©TheRogue on Flickr
I don’t think anyone reads my blog anymore. It’s my fault, really. I’m not consistent. Sure, I’ll spend a week or two putting up a handful of entries, but then I’ll go a couple of months until I post again. This time around, it’s been about six months. Oops.
The truth is, I’ve had a lot happening behind the scenes in the business arena and I’m not comfortable talking about any of it until official announcements are made. I don’t want to ruin and/or jinx any of these opportunities. (All I will say is that each day is a day closer to my goals.)
One thing that I can talk about, though, is what’s going on with me emotionally and spiritually. Last time you heard from me here, I was heartbroken. I experienced a type of love I never had before, only it wasn’t reciprocated and I was left shattered. I was hurt, then she managed to anger me and we stopped talking completely as I waited for her to contact me to resolve our differences. She never did, but It was during those last three months that God had been working on me in a way that he never had before.
I attend church on Sundays at Reality LA. We’ve been dubbed the “hipster church of Hollywood,” but I have to tell you that Pastor Tim brings some of the most solid biblical teaching out there and I’ve been under some great teaching in the past. He’s unabashed and unashamed of what the gospel says. And it is in this lack of timidity that he has taken us recently into the book of Ecclesiastes.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to respond to this study that we’ve just barely started. For those unfamiliar, it is an Old Testament book that was likely written by King Solomon (or someone within his sphere of influence or taking upon Solomon’s mantle). He doesn’t refer to himself as such, only as “The Preacher”. The other thing you have to know is that this is the most secular approach to God in the entire bible. It’s where the phrase “under the sun” comes from and it approaches eternity from a skeptic’s viewpoint. Basically, it begs the question “what is life all about when all there is to life is life itself?”
©Alex Eylar on Flickr
That first week, we looked at life as it would compare to a movie script. Most of us are familiar with some semblance of story structure. At the very least, we should understand what the climax of a story is. Pastor Tim challenged us with the fact that many of us in the room live our lives as if the climax of our story will be when we are successful and have received the admiration of our peeps. Others are living as if the climax of our lives will be when we are standing on the wedding altar with that perfect man or woman of our dreams.
While these are good things that we are meant to pursue, they are not meant to become our sole dedication in life. If our identity lies within who we date or what our job title is, then we stand the risk of losing sight of who we are should we lose that very thing. What we need to realize is that our relationship with Christ defines us. Our identity is within Him. The moment that we accepted Christ is the climax of our story and no point in our life will define who we are as greatly as that moment.
Several months prior, I had already wrestled with the career aspect. I asked myself if I was making my career an idol and I had already come to the conclusion that I had not. I was willing to give it up if that was how God directed me. But in the days prior to hearing this, I was already struggling with the question of whether or not I was placing my desire for a relationship with a woman above my desire for a relationship with Christ. And I couldn’t answer that at first, but I knew immediately upon this illustration that I was. It was time to try to let it go.
Every week, something was said that got me thinking about my priorities in life. Am I sharing my faith enough? Am I caring enough for the salvation of others? Am I making excuses for myself in these areas? And each week, I felt convicted. When the book turned to the unpleasant conversation of death, I began asking myself what I would say at a funeral of a loved one. Would I stand before all of the attendees and passionately proclaim the gospel?
And then Tim’s wife gave birth to their third daughter. He took the week off and another one of the pastors took the stage and preached about the prodigal son. He admitted that there was nothing new that he could glean from this oft-preached passage, but he hoped to refresh our memories and remind us. Yet, he was able to pull out a truth that I had not seen before in all of my previous studies. And it hit me square across the face and has (so far) changed my life.
At the beginning of the story, as the younger son is basically saying that he wishes his father were dead, we see how the father reacts in the face of rejection. He’s hurt, but he doesn’t lash out at his son. In fact, how he went about giving his son what he wanted was acknowledging that the son was still his. Of course, the application was supposed to be about God’s response to us when we reject him, but I got something much more personal out of it, much more profound.
You see, all of us can associate with the father in this story. We have all been rejected at some point in our lives by someone close to us. We’ve been dumped by a lover or betrayed by a colleague. Yet, our human nature is not to respond in the same way this father did. We have self-defense mechanisms designed to stop the hemorrhaging arteries of our heart. We change our opinion about the person who wronged us in an effort to stop the pain. If we convince ourselves that the person was mean and evil all along, it’s easier for us to stop caring.
Yes, I went with a brick analogy. Sue me. ©Tim Green on Flickr
Suddenly, it hit me. That’s exactly what I do when I’m rejected. And it’s not healthy. More specifically, I was trying to convince myself what a horrible person my ex was for upsetting me and not contacting me to reconcile our differences. That anger continued to build and build and build. I trying to insist that I was over her, but more than one person pointed out that I was merely trying to convince myself that I was.
That night, I posted on Facebook about my discovery. I posed the question that, if I truly love someone to begin with, must I stop loving them in order to get over them? Doesn’t love last through anger and non-reciprocation?
And suddenly, I wasn’t angry any more. I had peace. It was okay for me to still love her, even though she rejected me. It didn’t even matter if she knew it, as long as I did. I can’t tell you just how much freedom there was in that action.
There is honestly more to this story, but I want to stop it here. I’ll just summarize to say that I sent her a text message on Friday night to let her know that I didn’t hate her, then unfriended her on Facebook today as a way to just let her go. That hurt I felt before is gone. The anger has dissipated. This was an act I resisted doing previously out of pettiness and was able to do now as a sign of acceptance that we both had moved on.
Yes, I’ll still miss her. And part of me will aways love her (as I should). But I’m free. And it’s all because God keeps slapping me in the face with His truth.