Tag: Jesus

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.

The Way Out

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I have a problem: I sometimes forget who Jesus is. I also sometimes forget who I am.

It’s dangerous, you know. It’s one of the reasons I started doing drugs. Had I known, had I really understood the Gospel, I wouldn’t have felt the enormous weight of guilt and shame from which I was trying to escape because it wouldn’t have existed. I’d have known that Jesus loved me anyway, that he bore all that weight so I wouldn’t have to, that I’m actually and finally safe/accepted/loved. And I did, in my head. I knew it. I just didn’t believe it.

How did it happen, you ask? How in the world did I actually start believing it so that things changed? So that I changed?  Well, as I said, I still don’t believe it all the time; but the way I sometimes catch the fleeting glimmers I do is by listening to him, to Jesus.

Somehow, I developed this habit over the years of always reading about him. The Bible was more like a history book instead of Words That Are Alive. From time to time, I would have experiences while reading where it felt like it was really real, but those were few and far between. (To be honest, they still are.)

But when I remember to read as though the things about which I’m reading actually happened, as though Jesus were actually a person, things begin to change. I sit down to read and I imagine the whole scene: there he is in the middle of a crowd, walking from person to person, looking into their eyes and smiling at them, healing them and loving on them, trying to teach them things which most of them totally miss, and this young guy wearing a three-piece suit made from Italian wool and some expensive-looking leather loafers comes up to him, hands in his pockets, and he says, you know, “Hey, I like what you’ve got, so what do I need to do to get it?” And Jesus looks at him with that piercing gaze of his, cocks his head to one side, and says, “Love God and love your neighbor.” And this young, successful, arrogant guy inflates his chest a little and says, “Yeah I’m doin pretty well with that actually.” And Jesus says, “Okay, so you won’t mind giving up everything you have for the poor…”

I’m not gonna tell the rest of the story because you know it. I’m just trying to say when I read it like that, when I’m listening to him, he’s different. He says stuff that doesn’t make sense. He rarely answers questions directly.

And that’s just it: we know too much. I mean we know, don’t we, that he was answering their hearts, answering their real questions, or what their questions should have been. That’s what you were thinking as you read that last bit, wasn’t it? I’m not saying all the stuff you know is bad; I’m just asking you to listen.

There was an exercise we did at Wayside — the fifth and final rehab I attended — in which we went through the Gospel of John and summarized every chapter, wrote it down in our own words. That’s when it happened for me. That’s when I met him again.

So my submission to you is that if you find yourself having the same problem — you’ve forgotten who he is, or you just want to change so badly but you can’t — try it. Even if you’ve done it before, do it again. You’ll start to believe he can actually change things. You’ll start to believe he wants to. And actually, he’s so good that you’ll start to change just by getting to know him better.

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” That’s from the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, and you know what comes right before it?

“…where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

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.