On the lies demons tell us...

Me again.

As I do my copying and pasting, as I have been for work for the past... um, longer than I can remember anymore, I finally figured out that it's so mindless that I can listen to sermons again while doing it. And so, until I'm done, which will hopefully be this week, this place will probably be flooded more than usual with sermon snippets. Apologies if you find it dull and/or don't really like Matt Chandler's sermons, but really, I think they're awesome, and so that's how it goes.

So he rambles on (in the sermon from April 10th, 2011, which you can hear/read here) and somewhere near minute twenty, he quotes Colossians 2:13-15:

13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14. by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.


And then a little later he says this:

Now I love that last line in that text that says, “He puts to open shame the rulers and the principalities.” That’s a reference to demonic creatures. And I know we’re in the West and we want to pretend that stuff is not real, but in the Scriptures and in our experience here as your pastors here, there are demonic activities still very much functioning. Really the sole weapon they have is lying. They just lie and get us to believe lies. And those lies lead us into dark places.

Here’s what the text just said. A couple weeks ago, we were doing baptisms, and the girl who was baptized before my daughter gave this testimony of being sexually abused by a family member who was a deacon at a church. And then another family member did the same thing, which led her into a life of deep darkness, depravity and choosing to be abused by people. In fact, in her testimony, she said, “There are men with a radar for women like me.” She talked about how she had been abused and had just surrendered herself, thinking that she deserved that abuse somehow. Those are dark lies that she has believed. Who is whispering those lies to her? The authorities and principalities of this fallen world. And then yet in the middle of all those lies, being led down dark and deplorable, unspeakable paths, Jesus intervenes. Do you know what’s crazy? She gets in the water in front of a thousand strangers and shares her darkest moments. Do you know what happened in that moment? Jesus just said, “See? I’m better, bigger and stronger than this.”

And sure, anybody who knows me might see how that sort of explanation might affect me directly, even though my story isn't nearly that brutal, but I've never heard demons explained that way. I mean, I've heard them explained in a few ways, mostly with self-destructive behavior alteration, but this is the first time it's been said in a way where the person still makes all their choices on their own, but the information they're given in order to make those choices, and in particular, the information they're given about themselves, is very, very wrong.

And in my own personal story, there was a really distinct and abrupt shift from that perception of me where that treatment was what I deserved to realizing that I could get out of that pattern if I would just call a spade a spade and stop justifying the mistreatment of myself as being something unchangeable or even usual.

And in that sentence, it makes it seem like an easy thing to do, but it really wasn't. I spent months trying to figure out what it was that I was emitting that made me vulnerable, what those men's radar was picking up. And then just like that, a friend last summer told me my perception of events that had transpired in the winter of 2000 were wrong, it negated everything I'd felt about what I deserved in a flash, even though I'd spent the ten years after those events in that same trap of abuse as Matt Chandler described.

The thing with deserving is we don't deserve anything. I think I've talked about it before, either in this blog or the black blog, but even from a natural, non-religious standpoint, we don't deserve anything. I mean, nature is a cruel, cruel game of survival and the fact that we have shelter, that we have food and water, that we have things in our lives that go above and beyond simple survival and that's not enough and we think we deserve things on top of that? It makes no sense. We don't deserve anything. There is no deserving. Even earning is iffy in the world we live in. You earn your living, earn your car, earn your house and then what? It gets wiped away in a tsunami. Just like that, in a second, it's gone. Add to that the disproportionate way that income is inversely related to work and really, what is earned anymore? You have the person working their ass off making minimum wage, going home utterly exhausted and spent physically and emotionally and totally beaten down at the end of the day and you have the executive who spends three hours of his workday on facebook.

So what is it that makes us feel we deserve anything?

But what I never realized in having that point of view is that I also held the opposite view. It's not that I deserve nothing at all, which really is what not deserving anything is, right? No, instead, all along, I've believed I deserve bad things. I deserved to be abused. I deserved to be mistreated. And it was only when Matt Chandler used that word that it clicked.

