challenge coin

Last night I went for a stroll about the neighbourhood. I went with my usual intentions of connecting with God, and my usual expectations of being distracted into failing at it. I was pleasantly surprised.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I knew He was there, walking with me, engaging me in real conversation, for His own inscrutable reasons taking an interest in my blather and gushing. I could actually hear Him answering me. We actually hung out and enjoyed each other.
It is strange to converse with the Creator of all that exists as if I were a vet bumping into the CO of his old unit in a bar. As a fat civilian, I have no such first-hand experience, but I imagine it would feel very much like last night. Whatever pathetic "battles" or struggles or trials can be called my own were undertaken at His behest. He was with me all the way. He has total authority to evaluate and judge the outcome of my conduct on those occasions. He was not "leading" from the safety of an office. He has known every step I've taken before they ever happened.
I reminisced with Him about my early years as a Christian, when I was much more easily impressed by anything that had His name on it. I was so glad to be alive and in Him that the cheesiest band or book or song or sermon could delight and inspire me, and I didn't much care who knew it. I went gleefully and implacably berserk over things that it actually hurts to remember. They were that bad.
What makes the memories so painful is less about artistic quality then about lost innocence. Even coming out of a lifetime of mockery and contempt and reasons aplenty to mistrust my own species, even after having my very faith hijacked and poisoned by legalism and bondage and spiritual abuse, I hadn't really learned how fucked up people are, myself included. I am afraid I still haven't.
I hadn't yet learned how much corruption lurks under so much of what is broadly accepted as Kingdom business. I hadn't discovered how hollow and world-weary and cynical so many of my favourite Christian musicians were when the shows were over. I hadn't yet learned the knack of reading and listening between the lines to spot the little twists of deceit and empire-building and doctrine-peddling that now seem to hit me almost everywhere, even, it sometimes feels, in the living rooms of those precious few souls whom I can still muster the moxie to trust with my very life. People call that discernment, and sometimes it's apparently a spiritual gift. I am assured it is necessary. So is a designated marksman in an infantry squad, the one who doesn't merely fire at muzzle flashes or rustling leaves but looks through an expensive scope at an enemy with a face and a certain eye colour and maybe a wedding ring two fingers down from the one on his trigger, and who is forced to learn all that in a very few seconds about a person he has already decided to kill.
I don't pretend to equate myself with a combat veteran of any stripe, but I know one or two, and I have tasted a very muted, minor shadow of a phenomenon they have described to me. The things they have had to learn and do and become to survive have changed them forever, and sometimes they don't like what those changes add up to in a mirror or a moment of introspection. I wanted to go on finding God around every corner and reveling in Him forever, but I had to learn a lot of harsh, bitter lessons about the gulf between His heart and so much of what is done in His name. I learned this not only to survive, but to help others do the same, though I hope that anyone I may have helped came through with a little less cynicism than I have. Okay, a lot less.
I used to be giddy and enthusiastic about Jesus. I saw Him through and beyond and in spite of all the junk and trash and hype and petty human antics. There isn't much I know, but I know that He was pleased with that. Oddly enough, that scares me on some level, because I fear He will ask me to do my thing again and it will no longer be real and spontaneous and heartfelt, but only embarrassing. Make no mistake, He's no less real, just a lot harder to see and hear for all the noise. And I still love Him, though I've become quite a bit harder to pin down because it doesn't pay to stay still for long. There are snipers everywhere. I hate this. I really do.
I don't know how many more episodes of "doing my thing" I have left in me, if any, between now and heaven, but there is one thing I would like very, very much to know. I would like to know that I lost my innocence from fighting an adversary worth standing against, not from letting it die by default or whoring it out for the approval of others. I would like most of all to know that He knows that I did. Whatever He knows about me is true. I hope that is better than I feel.

Good Friday

My mother sent me an e-mail a few years ago that was meant to be an encouragement to me after a conversation we had. She told me that, among other things too wonderful for me to have ever hoped to be, she saw me as "someone who is much too critical of himself, but perhaps does not expect enough from others." I have wondered a great deal about that, and whether or not that was a good thing. I think I have the answer, and if not, God will correct me.
I think it is both good and bad. As much as my words and actions do not seem to bear this out, at my core I know that the merciless standards I hold myself to are not good at all; moreover, they are not the least bit effective in bringing about the changes I need to make. At the same time, it's certainly better to expect too little of others than to hold them to the same draconian ideals I reserve for myself.
Let's be honest, mmkay? Oddly like Mussolini when he bragged that he made his own rules and didn't even keep them, I'm no better than anyone else at being consistent. I fudge and rationalise and make excuses; perhaps if my own standards are as inhuman as others claim that's sometimes all that keeps me alive. And like everyone else I am adept at judging and categorising and dismissing other people while holding myself outside the problem as if it had nothing at all in me, when all the while I am as much a part of it as the enemy himself.
Expectations have always gotten me into trouble. My own set me up for a seemingly endless and predictable string of disappointments with myself and others, those of other people are all too often bricks in the pitiless wall of my own standards that I keep hurling myself into. I need very much to learn to expect what should in fact be expected, not because it's natural or even comprehensible, but because it's real and true. Or rather, He is.
As I write this, it's about an hour and change past Good Friday, another term I've often wondered about. The term "good" as used here has always been puzzling, as it's attached to the name of the day set aside to commemorate the Son of God's death by torture, but again, that's natural expectations talking. It was good for us, because there was no other way to save us. It was good for Jesus, because He was fulfilling His Father's will. And in some inscrutable, scandalous way, it was good for God because He loves us enough to pay such a monstrous cost for us.
Make no mistake, I am not in the least deluded into thinking that he came out ahead in this deal because of our intrinsic worth. We don't have any. Dirt is cheap. Except that He blew the breath of life into some and got us. So all the worth we have is from Him. And that is the only fact that offers any hope for us to understand how the the day that marks the most infernal and horrendous act in human history can be called good.
My expectations of satanic triumph are dashed when I discover that he was playing right into God's hands when he spilled the blood of Christ. My expectations of life as it always was - bereft of real living - shatter when the cross is revealed as the gateway to Resurrection, first His, then ours, not only on the last day but a little each day until then. My expectations of despair and damnation wither before the inescapable fact that the God Who loved me enough to die for me knows full well that my bottomless failure is precisely what qualifies me to receive His unspeakable gift.
If I can really learn to expect what He has never once failed to come through with, all these crushing, stultifying false expectations will fall off like scales off a pair of long-blind eyes. That's His plan. That's His business. That is good. He is good. All the time.