Note: If you've not had the opportunity to read the foreword or previous chapters and would like to, please look for the title of this writing under the "Blog Pages" tab above and click on it. You'll find what's available to date under that tab. jbh
The Passion Well
Chapter 4:
Drinking From A Poisoned Well
This may start out a little slow, but please bear with me. I need to set the table...
I personally feel that we're living in a largely desensitized society of spiritually sick people who're left craving increasingly sensational input. The media at large, proudly being the most common source of temporal relief by attempting to scratch that itch, seems to continually work harder at providing its constituents with fresh, "astonishing" and "amazing" fodder to graze on.
But watching the progression toward the continually amazing seems like something similar to a hardcore drug addiction in that after a while the things that used to seem sensationally stimulating just don't provide the same high that they used to. A persistently new more powerful high seems to be required to affect the sensitivities of the consumer in order to achieve the desired result. But also similar to drug addiction, that high never lasts and a continual cycle requiring new satisfaction and simultaneously driving a waning sensitivity pushes society ever further down a destructive path of depravity and seriously eroding moral and ethical values. Society seems to be lustfully drinking a slow poison without any real regard to the corrosive effects and final cost.
Think about the common promotions of the media for just a minute. They loudly center around conflict, violence, whatever's "taboo", glorification of deception, defiance, disrespect, promoting greed - the accumulation of (you name it), illicit and demeaning sexuality, mysterious spiritualism, etc... and none of those things have any positive spiritual value. In fact, they have the potential for a greater negative and damaging effect than some may be willing to admit (somewhat similar to an addict in denial). I understand it now because I've been a subscriber myself and it wasn't until I understood that there's a design behind it and identified the culprit behind it's promotion that I began to change my habits. Fortunately for those who're seriously interested in advancing a real relationship with Christ, there is an antidote and cure ... but it requires something seriously lacking in society by many today even in the church ... discipline.
Years ago, I was struck by a phrase that many will likely recognize. It was a statement decrying the common sense attributes of a good diet. It was the phrase "You are what you eat". The obvious and true inference is that if you consume things that are healthy, you'll have a greater opportunity for being physically healthy. Another true but less appealing way to say it would be to turn it around and say that if you only feed your body junk, sooner or later you're very likely going to be sick. It's true that what we consume has a definite affect on our physical health - we know it's been proven ... So what if we applied that same phrase to our spiritual health?
Our creative and genius God designed a number of what I call parallels in life - things that we encounter in life as physical truths that mirror a spiritual truth. The truth of healthy physical consumption is absolutely one of those and one that we need to give some serious thought and discipline to if we truly want to be spiritually healthy.
Consider this ...
Genesis 1:27 (NLT) "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."
John 4:23-24 (NLT) 23 "But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. 24 For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
Genesis informs us that we were created by God in His image and John tells us that He (God) is spirit. So it's not hard to recognize that being created in His image, we're spirit also. If you haven't already, please get this - we are not our flesh! We are a spirit designed by God to be eternal! I personally tend to think of our status as being eternal spirits, wearing a temporary flesh suit. We're simply living in a temporary training ground with the opportunity to freely determine our future destination (a determination demonstrated by the evidence we seek to live out) while we wait to move to our intended eternal destination.
So in thinking about a necessary, healthy spiritual diet as followers of Christ, we know that He's given us an entire book full of spiritual dietary wisdom intended to make/keep us healthy for our journey. But as in any healthy regimen, clearly understanding the regimen and having the true discipline to follow it are the keys to healthy success (but be sure it's a discipleship, not just a "religious" exercise).
Philippians 4:8 (NLT) "And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise."
So far I've asked a question intended to encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ to consider the foundations of their relationship with Him. I need to point out that in no way am I condemning simple child-like belief. I think that may be the purest form, but as the Apostle Peter pointed out, we need to be prepared to explain our hope and without examining it, it may be hard for some of us to explain.
Secondly, I pointed out how I became motivated to examine my own belief when I found myself confronted in a rather confined situation with a friend that I discovered to be atheistic in his own beliefs and found myself poorly prepared to answer some of his questions. And I mentioned how the encounters in that relationship set me on a personal journey of discovery. The atheist friend I mentioned earlier, didn't change his views while I worked for him and I have no knowledge about whether or not he's changed them since. But I've come to realize that my presence in his employ was likely far more about me than about that friend in terms of someone being changed. I tend to believe that my all knowing Father led me into a situation that He knew was required to make this child begin to move from stagnation and continue to the next stage of a divinely designed, educational journey to find the answers that he lacked. It was a knowing, guiding parental move that resulted in the desired effect.
Thirdly, I briefly touched on just a little of the secular history references that coincide with biblical history regarding Christ's presence on the earth and a little about the biblical prophecy that foretold so many details of His arrival, life, death and resurrection and how Jesus fulfilled them all. I talked about how that journey that the Lord motivated me to take opened the door to understanding and a more active relationship with Him that drew me in as I began to scour both the New and Old Testaments in an effort to truly know Him.
