“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)
I am going to break from what has developed as my typical blogging format and share something that is very much related to how I am currently dealing with my recovery in Christianity. Next month I turn 36 years old. I am not so concerned that I am “getting old”, but I am aware of certain frustrations with where I am. First let me point out places where I find much joy with where my life is. I am married to an awesome woman who somehow finds the energy to laugh at my jokes, support me through my existential dilemmas, and be an amazing best friend. I have two boys that are my world. I am surrounded by friends and family who love me. And (to be trite) I have good health and a roof over my head. However, as I prepare to enter the second half of my thirties I am disturbed that my life has yet to take off the way I wished it had. I get that life usually doesn’t turn out the way we wish, but at 35 years old I still struggle daily with identifying what my ministry is, my own spiritual journey, and my identity. Over the past year I have settled in a career that I would have ever wished for that (while I am honestly pretty good at) brings me very little personal satisfaction, gone through what has been a very difficult developmental stage of marriage, been hit headlong with financial struggles, pushed my dissertation back a semester, and made the painful decision to put my oldest child on behavior altering medication. As I went through those exhausting six months I realize now that I was in crisis-mode. Now, as life settles some, I am attempting to process what that all meant. As I begin to sort out the meaning of it all I can’t help but feel that God is attempting to do something in me or perhaps reveal something to me, but that I am simply unable to make since of that as well.
Over the weekend I was driving home from a little side job I picked up to help with expenses. It was a rainy morning and I was listening to some pretty sappy and depressing 70’s Top Forty music. I was hit with this feeling of overwhelming discouragement. I am not sure this is going to make much sense to anyone who is not as screwed up as I am, but I felt like a piece of my identity was missing. At the time I identified it as I was attempting to live completely normal life but was missing an arm. Obviously there are people who are missing an arm and do quite well, but there is no mistaking the fact that they don’t have that arm. That is how I felt. I was getting through life just fine without that part of my identity but there was no denying that it was gone. This took me to reflect on a verse that I had been meditating on all week, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Over the past week I had been meditating on how frustrating that verse is to me. If I desire to rid myself of thoughts, behaviors, and aspects of my life I need to replace them with something else or they will return (exponentially as the parable of sweeping the house would illustrate). But if you rid yourself of sin (sin being anything that separates me from God) before the Spirit can replace it then you are left with a void in your identity. If you try to feel yourself with the Spirit without repentance then you live with opposing identities. I realized on that drive home that this is how I feel. I am either suffering from a depressed state of lose of identity from ridding myself of a part of my identity (as in the DSM diagnosis 296.90) or I am suffering from competing identities (as in the DSM diagnosis 300.12).
As I struggle through my recovery of Christianity (and by the way, I would like to remind you that when I say Christianity I am referring to the cultural form of Christianity that I believe is neither biblical nor healthy) I am having to engage with some pretty hard truths regarding areas of my life that I have been able to mask with principles, doctrines, forms of righteousness. But one of those areas that is most difficult for me to engage in is identifying how and what must die in me. I am a firm believer that no one does anything for any single reason. There are multiple voices that play (consciously or subconsciously) in our heads when we do anything. Righteousness without holiness, while having value, is more about serving a part of our identity that needs to die. Holiness does produce righteousness, but it is easy to be righteous without holiness. It is easy in the modern church to confuse the two ideals, but the truth is that holiness is often more about obedience rooted in relationship with God than righteousness rooted in ethics.
So as I conclude this glimpse into the psyche of a Recovering Christian I ask one thing: if you figure out how to become this new creation we have all already been identified as in our justified state please let me in on the secret. Otherwise, find comfort in the fact that sanctification is a messy and complicated process of self-discovery that can only be worked out in true community.
No comments:
Post a Comment