Second Chance

My online friend Bill (who posts at Cycleguy's Spin) asked me to write a post for his site on "a second chance God has given you". My first thought was to quickly dismiss this request because my life hasn't turned out the way that I would have liked in many respects. My biggest failure and regret occurred nearly ten years ago when my wife told me that she no longer wanted anything to do with me. One moment I was living a pretty contented existence, and the next, I was alone. Everything spun away from me so suddenly, that it sucked the life and the joy out of me. Not only did I lose my partner and my best friend, I felt like the divorce robbed me of my future. When Bill asked me to write a post glorifying God for giving me a second chance, I scoffed. My scorn was not directed toward Bill, but more toward God. Here I am some ten years after my life was torn apart, and I find myself alone. While time has a way of weathering the hard edges off strong emotions and negative memories, I still find myself deeply wounded, still stewing in bitterness, anger, and despair. Where is my second chance God? Where?

But I continued to chew on what Bill asked me. I am one who all too easily focuses on the negative when I have many positives still around me. In many ways I am plagued by myopia and forgetfulness regarding God's blessings in my life. In 1997 before I was a Christ follower, I was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. My initial biopsy results indicated that it had spread into my lymph system. My prognosis for survival beyond a few years wasn't good. The day after I found out about my cancer, I learned that I was going to be a dad. There was a chance that I might not even get to meet my little one.

Second chance? How about the fact that I am still alive some 17 years after I was sentenced to be another mortality statistic? How about the fact that I have a 16 year old daughter who thinks that I am the greatest dad in the world? How about the fact that I have come to know Jesus? Second chance indeed.

(Note: Today's post was used as a guest post on Cycleguy's Spin today. This is the third guest post that I have written for other bloggers. As always, I hope that my words can help others, whether it be with a smile, with a tear, or with an amen.)

Survival Mode

Have your ever stopped in the middle of some activity that you have been doing for a very long time and suddenly begun to question your reasoning or your motives? You ask yourself why you are attending some regular function or why you are supporting some group or some cause or why you are meeting with some people. Sometimes this questioning is just a sanity check or a reality check. You quickly remind yourself of what you had hoped to achieve or why it is good for you, and then you push off the question or bury it deep enough that at least it won't resurface for a while. Other times you come to the realization that either the activity doesn't mean as much to you as it once did or that your passion for it has diminished. In such cases you decide to make a change and devote your time and attention to something else.

I have been attending services at church for more than a decade. In this time I have been a member of three different churches and I have missed only a small handful of Sundays due to business travel or sickness. I think, for the most part, I have looked forward to going to church to sing, to worship, and to fellowship with the few folks that I know. But recently, say for the past 1 or 2 years, something has been different. Something in my heart, in my spirit, in my mind. The truth is that I have been questioning why I am going to church. It isn't because I don't love listening to the beautiful music or connecting with the truth of God's word through the scriptures. It is my troubles dealing with other people.

My whole life I have struggled with some sort of social anxiety issues. I am just not comfortable in and around large groups of people. As I have gotten older, especially in the past few years, I think my "condition" has gotten worse, somehow more acute and more debilitating. As a result I find myself more and more uncomfortable around others. In situations of this sort, my body reflexively goes into "survival mode", where my mind directs all its energies inward to shut out all outside stimuli. Then when the hour-long service is over, I make a bee-line toward the exit so that I can breathe again and think straight. Often as I drive home, I realize that I did not hear a single note sung or word uttered. Things have devolved so much recently that I am seriously considering that perhaps it is best if I just walk away from church attendance for a while to let things settle a bit.

Potëmkin Village

Grigori Potëmkin was an 18th century Russian statesman who was once a lover of czarina Catherine the Great. Potëmkin had a great thirst for power and glory. It is said that he told great tales to make himself appear as large in Catherine's eyes as possible. One such account was that he claimed to have established thriving villages in the Ukraine that had, in fact, never been built. When Catherine insisted on sailing a flotilla down the river Volga to see his handiwork, Potëmkin arranged for work crews to erect fake facades replete with a contented populace and resources to fool Catherine. As soon as the barge of the empress had sailed past the false front, the crews swiftly dismantled the fakery and moved it downriver to the next location. The expression "Potëmkin villages" has since been associated with a grand sham, something that presents an impressive facade or show but is designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition.

If such terminology can be applied to my own life, I often feel like Potëmkin's masterwork. From the vantage point of the passing barge, most people will see a man who appears confident, connected, and content. However, if any of the viewing party were actually to get a peek behind the veil, to look behind the curtain, they would see only a poorly constructed pasteboard village hiding a struggling and sinful soul. I have had folks who read my blog or who have come to know the version of me that I have erected for the outside world comment on how "real" or how "transparent" I seem. That impression is also by design, just another fancy curtain hung to hide my clutter and my shame.

Allegiant

The final book in the Divergent trilogy by author Veronica Roth is entitled Allegiant and picks up where the second book, Insurgent, ended. The narrative focuses around a seemingly self-contained population group living in what used to be Chicago, at least what is left of this once great city after some great tragedy overcame the original citizens at some point in the distant past. The people who live here now have divided themselves into one of five recognized factions, Amity (fellowship), Dauntless (bravery), Erudite (wisdom), Candor (honesty), and Abnegation (selflessness). At the end of Insurgent the city had fallen into chaos and lawlessness, as a full-fledged war had erupted between the factions as small conflicts gave way to bold grasps for power. Our protagonists, Tris and Tobias, who have given everything they had to restore some sort of peace, have ultimately been forced to flee the city, to scale the fence and journey into the complete unknown. The citizens of this Chicago have been taught since birth that gruesome death awaits anyone who goes beyond the fences. Yet they ultimately choose to face this unknown rather than remain to be hunted down and killed in their hometown.

