Tag: Gospel

Reflections on Being Clean for Four Years, Part One

Published on by Ian6 Comments

Today I celebrate, by the grace of God, four years clean. Prepare yourself for lots of CAPS, boldness, BOLD CAPS, suave italics, and exclamations, ’cause I am one excited dude today! Also I’ve had lots of chocolate. Anyway. This is my first think in a series of thinks about it. (Being clean, that is. Not chocolate.)

Why I Did It (Got High, that is)

This is a doozy. People ask, you know? They wanna know why. As you might imagine, I did, too, but it’s not an easy question to answer.

For a while, I thought it had to do with a few concrete things in my past. To some degree, I’m sure they played a role, and there’s no doubt in my mind that facing such things was a very important step in my recovery. That being said, a piece of advice: face yer demons but keep the train a’chuggin’. After spending too many years in the tangled thought-maze of Cause and Effect, I found no escape but the obvious one, namely, that the maze wasn’t real, that it had at some point become a false construct to mask my inability to face myself. Deep, I know.

Well, so I moved on to accusing my upbringing. Life is easier when you don’t have to take responsibility for it, and since I decided those few concrete instances in my past, while terrible, couldn’t be blamed for it all, my parents were the next likely target. But my parents, you see, are human, and as humans are known for making mistakes from time to time, I decided this, too, wasn’t going to provide the answer I sought.

But what about the Church! There’s a place FULL of bad, hypocritical people entrusted with teaching Sunday School just begging to be maligned! I did this for a while, and with gusto. Unfortunately, while I don’t hold to every piece of the Southern Baptist doctrine in which I was brought up, the Church, too, is full of humans, and as humans are known for making mistakes from time to time… yeah.

It was me, folks. I was the problem. More accurately, what I didn’t do was the problem. Jesus gives this caveat at the end of his revolutionary Sermon on the Mount: “These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on a rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.” (MSG)

His words are so good! They’re for our good, not to put up some unnecessary red tape. They’re words for flourishing, for health, for life. From beginning to end, the Bible talks about people choosing either life or death. EDEN: all kinds of awesome fruit to eat, but Adam and Eve have to have the forbidden stuff and thereby choose death. THE JEWS: sometimes they choose life (following Moses out of Egypt), sometimes they choose death (makin’ cows outta gold in the desert and then worshiping them), and God’s always telling ’em stuff like, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse… so choose LIFE that you might LIVE!” I wanna LIVE! Don’t you? DAVID: gets off to an incredible start killing a giant, for God’s sake, but ends up choosing death — the death of his first, precious, baby son — all because he can’t keep it in his pants. SOLOMON: super smart, total disaster. ETC.

And then Jesus comes along and says, “I really want you to get this! I want you to have what I intended you to have from before Time began, and I want you to have it SO BAD I’ll die for you to have it.” And he did. He chose death for our life.

But then he got up! Can I get a Hallelujah?! But that’s another sermon.

In short, I heard the words of Jesus and I didn’t do them and my house fell down. And GREAT was the destruction of it. And LONG-LASTING the pain it caused — to me, to my family, to everyone I loved, and to lots of people I didn’t. I know it’s not in vogue to talk, in moments like these, of the danger of hell, but whatever. Heed my warning: The same destruction, the same growing, gnawing emptiness which ended with me and a needle full of heroin in my arm stares you in the face even now if you neglect Jesus’ words.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Sacrificial Vulnerability

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I got on here to publicly shame the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower. (If you haven’t seen it, know that there are spoilers in this post.) I planned it throughout the entire movie because I thought it was going to be like every other movie. I thought this poor kid was gonna fall in love with this poor girl and she was gonna miss it and treat him badly and then realize it toward the end and that would be that — requited love, which is rare and frustrating to watch — and I was going to ask insightful questions about what that movie says about what our culture is telling us about love, and then the end happened.

You wanna know why I watch movies? I watch movies for the moments that open me up. I live to feel raw and awake and alive to the Story of brokenness and redemption.

Like the part when this kid’s parents find out what his aunt did to him, and his dad walks in to his son’s room in the psychiatric ward and walks over to him and takes his head in his hands and kisses his forehead. You have to see the movie because the whole time his dad is this disinterested non-person, and then this, this understanding! This gentle. encompassing. closeness.

The big questions now are not for you or for our culture. They’re for me. Like: What happened to me that makes me seek out sickness? Why is it I want to be like that kid? I was way too young when I was introduced to sexuality, but I wasn’t abused like he was.

I just want to be understood, you know? Yeah. I want to walk next to be people who get it. This kid finds a group of people who get it, and that rings this big bell of longing inside of me.

But the sickness… you wanna know something? I was relieved, six years ago, when a psychiatrist told me there was a strong possibility I was in the early stages of schizoaffective disorder, but it’s not for the reasons I used to think. I used to think I just wanted to be sick, to be lazy, to have excuses. I mean those could be part of it, but the real, deep undercurrent was that I could maybe, now, be free to be me. I thought schizoaffective disorder would provide a lens through which I could finally see myself clearly. I thought it could explain the darkness inside me.

But I don’t think that’s all of it, either. When I came home from that appointment, my sister was the first person I told — I didn’t want Mom and Dad in the room with me when that psychiatrist told me because I didn’t know what her diagnosis would be (or maybe I didn’t want them to hear that I wasn’t ADD, that I didn’t have an excuse for totally failing at college) — and when I did, when I told my sister, she just hugged me and said, “I knew there was something else going on.”

