since i was twelve years old, i've been strangely interested in people...more specifically what lies behind their eyes, their words and ways, you know...what makes them tick as they say. i remember, and probably will not soon forget, one night in 7th grade sitting in our upstairs office counseling a friend over the phone. what she was so upset about has escaped me, but the idea was that i was craving to know what really was going on inside her head. anyway, my dad came upstairs and after i had hung up the phone, we kind of debriefed the situation. we talked about psychology and what it was, and how i was interested in people's minds. he encouraged me in such a way that from that time on, i never had a doubt that that's what i wanted to study in college.
during my college psychology experience, there were some incredible classes...but i soon learned that theorizing was not for me. yes, i was still intrigued and wanted to know more, but my psych classes were not cutting it. so i added some religion classes....nope, still didn't really meet what i was looking for. -not the religion part mind you, i'm still very much into Jesus.
all that is to say, this morning i was reading, Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. and i have to say, he hit the nail on the head. and it was such a large nail head that i should've noticed it long ago. probably the most screamingly obvious piece of my short existence and i couldn't see it. not that Daddy and I were wrong all those years ago...just maybe it was too soon to tell what i was made for. so here's the [kinda long but keep reading] exerpt that prompted my early morning epiphany:
"i figure i was attaching myself to a certain identity because it made me feel smart or, more honestly, it made other people tell me i was smart. this is how i learned my sense of importance. now.....by doing things to get other people to value me, a couple of ideas became obvious, the first being that i was a human wired so other people told me who i was. this was very different from anything i had previously believed, including that you had to believe in yourself and all, and i still believe that is true, but i realized there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside myself to tell me who i was. and the thing that had been designed to tell me who i was, was gone. [k just pause for a sec...i think he means missing when he says gone....because we've distorted the God of the Bible] and so the second idea became obvious: i was very concerned with getting other people to say i was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone.
and it wasn't just me. i could see it in the people on television, i could see it in the people in the movies, i could see it in my friends and family, too. it seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. it explained why i wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted to desperately to be right, why Shirley MacLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did.
later, when i set this truth about myself, and for that matter about the human race, next to what the Bible was saying about who God is, what happend in the Fall, and the sort of message Jesus communicated to humanity, i realized Christian spirituality fit my soul like a key. it was quite beautiful, to be honest with you. this God, and this spirituality, was very different from the self-help version of Christianity. the God of the Bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear.
i began to wonder if the actual language of life was not the charts and formulas and stuff we map out on a graph to feel smart or right, but rather the hidden language explaining why every perosn does everything they do, the hidden language we are speaking that is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
i don't mean to sound like a pop-psychologist. i am only pointing to the obvious stuff that is taking place in our souls that nobody wants to talk about. it is this obvious stuff that Scripture seems to waltz in and address matter-of-factly.
and that is the thing about life. you go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fasion or politics, but what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable. what if the economy we are realling dealing in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if we really want in life is relational?
now this changes things quite a bit, because if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula i obey in order to get taken off the naughty list and put on a nice list, then it doesn't meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn't interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather , obvious) language we are all speaking. but if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the comunity that named it, and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, and if it is more than a series of ideas, but rather speaks directly into this basic human need we are feeling, then the gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind."
there you have it. a glimpse into what makes me tick...and you too i would assume.
