Changing our "self"

I've been bummed out for too long, trying to outrun the confines of my "predicted personality."

While I do feel like there is some credibility to that Meyers - Brigg test, I'm understanding that it doesn't take into account the transforming power of God. I believe that throughout those personality quizzes, if you were to replace every instance of "personality" with "tendency," it would yield a more accurate and encouraging result.

You see, because tendencies are changeable. They are "fluid" as my bro Travis says. Tendencies do not give you a road map of your inevitable destination, rather they give you a sort of prognosis as to where you "would" go, providing no changes were made.

Provided that you choose not to change.

So yeah, according to my Meyers-Brigg "tendency" scale, I have the natural inclination towards melancholy, and provided I never changed or perhaps even indulged my God-given tendencies, I would end up happiest working as a teacher, or a counselor or in management.

But God is bigger than any constraint. He's stronger than our self-fulfilling prophesies and with time, effort and God, we can truly become who we want.

And, with God helping, we'll become who He wants, which is the biggest we'll ever be.

God help us.

INFP

Apparently, this getting to know yourself thing is pretty hard.

Earlier this week I was given the results of my Meyers-Brigg personality test, it's a fairly long, complex psychological analysis tool aimed at reducing all of your quirks, intricacies, and tendencies into a compact, understandable four letter acronym. There's four categories and in each category there can only be one of two available results, with varying degrees.

My "MBTI" Meyers Brigg Test Indicator is: INFP

At first, knowing what it meant to me was great, it meant understanding that I am "Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving" this was great. All good things.

My experience got even better when I started reading the typical descriptions of what the characteristics of an INFP might be. Knowing that only about 1% of the population is made up of INFP's was great consolation. Affirmation that my feelings of being misunderstood and alone were founded on truth, I am misunderstood and semi-alone, just due to the fact that 99% of people aren't wired the same way.

Soon though, as I began to acquire more knowledge about what makes an INFP, I'm beginning to understand that the brooding melancholy note that plagues me, seems to define me. That is, most of what I'm reading tells me that I'm passionate while misunderstood, and deeply devoted though easily hurt.

The descriptions are starting to become discouraging; ranging from a list of occupations that I don't want, to understanding that I'll probably always be lost in my head and unhappy within most social settings. I hate that it's so accurate, as it just leads me to believe that even their prognosis is correct.

What if I am relegated to teaching? What if I am meant to live a life of encouragement, rather than participation? All of these things are starting to wear on me and I almost wish as if I hadn't taken the test, so maybe I would understand that my life is going to be a constant work in progress, that I'm always going to toil against my nature, but in doing so, I would grow and stretch and learn to love my diverse personality.

Should I learn to just accept myself? Or be frustrated that a test just told me that I'm very similar to a million lives I don't want?

Vague and pointless

I guess the decision was made for me.

DURHAM '08

I think, rather than lowering the tuition at schools, or spending taxpayer generated income on financial aid for prospective students, we should implement a mandatory two year "workforce" experience for new high school graduates.

Borrowing from (among others) the Swiss and Lebanese system of mandatory military service following high school graduation, a similarly mandatory workforce experience would do wonders to stimulate higher education enrollment as well as encourage students' success once admitted. I believe that by forcing students to find employment after graduation would stimulate the economy ten-fold:

1. A fully staffed workforce for "menial" (lower-wage earning) jobs, rotating every year.
   
2. A much higher enrollment in higher education
3. An overall lower amount of student loan debt
1. (This is due to the anticipated savings accrued during one's "workforce experience, perhaps an employer-paid wage-matching system involved)
   

These are just a handful of reasons supporting the success of the proposition. Mandating that EVERY high school student must spend two years washing dishes, laying tile, scrubbing toilets, painting houses or making fast-food ensures a higher probability of continuing one's education, that they may increase their odds of finding gainful employment.

I would argue that most people do not seek a life of uncertainty, where the job that pays the most at the time of their high school graduation is the job in which they want to plant themselves. I think that many people see college or any other system of higher education as an economic impossibility. The concept of student loans or applying for federal aid seems an insurmountable undertaking when taking into consideration the probable occurrence of typical obligations.

