Worship Isn't Just Singing

I just looked back over my last few posts for this year.  It's strange how the words I wrote in the past six months, though few, somehow seem to describe how I feel right now.  But I don't remember ever feeling like I do now.  I'm not sure if my memory is bad or if I was more hyperbolic a few months ago.

All I know is that a certain word came to mind recently that seems to sum up how I feel right now: autophobia - The fear of oneself, or of being alone.

Both of those definitions are pretty accurate right now.  I am afraid of being alone.  No, I am beyond afraid.  I am broken from being alone, or if not yet, then I soon will be.

And I am more afraid of myself now some days than ever.  But honestly, it doesn't feel like it's even me.  It's more like there's a psychopath or an inhuman monster living in the backdrop of my mind, and sometimes his whispers seep through the cracks of my mind when I dream.  And it's horrifying.

But a thought comes to mind...what if the antidote is simple, easily found?

Because the most soothing thing lately is...beauty.  Strange.

As a favorite author of mine once wrote, beauty costs us nothing, and there is no desire within us to consume it or do anything about it but stare, and wonder, and simply take it in.

Which leads to another thought.

Maybe the deeper answer is worship.

But I haven't felt the desire to sing those songs filled with Christian clichés for a very long time.  Why does beholding beauty do more for my soul than singing?

Maybe it's the fact that singing songs has become convoluted in my mind, and it no longer feels like worship.  Maybe I need to go back to the fundamental essence of worship.  Maybe I need to forget myself and simply let the beauty of every aspect of life lead me back to the one who created it.  It's all just a reflection, after all.

Okay, but saying that it's "just a reflection" makes it feel wrong to admire anything else.  It doesn't feel wrong, so...

Oh, of course.  Reflection, not imitation.  There's a difference between a fake that is the object of worship, and a mirror that allows us to see the real source when the mirror is the only thing our eyes are clear enough to see.

That's a good thing, because my heart hasn't known how to worship God sincerely for a very long time.  It's comforting to know that the mirrors of pure and innocent beauty are lenses to see him.

Because sometimes, our minds are so frayed that we don't know how to worship God through the lens of descriptive terms.  Sometimes singing about how holy and beautiful God is feels so empty; sometimes the only way we can worship is by admiring flowers.

Hah...this is feeling a bit rambling and taking a while to get to the point.  But then again...maybe we don't always need to be so hasty about getting to the point.

Maybe...we have to stop and smell the flowers sometimes.

(...I swear I did not plan that...)

Inner Darkness, Self-Addiction, and Loneliness

I haven't been here in a while.

A lot's happened since I last wrote.

I can't really get into it, partly because of how complicated it is, partly because it's not just my story to tell.  But I can say that something's wrong with me.  I'm not completely sure of what it is, but I have a good guess.

It's me.

There's a chapter in Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz called "Community", in which he describes his experience of living with a group of guys under one roof after living alone in the country for a while, and how difficult it was for him to get used to it.

Something about feeling alone creates a very odd thing in the human soul.  On the one hand, we begin to crave contact, contact that is deep and meaningful and sincere, that gentle touch of two human souls truly acknowledging each other's existence, if only for a moment.  Sometimes it's as simple as an honest, friendly smile, and sometimes it's as deep as a conversation that lasts for five hours and delves into the deep details of life, and all its pain and joy.  It's a connection we need with at least moderate frequency to survive.

On the other hand, we become addicted to ourselves, to the silence of being the only soul within reach.  In the company of ourselves there is no reason to look beyond our own mind, and the convenience and comfort of this is a very strong thing.  We come to believe we are the only thing that truly exists, that the rest is just a background for our drifting consciousness while we keep ourselves company.

And it is so very poisonous.

I think long-term loneliness, the kind that has gone on for long enough to have a serious effect on the mind, is a kind of insanity, less severe and much more easily cured than a mental illness, but still powerful enough to be concerning.

