What you Think and what you Know

I know personal experience is among the most disputable types of evidence, but I can’t help letting it become a factor.  I’m simply astonished at the “God effect” in my own life.  It can easily be said that it’s a ruse of my own thinking.  But if one is sincere (and that’s the measure – like Lucy in Lewis’ Narnia wardrobe – she knows what she saw because she wasn’t trying to see anything) every day in seeking to explore and discover God – if one is absolutely sincere – then it becomes a very complicated ruse to maintain.  If God is my puppet then I must both pull His strings and forget they exist at the same time.  It’s certainly possible to accomplish such a feat, but it’s made much more complicated by the presence of sincerity.   
 
How can it be that I simply can’t seem to put my head together in any way other than while I’m on my knees? I feel so clumsy and unacedemic by making such an exclamation.  I can only offer up the fact that do I so because the constancy of this effect has become too astonishing to ignore.  It is utterly astonishing that it never fails to be that the angle of me knees corresponds to the quality of my headspace.  

Though I try, though I even greatly desire to be able to put my head together without the use of my knees, I can’t.  If this is all a ruse, to be honest, I’d like to trade it for one that leaves me far more independent and far more self-reliant.  
 
With all these things in mind it becomes necessary to acknowledge that sometimes what you think is more important than what you know.  Take marriage as an example.  How much can you really “know” before you make your choice?  Unmarried people think you can know a lot, married people know different.  Ultimately one of the most important lifestyle decisions you’ll ever make is more about what you think than what you know.  
 
I understand the value of the “rules” that preclude the use of personal experience (as astonishing as it may seem to the one who’s experience it is).  You are the only one who can describe your own experience – who knows how honest you are being?  Who knows how objective your observations are?  It’s fraught with problems.   

It is the foundation of all kinds of cults and leadership toxicity.  At it’s very base, it’s a dressed version of “just trust me, I know.”  And it sounds horrible, except when you consider, essentially, that is exactly what your investment advisor has to say about the stock market (and he or she holds your retirement in their hands).
 
I understand that value of the “rules” that preclude the use of personal experience, but I also understand that what you think is sometimes more important than what you know. Strictly speaking, no one can “know” what the stock market will do.  But there are individuals like Warren Buffet who’ve built a career for more than 30 years  by acting on what could not be known.  What they thought was better than what they could have known – and they have billions to show for it.  Equally, to be fair, there is probably a larger number of investors who thought better than they knew and were wrong.    
 
I am reminded of the Cassandra of mythology.  Blessed to know the future, cursed to be ignored in spite of it.  I am a prisoner of my own astonishing experience:  for 17 years I’ve relied on Christ in utter honesty and objectivity.  I’ve put the weight of my future on a set of ideas that would need God in order to work.  They have worked.  I can be so deeply convinced only because I know how sincerely I’ve trusted - without “fudging” the result, without aiding God’s cause, without pulling puppet strings to make a false idea seem true.
 
I know none of this is truly transferable – no one can repeat my experiment in a lab and compare results.  But the trust test is for each of us alone to measure the depth of our sincerity.  No one will ever know how honestly I let my life fall on these ideas and how honestly these ideas held.  

But at the same time, if anyone is interested in a “tip” not unlike investment advice about the stock market, let me say this:  I’m in the midst of a 17 year run.  So I’ll tell you what I think (and, perhaps, what no one else can know):  I think He’s there.  I think it so much I think I bloody well know it.  Oh, and one more thing, I think your knees are tied directly to your head space.

Grace and your Junk

It seems to me we have one of four choices when it comes to dysfunction:
 

(1) Live in denial. Believe in the myth of having it together.  Simply find a way to put an interpretive layer over top of who you are that leaves you completely oblivious of any junk that may or may not come from you.  Increasingly, I’m a “having it all together” cynic. I find it harder and harder to believe in the myth of special people.  I think it’s more about having the courage to really know yourself or not  I think it’s also about having the determination to pick through your own slanted perspective to find the ways you are kidding yourself.

(2) You can acknowledge your junk and live in shame.  What wonderful fun to spend your few years on earth lovingly licking your own wounds.  Whatever damage may have been done living in denial (see above) likely pales in comparison to the dysfunction that can come from acknowledging your own failure in ways that leave you isolated and alone.  

(3) You can acknowledge your junk and justify it.  Now we’re into a great, popular past time.  Find the worst part about you and then invent a reason not to change it.  “This is the way I am, the way I was made to be, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”  Well, how do you know?  It seems tremendously counter intuitive to identify a weakness only to further identify a reason why you should also learn to live with it.

(4) You can acknowledge your junk and get it cancelled. Acknowledging the worst part of you takes a courageous and objective voice.  If we’re really honest, most of us have one or a few twisted secrets we’d rather carry with us to the fires of hell than have them told.  

 
Acknowledgement is only the beginning, though (see numbers 2 and 3 above).  If that’s all you do, that’s not going to work.  Beyond acknowledgement, we need something more.  And that’s where “cancelled” comes in. I think the idea of “stopped” is a pile of fool’s gold.  Sure, there will be (and should be improvement), but I, for one, am sick of being pounded against the rocks of “you should be over this by now”. I live with my throttle pegged to the floor like most people, and I don’t need to be trashed about the extra capacity I haven’t found yet.
 
Only when you’ve honestly, deeply and objectively gazed at those twisted secrets without giving in to wound-licking shame or change-busting justification can you begin to grasp the explosive ramifications of this statement:  “I have been forgiven.”  My junk has been cancelled.  Parts of it may continue to trouble me, there may even be a relapse.  But it has been forever separated from my identity.  It’s something that’s touched me, but it doesn’t define me.  Sure it’s dirty – actually, it’s twisted and dirty – but it’s also been cancelled.  
 