A student who gains a perspective on what the job outlook for newly-minted high school graduates is, is a well-prepared student. He/she would likely understand the pressures and their own squandered opportunity by participating in "grunt-work."

All-in-all my plan seems effective, and while none of this is supported by fact, I feel that it's a fairly accurate assessment of humanity.

Thank you.

Update

It's been a difficult and strange few weeks. I'm not sure about much anymore.

I know God is good, I'm sure about that.

Waking Up

For me at least, It's easy to think of God in key moments of life, when someone is down, when someone is sick, when I am either sick or down, or when something goes really right or when something goes really wrong. It's easy to go to God when my back is against a wall, but I'm realizing that that's not trust at all.

It's like a fair-weather friend calling you on holidays and birthdays. God is amazing everyday and knowing that should make us want to join him in it.

Being thankful has always been hard for me, but I've been truly humbled lately and It's coming easier. With all the variables in our bodies, between the trillion cells in us that need to synchronize perfectly, it's a miracle to just wake up.

It's 6:25, Thank you Father, for opening my eyes from sleep.

"If the only prayer you ever said was, 'Thank you.' that would be enough."

Meister Eckhart

Resolutions: Everyday

As I sit here waiting for sleep to quell my usual Sunday night anxiety, my eyes wont close and my brain won't slow. My late Sunday nights, caused by staying up late and sleeping in through the weekend usually result in a mind racing with possibilities, doubts, vague hope and prolonged unrest.

It's funny/sad that I took the time a few weeks ago to drive up to the mountains for some personal reflection/worship goal-writing and now I can't even remember where I put the notebook containing all of my profound resolutions.

There's a strange phenomenon at the gym around this time of the year. Each year, the first week in January finds the gym packed and buzzing with sweaty determination. Christmas present memberships are redeemed and bodies are changing. There's a waiting list for the stair-stepper and a line at the front counter.

Just a few weeks into the month however, the gym returns to about normal and stays this way until the first warm days of summer.

What happens between the beginning of a new year and a month into it? We lose focus, we forget about ambition and change and we return to the comfortable myopia that's kept us from achieving much of anything during the past year.

It's just so easy to stay comfortable and afraid. I'm confident that if we found a way to harness the drive and passion of new beginnings, we could change the amount of our lives every single day. What if we change our life, everyday?

I submit that every single day we're alive is an awe-inspiring gift from God. If we changed our life, each one of those days the power would be unstoppable. It's easy to neglect some anonymous, distant "goal" but what if everyday, we tore away small chunks of these goals, consuming them, achieving them, and ready for tomorrow, a new day to change our life. I'm confident that this can be done, every single day.

This poem has spoken to me today in a beautiful and life-changing way.

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me --
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire --
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

Edgar Lee Masters

Not Yet Empty

Almost everyday for the past few weeks, I've turned on the computer, opened this blog, and typed some unintelligible mess of melodrama in attempts to reconcile myself, with... myself. It's like I have this seemingly impenetrable layer around my heart preventing me from feeling almost anything.

I'm fighting the daily battle between who I used to be, who I am now, and the man of God I'm commanded to be; the tug-of-war leaving me anesthetized and vacant.

To feel empty is to at least feel something, and I'm not there yet.

My brother Russ sent this to me today, I think this paradigm could change the world.

"God knows, I could be wrong.

It strikes me as odd that we, each of us, can be mistaken about the weather, about which direction to turn to get to a spot across town, about how we play the stock market, about any number of things, but we can be dead certain about religion and about God.

Perhaps, as most evidence suggests, Jesus was not born on what we now know as Christmas day. Perhaps Jesus wouldn’t make heads or tails out of evangelical healers in two thousand dollar suits while Austrian-crystal chandeliers hang within the camera shot. Maybe God’s love includes gays and lesbians, the Buddhist down the street or the atheist over in the next cubicle. It’s possible what you believe is not as important as how you express that belief, how you buy food for the homeless or comfort a stranger who is flustered at the store because she has just come from the hospital where her father is dying or remember that person who just can’t stand you with love during a prayer.

