The Dilemma

How often do you find yourself in a situation where you know you should do something but you never do? I’m not talking about Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout taking the garbage out. I’m talking about something deeper. Like you know you should read something spiritually filling or call someone, but instead you end up watching television or listening to music. Let me dish up a personal example.
Recently I have been digging into wounds of my past. As I have engaged, disengaged, and reengaged I have been hearing the gentle yell of God suggesting that I begin to write out my story. To engage in a way that will cause me to fully return to the sights and smells as well as the feelings of each moment and wound of my life. This urge began about 5 months ago, and my story is now one page. It goes something like this. “My Story by Jason Feffer.”
About a month ago I read an amazing book about understanding our stories, To Be Told by Dan Allender (highly recommended). In it Allender recommends - you guessed it - that we write our story. Ahem, God? You had me at, “WRITE YOUR STORY.”
Did I start writing my story at this point? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. Right, I still haven’t started. So the question is why. Is it because I broke all my fingers and can’t type or write? Nope. Am I waiting for God to skywrite me a message? Maybe, but probably not. That would be embarrassing having to explain to everyone why God had to skywrite to get my attention, (but I guess that worked for the Israelites). Or is it because I am lazy? “Bingo!” an outside observer might tell you. I have the time to write, but I always end up spending it watching “Show me the Money” (It’s Shat-tastic!) and reruns of the “The Office.”
Well here’s the deal (and of course I’m wicked convicted while writing this) it’s not a laziness issue. It’s not that simple. In this situation/choice I face a dilemma. On one hand I can begin writing. But this isn’t really about writing; it’s about entering into my story, seeing how God has worked, allowing him to work in the memories and messages of my story, and ultimately bring me to a place where I am closer to being who He created me to be and therefore closer to Him.
So on one hand I have living a life that is closer to God and who He created me to be. On the other hand I have comfort (sounds a lot like laziness here I know, but bear with me). On this side I can continue to live the life I know. I can keep living this life where so many of my actions and reactions are rotted (an interesting typo. I meant to write “rooted” instead I wrote the perhaps more appropriate “rotted”) rooted in old, deep wounds. Honestly this life is full of fear, pain, and self-loathing. Sounds like the life anyone would choose right?
Faced with these two options you and I would choose the former any day of the week and twice on Sunday. So why have I not started writing? Why am I standing in between these choices with each pulling on opposite arms threatening to yank me apart like a wishbone?
I believe that deep in very dilemma such as this there is something at risk. The difference between the two choices is so great that there must be something that I get out of staying in the worse option.
So what would I be risking to move into option A? In this particular situation I am afraid that God is not big enough to handle my pain, anger, sadness, and woundedness. What if I invite God into my story and he says, “Whoa, I didn’t need to know that!” What if I enter into my woundedness and find that God can’t work there, that God can’t heal me? I would rather stuff those feelings and never even acknowledge my brokenness than discover that these wounds are hopeless to heal. And this is the dilemma. Now that I have revealed a lot more of my journey than you were asking for I’ll bring this back to you. I know you were hoping I’d keep you out of this. At the start of this I wrote, “How often do you find yourself in a situation where you know you should do something but you never do?” I’m guessing many of you read this and thought of something in your life that fits the description. What’s your dilemma? What are the two sides pulling you? What keeps you mired in the lesser choice? What’s the risk and are you willing to take the leap? Do you have the courage?

Hyman the Ghost

“When did you learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist?” This was a question asked in a recent group meeting, and outside the obligatory, bad “Santa’s not real?” joke, I was amazed at the answers. Four of the seven people said they never really believed in Santa. They detailed what logical four year olds they were, and I felt like an idiot. How naïve was I as a kid? How did I not make the connection that we had no chimney, the handwriting on the tag looked an awful lot like Mom’s, and the presents from Mom were wrapped in the same paper as Santa’s? The evidence was right before my eyes!
The scene brought me back to a “magic trick” my dad did when I was a kid. He told us a ghost lived in his handkerchief. He would place the handkerchief on a table, call on Hyman the Ghost, and the handkerchief would magically rise in the middle. It was amazing! “Dad, make Hyman do it again! Do it again!! Do it again!!!” A few years later he would do the same magic trick for my stepbrothers and sister. I had already learned there was no ghost named Hyman that lived in the handkerchief, unless you call a bent wire sewn into the cloth a ghost. Immediately my brothers and sister picked apart the trick. They knew! Again I felt like an idiot. When I was their age, I fell for the “trick” hook, line, and sinker. How naïve was I to believe that a ghost lived in a handkerchief? And who ever heard of a ghost named Hyman?!?
But here’s the deal. I’m not an idiot, and I wasn’t quite as naïve as I thought. There are two reasons I believed in Santa and a ghost named Hyman. The first is that I believed in magic. I believed that that there were things in this world that defied explanation. I believed that there could be something out there that we can’t see that moves and affects the world around us. Kids today don’t believe in magic. There’s a whole thing I could do here about the spiritual realm, science, and miracles, but I’ll save that for later.
The other reason I believed in Santa and Hyman? I trusted the people who told me about them. My dad was the one to break the news that Santa didn’t exist and he did it under the pretense that he felt like he was lying to me. Maybe he really felt that or maybe that’s just how he chose to break the news, but it made sense. There must be some level of fear for parents that a child will feel betrayed when he discovers that he have been purposefully misled for so long. I’m not suggesting parents are wrong. On the contrary, I love that parents can instill a sense of mystery and magic in a child’s life, and I am grateful that I had and still hang on to that sense of mystery and magic. Generally, kids today don’t have that sense of mystery and magic. We are cynical and skeptical. As a child of post-modernity we don’t accept anything at face value; we don’t trust anyone. There are a lot of really good reasons in this world to be cynical, but how sad is it that a six-year-old child is too much of a cynic/skeptic to believe in magic? No wonder we are so slow to accept Jesus. Skepticism has become the birthright of our generation.