Skip to main content

Breakthrough

Everyone has them…those disturbing selfish tendencies or annoying impatient attitudes or judgmental prejudices or gripping fears or glaring weaknesses that we just can’t seem to totally get rid of. We wrestle with them off and on, we could in fact have long spurts of freedom from the besetting vices, but when some event triggers that wound, that Achilles heal, that fragile and often unhealthy defence mechanism or mindset or emotional reaction – we realize we are not entirely free of it after all.

Discipline and self-control are good things; they go a long way in helping us lead more stable and consistent lives, and though they can assist us in not giving in to our baser and unhealthy urges and help us in dealing with unpleasant and painful situations, they will never remove the trigger point itself, the hook in the flesh, the agitating sliver, the shrapnel under the skin, the tender spot that just never seems to totally heal. Discipline cannot bring wholeness.

So are we doomed to just “live with” our weaknesses, our failures, our tendencies toward destruction, and hope that our ability to say no, our stamina, grit and determination will keep us from hurting ourselves and others? I don’t think so, yet I have no tried and true method, no 1-2-3 steps to personal freedom that I can share with you. I can only tell you what has happened in my life.

I have a bit of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) which exhibits itself in mostly harmless ways like counting stairs when I climb them, sniffing everything before I put it in my mouth, and remembering exactly how I left things so I can tell if anything has been moved in my absence (I thought at one point I might make a good detective). But when this tendency toward compulsion grabs onto your soul, your identity, your well-being and worth...then you’re in big trouble. This happened in four areas in my life: one related to food, one related to relationships, one related to intimacy, and the other to fear. I spent years praying for God to take these things away from me, worked really hard at developing healthy habits to replace the unhealthy ones, but always with limited success. I know through painful experience that humanity really is powerless to save itself.

I can’t explain how or why, but one by one, over time, these compulsions have disappeared out of my life. One day I woke up and another one just wasn’t there anymore. I did not do anything different that would explain the drastic change from being a slave to being free. I did not seek counselling, I did not ask someone to pray for me, I did not have a “Holy Spirit power encounter,” in fact I kept all these things hidden and private, ashamed of my weakness. All I did was cry out to God day after day after day to help me. And in his time, he did.

Part of the territory that goes with being obsessive is the tendency to seek control and peace of mind through the use of patterns, repetition, and methodology in a desire to bring consistent results and stability. We even tend to pursue our wholeness, our faith, and our relationships this way and that never works. And sadly, we expect God to operate in a certain predictable pattern as well, but the only predictable thing about God is his character. And only those things that originate in the character of God have the power to truly change things. I am learning this day by day and ever grateful for undeserved grace.


One of freedom…matte

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

soul refrigerator

I went grocery shopping yesterday and came home with three bags of food. After I unpacked them all, this is what my fridge looked like: really empty. How does that happen? How can I feel so full and ready for any food emergency one moment, and after one quick glance, realise that I have nothing, really? Today is one of those days in my soul as well. I woke up with gratitude and fullness in my heart, ready to take on this day and all the wonderful opportunities that it presented. Then I caught a brief glance of some emptiness in my life and bam - my buoyancy was compromised. For the past few hours I have been treading water, trying to keep my head in a positive space, bobbing in and out of disappointment, and catching myself whining with pathetic indignity at the cement blocks of other people's stupidity that are tangled around my ankles. When I am staring at the empty refrigerator of my soul, these are my thoughts. Where do I go from here? Perhaps I should slam that refrigerator