Maybe God is not found in certainty, which serves to limit God to our own comfortable conceptions, but, rather, in uncertainty and a healthy agnosticism in places, letting God be God instead of a judge and jury schooled in our own prejudices and preoccupations and self-centeredness. Perhaps “God knows, I could be wrong” is an admission of faith, not of defeat. We may be mistaken — the arrival of God will not come in the form espoused by novels about the end times or in the image of a holy city being lowered down from the clouds on pulleys like it was some kind of cheap scenery change. The arrival of God or the second coming of Jesus may very well have taken place already and, in fact, continues to take place over and over again in the people and in opportunities around us, if only we had the eyes to see and the openness of the heart to feel.

God knows, I could be wrong, and in that, I think, I am necessarily right."

Definition

Rob Bell had probably the perfect answer to the question of how he faces critics.

"There's over a billion people in this world without clean drinking water, and 46 million americans don't have health care. That means if they get sick, they don't have anywhere to go. Half of the world, 3 billion people, live on less than 2 dollars a day, so the world is an emergency. When followers of jesus can think of nothing better to do with their time than pick apart and shred to peices the work of other followers of Jesus who are trying to do something about the world, that's tragic and I don't owe those people anything."

I love this answer. To me, the Church has become largely concerned with definition. We seem to want to define ourselves as one thing or another, Progressive or Fundamentalist, Liberal-Christian or Conservative, Evangelical-Free or Non-denominational. We're always looking to define ourselves by labels.

The problem with this preoccupation though, is that definition exists to separate one thing from another. We define a word, give it a meaning so that it means one thing and only one thing. We define things so that other things cannot assume their identity. This is necessary, for say, underwear at summer camp, but not for Christianity.

Even "Christianity," in all its ubiquity has lately become taboo. Apparently "follower of Christ" has replaced the antiquated "Christianity" as the label of choice for the progressively serious disciple. I will agree that the term has been diluted so much that it probably resembles G.W. more than it resembles a loving and amazing Jesus.

But this is not a call to walk away. Rather, it's a call to take back the name that once meant "Christ-like" and extinguish our rampant feelings of entitlement.

We are called to humility and peace. I agree with Rob Bell, I feel like too much time is spent pondering the great intricacies of eschatology, when our brothers and sisters are dying from preventable diseases, in preventable situations.

I want to live a life of redemption. Let's fix the world and then argue. I have a feeling the lines of our differences will begin to blur.

"Once" was an amazing movie. I bought the soundtrack already, good call Jesse.

I'm moving to Canada

Now, I know that it was a horrible tragedy. Over 1,400 people lost their lives, buildings/families/businesses/homes were destroyed, but honestly, what the hell kind of hurricane inflicts over THREE QUADRILLION DOLLARS IN DAMAGE?

According to this article, one of New Orleans proud residents is suing the US government for over $3,000,000,000,000,000. This fantastic piece of work feels entitled to reimbursement of about 220x the entire US 2007 GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT. This person wants over 220 times the value of ALL of the goods and services produced in the US during an entire year.

How does one settle on this amount?

"well my house is flooded... lost about $20,000 there... can't work much anymore... lost about $20,000 a year there... things sucked for awhile, this year was pretty much shot, a few friends died... 3 quadrillion ought to do it."

Times like this I really hate the American way. I probably seem insensitive, and I'm sure FEMA /Dubya dropped the ball, but oh my God, really? 3 quadrillion dollars?

What's ALMOST as worse, apparently over 250 people filed claims for over a billion dollars. This means over 250 people thought that what they lost was worth over $1,000,000,000 dollars. Now, I'm don't mean to demean any of the New Orleans residents, nor do I want to put a monetary value on their lives (isn't that exactly what they are doing?) but I'd like to see some financial statements reflecting 250 different people with over a billion dollar net worth. According to my limited research, there is only about 320 billionaires in the entire US. And I highly doubt they were all visiting their summer homes in the low-rent district of New Orleans during the hurricane.