Ultimately, we learn that a full-fledged civil war had devastated the population of the United States many generations ago. The war was fought between people known as GP's and those known as GD's. The GD's referred to those who had undergone a form of DNA modification to rid themselves of some less desirable traits and the GPs refer to those who did not. Ultimately the GP's contained the GD's into communities, like the Chicago experiment, to try to control them, quarantine them, corral them, and ultimately to breed them to a point when they might be reintegrated into society. Just beyond the Chicago fence, the GP's maintain a huge complex that monitors all of the experimental communities. It is this world that Tris and Tobias enter into. There they try to dispel the misinformation, bias, and ignorance of the GP program directors while saving their own people. Ultimately we see that everyone, GP's and GD's alike, are not so different. Each person an example of sinful and flawed humanity.

This series was recommended to me by my pastor's wife Monica. I very much enjoyed reading this series and related to the characters as they developed and grew through this story. While this series falls into the YA or "young adult" category, it contained enough complexities and moral quandries that kept me reading and thinking and, ultimately, to keep turning the pages to find out how it would end.

Observations 52

My occasional blog series "Observations" was created to be an outlet to share a variety of topics that pop into my field of view as a result of a condition that many bloggers are afflicted with known as "blogger's eyes". In this state we view the world on the constant look-out for topics on which to write about. Today's blog came about from random odds 'n ends of things that I have noticed over the past few weeks.

• It is most amusing to watch a grown man throw a full-fledged temper tantrum. Most amusing indeed.
  
• This one is for NBA fans and it came to me after I watched parts of several Chicago Bulls games on TV recently. George Costanza once said that the key to have folks think that you are passionate about your work and giving it your all is to look perturbed at all times. If that is the case then the Bulls coach, Tom Thibodeau, is clearly following George's advice perfectly.
  
• The heir to the DuPont chemicals fortune who was convicted of raping his toddler daughter got no jail time. The reason listed in the court documents was that the convicted man "would not fare well in prison". What do you think are the odds that no bribe money was paid out before the sentencing?
  
• We have all seen our share of cheesy Church billboards lined with bad puns and awkward word play. I passed by one the other day that hit me as a wonderfully expressed truth. Your life may be the only Bible that some people read.
  
• From my bag of hopelessly mixed up expressions, I actually uttered the following words the other day: "Well that took the thunder out of my sails."
  

Make a Difference

My church promotes a fund-raising campaign each month called "Make a Difference", wherein they choose a charity to support and then collect funds for that group or that cause throughout the month. There have been food drives, help for local shelters, support for orphans and the abused, and efforts to help out disadvantaged children. While it is easy to look around the world and even our own neighborhoods and feel completely overwhelmed with the amount of suffering, efforts like this can at least provide some small level of assistance. Likely the donations do more to make us feel good about ourselves than they do to make any significant or lasting impact in the lives of those who are in distress. The sheer number of needy individuals far outweighs the amount of financial donations.

Several years ago my church sponsored an effort to support clean water in developing nations. I wrote a post called Water! Water? about some important issues that I felt needed consideration when providing humanitarian aid for developing countries. My main point was sometimes the funds that we provide can actually do more harm than good, especially if it leads to even higher birth rates in places that already cannot support their populations. I think sometimes it is easier for me to spin my wheels in some sort of academic debate than it is for me to actually help. I believe that my bulleted list of objections and issues is really just a way for me to rationalize doing nothing, to distance myself from the suffering, to put it all out of my mind with a clean conscience.

This month my church is supporting a Make a Difference to help a poor and suffering community in Central America. Again the problem from my lofty throne is one of too many people living in an inhospitable region that cannot support them. As soon as this campaign was announced I began my cynical "here we go again" self talk. This smug inner voice is too quick to dismiss others, to put me first, to give me license to make clever high-brow arguments about why they are in the situation they are in, all while continuing to do absolutely nothing. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. The sheep are the blessed ones who step up to make a difference in the lives of those who suffer. The goats are to be rebuked.

Get out, worthless goats! You’re good for nothing but the fires of hell. And why? Because—

I was hungry and you gave me no meal,
I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,
I was homeless and you gave me no bed,
I was shivering and you gave me no clothes,
Sick and in prison, and you never visited.

I think it is time that I purposefully worked a little harder to try to make a difference.

Illusion

I was reading the book Water Walker by Ted Dekker and I came across the following bit of narrative provided by the main protagonist:

You just stepped beyond one of your fears only to learn that it was an illusion.

That once sentence resonated within me so strongly, it spoke such personal truth, that by the time I emerged from my own thoughts, 10 minutes had passed.

I tend to let my phobias and worries imprison me, to hold me captive. The what ifs play out such detailed nightmares in my head, that I too often force myself to avoid trying new things, making new friends, taking risks. My thoughts make me consider irrational ideas and improbable scenarios and accept them as the most likely outcomes of a given action. The other part of this
aspect of my make-up is that as I get older, the more that consideration of these outlandish scenarios rules my decision making.

I might consider asking a woman out on a date but ... but she will either turn me down in such a public manner that I am branded a loser or she will agree only to string me along far enough that I start to like her before she dumps me and breaks my heart.

I might accept a friend's invitation to go to the movies but ... but he will get to know the real me and decide sooner rather than later that I am not worth his time.

I might try to brooch an important subject with my daughter but ... but she will just tune me out and not take me seriously.

The truth is that most of the time when I do step beyond one of my fears, I find out that it really was an illusion. My trouble seems to be that my mind cannot hold onto this truth for very long and I keep having to relearn this lesson time and time and time again.