I've never said I have bad luck, but I have said I am unlucky in some aspects of life. To me, they're not the same. One implies junk is forced upon you as though you're some sort of victim, while the other, I felt, was more proactive. I tried, I did my best to remain idealistic and to stave off the cynicism, but in the end those aspects of my life just weren't meant to go well. But I didn't stop trying, even though I "knew" that. But the thing is, when you try and try and try all while believing you deserve horrible things, you will get those horrible things.

And I did analyse to death how those men got into my life, and I did find a pattern wherein they'd hurt me or reject me in some brutal, blatant way and when I wouldn't leave, when I'd forgive them and move on, that's when they knew. Whether it was conscious or not on their part, it was the same in every abusive relationship I've been in so far. And because I craved that indifference because I thought that was all there was out there because it was all I knew, I stayed and in staying, I shut myself off to any other possibilities.

But really, when I found God, or God picked me, stuff started to fall apart. How could God love me, how could I be a child of God, and- not that He'd let these things happen, but that He'd let me do these things to myself- how could He not make me feel loved enough to not even know what kind of love to hope for? And it made no sense because He made me loving. He made me forgiving. He made me strong enough to not carry a grudge (in the majority of situations anyway). What if God's example for love in my life was me all along? How could selfless, sacrificial love not exist if that was how I was living?

Or at least, striving to live.

And then that friend said without using the words, "You were loved; it just didn't come across that way," and things changed. There was love for me in the world, but I was missing it.

And so, I kind of do believe that explanation of demons. Not to shield myself from responsibility, but people say I'm fairly self-aware, but how else could I miss something so huge?

On idols and love...

From Matt Chandler's sermon given on March 20, 2011, questions which he says he took from Tim Keller originally:

So how do you identify idols? I have ten questions to ask yourself:
1. What consumes most of your thoughts and feelings?
2. What motivates the things that you do?
3. What are you most afraid of?
4. What brings the highest amount of frustration or anger into your life?
5. What is one thing that can change your mood in a second?
6. What would your friends say is your favorite topic of conversation?
7. What are some things that you feel you can’t live without?
8. What brings you solace?
9. What do you yearn for?
10. What is one thing that you wish God would do for you?
If you begin to answer those questions, you’ll be able to find your idols. Because what you think about, what you yearn for, what you talk about, what you want God to do for you, what drives you, what makes you angry, what satisfies you and what brings you comfort is what you worship.

I figure the best way to answer those questions is to just whip out answers as fast as possible without thinking. Here are mine.

1. Everything. There’s no real singular subject, but it’s everything. My dad refers to it as my anxiety, but it’s not usually anxiety so much as trying to figure things out. Assessment, I guess.
2. Love. More specifically, to be loved.
3. Everything. Life itself.
4. Lack of control.
5. Hard to put into words, but there are these moments where I’m the bad guy and I’m going to lose somebody and I have zero control over what they will do with me next. In those moments, I am ruined for the day. It doesn’t help that they’re usually brought on by things I’ve said or done that I really shouldn’t have.
6. Dogs. Probably. But I talk a lot, so I’m not sure that’s the only subject they might pick up on.
7. A car. Cars are freedom. And my dogs. Dogs are joy and family. Comfort and protection, I guess, is what I get from both.
8. Nothing. God, I guess, because nothing of this world brings me solace. It’s a major complaint lately. I have no escape. I have no tv, I have no substance that I can take to take me away and people would say the internet is my solace, but really, it’s more work than it is fun most of the time. It’s not relaxing. Writing does give me some relief, but I haven’t gone without it in over four years so I don’t know how big of a part it plays. You can always write- wherever you are. There’s always a pen and a receipt or business card or whatever. And if you know yourself well enough, you can write tiny and in code to fit it all in.
9. Happiness, I guess. Just knowing what that feels like. Maybe I already have it but I just don’t realize that this is what happiness feels like.
10. Love me. I wish I could know it’s there. I wish I could feel it even if I don’t feel it directly. You know? I wish I could be sure of it. Same goes for earthly loves too. I’m not even sure my own dogs love me.

