Loving Myself

I'm going through a dark time in my life. I am in Limbo. I have come home from college for a few weeks and I don't feel like I belong here. A couple times last week, I went back up to Kalamazoo for different reasons and visited my apartment, but there seemed no reason to be there. My spiritual computer has crashed the rest of the way. I feel restless and uneasy about the future, even hopeless at times. My heart has felt extremely heavy lately, emotionally. It almost physically hurts sometimes.

But I believe God has brought me to this emotional state for a very good reason. Struggling with loneliness and being depressed has caused me to confront an issue that has plagued me all my life. I have never been happy being me. I have never loved myself. Sure, I've been happy, I've felt the love of God and the love of friends and family in my life, but underneath it all, I have never really felt worthy of being alive or receiving love from others.

I was reading Blue Like Jazz again a few nights ago before bed, and I read the chapter on loving yourself. I knew a few days beforehand that I needed to read that chapter in order to directly confront this issue, but I patiently read through the preceding chapters. As it turns out, and as I've often experienced in the past, the night I read that part of Blue Like Jazz was exactly when I needed to.

Donald Miller talked about how all his relationships with girls never went well because he could not receive their love, he could not believe that anyone would love him. He didn't like himself any more than I did. When the relationships ended, he blamed himself, which continued this process. Of course they didn't like him, why would anyone like him?

One night, as he was cleaning his bathroom and comparing himself to some of the stuff he was scrubbing, God flashed a line in his mind: "Love your neighbor as yourself". He concluded that we know that it is not right to treat people badly. It is wrong to call people names and make them feel bad, like their not worthy. But if it is wrong to treat other people that way, why would it be acceptable to treat ourselves like crap?

As I was reading it, I felt like I was reading about myself. I could relate to just about everything he said. Most of the thoughts he portrayed had gone through my head again and again. And even though I have felt this way ever since I can remember, I had never confronted it.

I stayed up for another hour thinking about how it was wrong of me to ever think of myself as unworthy, as nothing, and how God created me for a reason, that there was a distinct purpose behind my life. I retraced all the meaningful relationships and events in my life and thought about how different they might have been had I only considered myself as deserving of those things.

As I prayed to God to forgive me and to help me to love myself, I could feel my heart begin to heal. almost instantly, my chest became noticeably lighter.

That night, I faced an issue I had avoided all my life. God has brought me to a low place and it's a long climb to the top, but the climb has begun. I believe that this was an extremely significant milestone in this Second Reboot. And I really hope that this is the beginning for a long awaited period of restoration in my life.

A Few Words from Donald Miller

I'm almost finished reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and I've got to say, it's an incredible book. I plan on recommending it just as soon as I'm done with it.

I just read an interesting chapter on loving others, and a few things really stuck out to me as I went. Don talks about how he and some friends spent a month working at a ranch in Oregon. While they were there, they lived out in the woods, forsaking material things and living on faith that God would keep them well. There were a bunch of hippies that were living there at the time too. They were formally educated hippies that believed in free love and acceptance. Don said that they introduced him to what loving others was all about.

Here's the passage I found most interesting:

Because I grew up in the safe cocoon of big-Christianity, I came to believe that anything outside the church was filled with darkness and unlove. I remember, one Sunday evening, sitting in the pew as a child listening to the pastor read from articles in the newspaper. He took an entire hour to flip through the paper reading about all the gory murders and rapes and burglaries, and after each article he would sigh and say, Friends, it is a bad, bad world out there. And things are only getting worse. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined there were, outside the church, people so purely lovely as the ones I met in the woods. And yet my hippie friends were not at all close to believing that Christ was the Son of God.

This did not confuse me so much as it surprised me. Until this point, the majority of my friends had been Christians. In fact nearly all of them had been Christians. I was amazed to find, outside the church, genuine affection being shared, affection that seemed, well, authentic in comparison to the sort of love I had known within the church. I was even more amazed when I realized I preferred, in fact, the company of the hippies to the company of Christians. It isn't that I didn't love my Christian friends or that they didn't love me, it was just that there was something different about my hippie friends; something, I don't know, more real, more true. I realize that is a provocative statement, but I only felt I could be myself around them, and I could not be myself my Christian friends. My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics like don't cuss and don't support Democrats and don't ask tough questions about the Bible.