This is the ultimate welfare system and the ultimate in human opportunism. Seeking some irrational comeuppance by exploiting a very real tragedy.

Last Night's Bullet

For a month or two now, a few friends and I have been meeting together over beer and discussion. We read through a book and discuss the chapters after having read them each week. The books have been great so far (the one and a quarter that we've been through) each of them inspiring, refreshing and poetic in their own ways. We call it the BBC, beer book club for lack of a better name. I would say it's been a charging force in my spiritual renaissance.

Tonight though, BBC was terrible. Brady said something so terrible and true that it kind of hit before I knew what I had heard. It felt like what I would assume a gunshot would feel like. I kind of think (speaking in complete ignorance) that a gunshot probably hurts.

I'm guessing it really hurts. I think when it happens, it aches and stings at the same time, with equal force. I guess it to be a strange dulling feeling that aches like a broken bone, but stings like a burn.

What he said felt this way, what he said was probably the single most convicting thing I've ever been told. Hearing that someone thought you were a certain way, only to realize you were just like every one else is sobering, it's painful, and it's only the beginning.

The problem with gunshots though, is not really how it feels when it happens, or really how it ever feels.

The problem with gunshots is fixing them, repairing the wound, saving your life. You have to essentially reverse the entire process by which you were shot, the bullet needs to come out, things need reattaching, skin needs closing. It's like pausing the scene at the worst possible part and rewinding it slowly, frame by painful frame.

But the beauty is in the repair. I'm learning that.

The hardest parts of Brady's words were that they were true. It hurts like hell but I'm glad it happened. We talked last night about using these tragedies, thanking God for them that we have a new platform from which we can change and inspire.

Today's a new day. Today was harder than yesterday and I suspect it's going to keep hurting.

Taking the hard way

"If you are a really, really good teacher, in your second year you'll be paid the same as any other second-year teacher and less than a really bad teacher with 10 years' experience."

This is so true. I've always been hesitant to join the teachers' money-gripe association, both because I like what I do, and I feel like it's a tired, trite, self-defeatist thing to do.

I'm starting to make adult-sized decisions, both in scope and (hopefully) in wisdom and it feels good. I love so much about teaching, it's a shame that the kids are not really one of them.

OK, I take that back. My Journo class is great. I truly do feel like we're doing something bigger than us, something that really might make a difference. But other than that, It's a struggle. I don't connect with the rich kids, and I don't feel like there's enough of an age difference between myself and the seniors to really earn their respect.

I completely enjoy working in the company of intelligent people. Literally every teacher at the school has been welcoming and supportive.

I love my parents, I love my father, but I can't be him. I'm absolutely terrified of living a life of safety. I want the struggle and I want the growth.

I keep hearing the phrase "the easy way is seldom the right way"

Warm Bed

You're in a warm bed.

If you're like the majority of privileged Americans, you begin each day in a warm bed. Sometimes you are alone in the bed, sometimes not, but you're safe, you're secure and you are warm.

No matter what your bosses or teachers or parents tell you, you have a choice when the alarm clock rings. It's decision time. Most of us make this decision in an instant, either to hit the snooze button and delay the inevitable rousing by a few minutes, or to turn the alarm off, and get out of bed. Most of us make this decision daily, and, depending upon the time we went to bed the night before, we toggle between the two.

What about the third choice? What about not waking up, not leaving your bed at all. Again, no matter what your teachers say, no matter what your bosses say, no matter what your parents say, you can stay in bed. Unplug that alarm, turn your phone off and stay in bed. It's warm after all, and the pressures of the morning are often uncomfortable. Showering, eating, talking to people, just stay in bed.

What happens though, when you stay in bed? What happens when you choose comfort over responsibility?

You start to lose things.