Sometimes, I wish my idols were the easy ones, like money or lust or stuff. Or maybe they are easy ones and I just don’t see it. The most obvious one is my dogs but even then, I don’t think they’re idols so much as a part of my life I know a lot about and that just makes me laugh every day. They’re a source of a lot of stories. But I guess that’s it, right? If God is everything, shouldn’t He be a source of stories? I never do talk about God. Well, not never, but rarely. Of all the things I talk about, His pepperings are probably among the rarest. Shyness, I guess. How do you talk about greatness without ruining it? It’s like trying to describe how the Rockies make you feel to somebody who has never been. (Except that there's a 98% chance that they're somehow adamantly opinionated and confrontational about whether or not mountains exist.)

The other most obvious one is control. There are two instances of control with which I have the most trouble. One is the one I talked about in #5 and the other is with my dogs in public. I got yelled at by neighbors in the city so often that I am actually still quite scared of walking them in the daytime. I'm on high alert the entire time, waiting for somebody to come out and scream at me. As a result, if I'm out with my dogs in the daytime, I stress an enormous amount over the control I have over them. If they do something out of line, I panic. I become so easily frustrated because of the tenseness of the situation that the whole ordeal becomes so unpleasant that I just won't do it. I'll either walk them in the middle of the night or not at all.

I guess if I branch that out further, the overall theme is that I can't make mistakes. Whether I make a mistake in a relationship or I make what some stranger perceives as a mistake, I lose the control. I lose my confidence and my equality. All of a sudden, I'm the underdog and there's nothing I can do about it. In those moments, to be honest, I loathe myself.

Because if I was good enough, if I was a quality individual, I could make mistakes and people would forgive me. But since I'm not, people don't forgive me and instead, choose to walk out of my life completely or berate my person without any regard for me as a soul. Evidently, my quality of person makes it such that either one of those becomes easy.

And there is the other point Matt Chandler made in the same sermon:

The Bible is filled with shady characters. And this goes back to the point that the book is about the mercy and beauty of God in Christ and not you and me. Because almost all the men and women in Scripture are these abject failures who God uses mightily. Why? Because the point is Him, not you. So for those of you who like the other end of the spectrum where you loathe yourself, that’s just as much idolatry as loving yourself. Both are saying, “I have no need of the cross of Christ.” Both are wrong.

Right there, the point being I should be allowed to make mistakes, I should be allowed to fail and I should be allowed to just be me because that's enough. I may not be the best and I may not be perfect, but God made me lovable.

Jesus, the most loving character ever written, was sacrificed to make me perfect and take away my profound failings and to make me enough just as I am.

One day, I'll figure it out. Maybe.

And until then, it (this particular bit of idolatry), among many other things, will stand between me and God, from my end, not His.

Always critical...

There are some things I find difficult about the church structure. And I'm always hesitant to say anything about it (even though this blog would suggest otherwise) because I really don't want to be the one who sits on the outside and tells the inside how to do its thing. But there are two things a few pastors seem to do that I've noticed a lot lately that just lose me.

1. Rehoming animals.
This one, if you know me at all, is kind of obvious. If somebody rehomes a dog, I immediately begin to question their person. To discard a dog is to discard a soul. It's to actively participate in the emotional scarring of an individual. It's also to throw that individual you've scarred onto somebody else.

Sure, life as a pastor is rough. I don't doubt it. But how many pastors these days say church comes in fourth on the priority list?

1. God
2. Wife
3. Family
4. Church

Seems to me that a dog would fit in #3. And not only is the emotional scarring of the abandoned dog significant, the negative lessons it teaches your children and those around you about loyalty, unconditional love and frankly, the elderly are also very important.

Dogs, I think, are a gift from God to show us what unconditional love looks like. They're meant to help us understand how to give sacrificially and how to put aside the events of our day and love wholeheartedly as if that were all that mattered.