Scattered

Western's campus is turning into a ghost town once again. Students are finishing up finals and heading home for the holidays. It's a strange thing to go home again after being at college for four months. The change in college students is an exponential one, and things back home usually seem more or less exactly the same as when you left them.

And so, those of us at the Xperience are scattered. Most are back home in their respective corners of Michigan. Some of us will be in other states. Some are as far as Mexico. Some will remain in Kalamazoo. It's kind of a sad thing that we're all away from each other, but we will all get to see family and friends from home and celebrate the holiday season with them.

I wish all the Xperience gang a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll see you guys after the break.

Jacob V: The Destiny of Love

Gen. 29

So Jacob continues his journey to Paddan-aram with the new hope and knowledge that God is with him has given His word to protect and prosper him. He reaches his destination and comes to a well where some shepherds are watering their sheep. They know his uncle Laban and informs Jacob that Laban's daughter will be arriving at the well shortly. Jacob had never met Rachel before she came to the well with her flock, but when she arrives, he serves her by opening the well and watering her sheep. Then he kisses her. He kisses her and he weeps.

It was customary for family members to kiss one another. When Laban came to meet Jacob, they kissed as well. To me, though, it seems that Rachel opened Jacob's eyes to something new and wonderful. He fell in love with her.

Jacob makes an agreement with Laban to work for him for seven years in order to marry Rachel. Seven years seems like a long time to wait for somebody, but the Bible tells us that it seemed like only a few days to Jacob because of the deep love that he had for her.

However, Laban has two daughters. Rachel was the beautiful younger daughter, and Leah was the older, blind one. When Jacob had completed his work for Rachel, he asked to consummate the relationship. Instead of giving him Rachel, he gave him Leah. Apparently Jacob was a little blind himself, because he didn't realize that he had been tricked until the next day. Jacob confronted Laban and got only excuses, but he was already bound to Leah. Laban agreed for Jacob to work another seven years to be with Rachel. He did his time, and was finally able to take Rachel as his wife.

Jacob found the destiny of love. He met Rachel and devoted the next fourteen years of his life to labor in order to be with her. Love is unexpected. It happens out of nowhere and hits like a ton of bricks. It is a time when life changes. When love hits, you begin to live for something other than yourself. You begin to care only about the needs and happiness of that special person, and everything else seems unimportant.

I believe that God is the source of all love. We love because he first loved us. God's love is one of complete sacrifice. He would do absolutely anything for us. He would, and did, die for us. God jumps for joy when he sees us happy, and it absolutely breaks His heart when he sees us cry.
God has shown us love over and over again, and most of the time we don't reciprocate that devotion. We pray to Him some days, go to Church on the weeks we feel like going, and read the Bible when we get around to it. We've crushed His heart over and over again. But when we return His love, when we acknowledge everything He's done for us; when we've gone our own way for so long and finally return to Him and tell Him that we love Him, that's when He knows that it was all worth it.

The New Reboot

Life's been coming at me hard lately. Between the stress of school, the holiday season, and other issues I've been having lately, I think my spiritual computer has crashed.

Lately I've felt detached from everything spiritually, emotionally and physically. I've been feeling like God has backed away from me and has let me go through the last couple months without Him. This is the main reason I haven't had as many deep, thoughtful blog entries lately. But the other night I had a much needed confrontation with God, and I'm starting to take a good, hard look at myself.

This, I believe, is the start of a second spiritual reboot. I'm making a critical evaluation of my walk with God. The key subject of this reboot is what it means to be a Christian man in this world, and what it means to truly love God.

We are currently in the last week of classes here at Western and finals are next week, so I won't consider this blog to be a top priority for a few days. However, after school has blown over, you can look forward to more spiritually themed blog entries and insights from my disturbed mind.

Please keep me in your prayers as I embark on this new reboot.

List Update

Two movies have been crossed off The List:

Cool Hand Luke

Pride of the Yankees

Both movies were pretty good. They are both classics that any movie buff should see. They are not exceptional movies, however, but they aren't bad ones either. They're good ones to watch when they're on TV and you have nothing else to do.

Also, one more movie has been added to The List:

In the Heat of the Night