In the past, I allowed myself to become poisoned by the attraction to unhealthy things and ideas. The kinds of things were those well pointed out and warned against in scripture and some of those ideas were conclusions I formulated myself based on either incorrect or partial information. The protection and defense against any of those things and ideas were laid out and available in advance by our knowing heavenly Father. So if I tend to hint repeatedly at the need to study scripture, you might understand why.
From here and through the following chapters, I'll give just a very few of the examples from my own life that further illustrate the Lord's positive parenting of me and a little of the poison I encountered and subjected myself to. It's my hope that you'll see His interaction with me and begin to look for it in your own life. My preconceived notions about how He operates were based on a puny perspective that didn't account for the vision and plans of a vast, unlimited God. It's been the Lord's repeated interactions, His grace, kindness and His long suffering patience with me that continue to give me experienced personal reason to want know Him ever more intimately and a part of why I've grown to love Him so deeply. I'll relate a few of the events from my own path and prior understandings and demonstrate how I've learned to see them from a different perspective - one that reveals the Lord's continued presence in my life and His ever continuing investment in my growth in spite of my own poison tainted failings and some of the poisonous decisions and actions of others.
The real journey toward a much more real and active relationship with my Creator didn't actually begin as such in my own mind. In the beginning I didn't recognize it as a journey toward anything or even a journey at all. I just needed to find some answers to some questions that continued to haunt me. Scratching that itch soon became a personal obsession that led to a passion that in a world full of pain and brokenness, that I know without a doubt I'll never have a reason to regret. It's become a learned, knowing passion for a Father, friend and savior whose own passion for me is magnified so many times greater than I have the capacity to understand or even contain. It's a love authored in heaven, even for the imperfect creature that I am ... and the imperfect any who dare to discover it - however imperfect they may be...
While I searched and as I began to submit myself (however haltingly early on) to the unseen parental hand that's guiding me continually toward His throne, I eventually began to slowly realize that I'd been wandering stumblingly down a path that has been divinely determined by my Lord throughout my whole life. I didn't see it right away and it hasn't always been an easy path, but as a parent myself, I've learned that the different personalities and traits of a child can require different approaches in the effort to raise them up and build good character. Father God as our parent, knowing the traits and character of His children far better than they know themselves, knows exactly what lessons are needed to guide and train them up to be the people of His hearts desire. One of the keys to the success of that process is our ability to submit willingly and trustingly to that process. As I've told some who've asked me how to move forward in their walk with the Lord, the key word is "submission".
Difficult children sometimes require firmer guidance, so looking back, the picture of my own life so far is much more clear to me now in some instances. They have the capacity to unnecessarily make the pathway toward spiritual maturity necessarily more difficult for themselves ... but a truly loving parent does not abandon the effort while there is still hope. Recognizing that I myself have at times been one of those difficult children and my heavenly Father being THE perfect parent, ... this explains a lot!
I confess that before I learned to submit to Him the difficulty of my path was determined in large part by my own failure to yield to Him completely. Sometimes the discipline requirements needed are more directly determined by the willingness of the child to submit to the necessary guidance of the parent. So the discipline of my path has been determined to a degree by my own stubborn decisions of course, but also by the divine parent who refused to give up on this child that He loves passionately. My life has numerous examples of this. Father God's efforts to raise me up as His child and train me in spite of my own inclinations, though very uncomfortable at times, have provided a continual source for gratitude now in retrospect and the further deepening of the well of my passion for Him. His kind patience and grace have been unrelenting.
I'm not at all proud of it, but the truth is that I've not lived the most sheltered or cautious existence. Throughout the various stages of this life in the past, I confronted its challenges passionately and aggressively - head on ... and I received the many resulting scars from those pursuits. They're not in any way badges of honor, but in more experienced reflection just simple reminders of both my prior shameful misadventures and bullheaded approach to life. But they're soothed by the memories of our God's continued undeserved favor to preserve me in spite of them. His grace is a salve capable of healing even the deepest wounds when they're humbly presented to Him ... in submission.
***
Nehemiah 9:27 (NLT)
"So you handed them over to their enemies, who made them suffer. But in their time of trouble they cried to you, and you heard them from heaven. In your great mercy, you sent them liberators who rescued them from their enemies."
***
I firmly believe now that having true faith and believing God requires that we believe above all else that He spoke the truth when He said that His intention toward us is for our good - and that we hold this to be true no matter how circumstances present themselves. But before I learned that, I had some self alleged "disappointments" with my parent Lord in the past. They were moments when I expected that our God would certainly do, or was doing one thing, only to find that in His own unlimited wisdom He chose to respond unexpectedly. In each of those situations, I was sometimes tempted to make quick judgments about my Lord's motives or actions based on my own self absorbed, puny perspective. But doing so would result in finding myself shamefully in error and humbly repentant later. On those occasions, like a spoiled brat I appointed blame to Him for things that others were responsible for while exercising their free will in less than positive ways. Others were the consequences of my own actions and decisions, and sometimes they were the actions that He took as my good and faithful Heavenly Father to correct my path ... out of deep and unwavering love.
Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)
"For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD . “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope."
Having made a serious effort to learn about Him, I've learned since to view everything with the character of God in mind first when attempting to come to any conclusions about His involvement in anything. I've learned to worship Him as God, trust and honor Him as my Father, celebrate Him as my friend and to adore and embrace Him as my Savior. But it didn't start out that way...