My dad told me he was worried about me.  And as that question hit the air, I was suddenly very afraid.  I had been lying to myself about how I was doing, whether I was going crazy.  The haunting dreams of relationships with my friends and family gone wrong, usually focused on one person in particular in each dream, have been shaking me for a while now.  They're not all that frequent, maybe once a week.  But in them I am confronted with either the monstrosity of my narcissism in its full force, or the soul-crushing weight of being left alone, so very alone.  Both of them leave my mind flailing for reality for at least a couple of hours after my eyes are pried open, and for those first waking moments I wonder if this is what it's like to go insane.

The bitter thing is that the only thing I really need is human interaction, something that is always present in too small a quantity and too shallow a depth, with the curing potency always out of reach.

And I wonder to myself, where do I belong?

I don't belong with the other homeschoolers.  I'm too broken down and too much of a stranger to fit in with them at this point.

I definitely don't belong with public schoolers.  They scare me, because I feel like their whole world is based around evaluating others, and I will certainly fall short of their standards.  They're well-established in groups by now too, anyway.

The people who care the most about me, who I feel I could really deeply connect with, are either adults with busy lives or people living so far away that I barely have a hope of ever even seeing their face without the aid of a wireless signal.

So where do I belong, really?

I think searching for the answer is the only way to climb out of this ever-worsening dream I feel like I'm living in.  I long to live in reality for longer than a day, to breathe the air of the living world through the darkest hours of the night and never slip back into the nightmare of my lonely mind.

I have had enough of being alone.  It's time to start the search.

Retreating

I am so tired.

I feel as if I am drifting away from who I am, somehow.  Or maybe all of the structures that I built are just fading into nothing, and who I really am is the only thing that is left.

But there is one thing that I do know.  I am so very tired of Christianity.

As all of this falls away, the cliche statements and ever-repeated lines, the fancy vocabulary and typical words of advice wear increasingly thin and unhelpful.  My mind is just too weak to even hold all of this within itself.  I can't do it anymore.

And suddenly I realize, I can let it all go, and the relief is almost overwhelming.

I can let it all go because what I believe is dependent on only one person.  Well, okay, two people.

The first one is myself.  I have chosen what I believe, and no one else can truly tell me how to believe or how to live.  Ultimately, I must choose whether I believe what they say is right.  And in so many ways, I want to let all of the doing go.  And I think I will.

Because it is finished.

Which leads me to who the other person is.  He's the one that's kept me alive and breathing and moving, even if it's merely a crawl.  He's the one who saved me.  He has quite a few names, actually.

The most well-known one is Jesus.

When I say I am tired, I mean that I simply cannot - and more than ever, simply refuse to - listen to the voices that speak these overused statements, these exhausting methods of "doing it right".  I am so very tired.  I can't do anything anymore.  I have to close my ears and open my heart, shut down my mind and let my soul simply exist within this place, and try to hear the voice of my rescuer once again.  It has grown so faint at times I fear that it was never there at all.

But all these "coincidences", these strings of events that are so very elaborate and beautiful, that have yielded so much joy...I cannot explain them in any other way.  Either I am inside of the most meaningful story of all, and someone is directing all of this, or life is madness that no man will ever understand, a ball of tangled string that will eventually unravel, meaningless.

I cannot accept that.

And so I must withdraw my heart from everything that would seek to speak all these conflicting "truths", everyone who seems to know what the world means, and I must remember who I am.  I must also remember who rescued me from the maddening empty and cold.

It may take some time, but if I listen any longer to those voices that demand that I listen, that tell me that I must do or not do, that I must believe or not believe, then I will surely collapse into my soul and succumb to insanity.  I can't handle it any longer.

My heart needs to bask in the Truth for some time before I am strong enough to recognize it out in the world again, and deny the lies that are mingled with it.  I must learn again the voice of my Father before I can deny the whispers of the Father of Lies.

Here's to regaining the truth.

When Life Gives You Mountains

It's late at night.  Sometimes there's snow, strangely enough, although usually instead it's rain, or it's dry.  In reality that has little to do with anything, but in a way it's a rather important fact.  The night and I seem to be spiritual twins, for whatever I feel, the night seems to reflect.  Maybe it's just my own projections.  But the cold, dry nights are some of the most bland and empty times, and the rainy ones are either times of relief or times of sadness.

