After Work and Working Through My College Studies

I woke up early this morning, marking the first time I've done so on a Saturday in a very long time. I don't keep a record of stuff like that. It's fair to say I don't schedule much of my weekends. Monday through Friday are different. My Saturdays are my own. If I feel like staying in all day, I do. If I want a stroll, I take it.

My batteries need recharging from time to time. And the more in-tune I become of God's nature, the more I want to be near him. The catch is I still have this self that walks with me. Sean, the ego, is ever present and very much in control in times of anxiety and stress. It's my defacto deal...the sad but very true way I've learned to deal with uneasy times.

Earlier in the night, after our employees went home to their families, my parents and I discussed a back-up plan for the company in case of a huge economic crisis. Just writing about the event now, brings up the anxiety all over again. There's a real and very present spirit in me that still needs healing from God. It's very painful to talk about. But I need to say it. He's been dealing with my need to control all areas of my life. And work-related stress is now on the plate. It makes me squirm as I think of giving that control up. It has, I'm sorry to say, defined me as a person over the years.

This is not going to be easy.

After dinner with family I return home very late in the evening. It's pitch dark in the house so I turn on one lamp. And I sit quietly in the presence of God. I know the events that happened in my heart need to be dealt with immediately or they could grow into something larger...and eventually have a strong chance to turn to resignation. Disbelief.... My god is not big enough to take care of my fears of the economy, my life, and the troubled times that come with the wind. I must be strong enough to tackle these things with the grace of a movie star and the authority of a king. I must be my own source of comfort. I must believe in the power within myself. And so it goes. And so it goes. I can feel those thoughts creeping up like pleasant assurance. Are you an angel or are you a demon?

He devours like a proud lion, but he dresses himself like a sheep. Oh how true.

In hard times I used to only have one choice...the one that pulls away from everything and gives me a chance to think things through. To make a game plan. To pump myself up and return to the show. It's a hard and cruel way to live. And the more glimpses of the Father I get, day by day, the more I realize living life like I'd done for so long is really not living at all. It's merely surviving.

What I know now is only to keep returning to God's love. It is, at least in my mind, the only place that is safe from danger. It's the true and only north. It will not deceive. It will not bight. It is patient. It is real.

And as the night air weighs heavily over my eyes, I pass out on the couch with my ear phones on. I wake up this morning laying on my ipod and my pants twisted on my legs and riding up to my ankles. The morning sun slaps my eyes and burns the brain. Something is not quite right, I know that. My heart is open. Awake to the presence of God. But very bruised. Deeply bruised.

So I brew a cup of Joe and sit outside on the front porch, inviting the sun's rays to cut through the chill. Barefoot and eager to talk with Him, I ask for his comfort to cover these wounds. What I need is a good an long slice of peace and quiet. So I pick up the Bible and turn to Psalms.

Psalm 25:11
For the sake of your name,, O Lord, forgive my iniquity, though it is great. Who, then, is the man that fears the Lord? He will instruct him in the way chosen for him...The Lord confides in those who fear him.

He confides in those who fear him? Really? How nice. But how so very far away I am from this. All the years together have taught me to confide in my self defense. To use my intellect as a guide. How will I get passed this? Father...it seems too good to be true.

But it wasn't for David, or whomever wrote the "walk through the valley of the shadow of death" poem in Psalms. God made him to walk along the bluest of waters and the greenest of pastures to lie down in His comfort-to fear no evil.

And so I put down my pen. That really means that I stepped away from the keyboard for awhile and sat in the quiet. And through all of that, I feel some good stuff coming up. I've been praying that He show me the root cause for my unbelief...whatever it is that had started the eventual decline in my heart, that had its reigns on it for so long, biting and tearing at the world.

College.

For all I've gained from my life on earth and my struggle for survival arrived at an apex in my formative years in college with my studies in Marxism and Deconstruction. But I could never blame the subjects themselves. It was something deeper. That point in time came right after my youth pastor committed suicide. My best friend. Leaving me. Without notice. Gone. Love, a father figure. My concept of God's love...wrapped up in an authority figure. A man of God. Killed by the bullet in his own gun.