Turmoil for me began in my relationship with my dad as a "tween" and young teen. It's an unfortunate cache of memories that because of grace, I no longer dwell on. But they help give a little background to the point of my writing, so I'll briefly touch on them here.
There were things at work in my young teen world that made me a victim for certain mean spirited kids in public school. It happens to a lot of kids. In my case, I was viewed poorly and mocked in part because we weren't affluent or dressed according to the current culture and because of the shabby house where we lived. I didn't really care that much that we weren't well off, but I definitely did care about the harassment for things that I had no control over and I defiantly stood up against it with the passion of Irish heritage. I didn't share those things with anyone. I internalized them. I learned over time to wall off relationships and draw inward as a defense against drawing any possible further anger from my dad or anyone else. But multiple occasions of getting randomly slugged or becoming the target of group beatings between school buildings among other things tended to create a grinding personal inner friction along with all of life's other insults.
As a freshman in public high school I joined the wrestling team and threw myself completely into my workouts. I received an award for the most improved build while working with the intent of one day getting retribution for everything I'd suffered at the hands of my tormentors. So you might see that between multiple smoldering factors including my youthful male pride, the flame had actually been lit and the stage set for a boil-over long before it finally happened.
My dad suffered from mood swings that could change his demeanor in an instant. I didn't learn that until after he was gone and he apparently didn't recognize that it was a problem himself until later in his life. But decisions were made and the anger that he chose to exhibit at times and my pain, both physical and emotional suffered as the result of it were markedly registered on a growing list and angrily cataloged.
All that I knew at the time that it was happening was that his seemingly incredible ability to reach a flash point would leave me bruised and sometimes seriously hurt and bleeding as I struggled through my teen years. Assumptions and angry accusations were made sometimes even in instances of true honest innocence and were then punished violently. The severity of some of these "punishments" and other choices would even leave me with a few permanent reminders of once broken bones.
Over time I eventually became numbed to the physical pain. I was 16 years old and 135 pounds of intentionally solid, hard toned muscle the last time that I was "punished". I don't remember what I'd done or was alleged to have done, but whatever it was. it resulted in a "spanking". When swinging harder and faster didn't make me cry out, dad finally broke the fir 1 x 3 across the small of my back and I just turned and looked at him to ask if he was finished. By now he didn't dare to punch or kick me anymore. He just stared at me silently for a minute and left the room. My stored anger had hardened me to a point that I felt that I could take anything either he, or life could dish out and both would one day pay. I had sooo much to learn.
My own anger and frustration finally boiled over and I allowed it to overwhelm everything else. It resulted in my leaving home at seventeen. In reality, I left because of what I was afraid my anger might cause me to do. I was made to work with my dad when he needed help. He was a contractor and his work often left him in vulnerable positions. My fury against the perceived injustice of his treatment of me led to daydreams of possible retribution at times and my ability to control my growing anger was becoming questionable. So I left.
My leaving came well before my dad's realization of what he had done to contribute to my own inferno came to him and when he later realized it, it troubled him terribly. My mother said that he cried himself to sleep often. Over a period of years that followed that acknowledgement, he repeatedly asked, tearfully at times, for forgiveness for the pain the he'd inflicted only to be greeted by a polite facade and secretly, but vehemently denied. We were both broken.
I had attended a Christian School for two years prior to leaving home. My parents, perhaps sensing the fury growing within me removed my brother and I from public school and enrolled us early in my sophomore year. I went from being an A student and the only sophomore in a senior Comp. III English class in public school, back to 7th grade level through the private school assessment testing. It was quite an adjustment and an assault on my ego to say the least.
It was a shock and I struggled at first, but eventually gave in to the peaceful, firm environment and began to dig in. I made an attempt to surrender my issues to my God and attempted to grow somewhat closer to Him through those two years. It was an apprehensive investment because I'd previously learned to fear God more than anything else during earlier years in church. I hadn't invested in that relationship with Him much, but now I was beginning to learn some different things about Him and a part of that was that He loved me. So I began to have some hope and started to share my heart with Him both at school and in the solitude of prayerful nighttime hours.
But in the daytime hours at home, the unchanged environment posed a direct conflict to my budding spiritual growth and relationship with my creator. The long smoldering fury that went against everything I had been taught began to overshadow my new found relationship with the Lord. And though I didn't really have a very mature personal relationship with Him, I knew that God was there while the physical and verbal battering was going on and that He knew it all. But He didn't make it go away in spite of my often tearful pleading. The rising conflict between what I was being taught about Christ and what He desired from me in the edifying environment of that Christian school and the fear inducing threat of being "punished" at home left me in turmoil. My anger toward my dad was creating a tremendous guilt in my heart because I knew from what I'd been taught both in church and at school that this wasn't right. But I couldn't reconcile what I was learning with what I was facing in my "Christian" home to make sense out of them and it became a bitter inner conflict ... and I reserved some of that bitterness for the God who was letting me down and that I now consequently began to hold suspiciously at arms length.