I glance down at my hands, watch the veins that continually supply these multi-branched limbs with the fluid that keeps them functioning.  Why are they so useless these days?  Why is the mind on the other end of the bloodstream so empty of inspiration and meaning?  What's wrong with the world?

No, not the world.  Just me.

What's wrong with me?

Although I see that face staring me down every night, I don't have an answer.  I think it has something to do with love, or rather the lack of it.  Where does motivation come from?  I think it used to exist somewhere in the skybox of the mind, but it's flown away, and I haven't heard hardly a whisper for months.

What's wrong with me?  Why can't I be bothered to actually live my life?  Since when did minor inconvenience become an impassable obstacle?  Why is inspiration so hard to catch?  Why does everyone seem to be better at this than I am?

I don't know.  It hurts to know that I'm here because of me.  It hurts more to know that I'm not strong enough to get myself out of this, and even more to think that it's only impossible because I believe it to be so.  Why am I so gullible, content to live this miserable lie?  What is there to be gained from this that I can't live without?

Lord, make me human again.  Let the flesh that you gave your breath to breathe your Spirit once more, not this stagnant miasma of procrastination.

If my heart were connected to my brain, I might realize that this time just proves what a sinner I am.  But that link is nonexistent now.  Maybe that explains the emptiness, the lack of soul I feel in my day to day life.  I want to know what it means to actually be a man of God; at least those snippets that I once had.  This is almost nothing at all.  My heart is alone, and my mind receives no validation for its faith, and overall it just makes believing harder and harder every day.  Who knew that the 12 short inches between the two could be farther than the distance from one end of the galaxy to the other?

What's going on here?  Who is this man who lives in my body?  He sure isn't me.  Not anymore.  The man of God I once knew wouldn't tolerate this.  But this man does nothing to even try.  I can't even kick this impostor out.  I'm out in spiritual no-man's-land right now, and my brain's getting maybe half a bar of connection to my heart every fifty miles or so.  But we can't stop at gas stations, because we're on foot, and every moment leaves us further behind where we should be in life, further behind where God "wants us to be".

Why am I not comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me?

Maybe it's because I think I have to do something to earn that planned life.

Maybe if I do what I should instead of lazing around, I'll finally be the perfect student, the perfect artist, the perfect brother, the perfect son, and the rest of my life will come together, and I'll get married, and be happy forever, and go to Heaven at the end.

Something's wrong with this picture.

I remember now talking with my good friend just yesterday; I remember him telling me that at the end of this tunnel, God has my perfection and my ultimate good in mind.  It doesn't make it any easier, but every single tear that falls is water for the growth of new life, and every storm that I encounter is not by accident, for it will give way to new seasons.  The lightning strikes serve only to help me wake up, and the gloom of the rain is not meant ultimately for my misery, but for my transformation.  Only by the dark do we truly appreciate the light; only through pain do we recognize beauty; only by being alone will I realize that I have never been alone, and I never will be.

It isn't easy, you know, sitting alone, painfully aware of every wasted second, mind too weak to break from routine.  Willpower is a muscle, and disuse may wear it down to the point of breaking.  Only when I truly think of this do I realize that each step rebuilds it, and that the only way I can defeat these demons is through the Lord's grace that lets me take those steps.

I don't know what I would do without him.  I don't know how I could bear it if I had never known my Friend.  He has saved me so many times, probably more than I can realize, and he's guided me toward much more joy than I could have ever found on my own.  At times, he is the only thing I have to hold onto, to keep living for.  This Rock is the only thing that has kept me from going under.

Time to raise the sails.  This storm is fierce, but I'm not alone this time.

What's My Voice?

So I'm sitting here.  And at the moment, I'm searching for something.  A sound.  The problem is, I don't know what it sounds like, or how it flows.  I don't know what it speaks of or what it means.

This sound is my song voice.