Resignation.

It happened over time. Gradually. From one semester to another. By the end of my tenure at OU, I was a full-blown skeptic. My heart simply could not contain the concept of God as a personal being after that event. I refused to let Him in.

From that point on, I had agreed in the quiet places of my heart that God may be alive, but he definitely was not a personal being. He was weak. Confused. Impotent.

I learned a lot in college. I thought I was smart. Now, I wonder how many years I've lost pursuing that elusive idea...the wisdom of this age. How ultimately misleading and confused it makes the mind. For those who follow, it's like the blind leading the blind. Ultimate heartache. Shovel more of that black coal into the engine.

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My college experience and what I'm working though:

When Niche and his friends pronounced God to be dead in the modern age, I think they were talking about his presence in everyday life...in people's way of thinking. The personal, intimate, omnipresent, omniscient God of the past was being replaced with the absence of God in everything. Welcome the new world. New science is free from the constraints of Plato and Aristotle's belief that the human experience was held together by universals. Free, was mankind, also from the traditional Christian worldview that the world and everything in it was God's. And we, as men and women welcomed psychology to replace the role of religion in our communal and personal lives. Freud, Jung, and the new church of the inner world taught the inner ego, reshaping our way of thinking away from the belief that reality exists anywhere outside of the subconscious. To tap into that quiet place is to find the keys to the universe. Unlocking its hidden potential is the new salvation.

As long as we're on this subject, I don't really think humanity ever changes. I don't think the need for mankind to worship something ever comes and goes over time and place. From where I stand, we all have an unspoken need to worship something. And I think no where else, outside of the Bible, is this more evidently spoken than from Karl Marx himself when he says "religion is the opiate of the masses." Here we are, the father of modern socialism, the author of the Communist Manifesto, the originator of a new way of telling the history of mankind based on the have's and have-not's... the idealist himself, saying humanity needs religion (or the belief in something to survive). There's a decent article on Marx here explaining the deeper context of his quote as it relates to materialism and class struggle:
Article



How evident is that in today's world? What words do we use to explain the things that just can't be explained? In troubled times, even if God is not spoken in the context of our speech, do we not still use spiritual words?

The last poll I saw on religion in America says that over 75% percent of us are spiritual. We believe. And we'll always have that need. If we don't, there is nothing left to live for.

That is what Marx was talking about. It's an innate need within each one of us to worship something. Now, as the institutions of Church and its greater meaning and relevance to society fades more and more, see the book, Unchristian: Link to Book's website do we not still as Americans use the old words of the Faith to describe our trials and struggles throughout the day? Do we, even though, as a group of people who have ultimately denied God's personal presence in our daily lives, still exhaust our collective memory, flipping through the dusty pages to find ancient words such as faith, hope, and love?

The catch is, without God, those words are empty...meaningless. The exist only as symbolism of something deep in the subconscious. A non-reality.

I heard Doctor Drew on MTV's Loveline say something a few years ago, while the show was still airing. He said, and I paraphrase here...that even though the majority of Americans don't practice a specific faith, they still have a desperate need to belong to the idea of faith, even if it's just the idea.

How poignant. How utterly spot on.

The way of thinking of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century has taught us to rely solely on experience and to label anything we cannot see, hear or touch as irrational and therefor undefinable.

Furthermore, this is the dilemma of the postmodern existential man: he realizes his rational world is not all there is to being human. So he must express himself in ways that he knows are irrational. The catch is there is never a real way to define those irrational experiences. He is at once in a cage with no windows or doors. Crying out to the rest of humanity and beyond for someone to hear him speaking. But as Jung so sadly points it...as he sits on a rock, he is yet to be confident if he is on the rock, or the rock is on him. See this somewhat decent article about Jung's thing about the rock and what he called the "Double" Click here to read an article about it
Jung's actual writings on "The Double" found here

This is existential man's despair: To exist and have no good way of defining his existence in any real context other than through pain and confusion. Resignation.

