Posts Tagged: redemption

general / life — 1 Comment
12
Oct 10

vulnerable

“I want to expose the wound to as many people as possible because there may be someone who could help the healing” :: Jeremy Current, Watershed Charlotte

There are moments of artistic openness that as a listener you absolutely have to seize, to grab ahold of knowing that you’re likely to learn something incredible. This was made true for me this past Sunday at Watershed when Jeremy Current, a guest vocal artist, began telling some of his story. While exposing some of the wounds that birthed one of his tunes he shared the quote above.

I was absolutely captivated, evidenced by my leaning forward in my chair and widening eyes. What I felt was a combination of a deep connection with this truth and yet an amazement at the succinctness with which he was able to verbalize truths that have taken me 30 years to even acknowledge. There are still chasms to cross before I begin to understand it.

It is not that I was unwilling to be vulnerable for fear of showing weakness. There are not enough über-masculine bones in my body to justify this. Essentially vulnerability required me to be satisfied with being embarrassed about the nature of my wound and required others to be at all interested in my being wounded and needing healing. Neither were realities that I could comprehend.

What I’m learning about vulnerability, though, is that it is provides the fuel for inspiration, transformation, and even revolution. Consider the concept of famous last words. When faced with challenge, defeat, looming destruction it depths of your soul, your heart, your core desires are the things that come out. The most well-known response when staring down the barrel of a gun is: “Please … I have a wife and family.”

These things come from down deep. It’s unfiltered soul-speak without any pretense or filter.

These are the important things.

The “I don’t want to be here anymore” things.

The “I don’t know what to believe” things.

The “I’m sure we can make it if we just have one more chance” things.

And, it is often in the vulnerable moments when we hear ourselves audibly speak the confessions and fears and troubles and questions that have been floating around in our heads that change can take took.  It’s fertile ground.  It’s shaken.  It’s soft and prepared for new things.

Seize those moments when you or someone close to you is being vulnerable.  Drink in the confession.  Let it stimulate your mind and heart. Let it stir your soul.  Let it connect you to another being.

And while you and I may never stare down the barrel of a literal gun, our hearts will break and our souls will be wrenched. We’ll be disappointed in our self.

Our failure.

Failure, though, and disappointment are the critical components for relationship.  Transparency breeds trust.  It is in the togetherness of life that my vulnerabilities and your concerns become our collective strength.

general / life — 1 Comment
18
Sep 10

clean

“Pobody’s Nerfect”

If the state of the world wasn’t enough to have to deal with, we all go through life adding on and disposing of mental baggage. Sometimes it’s a lack of confidence. Sometime’s it’s rejection. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s much more serious. Many times, however, our baggage accumulates from the myriad of mistakes that we are prone to make or the poor decisions that we felt would end with a different set of circumstances.

What complicates life is that we can have an aversion to just coming clean – of telling someone that we messed up, that we’re not perfect, that we haven’t got it all figured out.

Success in 2010 depends on a great deal of self-promotion. We have to be conscious of presenting the idealized self. And so on Facebook we tell other’s about the books we’ve read that affirm the image we’re trying to project. We careful craft our status postings to reflect the level of sophistication we want to portray. In real life we buy suits and cars and homes that reinforce our status and dress for the job that our ideal self deserves.

So it makes sense that we hide the aspects of our lives that are less than desirable. Having skeletons in our closets can be scary (I do not want to be attacked by zombie skeletons when all I really wanted was a sweater… just sayin). Admitting these skeletons can mean that you won’t get that job, or that thing, or that you will lose respect, or admiration, or that you ego will no longer be stroked.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, it is the catharsis that comes from telling another human being about your shortcomings that may help you deal with them. While I can speak only anecdotally about this (that is, I have no proof), there is a change that happens when you move from a defensive, hidden posture to an active, humbling posture in relationship with someone. There is a definite shift. It may be just the simple reality that the truth has been spoken and yet the world around us has not spontaneously erupted with laughter or ceased to exist whatsoever.

My situation on this front was one where I falsely believed that I had to live up to an idealized version of the real me. And so there is baggage that I’ve accumulated over the years that I made every effort to veil. To have someone else know these things, I rationalized, would have been far too costly and, frankly, embarrassing. Mine was a personal struggle, I reasoned. There were times when I even tried to convince myself that it would actually be harmful to the OTHER PERSON if I were to tell them.

(As an aside, I do realize that I’m speaking very cryptically at the moment. This IS intentional. If I’m interested in going into detail, I’ll do it in person… not to the safety of my computer screen).

I want to be able to say that the act of telling people about these experiences has been very rewarding. They’ve not. Or, at the very least I would not use the word rewarding. Perhaps I need only to go back to the opening line, here, and say that it has been cathartic. The world, in fact, has continued, as have my relationships with those on the receiving end of my confessions. Now there are people in the world who seem to think about me in much the same way as they always have, except now I KNOW that they know that I am not, and cannot be, perfect. And, so, I no longer have to chase after this unattainable ideal with the same fervor as before.

