of not being entangled... Andy asked what would the world look like if we all focused on the 'we' instead of the 'me'? Donald Miller reflects in
Blue Like Jazz,
"For a moment, sitting there above the city, I imagined life outside of narcism. I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered what it would look like not to live in a house of mirrors, everywhere I go being reminded of myself."
I am reading
The Shack by Paul Young. The main character was going through immense pain, and was meeting with God, and the God character in the book was speaking to the main character (it kind of reminded me of how I had been looking at God in those broken times). She says
"You don't really understand yet. You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through the tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self-centeredness, and power, and believing you are on your own and insignificant. All of these contain powerful lies. You see pain and death as ultimate evils and God as the ultimate betrayer, or perhaps, at best, as fundamentally untrustworthy. You dictate the terms and judge my actions and find me guilty. The real underlying law in your life... is that you don't think I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything- the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives- is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me. But you don't.... Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me..."
The main character asked how he could change that... and the God character says
"You can't, not alone. But together we will watch that change take place. For now I just want you to be with me and discover that our relationship is not about performance or you having to please me. I 'm not a bully, not some self-centered demanding little deity insisting on my own way. I am good, and I desire only what is best for you. You cannot find that through guild or condemnation or coercion, only through a relationship of love. And I do love you."
Having trouble trusting God threw me off completely. I was failing to find the life that God had given me and failing to see Him working through me in all this. Lemme tell you, having the support of people who believe in me, helps immensely. I had been told by someone who I hold in high spiritual regard, that he could see the spark of Jesus alive in me... and I disagreed with him initially, but I decided later that night that I would try my absolute hardest to make what he sees in me come true. I want that spark to be alive in me... Andy had said that God sees Jesus all over me, no matter how much I think I mess up, He created me with that... and my friend Jeff says that no matter what I do, I cannot separate myself from His love. If all these amazing people believe that God is still living in me, then I need to live to uphold that, not to make myself look good, but because I desperately want to feel God living in me...
The untangling has begun. I can feel it deep in my veins, that this is true and right.
With those distractions taken away from me this quarter, I am free to really live in this, free to be open for what He desires, which is what I desire... free to love others and to see myself with Jesus all over me, as how I was created, and I am on the edge of my seat.
...let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:1,2
Jesus died so I can be free.
We sang this song at 707 that week.
A thousand times I've failed,
Still your mercy remains,
And should I stumble again,
Still I'm caught in your grace.
Everlasting, Your light will shine when all else fad.es.
Never ending, Your glory goes beyond all fame
My heart and my soul, Lord I give you control,
Consume me from the inside out Lord.
Let justice and praise become my embrace,
To love You from the inside out.
Your will above all else, my purpose remains
The art of losing myself in bringing you praise...
From The Inside Out
Hillsong
These were my thoughts for the week.
