Reflections of a Humble Melancholic

First off, I recently realized that you guys can send me email at psalm13@hotmail.com. The problem is that I never check that account because it got tons of junkmail and no real mail. So I've now opened it back up, just in case anyone ever wanted to email me there, but if you've done so before, I haven't received it. I'm not snubbing you, I just never received it. My apologies.

There's so much in my brain that I want to get across to you in a somewhat coherent manner, and I'm off to a bad start. I think what I'm going to do is throw out a bunch of the random thoughts and events that have acquired recognition as "significant" to me recently. It may seem disjointed, but I want to try to let you see some of the influences on my thinking, so that maybe you can understand my conclusions. Here goes.

So this week I was a chore boy at Ye Old Conservative Bible Camp's family camp. They had this preacher in who was pretty good - knew his Bible well, spoke well and could pull together a lot of interesting stuff. His style was to take a word or a phrase or whatever and preach on it for a half hour - the meanings of the Hebrew words, the structure of the passage and how it relates to other passages, and analysis of the people and their overall attitudes and problems and so forth. Sometimes I thought he pushed his interpretation of someone's character a little far, particularly when it was based on one phrase thrown in as an aside to the main story. The thing was, this guy was a literalist - he believed that every word in his Bible was carefully chosen by God and (with the exception of those passages that are blatantly figurative) meant to be taken literally. It was hard for me to even wrap my brain around this - that intelligent people can hold these kind of views. I feel this way about a lot of stuff, and I suspect it's less to do with everyone who thinks differently than me being stupid than it is me being generally surrounded by people who think basically the same way I do. When all you interact with are like-minded people, all you hear are your own opinions. Opposing viewpoints need not even be considered because there's no one there to advance them. So naturally (being lazy) we assume that these other views are illogical/weird/evil, even if we're not trying to be narrow-minded to begin with. Anyway, that's why I love talking to people who have all kinds of different beliefs and mindsets.

I reread Blue Like Jazz this past week. One of the things that really stood out to me is when Donald Miller talks about a man who ran a bed and breakfast, and who was to him a vivid picture of selflessness. He asked this man how he puts up with people, and the reply was something like "If we're not willing to wake up each morning and die to ourselves, maybe we should ask ourselves if we're truly following Christ." I thought this was incredible - this idea of waking up every morning and dying to yourself, reminding yourself that you're only purpose as a follower of Christ is to love other people.

A couple weeks ago I was sitting around at another camp, talking to a girl I know. She was asking where I was at, and I said that I'd sort of decided that I need to do the things I'm supposed to do and try to just be a good Christian and love God and others and all that, even though I didn't really want to and it's never really worked in the past and I still have all my doubts. I said that I'd come to realize that I can't be a special needs Christian, I need to just suck it up and obey. She said that sounded a lot like what I'd decided a few months ago. This caught me off guard, but thinking back, I decided she's probably right. Every few weeks or months I come to the point where I say "Oh look, I'm being dumb. I should really just stop struggling against God and start obeying, even though I don't get it." And then I try to do this but it never really works out.

I was talking with another friend recently about how being a Chore Boy is really cushy. Yes, I have to do some gross stuff (women's bathrooms), but I really only work 4 or 5 hours a day. The rest of the time I can sit around and read or talk to the preacher or sleep or whatever. He said other people might include time spent hanging out with kids and forming relationships as work time. I said "Oh ya, I don't really do that. Y'know, it really frees up a lot of time when you realize you're the only one that matters." I was half joking, but I felt pretty convicted about it. As much as I talk about trying to really love others, I spent 98% of my time thinking about myself and doing things to please myself. The crazy thing is that I'd talked to this same guy just a few days earlier about how I'd realized that I'm basically only happy when I'm serving other people. And it's true: when I think about myself, I'm depressed, but when I think about other people or get a chance to help them it makes me feel good, as if I'm not totally wasting my life. People are always apologetic about needing help and they usually want to repay you somehow. I want to say "No, there's nothing to repay. The best thing you ever did for me was to need me just now, and to accept my help." What I'm saying is that even after realizing that caring for others, not myself, makes me happy, I've still failed miserably to really care about others. Isn't that amazing?