I learned to withdraw from true sincerity and openness with people in general, hiding my feelings and thoughts as a form of an emotional defense. But the resulting self imposed isolation began to create a vacuum of inner loneliness that I couldn't escape. I didn't feel free to share with anyone what I was going through inside and enduring in my own closeted misery. If it was ever suspected, let alone discovered that I had said anything to anyone about what was happening while I was still at home, I was certain things would get worse. So on the one hand, I built emotional and relational walls, but on the other I desperately needed companionship. Relationships then were generally kept within certain easily retractable bounds and they never soothed, let alone touched the depths of my inner anguish. I was searching for something I desperately needed, but couldn't yet identify "it". And trust? Not likely a word that I would have used in regard to anyone ... especially the God who did nothing to stop what was happening to me.
Though I may have pushed God to the back burner, He hadn't forgotten me and was just patiently and knowingly waiting for my eventual surrender. He doesn't easily let go of what He loves and those that belong to Him and He knows us far better than we know ourselves. Those are just a couple of the multitude of things that I'm now continually so thankful to Him for...
After leaving home I found myself struggling on my own. Not a surprising scenario for a seventeen year old without a home. Still confused, angry and emotionally isolated, I honestly tried to walk the straight path for a time out of that old familiar fear of God. But I wasn't gonna talk to Him. I was mad at Him and I wasn't sure just what to think of Him now.
Alone and ever more lonely, tempted by a new world of individual freedom around me with my resistance waning I began to compromise and experiment with things that I knew weren't right in order to fit in with a particular group of other rebelling people. Misery loves company right? I think in part that it was an effort to numb some of what I was carrying in my heart - a distraction from pain and loneliness. But in truth, it was also just old fashioned rebellion against everything that I felt had either hurt or failed me. But there would be a price...
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.” C.S Lewis
At some point I softened a little and realized that I had made myself the victim of extreme guilt and the overwhelming feeling that I had betrayed God because of my rebellion, my anger and the compromises I had made. And those feelings can easily become tools that the enemy can use with great success to bring about despair if we let him by leaving the source of them unresolved ... and they were not at all ineffective on me.
In those softer moments when my rebellion waned, it was almost as if I could hear the Lord calling after me. Memories of how good it felt to once walk and live in innocence with a good heart would somehow find their way into my thoughts and contrast themselves with the way that I was living at the moment. They'd usually drag guilt along with them to further wound my conscience and I'd usually find an unhealthy way to dismiss them. But there finally came an instance where that no longer worked.
At some point I finally stopped long enough to take a hard look back at where I'd come from in my own heart and how far away I was from my walk with my Lord during those days in that Christian school. In thinking about it in my young mind, I was certain that I'd already passed that much feared point of no return and the more that I thought about it, the more it became a rising terror because I knew that one day I would have to face Him. How could He possibly forgive such willful and knowing compromise and betrayal?
Considering all of the alcohol, the drugs, sex outside of marriage, the burning anger and all of the wrong things I'd done in such a short time, why would He even give me a second thought, let alone look at me? In my own mind I concluded that I'd definitely crossed the line and that now my only hope, the only One in all that exists who could have helped me if He wanted to, had justly and rightly turned His back. In my heart, I knew that was what I deserved and between my guilt and my ignorance or at least momentary blindness to the truth, the drugs, the alcohol and other seemingly overwhelming factors in my young life, I became convinced. In just a few months time, I had come to a point in my own confused mind that it became my sincere intention at seventeen years old to give up the struggle and end my own life. I concluded that if I was forever to be cut off from my only hope, then there was no hope left to be found ... and no reason to continue because I was already damned...
My intention was to permanently end the seemingly unbearable guilt and pain I was living in at that moment. And that would absolutely have been the ultimate result one evening ... except that my God, who was watching and waiting, knowing the time was now perfect for my surrender ... now intervened.
The Passion Well
Chapter 4:
Drinking From A Poisoned Well
This may start out a little slow, but please bear with me. I need to set the table...
I personally feel that we're living in a largely desensitized society of spiritually sick people who're left craving increasingly sensational input. The media at large, proudly being the most common source of temporal relief by attempting to scratch that itch, seems to continually work harder at providing its constituents with fresh, "astonishing" and "amazing" fodder to graze on.
But watching the progression toward the continually amazing seems like something similar to a hardcore drug addiction in that after a while the things that used to seem sensationally stimulating just don't provide the same high that they used to. A persistently new more powerful high seems to be required to affect the sensitivities of the consumer in order to achieve the desired result. But also similar to drug addiction, that high never lasts and a continual cycle requiring new satisfaction and simultaneously driving a waning sensitivity pushes society ever further down a destructive path of depravity and seriously eroding moral and ethical values. Society seems to be lustfully drinking a slow poison without any real regard to the corrosive effects and final cost.
Think about the common promotions of the media for just a minute. They loudly center around conflict, violence, whatever's "taboo", glorification of deception, defiance, disrespect, promoting greed - the accumulation of (you name it), illicit and demeaning sexuality, mysterious spiritualism, etc... and none of those things have any positive spiritual value. In fact, they have the potential for a greater negative and damaging effect than some may be willing to admit (somewhat similar to an addict in denial). I understand it now because I've been a subscriber myself and it wasn't until I understood that there's a design behind it and identified the culprit behind it's promotion that I began to change my habits. Fortunately for those who're seriously interested in advancing a real relationship with Christ, there is an antidote and cure ... but it requires something seriously lacking in society by many today even in the church ... discipline.