I doubt highly that your teachers will come to your house to physically remove you from bed. There's got to be some kind of employment law prohibiting the physical removal of bed from person. And your parents, well they may try to get you up, but just play heavy and they'll eventually leave you alone.

So now what? Back to losing things. What keeps you getting out of bed everyday? It's probably the thought of what you'd lose for not getting up. School will suffer, your grades may drop. Your job will certainly suffer; I don't know of one boss who promotes random acts of absenteeism. You may even lose your job.

Things will start to fall apart. You have a responsibility, everyday, to get out of bed and fight the day.

I'm learning that life is the same way. The comfort of our lives prompts us to stay comfortable, to never risk the idea of leaving this comfort, certainly not in exchange for uncertainty. But I would argue that our lives suffer the same way we do if we stay in bed. We start to lose things.

Things start to fall apart.

Without getting out of bed each day we wouldn't be living. People can go for weeks, months, years at a time in a kind of vegetative state, laying in a bed, comfortable. But, would anyone call this living? Would anyone accuse them of being alive?

Life is spent most often in the bed. Not the physical bed (though this might be argued) but the intangible bed of comfort, this bed of security. We tell ourselves that it's cold outside, we tell ourselves that standing up isn't nearly as fun or safe as laying down, warm and comfortable. We tell ourselves that it's scary outside.

What we don't tell ourselves is that when coma patients wake up, they often have to rehabilitate, they lose muscle, they lose life. Every second spent in bed weakens us, we lose muscle, we breathe, but we aren't alive. The same consequences apply to our Life. The longer we spend in the comfort of certainty, the less we are alive.

Life isn't about sleeping, and living isn't about comfort. Living is about experience, and growth and fighting and losing, and winning and loving and feeling.

Living is about getting out of bed.

A Lighthouse

Wanting will never, ever be doing. I can hope for hopes and want forever, but if thoughts never become action, if words never become speech, it has all been lost. Truly, the hopes and the ambitions of men are stifled daily. We feel deep within our psychology that we're wired for something more. That we have some kind of answer. It feels a little like words without speech.
And these dreams stay as silent as unconfessed sins. The self-loathing increases, parallels our apathy. Pushing us further from shore, drifting to sea, towards the big waves.

But, when we think about God, our Lighthouse, built into the sturdy frame of the mainland, we can see the beaming light, dancing in the horizon with the stars. A pale yellow flicker against the backdrop. Beckoning the ships home with each revolution, there always, shining through the fog.

I'm still a long ways off. I know I am, but I can't help but feeling the pull of God's current throughout my days.

Parallel truths.

It's so easy to forget that Christians have a parallel reality running along side us at all times, It's like God is running next to us throughout the business of our day offering a different solution to our inevitable encounters with life.

It's like those chase scenes in movies where the good guy has to jump from the bus into the truck window next to him as they run parallel at 70 mph. Sometimes it feels easier to take the road we're on, the road stretched out in certainty ahead of us.

The road we've been traveling on for years.

The problem with taking the road we're on though, is that theres always a reason the good guy is trying to jump ship. Sometimes its to save the beautiful co-star, sometimes its to save the lives of other people. Sometimes though, its because there's a bomb on the bus somewhere, and the hero has absolutely no other choice but to jump from the explosive present reality, into the safety of the moving vehicle next to him.

I feel God's reality in this way. I find myself falling into the "safety" of the world's advice, while forgetting that truth is running parallel to me offering a clear picture of my future, and the steps required to attain it. It's easy to stare straight ahead at the sometimes clear road before me listening to the world's advice, advice that tells me to buy more clothes so I feel better about myself, that tells me to buy a faster car or a better watch.

Advice that tells me that looking = feeling.

Seeming = being.

The problem is that the bus is going to explode. The bus is going to explode and I don't want to be on it. I have to take the jump.

Green-tinted glasses

Sometimes I wonder why my father didn't work harder. Why his father, a wartorn veteran, collected pension checks instead of starting a company with our namesake splashed on freeway advertisements. It should have been that easy, to collect the money made by my father and his father before him.

