Blogging After Midnight

The reason I'm up so late is because I just watched "Bridesmaids" with some friends a short while ago. Before that we watched "Unknown" (so much better than "Taken," for whatever that's worth). Before that I watched "It's Kind of a Funny Story" on my own. Today was a stay at home and watch movies day because I had/have a cold and it's a good excuse.

To be brief: it's been almost three months and I still get sad about it. Still feel pangs of missing her and what we had. Even while others have passed in and out of the radar in the intervening months.

What's the deal? When will it stop catching me off guard? Breaking up was the right call, but there was so much good stuff that was lost as a result.

I've played in so many of my friends' weddings during my five years here in Nashville. Most of them I knew separately before they became a couple. I've been experiencing bits of peace lately about not ever getting married. I've felt that peace before, but not so much since I moved here. But's in sporadic, in waves.

There's plenty else going on in my life these days, but I'm hardly ever here anymore, so I guess that's all for now. Peace.

Intimations

I'm not trying to be cryptic, and I think I'll be able to flesh this out later, but right now it's just hints and things that I'm still processing.

I feel like God is being sweet and merciful and loving and kind to me, in ways that I can actually pay attention to in this season of my life. I feel like he's drawing me into his Word, like I knew I needed. He's working on my heart, I hope. Teaching me of his love, showing it to me. Teaching me that trials are there for my good--or, rather, helping me to believe it.

From my head down to my heart.

Box

People talk about putting God in a box (or letting him out of the box or whatever), so I'll tell you about one of mine.

I don't know if this would qualify as "artistic sensibilities," since I'm not exactly making a whole ton of art, but my disposition when I look at the world and try to put words to it is to focus on the brokenness. To see Jesus' redemption and God's truth, certainly, but to understand the lens of the fallenness of the world. Or something vaguely pretentious like that.

The downside (and I'm not sure I'm exactly reaping much of an upside) is that I fixate on my failures and fail to see God's redemptive work in the midst of the mess. For a very concrete example, there are a few people whom I see fairly regularly, since we share the same church community. These are people that I am no longer really friends with, almost entirely due to my foolish mistakes (at least, that's what I tell myself). We're not enemies, thankfully--we've worked out our conflicts and issues, at least to some kind of resolution. But we're not friends anymore, either, for sake of appropriate boundaries and continuing in community in some different way. We're acquaintances, or something, I don't even know what. And with a couple of these people, I deeply lament the loss and wish that we were friends the way we were before. The way things were before. I really screwed it up.

I don't see the redemption that God is working in those relationships. To be honest, I'm not really looking for it. It's tempting to say that I'd rather have a time machine more than redemption, but I don't know how to get past the whole thing about how even if I knew then what I knew now, I would still feel the scars, right? I could stop certain actions from taking place, but the damage inside would have already been felt (by my hypothetical time-traveling self--bear with me here).

What the heck am I talking about? I think I'm saying that I wish I didn't need Jesus quite so much. That I wish I could micro-manage my sinfulness and prevent it from bearing fruit in the first place so that I wouldn't screw it all up. Whatever "it" happens to be at the time. That's not the true Gospel, of course.

But in this case, I'm stuck. Stuck in the loss and the screw-up. Every time I see these people, that's what I think about, what I remember. I don't see God's redemptive hand. I do see how he delivered us from the conflict and the hurt, and I am grateful for that. But I don't feel like this new state of things is better than the old. As if I knew better than God, as if I could see with his omniscience.

So I fixate on the brokenness and blind myself to his good work. I don't know how to repent of that. And I know that there are always parts of me that don't want to. Because I've built it up over time into an idol ("my precious"), into my functional identity--the pain, the memories, the heartbreak, the longing. I'm stubborn, that's for sure.

I know from past experience that God can deliver me from the depths. But this doesn't feel so much like depths as much as mucky shallows that I tolerate. And in the meantime, I make my mud pies, because at least it's familiar ground, right?

I wish I were different. Is that a starting place? I wish so many things were different. Am I just holding on here until the ultimate restoration of all things? How am I to live in the meantime? I'm pretty sure that it's not supposed to be like my heart is now. How does that change? How will God break me in these particular struggles of pride and identity? When will I sing again, "I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see"?

I think engaging with his Word has something to do with it--letting it engage me. And I do believe that the destination is real. But the journey feels like a mystery. Or just too hard, too much for my fear and my laziness to contend with (lies, yes, but I give them power).

Am I still Eustace the Dragon? I guess he didn't just become a boy again--the same selfish, self-centered, mean-spirited, small-minded, small-hearted boy again. His heart changed and he was transformed. So I guess I don't really want to just go back to the way it was before. I guess I want to be whatever it is that God is making me through this. I just have no idea what that will look like, or how and when.

That said, Jesus assures me that his work will be completed, and that he loves me in the meantime, in the here and now, just as I am, a sinful man.

So stop fighting his love, you stubborn fool, and let it be enough for you.

(that's me talking to me, by the way--I certainly wouldn't call you a "stubborn fool")

(at least, not here)

Corollary

More reminders that with the human heart, when one bitterness or fear or anxiety leaves, another one (or two or seven) will simply come and fill in the vacuum. One idol for another, unless it experiences what 19th-century Scottish theologian Thomas Chalmers called "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection"--something else greater and more true and more beautiful for a changed heart to seize upon and be captivated by. Some excerpts from Chalmers' text:

There is not one of these transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered; but as to its desire for having some one object or other, this is unconquerable. Its adhesion to that on which it has fastened the preference of its regards cannot willingly be overcome by the rending away of a simple separation. It can be done only by the application of something else, to which it may feel the adhesion of a still stronger and more powerful preference. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of--and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind as hunger is to the natural system. It may be dispossessed of one object, or of any, but it cannot be desolated of all. The heart must have something to cling to--and never, by its own voluntary consent, will it so denude itself of its attachments that there shall not be one remaining object that can draw or solicit it.

In a word, if the way to disengage the heart from the positive love of one great and ascendant object is to fasten it in positive love to another, then it is not by exposing the worthlessness of the former, but by addressing to the mental eye the worth and excellence of the latter, that all old things are to be done away and all things are to become new.

The love of God and the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity--and that so irreconcilable that they cannot dwell together in the same bosom. We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted; and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.

Also, my friend Beth reminds me where my center is and where power and love truly reside.