The other interesting component of this experience has been the affirmation of “there can be good in every situation” mentality. For me, this good has been a new down-to-earth-edness that didn’t exist before. For you readers of Velvet Elvis, it’s the take “super-whatever out back and end his worthless existence.” This humility has come in waves. The first recognition come with an admission to myself that something was amiss. My behaviors didn’t line up with my beliefs and claims. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. That took a while to sink in before I could move on to step two: needing someone else to know that I’m not as good as I thought I was.

Step two is altogether hard, incredibly worthwhile, and sometimes unexpected. For me, it started following a flippant, passing remark during dinner one night at a local pizza place. The opportunity blindsided me like nothing had ever blindsided me before. Within the eternity that was just a couple of seconds, I reasoned that this was do or die; a “you HAVE to walk through this door” moment. So I did. And with that, the remorse and guilt and fear that saturated my consciousness for literally half a lifetime began to precipitate out. It was visible. It was just there. In the open. It could be measured and poked and prodded and evaluated.

But it couldn’t be ignored. And it couldn’t easily be dissolved back out of sight.

And then today I had the opportunity to be the first to walk though that same door rather than simply responding to someone else’s first move. It was undramatic and worthwhile and altogether incredible.

Once and for all it suddenly seemed like something separate: something that wasn’t me, but something that had continued to live parasitically from me. It didn’t drain me of happiness or joy or life. It just took the excess. It didn’t need all of my self-confidence. But it took enough so that other areas of my life suffered. It thrived when I should have been thriving. It lived when I should have been living.

It suddenly seemed so overdramatic to have spent such a great deal of the last fifteen years working to hide and feed this life-sucking leech.

And so freeing to live free of it.

From here, your guess is as good as mine as to which way this will go. I’m not expecting it to be the easiest thing in the world. Once you get used to living a certain way, changing is a challenge to put it lightly. But it’s intriguing to me that it’s in my weakness that I’m strong. It’s in my shame that I’m proud. It’s in my pain that I’m alive.

There are a few moments that I can honestly look back on and say they’ve changed my life. The day I learned about “active and passive” living and my wedding day are two that come to mind. I suspect, in a few years that I’m living another of those moments right now.

faith / general — Comments Off
17
May 10

bigger than my body

Someday I’ll fly
Someday I’ll soar
Someday I’ll be so damn much more
Cause I’m bigger than my body gives me credit for

After listening to the thoughts of Desmond Tutu from my last post, I imagine God to still be inspiring writers to write profound thoughts that someday will be canonized into The Bible II.  The prophet John Mayer has spoken.

Desmond Tutu said this during a portion of a recent interview that dealt with his good friend, the Dalai Lama:

“Do you really think that God would say, ‘Dalai Lama, you really are a great guy, man.  What a shame you’re not a Christian.’  I somehow don’t think so.  I think God is just thrilled because no faith, not even the Christian faith, can ever encompass God or be able to communicate who God is.  Only God can do that.”

This flies directly in the face of what traditional theology teaches.  How many times have you heard, “No one may come to the Father, except through me,” which implies you have to come experience the Jesus that this brand of church is promoting before you can graduate to some distant heaven far away in the clouds.  In church we are taught about love and grace and mercy which flows from God in heaven – God IS love, after all – and yet when we see these traits in people who aren’t traditional God-heads, we puzzle as to how non-Christians can experience and show these traits.

Perhaps God is bigger than we, “his body”, give him credit for.

It’s human to want to compartmentalize – and put concepts in neatly and clearly defined mental boxes.  God is bigger than our mental boxes.  It’s tempting to think of God in terms of metaphor to put his character in terms of something that we can understand, but the problem here is that every metaphor quickly breaks down.

God is big.

But how to we reconcile the words of a book that says “no man comes to the father except though me” with a spirit and an understanding of Jesus that is so loving that he wouldn’t see anyone not be part of the family.

We’ve got one mechanism – it’s our choice.  Our go-to default position on this has been – “it’s a gift that is freely offered” and you’re stupid, dead, ignorant, irrational NOT to take it.  This functions, but doesn’t remove some of the callousness – God throwing his hands up and saying “The ball is in YOUR court – I’ve done all I can do.”

We sometimes tack on that not “accepting God’s gift” makes baby Jesus cry to handle this.

But, maybe, we’re starting in the wrong place – maybe we’re reading too much into the english translation of greek words that were written thousands of years ago. Perhaps instead of reading that Jesus is the only door that leads to the father so if you don’t accept his love prepare for eternal damnation we should read Jesus is the way through eternity and He has revealed himself to so many people in so many ways that everyone can have access.

It’s a much different interpretation that resolves the “only through me issue.”