My thick and calloused heart, green with working-class desperation. A place usually reserved for paupers and coulda-beens, near misses.

But me, I'm lazy, you see. I'll probably never make a million dollars, not because I can't but because I wont. The greatest gift given to an American is the gift of opportunity. Orphans and Immigrants make millions daily. Thieves and the immoral make millions daily.

I'm left with mediocre clay and the tools to design a mediocre life. My hands are ill-equipped to paint something beautiful. I have a million wordless thoughts swirling through me in want of homes, needing rest upon a blank page or fertile ears.

I want to change lives, but have yet to change my own. A hypocrite living a liars life.

Rich

Your heroes are out to make a dollar. An extra few dollars if possible. Every company exists to pad the palms of a select few individuals. Car companies design safer cars because they want you to feel safe, and feel safe giving them your money. Healthy foods exist to take the dollar from the health-conscious.

Self-help books are written to make money.

If the "help" part happens it's accidental, but know that it's the secondary (if that) purpose for writing the book. We're all out to make an extra dollar at the expense of everyone else.

And I'm sick of it.

Some kind of encouragement, I hope

What does it mean when we are told that "God will give us the desires of our heart" for such a long time, I figured this to be stock Christian rhetoric told to someone who's constantly worrying/wondering about their life.

A blow-off.

I'm ashamed to admit that I JUST realized that it's a verse, it's a Psalm.

Psalm 37:4 in fact.

Now that it's a documented truth, I'm faced with the difficult part of acceptance. Questions swirl and plague me:

"Does God want to give me what I want?"
"How do I get these things?"

and for me, the worst,

"What are the desires of my heart?"

I truly don't know what they are. The tough part throughout my entire life has been discerning what God wants, and what I want. A battle as old as the world. I'm imagining Adam or Eve, their cheeks red with shame.

The struggle I've had lately is dealing with the concept and reality of sin nature. If I am a born sinner, given the predetermined oxen-load of "free will," how then will God, in whom there is no darkness (1 John 1 somewhere I think) give me the desires of my naturally born evil heart?

It's a long sentence, hopefully it's coherent.

Is God going to give me the desires of my evil heart? These questions are revealing small crumbs of truth to me as I type. It is because of this same free will that God gives us these desires.

I believe that in many cases, God does give us the desires of our evil heart.

Wow.

Think about it though, If I want to steal badly enough, has God not given me the bendable conscience to take something that isn't mine?
If I want to cheat on a girlfriend or a wife, has God not given me every resource necessary to make this happen?

and so there's the "Rub" Hamlet talks about.

The desires of an evil heart lead to depression. Lead to anger. Lead to distrust and infatuating doubt. The desires of an evil heart leave us empty. I believe that God's free will is demonstrated in this feeling. While I still believe that in God there is no darkness, no evil and no ill-will, his love is demonstrated purely in our choice.

We have a choice. God loves us so much that He gave us a choice.

Now, for the "blow-off" that helps.

I can't really recall the number of times I've recited the verse to myself, or how many times someone has given me the first part, as thought it was the bandage that was sure to stop my bleeding.

I believe Philippians 4:6 is a tremendous verse, useful for soothing scrapes and covering cuts, but it is when Philippians 4:6-7 are read together that the healing of big, bleeding wounds takes place.

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

If verse 6 is a blow off, verse 7 is the pay off.

While the promise is not as clear cut as "giving us the desires of our hearts," it is ambiguously amazing. I believe that when we are looking for our sexual desires, when we want to steal, when we want so desperately to buy the faster car, the bigger TV, the bigger house or the better jeans, what we are truly looking for is contentment.

I believe that what we are looking for is so much bigger than the car, and bigger than the TV. At least in my case, obtaining these things are treating the symptom and not the disease. We were created for peace, we were created to be content.

God wants to give us the desires of our hearts, and He also promises peace.

In the media-fueled turbulence of this country, in the thing driven mentality of our culture,

Peace approaches us like cool air in dusty lungs. I want peace to be the desire of my heart.