Years ago, I was struck by a phrase that many will likely recognize. It was a statement decrying the common sense attributes of a good diet. It was the phrase "You are what you eat". The obvious and true inference is that if you consume things that are healthy, you'll have a greater opportunity for being physically healthy. Another true but less appealing way to say it would be to turn it around and say that if you only feed your body junk, sooner or later you're very likely going to be sick. It's true that what we consume has a definite affect on our physical health - we know it's been proven ... So what if we applied that same phrase to our spiritual health?
Our creative and genius God designed a number of what I call parallels in life - things that we encounter in life as physical truths that mirror a spiritual truth. The truth of healthy physical consumption is absolutely one of those and one that we need to give some serious thought and discipline to if we truly want to be spiritually healthy.
Consider this ...
Genesis 1:27 (NLT) "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."
John 4:23-24 (NLT) 23 "But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. 24 For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
Genesis informs us that we were created by God in His image and John tells us that He (God) is spirit. So it's not hard to recognize that being created in His image, we're spirit also. If you haven't already, please get this - we are not our flesh! We are a spirit designed by God to be eternal! I personally tend to think of our status as being eternal spirits, wearing a temporary flesh suit. We're simply living in a temporary training ground with the opportunity to freely determine our future destination (a determination demonstrated by the evidence we seek to live out) while we wait to move to our intended eternal destination.
So in thinking about a necessary, healthy spiritual diet as followers of Christ, we know that He's given us an entire book full of spiritual dietary wisdom intended to make/keep us healthy for our journey. But as in any healthy regimen, clearly understanding the regimen and having the true discipline to follow it are the keys to healthy success (but be sure it's a discipleship, not just a "religious" exercise).
Philippians 4:8 (NLT) "And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise."
So far I've asked a question intended to encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ to consider the foundations of their relationship with Him. I need to point out that in no way am I condemning simple child-like belief. I think that may be the purest form, but as the Apostle Peter pointed out, we need to be prepared to explain our hope and without examining it, it may be hard for some of us to explain.
Secondly, I pointed out how I became motivated to examine my own belief when I found myself confronted in a rather confined situation with a friend that I discovered to be atheistic in his own beliefs and found myself poorly prepared to answer some of his questions. And I mentioned how the encounters in that relationship set me on a personal journey of discovery. The atheist friend I mentioned earlier, didn't change his views while I worked for him and I have no knowledge about whether or not he's changed them since. But I've come to realize that my presence in his employ was likely far more about me than about that friend in terms of someone being changed. I tend to believe that my all knowing Father led me into a situation that He knew was required to make this child begin to move from stagnation and continue to the next stage of a divinely designed, educational journey to find the answers that he lacked. It was a knowing, guiding parental move that resulted in the desired effect.
Thirdly, I briefly touched on just a little of the secular history references that coincide with biblical history regarding Christ's presence on the earth and a little about the biblical prophecy that foretold so many details of His arrival, life, death and resurrection and how Jesus fulfilled them all. I talked about how that journey that the Lord motivated me to take opened the door to understanding and a more active relationship with Him that drew me in as I began to scour both the New and Old Testaments in an effort to truly know Him.
In the past, I allowed myself to become poisoned by the attraction to unhealthy things and ideas. The kinds of things were those well pointed out and warned against in scripture and some of those ideas were conclusions I formulated myself based on either incorrect or partial information. The protection and defense against any of those things and ideas were laid out and available in advance by our knowing heavenly Father. So if I tend to hint repeatedly at the need to study scripture, you might understand why.
From here and through the following chapters, I'll give just a very few of the examples from my own life that further illustrate the Lord's positive parenting of me and a little of the poison I encountered and subjected myself to. It's my hope that you'll see His interaction with me and begin to look for it in your own life. My preconceived notions about how He operates were based on a puny perspective that didn't account for the vision and plans of a vast, unlimited God. It's been the Lord's repeated interactions, His grace, kindness and His long suffering patience with me that continue to give me experienced personal reason to want know Him ever more intimately and a part of why I've grown to love Him so deeply. I'll relate a few of the events from my own path and prior understandings and demonstrate how I've learned to see them from a different perspective - one that reveals the Lord's continued presence in my life and His ever continuing investment in my growth in spite of my own poison tainted failings and some of the poisonous decisions and actions of others.
The real journey toward a much more real and active relationship with my Creator didn't actually begin as such in my own mind. In the beginning I didn't recognize it as a journey toward anything or even a journey at all. I just needed to find some answers to some questions that continued to haunt me. Scratching that itch soon became a personal obsession that led to a passion that in a world full of pain and brokenness, that I know without a doubt I'll never have a reason to regret. It's become a learned, knowing passion for a Father, friend and savior whose own passion for me is magnified so many times greater than I have the capacity to understand or even contain. It's a love authored in heaven, even for the imperfect creature that I am ... and the imperfect any who dare to discover it - however imperfect they may be...