But what was it? What else was going on? It wasn’t schizoaffective disorder. I always felt different, but I know now that I’m not.

That’s the point here: We’ve all got the same story. We’re all trying to fill the big impossible holes inside of us. I’ve always felt different but I’m not. I am seriously — but not fatally, thank God — narcissistic. Or I was.

The Gospel really is wonderful.

I was led to pray recently that God would restore the innocence I had when I was three, because when I was four, it was gone. I was that young. (That would certainly qualify as an answer to those questions above.) I didn’t understand it at the time. I understood that I had to hide it from Mom and Dad, and as I grew older, I became so ashamed, so full of guilt.

You know what opened me up? Another person’s honesty. Michael’s honesty. He told me what happened to him, and I thanked God at that moment that at least the person who introduced me to sexuality at the age of four was only a couple years older than I was and that she was a she.

What is going on in the quiet?

I’m not trying to be dramatic, really. I just think we have to ask ourselves these questions. And if I’m not vulnerable about all of this like Michael was, you might not ever see it in yourself. You might not ever come out and ask the questions which are eating you alive because you don’t even know they exist. You might not ever talk to someone about it.

And if that’s you, you have to. You have to talk to someone about it.

I Am SO GLAD I’m Clean

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I was going through old journals yesterday and found this entry from June 20th, 2007, which was at The Start Of It All. It’s good to look back and see out of what depths God has brought me. (Psalm 30)

(Begin: journal entry.)
I can’t sleep. Things are weighing down on me. I never consider suicide, but I always want relief. I am ever in search of it, some way to kill the pain.
I can’t hold a job. I don’t want to work but I also don’t want to sit around.
I feel most of the time like no one wants to be around me. This is a dark time, and the light at the end of the tunnel winked out. Where is hope? I hope in everlasting life and I know I have it now, but the time from now until I am perfected is too much to bear.
I don’t really mean that because I’ve made it this far. I just want to be okay. I just want to feel good about my life.
There are ways to accomplish this — exercise and eat right, read the Bible — but every time I consider these, I think it’s no use starting because I never follow through.
And I’d love to believe that if I just found the right woman, things would shape up, but I’d love to believe a lot of things.
I’d love to believe life gets easier, for instance, that this is simply a depressed slump that has an end.
But it’s times like these that I can’t remember beautiful things and everything seems worthless and irrelevant.
What can drive me out of this place? People drive me, but most people don’t like me. Music can drive me but I don’t have the discipline. God can and does drive me, but I feel so sinful so much of the time that it’s hard to approach him. This isn’t a crisis of belief. I believe God exists; I just can’t see him. I feel him pursuing me — the Hound of Heaven — and I’d give up my life except that it’s hard to see, in times like these, that the life he offers is actually better. I know it somewhere in my soul, but it’s hard to see.
I want to taste the Divine Nature so I can more easily turn my back on sin and folly (O, taste and see that the Lord is good!), but I don’t believe I’ll get it because he’s already given me more than enough reason to believe he is good and wants the best for me.
When does it end? He is the only one who can pull me out.
Oh God! Where are you now?
(End: journal entry.)

Now this.

If you’re feeling any of that, there is a Light. I still feel some of these things sometimes, but mostly I’m healthy — mentally, spiritually, emotionally.

One thing I know: I was blind, but now I see.

Tension

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I’ve been thinking a lot about tension, about allowing it to exist and being ok with it. As I’ve been thinking, I’ve started to see tension applying to a lot of categories in my life. In fact, it seems to exist in every category.

For instance (briefly), politics: my upbringing plus my understanding of history plus my beliefs concerning people’s inherent fallenness make me lean conservative, but my bleeding heart (which I don’t consider naïve) makes me lean big government/lots of programs; psychology: how much must I “believe in myself” creatively, etc. in order to come into my own, so to speak, and how much has pop psychology bullshit seeped into and twisted what should be the praise and love of God, familiarity with my position in his family, and total trust in his sovereignty as the ultimate answer to mental health, specifically but not limited to depression and anxiety, which together are the bane of my creativity; music, généralement: tension is the reason I am still more moved by “classical” music, the composers of which were more acquainted and comfortable with tension than most modern artists (other than Radiohead), their music still speaking what words can’t about this life of tension.

I could go on and on.

I see tension everywhere – which I only just realized thanks to a conversation with a good friend – so that I’m rarely capable of getting across what’s going on in my head because I run back and forth from this side of the argument to that, never completely spelling out either because, as my mind runs ahead of my mouth, I’m thinking of an apology against the capitulation I’m speaking.

Questions questions questions, which I’m starting to see as tension tension tension, which I’m finally starting to be ok with, because really, back to the psychology bit, this whole train of thought serves to make me even more aware just how utterly necessary it is to be leaning on and trusting in God – how could I not go insane otherwise? – these mysteries being his, for which I’m so thankful, because I need mystery.

You’re tired of being in your head? You want to see something new? Following Christ – really trusting and loving him and losing my life to gain it – is proving to be a more exciting life than I imagined existed. Please, I beg you, consider him. Leave for a moment your problems with Christendom and consider him. O, the man acquainted with sorrows knows your pain! He knows about the big insatiably thirsty hole in your being and he stands up and cries, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink!”

Go to him. Drink.