You see, I have written lyrics in the past (some of which are on this blog, in fact), and I've always written them with a little voice in my head singing them out, vocalizing the words into a sound that has structure.  But the problem is, it isn't my voice.  It's the voice of whatever singer I was just listening to a moment ago.  And that's wrong, because that doesn't make me a song writer.  It makes me an actor, an imitator.  And if that's what I was looking for, then it would be alright.

I believe that every one of us has within the potential to be utterly unique and extraordinary, to say something or be something that the world has not seen before.  The trouble is that so many of us fall into imitation instead.  It makes perfect sense, really; from birth, we learn how to walk, how to talk, how to act and not to act, how to think and not to think, from the people around us.  It would be very hard for us to do otherwise. But this makes it hard to find out what that unique person inside of us is truly like, because they're hidden under layers of mish-mashed personalities that we saw, liked, and added to our persona.

Starting from scratch isn't easy, whether it's in singing, in writing, in thinking, in creativity, in intuition, or in our spiritual journey.  And I don't mean to say that we leave everything behind, because there are great lessons that all of us have already learned from our past.  But when we see those events as defining us, it is then that we incarcerate the person that we truly are.  Bad things happen, and so we adapt to try and keep it from happening next time.  Good things happen, and we change to make sure they happen more often.  And yet we're still miserable.

Maybe this is because we don't have an idea of what we're trying to be.  As Christians, arguably, we do: we ultimately try to become more like Christ.  But what does that mean?  Look at what Jesus did.  He hung out with normal, nonreligious people; he did things and said things that no one else would have thought to do or dared to do.  Why?

Because he was completely himself, and no one else.

Is that why we do what we do?  So that we can become like the people that we imitate, people that seem happy or successful?  Well, of course we do.  I suppose that's obvious.  But maybe this also reveals the source of our pain when it doesn't work.  We can dress like someone else, act like someone else, even think like someone else, but none of us are happy.  And so, everyone is still trying to find that "perfect image" to follow.  Have we never considered that maybe what becoming Christ-like means is not to all become uniform copies of a man who walked this earth, but to each become a unique, beautiful facet of an infinite God, whom Jesus is a part of?  God himself is Three, and yet he is also One.  And so we must be: each entirely different, each entirely a reflection of God's character, yet when combined, all forming a single Body.

Didn't Paul say that each of us had a different role to play?  Why are we all trying to reach the same goal?  Why aren't we instead seeking what our completely unique role is, instead of copying somebody who looks like they're happy?  Jesus never told his disciples to all become walking Bibles.  He told them to spread his message, yes.  And we are called to be like Christ, yes.  But when we are talking about a man who was God, a man who was also infinite, what does that mean?  I believe that it means something different for each of us.

What's my singing voice?
What's your singing voice?

That's between you and God.

About Joy

It's so amazing (by which I mean: incredible, relieving, and slightly hilarious) how, no matter how bad things seem to get, no matter how big a mess I feel like I am, God can bring along just the right encouragement at just the right time.  I love it so much.  What I don't love, though, is that I always seem to forget.

I forget every time that God has come through for me, and all the wonderful times I've had because of his encouragement.  The only thing I can see is the emptiness in front of me.  I haven't yet learned how to carry those moments with me, so that I might bridge the chasms of despair in front of me with God's amazing blessings.  Oh, to bring along all that joy, to store it in a bottle or a box, or stick it in a backpack for a rainy day.

I mean, there are those poetic rainy days, those days when all you want to do is dance in the rain, bask in it.  But then there are those times when the rain might as well be made of smoke, because it makes everything gloomy.  Life is the same way.  Sometimes the joy in our sorrows is immediately apparent, like the death of a godly man or woman that inspires us because of the way they lived their life, and the fact that it reminds us of the incredible joy that we will all share when we reach heaven and celebrate together again.  But there are also those times when the gloom of the clouds feels like the only thing that is true, and every little ache in our heart is magnified a thousand times, while joy feels as far away as a sunny summer afternoon feels during a snowstorm.

This is why we have to learn to carry the sunny days in our pockets.  If only it were as easy to do as it is to say.  Our minds are a sieve when it comes to certain things, and while a piece of paper may carry the words that can inspire us to remember the joy we left behind, sometimes it doesn't work if our mind is too clouded by pain to remember, and the words are just words.

