I Used to Be Smart.

Every so often, a man must have an adventure.  He must leave what is familiar and prove to himself that he can survive in the world.  He must break free from the comfort that he has created and prove that he is able enough, that he is clever enough, that his resourceful enough, that he is smart enough and that he is good enough to make his way wherever he may find himself.  Every so often, a man must leave behind all of the things that he has gathered up for himself and attempt to strike out anew, just to see if he can do it.

Everything starts to press in on him.  He starts to feel as if he is in a box that was already too small, and that box is being squeezed tighter and tighter.  He cannot shift his position, and the air grows warmer and staler by the minute until he finally cannot endure.  When that happens, the man must make a choice.  He can be crushed under the weight of all of the things that he has gathered, or he can cut himself loose from all his entanglements.  There is, at that point, no compromise.  He will either be crushed under the weight of all that has become familiar, or he will leave it behind and test himself once more.

At this point, the man knows that he will be fine.  He knows that taking that single step that severs the cord between himself and what he has accumulated will not be a catastrophic step.  He knows that whatever fall he endures will be met by some soft landing.  More than that, he knows that if the landing is less soft than he anticipated, then he will recover.  He has recovered every time before, and he knows that he will recover every time in the future.  He’s never quite sure how he knows this, but he knows it.  It’s something that has been written so deeply within him that, even in the fall, he knows it’s true.  Maybe he just got lucky and had good parents, or maybe he has discovered some secret that has always been around for the knowing.

Whatever the case is, he knows.  He knows that the time is coming.  As tightly as the box has pressed in on him before, he can feel it pressing even tighter.  He can no longer hold his arms out to his sides.  He can feel the top brush his head.  The time is coming when he has to decide.

He sees everyone around him deciding daily.  He sees some men that are trapped in their boxes.  Some of them are unaware of their prison (and sometimes he envies them).  Some of them know their prison all too well, and they hate the choice they made so deeply that it destroys them.  He sees some men breaking free.  He sees them running as hard as they can toward that thing that they’re all looking for.  He envies them.  He wants to be ready to set off in a sprint toward something that he can’t see yet, but he still feels like he’s glued to this ground, and even when he wants to, his feet do not move.

Some days, he wonders.  He sees those men running.  He sees how free they look.  He sees this look they all have that lets everyone else know that they are convinced of their freedom.  But they always run out of sight.  What do they find out there?  While he can just reach out to touch his walls, are they just running to find there’s?  Will they slam headlong into some wall that they did not see?  Will they all stumble back, shocked at a setback they were not anticipating?  What will they do?  How will they handle such a shock?  He wonders.

So what will he do?  Just rely on little victories to expand his box enough to make it livable until it squeezes in on him again?  Is that his destiny?  Is his life meant to be a constant battle with the box that scares him so badly that some days he just can’t stand it?  Is that all he has to look forward to?  Will he ever run?  And will he find that he cannot outrun himself?  Will he find that all he can do is move the same box to a new place be too much to bear?  Will he become convinced of his freedom, only to have it yanked from underneath him?  Will such a rattling of his expectations be more than he can handle?

For now, he only knows that the box is pressing in on him.  He grows more aware of it every day.  He tries to shake it, but he cannot.  Every day he wonders how he will react.  He wonders what the outcome of this test will be.  He wonders what it means to fail and what it means to pass.  Every day he tidies up the box more and more.  He add things that makes it feel like home.  He finds ways to make it bearable.  Some days, he even thinks that he likes it.  That scares him to death.  He is scared that he will find a way to deal with this thing that is pressing in on him, and that he will live a life where he never asked himself the tough questions.  He will never have that adventure that lets him know that he can make it in the world, that he will always, always be okay.

So what’s he do next?  Like a movie cliche, he keeps walking toward a crossroad with his hands in his pockets, and the screen fades to black before we see which road he takes.

I won’t pretend that I’m not a complete sucker.  I had avoided customers all morning.  I buried my head in the crossword puzzles, content to find four letter synonyms for “zilch”  (it was “nada,” by the way) and discovering what in the world “hoarfrost” might be.  I just didn’t really feel like talking to anyone.  To be honest, I had better things to do.

However, like I said, I’m a sucker.  All it took was a pretty girl for me to forget about the latest torture that the NY Times had devised and to forget about the surly mood that I had been in all morning.

It wasn’t like she was something from the page of a magazine.  She was normal.  There’s a chance that she had just come from a workout, or that she was heading to go workout.  She was, however, very attractive and very approachable.  So I approached her.

Let me cut off your mental image right there.  I didn’t “approach” her.  Sorry.  This isn’t some story about how I found a pretty girl and put “the moves” on her.  If you had your hopes up, then you’ll have to deal with that before we move on.

She didn’t want anything special.  However, even with my head still in the funk that is every morning I have ever experienced, I was quick enough to be funny and make her laugh a few times.  It’s always nice to make a pretty girl laugh.