While I searched and as I began to submit myself (however haltingly early on) to the unseen parental hand that's guiding me continually toward His throne, I eventually began to slowly realize that I'd been wandering stumblingly down a path that has been divinely determined by my Lord throughout my whole life. I didn't see it right away and it hasn't always been an easy path, but as a parent myself, I've learned that the different personalities and traits of a child can require different approaches in the effort to raise them up and build good character. Father God as our parent, knowing the traits and character of His children far better than they know themselves, knows exactly what lessons are needed to guide and train them up to be the people of His hearts desire. One of the keys to the success of that process is our ability to submit willingly and trustingly to that process. As I've told some who've asked me how to move forward in their walk with the Lord, the key word is "submission".
Difficult children sometimes require firmer guidance, so looking back, the picture of my own life so far is much more clear to me now in some instances. They have the capacity to unnecessarily make the pathway toward spiritual maturity necessarily more difficult for themselves ... but a truly loving parent does not abandon the effort while there is still hope. Recognizing that I myself have at times been one of those difficult children and my heavenly Father being THE perfect parent, ... this explains a lot!
I confess that before I learned to submit to Him the difficulty of my path was determined in large part by my own failure to yield to Him completely. Sometimes the discipline requirements needed are more directly determined by the willingness of the child to submit to the necessary guidance of the parent. So the discipline of my path has been determined to a degree by my own stubborn decisions of course, but also by the divine parent who refused to give up on this child that He loves passionately. My life has numerous examples of this. Father God's efforts to raise me up as His child and train me in spite of my own inclinations, though very uncomfortable at times, have provided a continual source for gratitude now in retrospect and the further deepening of the well of my passion for Him. His kind patience and grace have been unrelenting.
I'm not at all proud of it, but the truth is that I've not lived the most sheltered or cautious existence. Throughout the various stages of this life in the past, I confronted its challenges passionately and aggressively - head on ... and I received the many resulting scars from those pursuits. They're not in any way badges of honor, but in more experienced reflection just simple reminders of both my prior shameful misadventures and bullheaded approach to life. But they're soothed by the memories of our God's continued undeserved favor to preserve me in spite of them. His grace is a salve capable of healing even the deepest wounds when they're humbly presented to Him ... in submission.
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Nehemiah 9:27 (NLT)
"So you handed them over to their enemies, who made them suffer. But in their time of trouble they cried to you, and you heard them from heaven. In your great mercy, you sent them liberators who rescued them from their enemies."
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I firmly believe now that having true faith and believing God requires that we believe above all else that He spoke the truth when He said that His intention toward us is for our good - and that we hold this to be true no matter how circumstances present themselves. But before I learned that, I had some self alleged "disappointments" with my parent Lord in the past. They were moments when I expected that our God would certainly do, or was doing one thing, only to find that in His own unlimited wisdom He chose to respond unexpectedly. In each of those situations, I was sometimes tempted to make quick judgments about my Lord's motives or actions based on my own self absorbed, puny perspective. But doing so would result in finding myself shamefully in error and humbly repentant later. On those occasions, like a spoiled brat I appointed blame to Him for things that others were responsible for while exercising their free will in less than positive ways. Others were the consequences of my own actions and decisions, and sometimes they were the actions that He took as my good and faithful Heavenly Father to correct my path ... out of deep and unwavering love.
Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)
"For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD . “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope."
Having made a serious effort to learn about Him, I've learned since to view everything with the character of God in mind first when attempting to come to any conclusions about His involvement in anything. I've learned to worship Him as God, trust and honor Him as my Father, celebrate Him as my friend and to adore and embrace Him as my Savior. But it didn't start out that way...
Turmoil for me began in my relationship with my dad as a "tween" and young teen. It's an unfortunate cache of memories that because of grace, I no longer dwell on. But they help give a little background to the point of my writing, so I'll briefly touch on them here.
There were things at work in my young teen world that made me a victim for certain mean spirited kids in public school. It happens to a lot of kids. In my case, I was viewed poorly and mocked in part because we weren't affluent or dressed according to the current culture and because of the shabby house where we lived. I didn't really care that much that we weren't well off, but I definitely did care about the harassment for things that I had no control over and I defiantly stood up against it with the passion of Irish heritage. I didn't share those things with anyone. I internalized them. I learned over time to wall off relationships and draw inward as a defense against drawing any possible further anger from my dad or anyone else. But multiple occasions of getting randomly slugged or becoming the target of group beatings between school buildings among other things tended to create a grinding personal inner friction along with all of life's other insults.
As a freshman in public high school I joined the wrestling team and threw myself completely into my workouts. I received an award for the most improved build while working with the intent of one day getting retribution for everything I'd suffered at the hands of my tormentors. So you might see that between multiple smoldering factors including my youthful male pride, the flame had actually been lit and the stage set for a boil-over long before it finally happened.
My dad suffered from mood swings that could change his demeanor in an instant. I didn't learn that until after he was gone and he apparently didn't recognize that it was a problem himself until later in his life. But decisions were made and the anger that he chose to exhibit at times and my pain, both physical and emotional suffered as the result of it were markedly registered on a growing list and angrily cataloged.