Maybe we need more than just one piece of paper.

As the kid president in the video said, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled...and it hurt, man!"  And so we need to somehow overwhelm the pain of everyday life with joy.  But where?

John Eldredge says of the days after his close friend Brent was killed in a climbing accident, "As the shock of Brent's death began to wear off, the searing pain of intense grief took is place.  It was too difficult to read my Bible.  Conversation required more than I was able to give.  Frankly, I didn't want to talk to anyone, not even God.  The only thing that helped was my wife's flower garden.  The solace I found there was like nothing else on earth....beauty and affliction are the only two things that can pierce our hearts.  Because this is so true, we must have a measure of beauty in our lives proportionate to our affliction.  No, more.  Much more.  Is this not God's prescription?  Just take a look around.  The sights and sounds, the aromas and sensations--the world is overflowing with beauty.  God seems to be rather enamored with it.  Gloriously wasteful.  Apparently, he feels that there ought to be plenty of it in our lives."

That last line hit me pretty seriously when I thought about it.  I don't even try to make room for joy in my life. Oh, wait...unless you count all the imposters I make room for in my day.  I think this is part of the reason that all of us have some kind of addiction to some thing, activity, thought process, hobby, job, whatever it is.  We can't find the peace and happiness we want in our life, and naturally we have to find a substitute, or else kill our urge to find it, which is equally dangerous.  This hunger for joy is a hole left unfilled because God is not fully present in our world, and so a part of our soul is still disconnected from him, unless we come to him intentionally, seek his joy in the world instead of cheap substitutes.  But it's hard.  So hard.

And I know firsthand what can happen if there is nothing at all substantial to fill that emptiness.  The times when I don't make any effort at all to reach for God are the most gloomy and miserable times of my life.  The worst part is, the longer I spend in that place, the less I even want to reach out to Jesus, because it's so hard when your thought process has been twisted into the wrong shape.  It's like having a bad back and no chiropractor; I can't stand up, and although I might be able to get to the car to drive to the chiropractor if I did make the effort to stand up, the back pain is so undesirable that I don't want to try.  I'd rather lie in relative relief on the bed.  The problem is, eventually you need food and water.

Thank God, God leaves so much beauty for us in this world.  I think everyone should spend at least one day out of the month and take a nice long walk and admire nature and just think about the fact that God made it. Not only that, he made it for us.  When all was said and done, God put man in charge of all the other creations, one of the best engagement presents ever.  We screwed up afterwards, but the point remains that this world, despite its fallen and faded state, is still a stunning reminder of how much he loves us, enough to gift us this incredibly complex, impossibly beautiful place we call home.

Pick a sunny day, when it's warm but not too hot, preferably, and find a place with plenty of trees.  A local lake, maybe, or possibly a nearby forest or walking trail.  Just walk.  Walk, and look.  Admire.  Let go of everything else, don't feel the need to do anything.  Breathe a bit.  Maybe take some calm music along, but don't keep it on the entire time.  Or whatever works for you, really.  A walk in the city can reveal many things too.  The intelligence that God gave us shown in the ingenuity of architecture, or God's incredible skill and artistic spirit in inventing colors.  The Trinity's communal laughter echoing back through friends at a coffee shop, or a couple walking down the street.  And one stop in a restaurant or ice cream shop will reveal without a doubt that God was a genius to invent flavor.

The point is, there is beauty in every single inch of this planet, even in the artificial, as long as we have our eyes open.  And simply enjoying this beauty is a form of worship that is totally different than any other kind we have available.

And like the kid president said, create!  Doesn't matter what.  It could be words, it could be pictures, it could be sounds or tastes or an encouraging word or a hug or a million other things.  Think of something positive that people do, and that is another way that you can create and give back to others.  And if nothing else, you are giving back to God, which is yet another form of worship.