Something about a pastor rehoming a dog, especially an elderly one, makes me question whether he knows love at all. How can he teach the love of God when he has no respect for the love of a dog? I'm serious too. Dogs don't need much and as they grow older; they need less and less (albeit more in vet bills sometimes). To abandon a faithful friend as they enter into their older years where they require compassion and the fulfillment of trust is just cruel. It's blatantly unloving. And somehow, I still hold pastors above regular people in that sense. They should love more. They should strive to love harder and fuller than the rest of us.

And really, if you foresee a pastoral life in your future, don't get a dog if you can't prioritize properly. Be responsible.

2. One-sided communication.
In another lifetime, I joined a pet forum on the internet. At the time, I was pretty sick and couldn't really do anything with myself, so I decided to try to help people with their dogs online. When I first got there, there were about twenty threads updated every day. It wasn't that many in spite of the admin's bloated membership number.

Once in a while, somebody would post a thread with some obscure medical issue that nobody knew anything about. They'd be upset and you could kind of tell by the tone of their post that they'd be sitting there waiting for a response. And I won't hesitate to say that a couple times after I was made more aware of those empty threads, that person was me. I remember asking how to train Jemma when she overreacts in a very negative way to any sort of correction. At the time, she had really low estrogen too, so that contributed to her submissive upset. Nobody answered. I remember feeling hopeless and a little bit rejected.

All that to say, I quickly learned that people just want an ear most of the time. They don't necessarily need all the answers but they do want somebody to hear them and just be there. And on this forum, it was a little bit of an extreme because of the panic that sets in when somebody we love is afflicted with something we can't figure out, but on a lower level, this happens everywhere with everybody in every situation.

A commenter on that forum who appeared out of nowhere one time, commented that this Prin person (i.e. me) had a "sickness" whereby she'd answer everything. And I did. I tried my best to answer all the threads nobody would answer, even if just to push it back up to the new threads so somebody with actual answers would see it.

When I left that forum a few years ago, the daily thread count had risen from the twenty or so when I'd arrived to around 120. And it's not just because of me. Other people started doing the same and it became a really caring forum. People listened. They tried to help. It was great.

I still try to do it now, in my daily life. I try to hear when somebody just needs an ear- although sometimes, it's hard not to offer unsolicited advice. I've been told that somehow, people feel they can open up to me and say things they wouldn't otherwise say out loud. I love that. I love the privilege of people letting me in.

Pastors have that privilege built into their role. People open up. People want to be heard. People want direction or at the very least, understanding.

A pastor has to reply. Has to. I understand schedules are tight and pastors are pulled every which way, but still, there has to be a way, even if that way is finding a volunteer who will help you sort through your email or phone messages or other requests. You have to answer.

Nothing makes a person feel invisible quite like being asked, "How are you?" and being shut down during the reply. Sure, in some parts of society, people ask that question without meaning, but a pastor is supposed to care. And worse still is the next time the person is asked the same question. How do you answer a question to which the asker has already expressed no interest in hearing an answer?

You just stop answering. You shut down. You build a boundary between you and your pastor and that boundary makes the relationship superficial and uncaring. It makes it so that you and your pastor will never become more than acquaintances who exchange meaningless pleasantries.

And I honestly don't think any pastor goes into ministry with that kind of goal for personal relationships.

Answer the emails. Answer the phone calls. Learn to communicate so that your replies are thick and juicy and the interaction can be short and fulfilling.

Learn to communicate so that, as tight as your schedule gets, nobody feels left behind.

Learn to communicate.

Because really, who cares if you give three hundred talks and write seventeen books this year when nobody (as far as I know) has felt true community from a book? Or even a lecture? Who cares when none of those words you put out makes anybody feel loved? Who cares when all the effort you put into those endeavors is not felt at a level of personal connection?

Stop putting effort into things that seem big but do nothing for the people you love or are called to love. Who cares if the biggest pastor in the United States thinks your book is great when your most loyal church member's life is falling apart and you're just not there? Who cares if other pastors lift you up when you slap away the hands reaching out to you?

It's the little things that count.