My heart breaks for this generation as I type. I feel like stopping. It is that sad to me. These are my people...the ones who have bought into the idea that higher education can lead to Enlightenment and an understanding of things. My people. My friends. Confined to hell on earth. Locked in a box. With no key. Oh how my heart aches for these people.

God be with them. Show me how to love. Real love. Your love.

There once was a great man in the Faith named Francis Shaeffer. If you haven't heard of him, I encourage you to look him up. His style of writing is sometimes stuffy. But I believe he comes from a good and honestly humble place. Some say he was the world's last great Christian Philosopher. What makes him different from the mainstream Christian thinkers of his day, was that he was not arrogant, rude, or shallow. He was willing and eager to meet with all people, of all walks of life. And to love them as they were.

He wrote many essays and books on modern man's struggle to kill off the concept of God and the reality of God's presence in everyday life. He writes with a heavy pen. He uses big words. But comes to conclusion that our everything we do and think comes first from our belief about the world we live in (our presuppositions as he called them.) As a man thinketh, so is he. In other words, Shaeffer taught that mankind will filter everything he sees, touches, smells, and thinks through his previously held worldview.

To make that less scholarly, I think what he was trying to say that there are trends in history that throughout time, shift the collective thinking of mankind, slowly away from a worldview that includes a concept of God, into a worldview that accepts mankind and his finite mind as the center of the universe of understanding.

Wheeph. There's really no way to explain him without getting all stuffy. But I would say, don't let that distract you from at least picking up his book "How Should We Then Live". It's an amazing retelling of the rise and fall of Western thought through the lens of Art and Culture. A must read for anyone curious or confused as to how Art relates to the human experience. I have always had a hard time understanding art and how it relates to the human experience. This book helps me out.

Shaeffer was popular during the 60's and 70's. And helped the Christian church understand the drives behind the hippie and strange Modern Church movements during those times. He really worked to push believers away from their pews out in society to love people where they were.

But explaining the hippie movement in a way that made sense--which was that the young people of the day were not just rebelling for rebellion's sake...but were rebelling against the spirit of the age...the idea that drove American's at the time...which was the age of personal peace and affluence. Check out a video from Shaeffer on personal peace and affluence: the spirit of the age during the 60's

...by explaining the drives behind these movements in real terms, he helped paint a larger picture. That picture was one of a non-judgmental and deeply passionate longing to bring God's love closer to a lost generation.

He told a story once about meeting an Atheist that I hope sticks with me to my last days. It is very powerful and sometimes, in the dead of night, prompts me to tears. The story goes that he was at his resort in Swiss, that he calls L'Abri L'Abri's Official web site (translated in English to "the shelter") when he had the chance to meet this young man. He greeted him with his usual greeting, which I can only assume was the biggest smile and the kindest handshake ever demonstrated from a human being.

After the discussion, which probably went long. If you ever want to know what Shaeffer sounds like, search him on youtube. He's got a funny look. Even funnier voice. Very long-wended. But he seems genuine in his speeches and in his writing for the young people of his day. So after their discussion, the Atheist turned to Shaeffer and asked him why did he greet him with such beautiful kindness? And Shaeffer, in his geekish ways simply said, because you are created by a lovely God who makes no mistakes and creates everyone on earth in his image.

For Shaeffer's wiki page click here



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Forgive me if I've ran long with that. I needed a place to write all my thoughts down that started coming to me. And now that I have, I'm much better.

May I never resign myself to a life of lesser value than the love expressed by God. May I never walk into the arms of a lover less wild than He. Let it never be.

The lover of my soul and the maker of the heavens and the earth. Who sits on the hill of the Lord and instructs him in his ways? Who presents council to him, that gives him advice? Who is able to understand the expansion of the universe and all that is within it?

And all these days, covered with the blanket of eternal peace and love. And all these days, with my transgressions tossed as far as the east is from the west. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Where there is Love. God is Also. ~ Leo Tolstoy