Bauserman Cottage

August 10, 2008

I am currently doing a prayerful postmortem on a typical Joe crash.  Going into last week I knew that I would have four very hard days that would take a lot out of me.  I was trying to prepare myself and my family for this.  But I had been feeling so much better and doing so much more, that I kept up my pace through those days, being proud of myself that I wasn’t letting the hits of radiation get me down.  Yesterday I was in a hole that I had been digging all week.  Today I am hoping to begin to climb out of the hole. 

The truth is that the four doubleheaders totally kicked my butt physically, emotionally and spiritually.  I made it far worse by pretending that I wasn’t someone whose butt was being kicked.  I have done this all my life.  I remembered an old story today in my quiet time of a particularly bad example of this when I had allowed the demands of my work to ruin me profoundly, and hurt my whole family.  I was a thousand times worse than today, and trying to find my way back. 

I went to see a man I respected very much and I must have driven him crazy pouring out my sad tale of woe.  After about forty-five minutes of listening to me patiently, at least on the surface, he said, “you need to remember who you are in Christ”.  He didn’t say much more but expressed his confidence that the Lord would help me.   It may sound like a dismissive end to a boring conversation on his part but it was in fact just what I needed to hear.  Both parts of his comment helped me immensely. 

The first is that I had to remember who I was.  I was an emotionally and spiritually crippled man.  I was fighting with this fact, needing God to take it away.  I had to face it how I got there and heal, no matter how long it took [it took a long time].  My true identity was not suffering servant, burned out psychotherapist, victim of a hard profession, which had been how I was thinking.  My true identity was clueless, self-absorbed forsaker of God and griever of the Holy Spirit.  The trip from victim to prodigal was mercifully short and the Lord met me in my true identity and helped me on the long road back to health. 

Last week was another clueless week on the slippery slope of consciousness.  My identity was macho man triumphing over cancer treatment.  It only separated me from everything that has been helping me.  It made me think about the God and Cain encounter again.  It struck me that our “countenances” can be down in a couple of ways, and sin is always crouching at the door either way.  We, like Cain, can be offended with God and overtly rejecting grace and mercy.  We can also be distracted by earthly things to such an extent that we are not paying any attention to the important because the unimportant has captured us. 

There are so many admonitions in the Bible to look, listen, be on the alert, consider carefully, pray without ceasing, and other countenance raising exercises.  I have worked with the identity crises of others for over thirty years.  A universal major factor, usually the primary factor, has been that there were important things going on inside of them and around them, perhaps for decades, and they were simply not aware.  They were looking down. 

So here I am, praying for the Lord to help me climb out of the miry pit for the five thousandth time, and praying for you to have awareness of what is important and how you are really doing.  The Lord will meet you there but not in your fantasy about what’s wrong with your life.  May the Lord be the lifter of your countenance and may you pay attention to what He shows you.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Joe's Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.