All that I knew at the time that it was happening was that his seemingly incredible ability to reach a flash point would leave me bruised and sometimes seriously hurt and bleeding as I struggled through my teen years. Assumptions and angry accusations were made sometimes even in instances of true honest innocence and were then punished violently. The severity of some of these "punishments" and other choices would even leave me with a few permanent reminders of once broken bones.
Over time I eventually became numbed to the physical pain. I was 16 years old and 135 pounds of intentionally solid, hard toned muscle the last time that I was "punished". I don't remember what I'd done or was alleged to have done, but whatever it was. it resulted in a "spanking". When swinging harder and faster didn't make me cry out, dad finally broke the fir 1 x 3 across the small of my back and I just turned and looked at him to ask if he was finished. By now he didn't dare to punch or kick me anymore. He just stared at me silently for a minute and left the room. My stored anger had hardened me to a point that I felt that I could take anything either he, or life could dish out and both would one day pay. I had sooo much to learn.
My own anger and frustration finally boiled over and I allowed it to overwhelm everything else. It resulted in my leaving home at seventeen. In reality, I left because of what I was afraid my anger might cause me to do. I was made to work with my dad when he needed help. He was a contractor and his work often left him in vulnerable positions. My fury against the perceived injustice of his treatment of me led to daydreams of possible retribution at times and my ability to control my growing anger was becoming questionable. So I left.
My leaving came well before my dad's realization of what he had done to contribute to my own inferno came to him and when he later realized it, it troubled him terribly. My mother said that he cried himself to sleep often. Over a period of years that followed that acknowledgement, he repeatedly asked, tearfully at times, for forgiveness for the pain the he'd inflicted only to be greeted by a polite facade and secretly, but vehemently denied. We were both broken.
I had attended a Christian School for two years prior to leaving home. My parents, perhaps sensing the fury growing within me removed my brother and I from public school and enrolled us early in my sophomore year. I went from being an A student and the only sophomore in a senior Comp. III English class in public school, back to 7th grade level through the private school assessment testing. It was quite an adjustment and an assault on my ego to say the least.
It was a shock and I struggled at first, but eventually gave in to the peaceful, firm environment and began to dig in. I made an attempt to surrender my issues to my God and attempted to grow somewhat closer to Him through those two years. It was an apprehensive investment because I'd previously learned to fear God more than anything else during earlier years in church. I hadn't invested in that relationship with Him much, but now I was beginning to learn some different things about Him and a part of that was that He loved me. So I began to have some hope and started to share my heart with Him both at school and in the solitude of prayerful nighttime hours.
But in the daytime hours at home, the unchanged environment posed a direct conflict to my budding spiritual growth and relationship with my creator. The long smoldering fury that went against everything I had been taught began to overshadow my new found relationship with the Lord. And though I didn't really have a very mature personal relationship with Him, I knew that God was there while the physical and verbal battering was going on and that He knew it all. But He didn't make it go away in spite of my often tearful pleading. The rising conflict between what I was being taught about Christ and what He desired from me in the edifying environment of that Christian school and the fear inducing threat of being "punished" at home left me in turmoil. My anger toward my dad was creating a tremendous guilt in my heart because I knew from what I'd been taught both in church and at school that this wasn't right. But I couldn't reconcile what I was learning with what I was facing in my "Christian" home to make sense out of them and it became a bitter inner conflict ... and I reserved some of that bitterness for the God who was letting me down and that I now consequently began to hold suspiciously at arms length.
I learned to withdraw from true sincerity and openness with people in general, hiding my feelings and thoughts as a form of an emotional defense. But the resulting self imposed isolation began to create a vacuum of inner loneliness that I couldn't escape. I didn't feel free to share with anyone what I was going through inside and enduring in my own closeted misery. If it was ever suspected, let alone discovered that I had said anything to anyone about what was happening while I was still at home, I was certain things would get worse. So on the one hand, I built emotional and relational walls, but on the other I desperately needed companionship. Relationships then were generally kept within certain easily retractable bounds and they never soothed, let alone touched the depths of my inner anguish. I was searching for something I desperately needed, but couldn't yet identify "it". And trust? Not likely a word that I would have used in regard to anyone ... especially the God who did nothing to stop what was happening to me.
Though I may have pushed God to the back burner, He hadn't forgotten me and was just patiently and knowingly waiting for my eventual surrender. He doesn't easily let go of what He loves and those that belong to Him and He knows us far better than we know ourselves. Those are just a couple of the multitude of things that I'm now continually so thankful to Him for...
After leaving home I found myself struggling on my own. Not a surprising scenario for a seventeen year old without a home. Still confused, angry and emotionally isolated, I honestly tried to walk the straight path for a time out of that old familiar fear of God. But I wasn't gonna talk to Him. I was mad at Him and I wasn't sure just what to think of Him now.
Alone and ever more lonely, tempted by a new world of individual freedom around me with my resistance waning I began to compromise and experiment with things that I knew weren't right in order to fit in with a particular group of other rebelling people. Misery loves company right? I think in part that it was an effort to numb some of what I was carrying in my heart - a distraction from pain and loneliness. But in truth, it was also just old fashioned rebellion against everything that I felt had either hurt or failed me. But there would be a price...