The mindset that allows for the pure unadulterated consumption of joy and creation of new things is hard to come by, but if more of us start seizing it when it comes, it makes things less gloomy.  Sometimes we forget to carry our joy with us, but there is an abundant source all around us and even within us, so long as we remember the Source.  And we can't be ashamed of enjoying the joy God puts in life all around us, so long as we remember that doing so is and should be treated as a way to worship him.  It's healthy, and it's a way to find our way back to God when we are lost.

You can't get fat on joy, so look for it everywhere.  It may just be what you need to get through something hard one day.

Our New Names

I love it when something God taught me months before gets brought back and built on right when it's most needed.

The message at church today was about the labels and names that people peg on us, or that we peg on ourselves, and we spend our whole lives believing those names are true, which affects our entire life.  But these names are lies.  As Aaron said this morning, "Satan can't do anything to you except feed you lies."  The sad thing is, we believe them and we live them.

How wonderful to know that we have been given new names, and each of us has a name that is our own, that is completely unique.  Almost a year ago, God told me my two new names, and only now am I just barely beginning to see myself growing into them.  It's such an amazing gift to be given this, although I am so undeserving of it.  And my names are the complete opposite of what I feel is true.

Back last April, God first started bringing this to mind.  I had been reading in a book about the verse in Revelation that says, "I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it." (Rev. 2:17b)  Soon after that, a pastor spoke at a homeschool event I went to, and he talked about the new names that God gives us, and told us that three questions mattered most, one of which was, "What do You call me?"  I was amazed.

I spent some time later on praying and asking God this question.  I heard two names, "Bright One", and "Warrior".  In a way, I didn't feel much connection to them at the time.  But in this season of my life, after this sermon, I realize that these names are the exact mirror of what I think about myself.  Most of the time I don't feel like the Bright One, an inspiration to others or a reflection of God's glory.  I feel like the Forgotten One, alone, unnoticed, not worth the time it would take to consider me at all.  How could someone like that be anywhere close to a great inspiration?

Likewise, I don't often feel like the Warrior, the one who fights for others, who stands up against what is wrong and doesn't give up.  I feel like the Weakling, the one who'd rather be passive than cause a fight by standing firm, the one who would rather not deal with anyone else's problems, the one who doesn't even have enough discipline to finish a day's work, let alone accomplish anything great.  How could a Weakling be a Warrior?

But...something's changing.  In my growing interest in music, I'm starting to realize that I really could be the Bright One, showing the glory of the Father by devoting the music I make to him, even if it's not all worship music.  In fact, I would rather it not be exclusively worship music, so that I might reach beyond the borders of Christianity and into the rest of it.  But in this is where I most need the Lord's help, because I might instead attempt to be the source of light myself, a dangerous step down a path of pride.  Thank God for the grace to grow into this slowly enough for my heart to remain in him.

And I feel more open, more caring, at times.  Not always.  In the power of Jesus, I can and sometimes am a Warrior for others, although it doesn't happen often.  Again, I am growing slowly into this, which is a good thing.  We should not try to take our new names on all at once when we have lived so long under the lies, or we'll either be overwhelmed and give in to disappointment, or we'll succeed and fall into pride.  It is a process.  You can't shoot a gun until you know how to hold it, how not to hold it.  You can't play an instrument without time and practice, and trying to perform at a concert a week after you first picked up a violin is only going to bring more pain on you.  These things take time.

But praise the Lord that Jesus's work has given us this incredible gift, this amazing grace of a new identity.  And this God, this Father who will never give up, he proves time and again that he truly does have a plan.  Now and then we can see the connections that are interwoven throughout every moment of our lives, but for the most part remain unnoticed.  But now and then, we see glimpses of the steps, the stages, the process.  And it's beautiful.  It will be a sheer joy to look on our whole lives from the perspective of one beyond time, and see how every single moment was in its proper place, leading up to everything else.  God will be glorified above all else.

So here's to new names, to events that will work out for the best, for the one who died for our new identities.  And here's to all the disappointments and failures, the grief and anger, the confusions and frustrations, for they are the stones that make up the path that leads to ultimate Joy.

The destination is worth the rocky roads.  Just wait and see.