impairment

I was thinking about how the sensations one  experiences when  they have an inner ear disorder correlate to the way we understand in the spiritual realm.

When you have vertigo, if you don’t know better, you believe you or the world around you is spinning. You can even have sympathetic head movement to something that is not actually happening. If you have a balance disorder, you occasionally feel weighted down on one side, as though you were being pulled in one direction. I have had both of these sensations numerous times. Because of the impairment to my right ear, I cannot distinguish which direction a sound is coming from. Reality is uncertain.

When it comes to the spiritual realm, we all tend to think we have clarity. That we can understand reality and make corresponding decisions with certainty.  In the 1960′s or so, trusting this to be true, many progressive parents went so far as to allow their children to choose which religion they wanted to pursue, or which church they wished to attend, or not – as though their children had spiritual insight by osmosis, and nothing could clutter their understanding and keep them from making wise choices.

But what if in this regard, the spiritual realm is no different than the physical? If we can be broken or dysfunctional physically, why do we think our spiritual side is any different? Especially when it is so tied to our emotions, our psyche and the “truths” modeled in our family or cultural environment?

Think about the impact on someone’s spiritual reality if they have been raised by a nanny as the child of an emotionally distant billionaire. Or been kidnapped and forced to become a child soldier and murder, maim and rape even their own mother. Or been sold into sex slavery by their drug-addicted parents and moved to a foreign land to “work” 18-hour days. Or been raised in a Christian, Midwestern US, upper-middle-class white suburb with a stay-at-home soccer mom.

All of these people are going to see God differently. Even when they are reading the same scriptures. Their relationship with him is going to be built differently, beginning at a different starting point and moving at different angles, with different pieces of the puzzle put in place in a different order. Each will “see” or understand certain facets of God more effectively than the others based upon their brokenness, their unique impairment.

Which makes you wonder if that is a value in brokenness – whether physical or spiritual: it allows us to see God from different angles… angles that might be missed, or taken for granted, otherwise.

did you know…?

Did you know that the three largest American embassies in the world are in:

• Islamabad, Pakistan
• Baghdad, Iraq
• Kabul, Afghanistan

They were unbelievably costly to build, and are incredibly costly to operate. I wonder what we plan to do with all that investment when we leave the area…?

fences…

What Your Blog Audience Knows About You That They Won’t Say.

Do other people have the same voracious hunger for information that I have? I don’t have time to read everything that interests me, but whenever I’m reseaching one thing, and am distracted by another in the process, I bookmark it, or email it to myself, or subscribe to the RSS feed. And I have a broad range of information that interests me – some of which relates to writing, and small business marketing and social media.

Occasionally I get to review a few  of the enormous number of feeds to which I subscribe (!), and today this one sounded interesting. And it brought back unexpected memories…

The author does an effective job of explaining how people resist claims of perfection, as they intuitively know they are chicanery, whether the claims relate to a product, or breadth of knowledge, or personal integrity.

I grew up in an environment that encouraged such subterfuge. Not consciously. I don’t believe people were intentionally teaching me to be duplicitous. I don’t think they realized that’s what they were doing. We were told to separate ourselves from the evils in the world, and that would assist us in the development of personal righteousness.

Now I believe this to be true. I believe that if we refrain from stealing or frequenting strip clubs or abusing drugs or physically assaulting our neighbors or children when we’re angry, that these abstentions will assist us in developing righteousness. But over time, we tend to forget these restraints are only helps. And as we discover how difficult it is to maintain personal integrity, some of us start to expand the list of activities and people and places we avoid – thinking such choices will preserve and protect our moral perfection.

Only when we get this far, we’ve really lost sight of the goal. The goal isn’t to cocoon ourselves, to coat ourselves in impenetrable titanium and hold our breath until we are rescued from this harsh reality called life, unblemished.  The goal is to invade the darkness with light. To take the offensive. To step bravely toward evil as it accosts us and resist it’s lure and expose it’s costs.

And we can’t do that if we are never in the presence of evil. Neither would we be perfect; we would only be untried. Segregating ourselves from evil makes life more manageable. We unconsciously attempt to live it in our own strength, because when you’ve placed all those fences around yourself – it’s doable. Living in the midst of darkness is not manageable. It requires a power and wisdom beyond our own.

I used to be the Queen of Fences. A few still resist dismantling. I remember a time in Bible college when I asked myself, “Is this all there is? Is this all it takes to live a righteous and holy life?” I had no idea that my fences were what made “perfection” easy. That my controlled approach to living life, limiting my exposure to the brokenness of the world and denying the rest, was giving me a false picture of my own goodness.

I wonder if that’s why so many people despise Christians, today. They ran into me thirty years ago, and they knew I wasn’t real…