Sometime over the past year I realized that I had no reason to think that God's ever answered my prayers. Maybe I've told you before that the only prayers I've ever seemed to get answers to are the ones about becoming a better person. For example, I'd pray that God would help me with my anger or pride or whatever, and I'd work hard at it, and a couple months later I can see the difference. So then the question is did God really help me or did I just do it myself? Impossible to know, but it seems to me that I do better when I pray about stuff than when I don't. Ok, but that doesn't necessarily mean God's helping me - it could be just the psychological benefit of thinking he's helping me that really helps. When I was young and scared of monsters in the night I would do two things: pray, and hug my teddy bear. The bear certainly helped, though only because of a silly psychological trick that allows me to be comforted and encouraged if only I think I am. To be fair then, we need to take the same consideration for prayer, subtracting from the overall benefits of prayer the benefits of a cheap psychological trick. When we do this, is anything left to be attributed to the intervention of God? (I know, I'm treating abstract metaphysical whatever like a mathematical equation, and this is probably pretty shakey logic, but I'm just saying this is the way I've been thinking.) I was thinking about what really happens when we pray (also kind of dumb - how could I know?) and I'd pretty much decided that God usually doesn't do anything when we pray, but he tells us to pray because:
1) It reminds us that God's up there and he loves us.
2) Praying for other people reminds us of their significance, prompts us to think more about them than we might otherwise, and might even cause us to care for them in practical ways (which probably does them more good than any amount of prayer).
3) psychologically, if we think God's listening to us and will help us in some weird, mystical way, this belief in it's self will be helpful. This is probably the only real help that comes from prayer, under normal circumstances.
(Note: I've always believed that God can and does answer prayers in practical and even miraculous ways. He just never seemed to do this around me. Furthermore, I wouldn't insist that God does not answer my prayers in mysterious, intangible ways, but only that if he does, it's all very... Mysterious and intangible. Which is hard on my faith.)
The problem is that if you believe point 3 to be true it totally undermines the effectiveness of point 3, making prayer basically worthless. Or rather, of no discernible value to me, (it's all about me, you see) and therefore unappealing. Yes, points 1 and 2 are still valid, and so is all that stuff in the "note", but none of that stuff is particularly attractive. What all this means is that I'm disgustingly skeptical and I end up not praying much, and when I do pray it's with this weird attitude of smirking cynicism, as if I'm saying to God "You and me know that this is all nonsense, but I'll play along. See how gracious I am; how good at following your rules, even though they're dumb." This is not a good way to pray.

I recently read through the "Sermon on the Mount" (Matthew 5-7) a couple times, and I decided it's awesome. Especially if you're really believe that Jesus means stuff like "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." This stuff was so radical when Jesus said it 2000 years ago. I think it's still pretty radical today, which maybe means we haven't been doing a very good job of applying it. What would happen if I took these teachings as a challenge and really tried to live the rest of my life based on them? I wonder if I'd look totally different. Actually I wouldn't, because no matter how hard I'd try, I wouldn't be able to wrench my focus away from myself and actually live selflessly, which is the key to everything.

Another conversation: in response to the general theme of this blog, and specifically the entry "Laura, I love you", a friend of mine said this: he once lost the love of a woman because he demanded that she love him the way he wanted her to. If we can't force other people to love us the way we want, we certainly can't force God. So basically, I'll never get anywhere moping and whining because God won't speak to me. God will do what God will do, and I've got to either accept that or get out.

