I know that a lot of you out there are hurting, feeling lost, searching for answers, struggling to try to figure out how to best live your life. I know your pain, I feel the same way. Most people who feel this way are trying to put up a good front, give those around us, even those closest to us, a sense that everything is good, but truthfully, it’s not ok.
I want to do and be what’s right and good. Deep down, I have a very high sense of integrity and a desire to do what’s right and good for those in my life, as well as those around me. I have no desire to take advantage of others, no matter how it may benefit me. I would love to deal with, do business with, and have friendships and fellowship with people who have the same values and integrity as myself.
I believe that all who feel this way, have a hard time finding each other, because we’re all afraid of being vulnerable and expressing our true struggles with anyone. I’m expressing it now, because I believe that we need each other. I believe that a group of people who are honest with each other about the struggle, can together, find their way through it and into a life that is free and at peace. I believe that that group of people, is supposed to be the idea of something called the church, but in my continuous experience, the thing that calls itself the church, is really just an enterprise that exists to pay a preacher, and grow the enterprise. I not only don’t find peace in these enterprises, but I find a disconnected group of people who mostly just keep up the charade of “I’m ok, your ok” and frankly, I just don’t need that. I need REAL.
In essence, I just want to cut the crap, and get to being real, together with whomever has that same desire and need. No imparting of religious guilt, no tithing, no law, no special days of the week, no figure head preacher who’s paid to pretend he and his family have it all together and has the answers. None of this, and I have a lifetime of experience here, has really helped me to find peace and life, just plenty of guilt, shame and continued unrest.
If your honest enough to admit that this is where you are as well, I’d love to meet you, talk to you, and maybe even find peace together with you. We live in a broken, dieing culture. I don’t want to see it go that way, and I believe it starts with dealing with our own brokenness.
Direct message or email me. Tell me how you feel about this. If you have all the answers and you think you’ve got it all under control, than please by all means let me know because I haven’t met you yet, and I’ve spent a lifetime searching.
This makes me consider how, especially in the church context, when I talk about the truths which I profess to believe, I want to convey them in a way that is psychologically relevant. (When we are about the business of “saving souls”, consider that ‘soul’ is from the word ‘psuche’, pronounced ‘psoo-khay’, and thus ‘psychology’ literally means ‘the study of the soul.) I don’t want to speak things that are just true, I want to speak things which are truth-producing. That’s a nuance which I believe is often missed because of the inertia of both general tradition and perhaps because of the impulse to put up our best faces for one another. Everyone’s a bit afraid of each other. Perhaps this is a way in which it is necessary to fear God and not man, because the stakes are too high, both for this life and the next, to not to push the boundaries of accepted or assumed limitations which stand in the way of a clear path from professed truth to practice.