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| | Let's talk about brokenness. (If you read only one of my posts this entire year, read this one, please, and think about it. This is important, and true. And, honestly, it has nothing to do with anyone and everything to do with everyone. So shush and read.)
Everyone feels that they have hurts which no one else can understand for scope and uniqueness. "Nobody knows // the trouble I seen," they sing in a mournful tone. Trouble comes, and it comes so often in this worn-over life that they begin making bricks, and then a tower out of their self pity and hunger, shutting themselves away row by row.
It is true: no one has been wounded in particularly the way you have, because you are the only one of you in existence. But isolation by experience is entirely a post-modern construct formed by self creation.
What all those fancy words in the last sentence mean is that humans, when we believe we create ourselves and our own world by each action and experience we have, eventually end up on an island, separated from man and God. This separation breeds the "cult of the individual" -- not the wonderful attributes of individuality and uniqueness, where we celebrate our God-given differences, but the cult of individual which raises each person to the level of god over their own lives. Post-modernism says, "You make your own standards. You measure your own experiences. Therefore, what anyone else says about the way you live cannot be true unless you bear witness to it inside because only you can measure what you have lived, as you are the only one who truly understands what it is like to be you." Post-modernism separates us from God by declaring that our thoughts are our truth. To stuff be His thoughts if they don't "speak to me" or "address my situation."
Persons caught in this have thus allowed their broken places to separate them from God, the only source of healing. They look at their ruined lives and proclaim, "I have a right to be this way! I'm the victim! Look what happened to make me this way. No one can say how I am wrong because they don't know what I've been through." This attitude accomplishes the abominable by elevating darkness to the position of light, untruth to the position of truth. "I don't care if it's true for you, it's true for me." Our thoughts, if bent this way, slap the face of God by deposing him from his being, his essence, of real truth.
No. Truth exists outside of our experiences. Yes, it can be desperately difficult to find that truth through the rain, blood, and tears. But it exists. The way out is not by believing your version of truth, which may or may not really be truth at all (probably not, considering that you are human and therefore deeply flawed), but by believing the real truth. Where do you get that?
Must I even ask?
I marvel so often that the events and duties I dread beforehand often turn into sunshine and rainbows when I have actually set my teeth and begun them. My fear was not reality, but it became that reality until I decided to do what was necessary and right. Ironically, that very action is what released me from my prison of fake, frightening false truth. Too often we allow the same in our relationship -- or non-relationship -- with God.
Life sucks. As Paul said, we are "pressed but not crushed, persecuted but not abandoned, pressed down but not destroyed." God's great design in allowing pain is that it send us scurrying after Him. So many times I have been the little child tugging dreadfully hard on his belt, whimpering, "Um...daddy? Daddy! I'M SCARED!" Just as a doctor sometimes has to re-break a bone that set incorrectly after a fracture, or a surgeon often has to cut away malignant tissue, so God also uses pressure and hurt to take away older hurts. When we run from His careful hands, we destroy the opportunity He had set up to heal our hearts and, in the process, ruin ourselves even more.
Run, baby, run. But run to, not from.
| | | Posted 5/23/2006 9:03 PM - 11 comments
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