(I have to apologize again.  I promise that there’s a point coming.   Just bear with me.)

We finished everything up, and she had to leave and come back to pick up what she bought.  It was only going to be about a 10 minute delay, so she went next door to Starbucks for a few minutes and came back.  When she did, I got her stuff ready and took it to her.  When I did, she thanked me for my help.  And when she thanked me, something foul came rolling out of her mouth.  I was blasted with a wave of disgusting coffee breath.  I had this horrible flashback of wrinkly old aunts and disgusting high school teachers.  I think that there was a visible brown fog that rolled past her teeth and into my face.  I’m pretty sure I even had to brush the cloud away to be able to see her.

That’s the point.  Pretty girls have coffee breath too.

It’s my new metaphor for life.  Pretty girls have coffee breath too.  It’s something that should be obvious.  Everyone has their own crap to deal with.  Somewhere, I bought this lie (and I’m sure that I’m not alone) that the people who look “together” really are “together,” and that I should be working to achieve that same level of togetherness.  I’ve tried all sorts of ways to get that look down.  I’ve tried every solution in the world to hide my coffee breath, but it always hangs around.  I’ve thought for years that was my fault.  I thought I just had to make sure that I didn’t stand close enough to anyone for them to catch my coffee breath.  What I never actually realized was that they all have coffee breath too, and no matter many temporary fixes they try, the problem will always remain underneath it all.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  Life isn’t about fixing all of the problemes.  Life isn’t always about feeling like everyone else pretends they feel.  Life isn’t about trying to capture the lie that we’ve seen on some movie screen, or the fakeness we’ve seen in someone’s smile.  That’s not life.  That’s not Truth.  Life is realizing that, no matter how pretty the girl is — that she’s got coffee breath.  She’s got something about her that makes us shudder and makes us want to sprint in the other direction.  But that doesn’t matter.  Because when we get close enough to her find that imperfection, that’s when we remember our own.  And that moment is the moment when we can let down all of the walls that we have thrown up and start to participate in life.  We can start to love other people, no matter what kind of stinky breath, weird body odor, or horrendout fashion sense they have.  We can let ourselves be loved, no matter what sort of stupid hangups, ridiculous obsessions, or annoying habits we have.  We an all admit that is life, and we can laugh about the pretty girl’s coffee breath, because we have coffee breath of our own.

It’s true.  I still do think about things.

Lately I’ve been reading Nick Hornby, and enjoying him quite a bit.  However, I have now read all of his novels, so there’s not another one to buy.  Something about Hornby makes him the kind of read that makes me want to keep reading.  His books aren’t a chore, they’re an invitation.  When I finish one, I’m not excited that it’s over, I’m usually sad that there’s not more.  I haven’t often been able to say that about any work of fiction.

I don’t know what history will say about Nick Hornby.  I don’t know if he’ll stand the test of time, or if he’ll even be relevant in 25 years (though I hope he will).  However, reading him has started to ruin me.

I was ready to buy another novel to read today, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything.  To be honest, I was scared.  I’ve been in good hands with Hornby.

Too often, the things that we read and the things that we watch just aren’t true.  They are these chopped up versions at the truth trying to get us to buy something — a point of view, a lifestyle, a product.  We’re so gullible that we believe that they are truth.  We believe that the lives we read in books and the things that we see on our television screens are the way that things really are, and they way that we are living is not the way that things should.  In the process, we get all turned around until we cannot discover what is truth and what is lie.  We get depressed and frustrated, because we’re chasing the ephemeral.  We’re chasing a thing that was never real to begin with.  We are working hard to model our lives after things that cannot happen.  We are trying to turn the truth of lives into a pack of lies.

I don’t know if Hornby understands it in those terms, but I feel like Hornby understands that about life, and that he works hard to present the truth of life.  His characters are nothing false.  They do not sell us some life that we can never have.  They do not find overly simple conclusions to overly simplified problems.  Theirs are messy lives, and at the end of his books he has raised as many questions as he has answered.  It is just like my life, and it is beautiful.

So I’ve been ruined.  I couldn’t pick up anything else because I was afraid it just wouldn’t do justice to the truth.  I was afraid it would be too pretentious, or overly simple.  I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  In the end, I decided to stick with some Hemingway I already had, and that’s serving me well.

But I’m scarred now.  In a land where truth-telling takes a back seat to profit-gathering, how can I seperate the truth from those just trying to make the sale?  There is too much greatness in the world to waste my time on mediocrity.  (And I am much too mediocre to waste my time with my own kind.)

So, I’m on a search (and I’ve been on that search for a while).  I’m searching to find the places where people are revealing truth in the world, and searching to find the ways that I can root out all of the lies that I have bought for so many years.

Who’s with me?

I haven’t posted forever, I know.

Work just drains me and makes me uninteristing.

This is something I wrote last week though, for a discussion elsewhere.  Take it or leave it.

