The following blog post may, in parts, seem a little self-indulgent, self-pitying, and self-deprecating. And maybe a blogpost is not the best forum for what Im about to write. But allow me to work out some thoughts here. And in the end, dont hold them against me.
Ive just been thinking for the past several days about how destitute and lost my life feels lately. (How is that for a morbid beginning?) I really dont mean to start whining here, but "destitute" and "lost" are just two of the better words I can come up with right now.
To be honest, Ive just felt like crap lately and its beginning to feel like Ive been going through something like a mid-life crisis, except its (hopefully) a third-life crisis in my case. Ive always understood a "mid-life" crisis to be that moment in a person's life (I guess we usually think of men here for some reason) where that person begins to be overwhelmed with the idea that he has wasted his life and that he has made all the wrong choices (spouse, career, location, etc.), and where he becomes immensely afraid of the possibility of dying before he has reached his innermost, unrealized potential. I dont know if my situation is exactly like the one I just described, but there are some close similarities.
Now according to Christian ideals, a man should not worry about his life. He should "lose" his life (and all the anxiety that comes with it) for the sake of "gaining" it. He should not be concerned about the outcome of his own fortune at all, but only that he has been a "good and faithful servant" to God and to his neighbor. For the Christian man, there should be no concern for "self" but only concern for "others." I was ready to completely buy into that idea until I read Soren Kierkegaard a few years ago. Now Im obsessed with the idea that my "self" is always going to be an important part of life's equation.
I wrote in an earlier post somewhere back that I dont ever want to stop being me. Ive kind of boiled all my hopes and desires for life down to that one fundamental thing: I want to exist. I can be self-righteous and claim that all I care about is God and his glory and the well-being of others and righteousness and truth and all that jazz. But at the bottom of it all is my desire to be a part of it all. I want to exist in a conscious state for all eternity. If everything in the Bible was true and I knew that I would one day cease to exist, I wouldnt care anymore about the Bible. If I were to have written I Corinthians 13, it would have looked something like this:
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,
but have not ME,
I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.
And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,
but have not ME, I am nothing.
And if I dole out all my goods, and
if I deliver my body that I may boast
but have not ME, nothing I am profited.
Thats how I feel. I love me more than anything else. I cant possibly imagine a universe where I could love something more. I am a wholly selfish being.
And yet heres the rub. I hate me. Now I know that sounds pathetically self-deprecating. But its true. I really do hate me. And as time goes by, I really do find that I hate myself more, not less. As Paul said in Phillipians, I have found that all of the things that may have seemed good about me at one point in life, are really just rubbish. I find all of the things that I might have boasted in to be like trash. I count them nothing. I really cant think of anything to say about me that is unqualifiedly good. I would even go onto say that I hate myself more than I hate anything else in the universe, because I know more about what is to be hated in me than in any other thing.
And so I am hopelessly in love with the one thing in the world that I hate the most: me.
I really have just been obsessed lately with some of the following thoughts:
1) I am going to die
2) I have caused seemingly irreparable hurt and harm to a number of people in my life
3) I have spent the majority of my life in lazy, self-indulgent behavior rather than in service to others
4) I am not responsible, nor am I independent, nor am I mature for my age
5) I have done far less with what I have been given in life than I could have done (the parable of the talents consistently haunts me)
6) I am selfish, and deep down inside, I would rather be able to stay the way that I am without eternal consequences than to change
Now I know this sounds like needless, overly harsh self-pity. Perhaps.
This is why if I dont have the gospel, then I have nothing. Ryan posted a good thought on my blog a few months ago, about the time that Peter said to Jesus:"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God." This has become kind of a fall-back verse for me lately. Despite the fact that Ive found it really hard to believe in Jesus lately, I do find myself constantly saying "Where else can I go?" His words truly are the ONLY words of eternal life that can save me from my condition.
My condition is that I hate myself and yet I cant rid myself of myself, because deep down inside I love myself too much. Im stuck with myself. And I hate what Im stuck with, but I love it too much to let go. Thats why my only hope is the kind of RESURRECTION that I hear about in the Gospel of Christ. Its not the kind of resurrection where I come back to life as somebody else. No, I still get to be me. This is a good thing and I wouldnt have it any other way. But its also not the kind of resurrection where I come back as my same old stinkin' self. That would be a bad thing. No, its apparently the kind of resurrection where I come back as myself, but not just as myself. I will come back as a transformed self, a new self.
This is why I Corinthians 15 tells me that if there is no resurrection of the dead then I am a complete moron and I deserve to be pitied. But if there is a resurrection of the dead, then I have a LOT to look forward to:
"So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body."
I cannot help but to look at myself as I am right now as a dishonorable, weak person. But the Bible tells me that there is hope that I might experience, in myself, glory and power. What does that feel like? What does glory feel like? What does power feel like? Im not trying to make it sound like Im some glory-hungry, power-hungry egolomaniac. No, I fully realize that the Bible is talking about a glory and a power that comes through humility and through being identified with Christ, the sole heir to glory and power.
And yet I wake up everyday and lament the fact that doing even the simplest act of loving somebody other than myself or obeying God against some temptation to sin takes so much energy and so much willpower, and I usually if not always fail. I wonder what it will be like when we have the power to love, to trust, and to obey God right at our fingertips and it flows through us as naturally as air through our lungs and blood through our veins.
If that is truly our hope, then I will count all the suffering of this life to be worth it. But if I dont have that hope, then I have nothing. I just have myself, and all of the fear and doubt and self-loathing that comes with it.
Posted by todd at July 24, 2006 05:11 PM