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.” C.S Lewis
At some point I softened a little and realized that I had made myself the victim of extreme guilt and the overwhelming feeling that I had betrayed God because of my rebellion, my anger and the compromises I had made. And those feelings can easily become tools that the enemy can use with great success to bring about despair if we let him by leaving the source of them unresolved ... and they were not at all ineffective on me.
In those softer moments when my rebellion waned, it was almost as if I could hear the Lord calling after me. Memories of how good it felt to once walk and live in innocence with a good heart would somehow find their way into my thoughts and contrast themselves with the way that I was living at the moment. They'd usually drag guilt along with them to further wound my conscience and I'd usually find an unhealthy way to dismiss them. But there finally came an instance where that no longer worked.
At some point I finally stopped long enough to take a hard look back at where I'd come from in my own heart and how far away I was from my walk with my Lord during those days in that Christian school. In thinking about it in my young mind, I was certain that I'd already passed that much feared point of no return and the more that I thought about it, the more it became a rising terror because I knew that one day I would have to face Him. How could He possibly forgive such willful and knowing compromise and betrayal?
Considering all of the alcohol, the drugs, sex outside of marriage, the burning anger and all of the wrong things I'd done in such a short time, why would He even give me a second thought, let alone look at me? In my own mind I concluded that I'd definitely crossed the line and that now my only hope, the only One in all that exists who could have helped me if He wanted to, had justly and rightly turned His back. In my heart, I knew that was what I deserved and between my guilt and my ignorance or at least momentary blindness to the truth, the drugs, the alcohol and other seemingly overwhelming factors in my young life, I became convinced. In just a few months time, I had come to a point in my own confused mind that it became my sincere intention at seventeen years old to give up the struggle and end my own life. I concluded that if I was forever to be cut off from my only hope, then there was no hope left to be found ... and no reason to continue because I was already damned...
My intention was to permanently end the seemingly unbearable guilt and pain I was living in at that moment. And that would absolutely have been the ultimate result one evening ... except that my God, who was watching and waiting, knowing the time was now perfect for my surrender ... now intervened.
My simple faith had been solid - I had no desire to risk questioning the truth that God did in fact exist or that He was sovereign over all of creation ... including me. So my conscious missteps in that period of life cast against the backdrop of my limited understanding of Him now held me in fearful torture. I respected Him and I feared Him, which to a proper and holy degree is right - but I was now so much more just deathly afraid of Him. My perception of Him then was more strictly one of wrath, not allowing the truth of one that involved intimate love and caring as well as one being forever justly due my reverent respect.
A partial truth can be so dangerous and so deceptive. It can skew understanding to allow belief in a lie and it's a potential weapon commonly manipulated by our enemy. It's a weapon that he uses unsparingly against those who fail to seek out the fullness of what is real - what truly exists in the sight of The One who sees and knows everything. It's a truth that He makes evident in the complete fullness of His word.
I remember being more thoughtfully conscious a couple days after my visit to the hospital and as soon as it was possible, intentionally eluding anyone else so that I could be alone. I didn't want to talk to anyone or see anyone. I remember walking down an empty street railing against God like a young mad man. I still believed he was there and I knew it was God that caused me to fail in my intention, it had to be. Now He was just keeping me in torture, so I was angry with Him. The questions I had so violently burning in my mind now were simple. They really shouldn't be too hard for God to answer, although I really didn't expect Him to: "What do you want from me?!! Why did you make me live?!! Why didn't you just let me die?!!" ... ... ... "Because you've not yet fulfilled the purpose that I created you for" came the soft reply out of nowhere with no one around ...
I was shocked and totally stunned. His unexpected response shut my mouth like a steel trap and at the same time made me very suddenly and keenly aware that if He had in fact completely abandoned me because of my betrayals to His heart - He wouldn't be responding to me now. I was speechless, in awe ... and also suddenly once again very reverently afraid. What would He do to me now? I was struggling to contemplate and digest what this all meant and that contemplation left me a very, very quiet young man for weeks afterward. His response also now left me wrestling with new questions that I didn't have answers for. Questions like: "What purpose?" " Why didn't He intervene sooner when He knew I was in trouble?" "Where was He when I cried out to Him?" "Why is He talking to me now?" "Really, what DOES He want from me?" But He was silent.
After a couple of months of emptiness, isolation and quiet meditation, the deep loneliness began to return - though not with quite as much prominence as before. It was absolutely certain now that even when I felt alone, I clearly wasn't. But one thing that I've learned about the Master - He doesn't speak unless He has something to say and when He speaks, it's the pinnacle of wisdom to listen intently. He's perfectly complete and in complete control. He may just be silent, ... but never doubt that He's there.
I longed for a companion, but not just any companion. I no longer felt the need or a desire for the "friends" who were a part of my previous drunken, drug infused exploits. They would only tend to lead me back to that place in life that I was desperate to forever abandon. I longed now for someone I could trust, a companion who could help in the healing of a young, very torn up heart.
Did He see me now completely broken, submissive and sitting among the ashes? Was He still listening? Did He care?
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Psalm 25:16 (NLT)
"Turn to me and have mercy, for I am alone and in deep distress."
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