I think there is one point where we all agree.  Christians are to be involved in the world around them.  We are to have hands that are absolutely filthy because we have been up to our elbows in the dirt that is the world around us.  (Don’t misunderstand that metaphor.  Dirt isn’t always bad.  Dirt is the thing that sustains the plants that we rely on for food.  Dirt is good.)  That’s why we’re having this argument, because we believe that Christians should be utterly active in this world.  If we disagreed on that point, there would be no discussion to be had.

Where we disagree is the point of what that action should look like, and I haven’t been entirely clear about what I believe on this point.

My least favorite thing in the world is having to frame my arguments in negative terms.  That is, I think any position (not just my own, everyone else’s too) is done a great disservice if we only ever say what it is not.  That sort of negative construction and defense of what we believe doesn’t get anyone anywhere.  In this discussion format, it’s an easy trap to fall into.  When you’re lazy like me, it’s even easier to fall into, so I’m going to try to remedy the situation.

The only place I know to start is to talk about what I believe God is, and how I believe God wants to deal with the world.  Understand that there is so much history to how I came about all of this that I can’t even start to unpack it all.  I feel like I’m standing waist-deep in the minds of and riding the coattails of a thousand people that I can’t even begin to name.  I didn’t come about any of this except through a process of great struggle.  Those sources are all rattling around here, and I probably won’t even refer to anything directly.  So if you see something familiar, I didn’t say it first.

(But moving on.)

When we’re discussing who God is, I am convinced that the first place that we must look is Jesus.  Jesus tells us who God is, and there is nothing that is true about God that is not true about Jesus.  So, more relevant than the question of how I see God is the question of how I see Jesus.  As I have said many times before, I am convinced that there is one thing about Jesus that rings true than anything else.  Jesus’ goal on Earth was love.  His incarnation was to show us that we are always, always loved more than we can possibly imagine.  He came to show us that the God of the universe that had been working so hard in Israel’s history to show them who he was still believed in them, and was ready to fulfill his promise.  God was making possible what he had promised to Abraham — through Israel’s history, the culmination of which was Jesus, God was making that specific people the means by which he bless all people.

But why?  Why was God doing this?  Because he loves what he created so much that he almost cannot stand it.  He loves his creation so much that he is more patient with them than he ever should be, and he does wild things, wild things like the event that is Jesus.

Because we are loved so fiercly, it is only natural that God wants the best for his people.  All through their history, God’s people have been trying to figure out how he wants them to live in the world.  Most of the time, they are completely confused, and they miss the boat.  They believe that God is calling them to violence and war.  The prophetic imagination in the Old Testament is always trying to right the ship.  It is always calling for peace and justice in the world, but God’s people were stupid.  They never could see how God wanted them to live in the world.

God’s people are still stupid.  We still cannot see how God wants us to live in the world.  However, the whole point of God sending Jesus into the world was to make the point clear.  It was God telling us that we must start living his way.  We should start living that way not because it is what God has arbitrarily decreed.  Rather, because loves what God has created so much that God desires what is best for the creation, not for God’s sake, but for the creation’s sake.

Packaged with all of that is a promise.  It is God’s promise that if we will live the way that God has told us to live that God will take care of the rest.  To put that very general phrase into specifics: we must live at peace with the world around us, because God is waiting to be the perfect master of justice.  We must not seek revenge, because only God can offer perfect vengeance.  We must give of ourselves for the alien, the orphan, and the widow because they bear the image of the loving God just as much as we bear that image.  Above all, we must always, always trust that God will fulfill his promises.  We must trust that, no matter how silly our non-violence and self-sacrifice looks, it is not in vain.  God has promised has us this.

Not only did God promise it, but God proved it.  The cross and the resurrection prove it in a way that nothing else possibly can.  In that event, Jesus confronts the very thing that is most terrifying to humanity.  He stares right in the face of the very thing that scares us the most.  He looks right into the eyes of the force that we spend the most money trying to stave off, and he stares down the impetus of all our violence.  And when the resurrection happens, we are shown that not even death has power over us.

That’s where it becomes clear.  Death doesn’t mean a thing.  Death is worthless.  These are not our real lives.  This is not all we have.  We can live in the way that God told us too, patiently waiting for him to come and set right all of the things that look so wrong because we have been shown that there is something so much more waiting for us.  As real and as huge as all of this suffering seems, it nothing compared to what has come.  And as long as life and human history may seem when we’re in it’s confines, it is nothing compared to what God has promised us.

That is the reason we can turn the other cheek.  That is the reason we can be nonviolent in the world.  That is the reason that we can give up everything we have for the sake of the people who need it most — this is not our real life, and God loves us so much that he wouldn’t have it any other way!

Doesn’t that make it clear?  There’s no need for violence in the world.  There’s no need to hoard possessions.  There’s no need to chase after power and position.  There’s no need to run in the futile race of significance.  This is not our show, and these are not our lives.  We’re being prepared to live for something that is so much more.