Apparently I'm Melancholic. (Don'cha love personality tests? For the record, I'm also phlegmatic, green, and an INTP.) The lovely thing about these tests is that they give you the two lists of personality traits at the end, and the first list makes you sound angelic, and the second list makes you sound like scum. My first list looks like this:
Deep and thoughtful, analytical, serious and purposeful, talented and creative, artistic or musical, philosophical and poetic, appreciative of beauty, sensitive to others, self-sacrificing, conscientious, idealistic, and (I'm not making this up) genius prone.
I guess we'd better do the negatives too. Here ya go:
remembers the negatives, moody and depressed, enjoys being hurt, has false humility, off in another world, low self-image, has selective hearing, self-centered, too introspective, guilt feelings, persecution complex, tends to hypocondria.
I don't think all this stuff applies to me (actually, I think there's more in me from the first list than the second, but that's probably just because I'm full of myself) but some of it is bang-on. "Enjoys being hurt"? Yes, I think so. "Off in another world"? For sure. And we all know I'm self-centered, moody and depressed. "False Humility"? ...That's an interesting one. Ok, raise your hand if you've achieved true humility. No one? (Well, there's always Moses, the man who was the "humblest man on earth" even after he said "I'm the humblest man on earth." That's pretty impressive.) I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this. Maybe I'm falsely humble sometimes, but I think sometimes I'm falsely proud too. I've been falsely a lot of things; I'm rarely sure if what I'm saying or feeling is "real" or not. I actually spend a fair amount of time thinking about this - perhaps too much. (After all, there's such a thing as being "too introspective".)

Hopefully these random snippits make sense to you. Hopefully you're seeing some kind of vague theme here. If not, I'll help you out. I'm thinking that what's missing in my life and my approach to seeking God and being good and selfless is humility. I think I need to humble myself and come before God and really ask him to help me be good. It doesn't matter that I can convince myself that God doesn't really answer prayer, that the Bible isn't necessarily inerrant, that there is no real evidence of God's presence in my world. I'm coming to him now on my knees, perhaps in false humility, but striving for sincerity, for true reverence and meekness and submission, asking him to accept me as I am and take these imperfect efforts of mine and make them pure and holy. I recognize that I am self-centered, proud and hostile, that my attitudes are wrong, that my desires are tainted and my resolution is feeble and my efforts are half-hearted and my all my results are pathetic and backwards. I've come to a similar conclusion to Douglas Coupland's: "I need God - I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."
So many times and so earnestly I've prayed that God would reveal himself to me. (I'm talking about those prayers in my Journal from earlier in the year.) So many times have I begged him to move powerfully in my circumstances to rock me out of my complacency, to take full control of my heart, soul, body and mind, to use me for his purposes, withholding nothing that would make me more completely his servant. But with every prayer - however heartfelt and sincere and pure in motive - comes an expectation. An expectation of a dramatic experience, a filling or a calling, an order to go or to do. And with every refusal of God to conform to my expectations comes confusion and anger and frustration.
But this time can be different. I come crawling to God now, demanding nothing, asking nothing, expecting nothing, only offering to him without reservation or condition my whole self: my bitter heart, my cynical mind, my sinful body and my tortured soul. This is my prayer: that God would do his will in me. That he would change my attitudes and remake me into a true servant, a true seeker of his will.
And now I come to you, my reader, my brother, my friend. And I come to you in humility, on my knees. You've seen what I am - all of my failings and the depths of my selfishness and pride. I want to be your servant. I want to be Jesus to you. I want to give you not only my words but my time, my sweat and blood, my love, my heart, my very self. I will do my best, but so much more than that I will beg of God that he change me and live and love through me. This is my pledge to you: that I will do my utmost - not by my own strength but through reliance on God - to truly love and serve you. And this is my request: that you be patient with me, because I will fail, that you support me, because I will become discouraged, that you refocus me, because I will wander from this path, and that you accept my servanthood, because slowly but surely I will achieve this great thing, I will die to myself and live for Him and for you. And as always, I ask that you pray for me, because without God's intervention I will never be more than a self-serving wretch. I say these things with all the earnesty and humility I possess, and I pray that God will make these statements ever more true, that more and more I would desire what I claim to desire and that it will come to pass.