As time has gone on I've found that my perspective has become alien to several of my friends whom I respect a good deal; the friend I just referenced was hardly the first person to react to me as if I'd grown a second head. To me and my wife what I'm saying is the end result of years of intensive prayer, studying, and suffering. But the end statements don't add up to many people who used to know me because they haven't seen the arc that God brought me along. It's a truly distressing thing to say things that, to me, are truly comforting truths, only to be told that I'm being depressing, if not downright erroneous and then just plain old ignored. I can't say I blame my friends for doing this. We've all been conditioned to ignore Christianity in its actual form and to accept a bastardization that has no teeth, no force behind it.
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| Photo: http://andrey3377.livejournal.com/ |
But the more I argued the more resistance I met until, one day, I just sat at my computer and threw up my hands in absolute frustration and asked "What am I doing wrong? My life is changing for the better because of what I've found and I can't seem to communicate it!" As an artist communication's paramount. My existence is to communicate. Not being able to do that is horrible. I asked God what I should do. And right then and there, I stumbled upon the story of the Gadarene demoniac. Christ was just walking along and the demoniac ran at him, begging him not throw him into the outer darkness. Christ drove Legion into the pigs, who killed themselves. When the former demoniac tried to go with Christ He instead told the man to tell everyone what God had done for him. I took it to mean that I needed to tell my story, because ultimately I don't feel all that different from the Gadarene demoniac. I ran after God, begging Him not to destroy me, and found mercy in a way that I could not have expected. I found kindness, I found mercy in a form that I never would have looked for had it not been the mercy of God.
Christ didn't tell the demoniac to go and spread doctrinal statements about His divinity, nor did He command that he critique modern society, or even try to spread news about some abstract deity way up high in the sky Who had mysteriously intervened and changed everything. No, Christ told the demoniac to tell everyone the good that had been done for him. He was to tell everyone that he had been possessed but saved. He was to tell everyone that he was on the way to hell but had been saved. He was to tell everyone how he had come to change.
And that's the purpose of this blog, to announce the news: I was going to Hell itself, bound up with sins that I couldn't begin to understand, but God intervened! He's taking my cursings in the darkness that I was barely aware of and is helping me watch as He lovingly frees me from them. And all I have to do is tell you what happened as honestly as I can. I intend to do what my Lord commanded.
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| The Resurrection, by Myself. 2014. Silver leaf and acrylic on wood |
Some of you may read this blog and be put off. The darkest depths of any human's heart is a dark place, filled with demons and pain and awfulness in ways that can be barely looked at it's so fallen. It will be a blog about Christ kicking in the doors of my soul, throwing Hades in chains, and offering me a hand as I sit back, marveling at what just happened. Some of you will be put off by how personal the blog is. I will make no effort to spare myself, for it's in the areas of sheer darkness that Christ is acting the brightest. Some of you will think "Hey, he's just reaching for attention!" You're half right, unfortunately, but that's not the half I'm hoping God will honor. I'm trusting He'll do what He's always done, which is to purify the part of me that's wrong and put Himself into all of it, so that way, if you read this blog and see my story, you see Christ instead.
That's the goal, that's the plan, and and may I never deviate from it. Please follow the story of a poor man who is still in his coffin, begging to be let out as he pounds under six feet of dirt and Christ digs him out, even as the idiot digs himself further in. Stick around for that. You may not agree with where I end up, but do not deny my story. That's all I have to tell. It's all any of us have to tell, really.
