My Whole World View is Crumbling

Most of the time, being absent-minded is a minor inconvenience, but sometimes it’s embarrassing. Example: I received a prayer request and forgot to post it. It comes from JeffW.

In addition to your prayers for Mish, could you also lift up a boy by the name of Russell? He is a 13-year old student at my daughter’s homeschool co-op that has a cancerous brain tumor. The family was informed last night that the tumor had grown 3-4 times it’s previous size in the last six weeks and the prognosis is not good. The family are all committed Christians, so they value prayer.

I had no business going about my business and forgetting to put this up. Prayer is powerful, and sometimes it is needed desperately. I should have mentioned this earlier. And don’t forget Mish. Her fever is going up and down. I assume that’s a good sign, since it suggests the bacteria are not getting their way.

Overall, my own walk is going well. Lately I have let things disrupt my routine, so prayer and study have suffered somewhat. I am working to fix it, and I’m going to succeed.

For many Christians, faith is all about not going to hell. As I keep saying, I don’t focus on that. I can’t recall ever having concerns about going to hell; I have no idea when I became a Christian, but it was a long time ago, and since then, I haven’t thought a lot about my own salvation. What I do think about is leading a blessed and productive life. I can’t tell you what heaven is like. I’ve never been there. But I know the difference between life close to God and life far from God. It’s huge. So to me, Christianity is mainly about holding onto that difference.

My life was consistently miserable until I was about 30. Everything I touched turned to garbage. I was depressed. I worried. I never stopped fighting the problems; I kept trying to improve my life. I learned all sorts of wonderful self-help tricks. But I could not make things better on a long-term basis. It seemed that the things I wanted were dangled in front of me and then jerked away, over and over. I was healthy and free, but other than that, I was incredibly unlucky and there was nothing good about my life.

I became increasingly religious in my twenties, and for a while, it seemed to help, but I got in with a self-oriented prosperity-theology Assemblies of God church, and things stalled. That stuff does not work. You can’t just go to church twice a week and beg God to heal you and make you rich and so on. You have to focus on serving God and helping other people, too. The word-of-faith people didn’t teach that. Many still don’t. Listen to their sermons, and you hear the word “money” over and over. God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be perfectly healthy at all times. Give money to the church and do everything just right, and it will work out. If it doesn’t work, come back next week, give the church more money, and find out what you’re doing wrong. It’s like chasing a carrot on a string.

It’s a sink. You dump your time and money and effort into it, and you don’t get much out, and the farther in you get, the more you think you’re not doing enough. Sooner or later, you realize it’s not working, and you get discouraged. You may get the wrong idea. You may think your preacher is a dud and your church is no good, and you’ll be right, but the danger is that you’ll decide God is imaginary or that he doesn’t care about you.

I realized my church was a dry hole, and I quit. Stupidly, I didn’t find another church. I figured I could do it on my own. And of course, I fell away. Still believing, but lazy and not very obedient. I would go days without prayer. I rarely looked at a Bible. When I needed help, I prayed. And in the mid-Nineties, I had the disturbing experience of feeling as though I were praying in some sort of tank or cistern, and that my prayers simply bounced off the ceiling. Maybe that was because I was asking for help, but I wasn’t offering anything in return. I didn’t think I had to change.

I had problems in my thirties, but on the whole, the trend was positive. Things have been pretty good since about 1997. I would say that was when I became a happy person. Since then, things have gotten better and better. I don’t think I’ve had more than two or three consecutive days of sadness in all that time.

After 911, I started praying every morning. I developed a prayer list, which is something everyone should have. Since then, the improvement in my life has accelerated. And lately, the acceleration has accelerated. Incidentally, I believe engineers call an increase in acceleration “jerk.” Appropriate in so many ways. I feel like I’m being jerked out of the state of being a jerk.

Every morning and every night, I literally get on the floor and thank God for the way things are going. And I mean it. I don’t have all the pieces of my conception of a whole life, but the quality of life is not determined primarily by whether you’ve achieved your goals. What matters is the trend. If you know you’re on the right track, and things are consistently improving, chances are, you’ll be happy. And for that to be true, it is necessary that you be among the things that improve. Your behavior, your feelings toward others, and so on.

Goals are important, but here’s a funny truth: once you achieve them, you are likely to feel a tremendous and painful emptiness. Sometimes I wonder if this contributes to post-partum depression. Before you get something you want, you’re excited, because you’re anticipating and working toward something good. It gives your life meaning. It fills your time. Once it arrives, all you have is the thing itself. And it may be less rewarding than the process of getting it, even if it’s a child. Your hopes may be so unrealistic that nothing you receive can fulfill them.

I’ll bet brides have to cope with that a lot. They have the most unrealistic hopes of anyone in society. It’s a little disgusting. You spend thirty thousand dollars on one day of self-worship and concentrated attention, and then three hours after the wedding, everyone has stopped focusing on you, and all you have is the same old boyfriend and a bunch of junk from Williams Sonoma. And maybe a lot of debt. It’s never fun paying for something you have ceased enjoying.

Watching a big, self-indulgent wedding is not significantly different from watching a morbidly obese man get in bed and eat five pies with his fingers.

I think women have an unfortunate tendency to turn new husbands into messiah figures, expecting them to solve all their problems and provide things only God can give. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t enter your own personal messianic age when the ring goes on.

New things that bring me satisfaction keep coming to me. I don’t mean objects, although I have found objects essential to some parts of the process. I mean new outlets for creativity. New growth as a Christian. New knowledge. New interests. I think this all comes from God. I believe that making a sincere effort to believe and serve has brought me a certain measure of protection and reward.

I am not stupid enough to think I’ll never have a problem again, or that every good thing I have will be with me until I die. But I suspect that regardless of what happens, the sensation of being blessed and looked after will be with me the rest of my life. After all, what does Psalm 23 say? “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” What does Psalm 1 say about God’s servants? “And he shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” What about Psalm 34? “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” This stuff isn’t lip service from a fat rich Jewish king trying to impress people with his piety. It’s truth. These are promises from God. Either you believe in God, or you don’t. If you believe, you should believe these words are not empty.

God does not necessarily make your life problem-free, although it is very likely that he will shift it strongly in that direction, ending many of your troubles. He makes the problems unimportant and brings good things out of them. That’s actually better. It increases your faith and makes you stronger, because it teaches you that troubles are not to be greatly feared.

Christians who only worry about where they go when they die are blowing it. Life in the kingdom of God starts while you’re here. Literally.

So anyway, I am determined to get back on track. The course deviations I experience these days aren’t all that bad, but they are not acceptable, either.