What makes it powerful is the acknowledgement that precedes it, when you get to the place where you see (ever so clearly) how much you really needed it in the first place.  Do you think you might need it?

What about Crap?

What about the junk we all have inside ourselves?  Doesn’t apply to you?  I encourage you to find a blog for non-humans.  I don’t mean to be specist (which is a word I invented that goes one step beyond racist) but this is a human-only issue.  

Confession:  I've had a quiet goal for my whole life to not ever actually need grace.  I’m too proud.  I've wanted to be able to bask in the acknowledgement that I didn't need "corners cut" for me  My, my.  What a costly and foolish mental framework to try to maintain.  

All of this is why I've had only a very little personal attachment to the idea of forgiveness until the last few years.  I had been a resource "other people" needed.  Any talk of God's "amazing grace", which I accepted in principle, was something I considered from a distance, thinking, "Isn't it so wonderful that God will give so generously to 'other people' who 'need it'".

The bliss of ignorance, however, came at a heavy price.  The idea of having it all together became far too costly and sketchy to maintain.  It required a degree of personal dishonesty that began to spread to other areas of my life.  In other words:  it was full of crap and time for something new.

Now I am a "togetherness" cynic.  I don't really believe it exists in large enough quantities for any of us to not need grace – or some other way to deal with “junk”.  If we're deeply honest, I think we all have secrets we'd gladly go to hell just to keep to ourselves.  (Sure, that's extreme language, but it's also reflective of the level of shame possible when you get really honest about your deepest motives).

All of this creates a bit of a situation.  How can we have a functional sense of identity when some parts of us are such a frightening, twisted secret?  It seems to me that you can either deny your junk and try to keep the ruse of togetherness in tact or you need some other mechanism.  Not many of us can simply admit, “I’m an animal” and leave it that.

I think what we really need is to have our junk "cancelled".  "Stopped" is a bucket of fool's gold.  Promise yourself "never again" and watch what happens.  Every "never" is followed by a "next":  you say "never again" and then go on to the "next" time you do it.

"Cancelled" is my only viable option because I just can’t “quit”.  To live in denial is to be held hostage by your deepest secrets.  But to acknowledge your "junk" may be one step worse because the guilt you didn't know about becomes the shame you do know about.  And one step further, the shame you do know about can become despair when we start to lose hope.  

Which is what makes forgiveness such a necessary and incredible thing.  It is the central shock of ancient Christianity that you can acknowledge your twisted secret and then have it cancelled.  I don’t want to embellish that lest I make the concept perfect for my own thinking and useless for yours.  It’s a mystery.  It’s a mess.  It’s a contradiction.  It’s also true (I believe, anyway).  My crap’s cancelled.

So...  If you have the courage to find an objective voice about yourself, gaze into your deepest secrets and accept that they are no surprise to God, then and only than can you truly appreciate the explosive ramifications of the statement, "I am forgiven".

And I am so glad I am.    

The Great Things Other People Do

It’s not a theory we bother to articulate, otherwise we might discard it for sheer foolishness. No, it’s one we quietly believe and assuage and follow blindly after.  It’s this whole idea that you can “catch” success through your eyes by reading about the great things other people do.
 
I think it interesting to note that those hosting seminars on success did not get successful by attending them.  Rather, they became successful first and then designed a seminar around it.  What you are hearing is just a theory about what they think mattered in their journey.  Who knows if they are telling all  you need to know?
 
Staring at the great things other people do has several problems with it.  Chief among them the fact that you are seeing a journey from the destination backwards, and you are seeing from the outside in. It’s like trying to reconstruct the meal after, well, you know, after someone has “done their thing”. It’s at least twice modified: chewed, digested and ejected. It can be difficult to extrapolate all the ingredients that came before.  The prospect of reverse engineering success from the story told after the fact is no different.
 
Reading a steady diet of everyone else’s “great things” may leave you so saturated in other stories that you may lose your sense of your own.  It’s a sobering thought (and also quite true) that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his entire lifetime.  What was turned down by art dealers across Europe as worthless – what he couldn’t give away for food and board – now fetches millions. By many standards, he was failure. Dead in the prime of his life from a self inflicted gun shot wound in an act of suicide.  
 
But still, we remember his name today.  The great “copiers” of his time – those who were successful by the standards of their day, however, are part of the anonymous mass of people who form the backdrop of history.  They did other people’s paintings well.  They studied success and achieved it.  In exchange for their efforts they received a comfortable salary and anonymity.  Significance, however, slipped through their fingers.
 
Being brilliant, we can assume is quite different from being successful.  There’s nothing new in that.  Clearly Van Gogh wasn’t aiming at the latter.  He never sought to learn the kind of paintings that sold well.  Instead, he was driven by a mad fever to express himself in a certain way whether it sold or not. He had a cause.  
 
Perhaps if you aim at success and miss it, your endeavor becomes a failure by your own standard. You did what you did for the outcome and the outcome eluded you.  But if you find a cause or a passion, and you do what you do for the journey, then at least you still have that in the end.
 
If we are gazing into the accomplishments of others trying to understand success, please know that they gazed into the same possibility from the other side, before it became a success, and their motives were often quite different.  Their success sometimes came as an accident of a greater passion to serve or create or change or risk or learn.  
 
Indeed some of the greatest innovations were preceded by behavior that seemed outlandish and unacceptable at the time.  They didn’t stare into success, they stared past it to a greater idea. Maybe the best we can do is turn to our resources and our opportunities and ask what noble thing we can attempt. Let success become an accident of substance.