You can’t own God.  But the Christian church (and to be fair, all of our faiths) have staked their claim.  My God does this.  You (lower-case g) god doesn’t.  We’re trying to contain the uncontainable.

Sure, this is heretical – I understand.  But how much more like Christ would it be to drop the us-and-them mentality, the “homosexuality is an abomination” approach to life, the drive for pious perfections and simply replace bad circumstances with good circumstances, and to replace good circumstances with better circumstances?

It is utterly irrelevant to me if when I die I was right or wrong.  I don’t care what heaven is like.  I’m OK with Zen-like questions surrounding my Christian faith.  I don’t need answers.  What I need is to express faith in practical ways by being friendly, sharing food, washing cars, giving money, hugging, and relating to people in completely unconditional terms.  I am motivated by a belief that we’re all created in the image of God and that your soul and mind and strength are equally as valid as my soul, and mind, and strength.

He’s bigger than His body gives him credit for.

general — 1 Comment
7
Mar 10

passion

I see the young girl huddled on the brothel floor
I see the man with a passion come in kicking down the door

This lyric is from a Sara Groves song – When the Saints.  Every time I hear it, it blows my heart to smithereens, and without fail, I’ll get something in my eye.  Without fail.

The song itself, if you’ve not heard it is pretty unassuming – essentially, Sara says she wants to walk in with the Saints, mentions a few Bible characters for comparison and off she goes singing again.

Then this happens:

I see the long quiet walk along the Underground Railroad
I see the slave awakening to the value of her soul

I see the young missionary and the angry spear
I see his family returning with no trace of fear

I see the long hard shadows of Calcutta nights
I see the sister standing by the dying man’s side

I see the young girl huddled on the brothel floor
I see the man with a passion come in kicking down the door

I see the man of sorrows and his long troubled road
I see the world on his shoulders and my easy load

In all seriousness, that one lyric does it for me.  I’m sure there are lots of reasons why but, for whatever reason, I really connect with the spirit of this thought.  I think about being a guy and about all of the baggage that comes along with that – teenage years of hormone-induced lust and the residual hormone-hangover that most of us experience throughout our twenties.  I think of pornography and how what can start as an innocent curiosity and what gets regarded too often as a rite of passage is, in fact, a mind-bogglingly large profit sector with complex revenue streams and profit sharing.  It is big business that, like all big businesses, are about making money.

It makes me wonder what portion of mouse-clicks support things like sexual trafficking. There has to be some fringe sites and systems that take advantage of men’s addictions. It makes me wonder how many of these girls get into the porn industry because they feel like they have no other options. It makes me wonder how many abductions result in forced sexual slavery – I know the numbers are staggering.

And then I think about us men having our lusts transformed into compassion, motivating us to turn off the computer and figuratively or literally busting down doors with an appetite for restoration, an appetite for rescue.

To me, this is incredibly moving imagery that speaks to me more strongly than I could even attempt to write about here. I’ve written before on this blog about how restoration speaks deeply to my soul and this may be, for me, the ultimate display of restoration.

Here’s the song on Lala.com so you can listen for yourself: http://lala.com/zZu8I

life — 2 Comments
6
Jan 10

redemption

Redemption gets me every time.

Behind my obviously gruff exterior is a soft-hearted man who would cry at the drop of a hat and its subsequent return to its rightful owner. There is something about redemption and restoration and encouragement that clutches my heart and simply will not let it go before ensuring that my eyes well up and that I have to sniff back tears.

I don’t mind admitting this. I’m not a proud man.

It speaks to a sense of belonging to an inclusive human family as well as a belief that we can live counter to the entropy of the universe. We tend towards chaos. But we neither belong there nor do we have to remain there.

We’re told that God wants whats best for us and has a plan for us. I believe that there is a ‘right’ way for us to live as individuals and as a collective. While I don’t believe that the Creator has packed our calendars full of events and appointments, tasks that we are to complete save eternity hangs in the balance, I think it’s appropriate to say that God would have us live in such a way that we both actively and passively find opportunities to make life better. Simple things. Ambitious things. Things that are a doomed to fail. Things that are overnight sensations.

These things shift our trajectory away from the chaos. They give us purpose and direction in more than one sense of those words. It was the grand intention of God not that I would give a homeless man a sandwich on Aug 17 at 2:34pm but simply that we would live with kindness, generosity, understanding, integrity, and a designed desire to crave justice for our fellow creatures.

It’s these things that make miniscule corrections to our path – a state of perfect redemption approached by the assimilation of millions and billions of unnoticed acts.

There are aspects of my life that I’m not prepared to share on my blog, and so it makes this next bit much less dramatic. But, for a brief moment in time I was able to zoom out and get a wide-angle shot of my life and realized that there is a redemption that’s been happening all along, a restoration, a return to how things should be and how I want them to be. It’s millions of little things that are coalescing into a beautiful work of redemptive art.

And that may make me well up, just a little bit.