March 31, 2007
I’m sitting here at starbucks thinking and studying. The song by Switchfoot came on and it just hits me every time. I enjoy the lyrics and it symbolizes a lot of my own experience in life. It is the inherent wishes and dreams that are expressed in my own heart, but yet realizing how futile they can become.
I salivate at the anticipation of such things. Those desires of this world that make you believe happiness is just around the corner waiting to embrace you, but all I’m left is with an uncertainty that its just not suppose to be this way. The first verse speaks about this old man tracking him home and gave him a crooked smile. There was something about him that didn’t seem right. There was a vague familiarity again enticing the heart. Promises and dreams of attaining our dreams and desires to be fully satisfied.
So it is perhaps here that we find ourselves in this predicament. We relunctantly succumb ourselves to that man, the promises that arise from a longing of our hearts to be desired. We believe we know what it is that will fulfill us, but that initially uneasiness is replaced by the growing expectations of things to come. We’re able to ignore the moments of sanity where our hearts tell us it isn’t right because we’ve invested so much of ourselves. I know and I understand. Those dreams of satisfying those around me, wanting the fame, wanting to be known, I want it all. I want to be rich, I want everything! But even as I write that, I know that I don’t. I live in this contradictory sense of wants and knowledge.
“I began to scream, I don’t think this is me, is this just a dream or really happening” I think that’s point where we face reality and we realize that this is me. I am but a dream wisked away in a fantasy of beliefs. I live in the fragile existence of what was created by our own dreams, our own desires, fooled by our own hearts, but wondering how to get out? We are sold out and we are lost. I know how that feels. I know how it feels to be unsure of everything….feeling as if this world is so fluid with no stable ground to keep my feet into. Everything feels like quicksand, slowly sinking into this abyss of hopelessness. When will it change? Why do I feel so powerless? I am all words and thoughts, but no substance? Even the substance lacks substance because I sold myself out in order to gain such substance. Integrity can be sold for the cheapest of price to attain the greater treasures this world seduces us with. I am not one who speaks in victory, but one who has encountered the depravity of myself to find the longing only grows greater.
“I woke up as before, but the gold was gone, my wife was at the door, with a nightrobe on, my heart beat once or twice, and life flooeded my veins, everything has changed, my lungs had found their voice, what was once routine was now the perfect joy”
The question that is to be asked of all of us is when will we wake up? I think is what it means for things to “click” We wake up, metaphorically we are unplugged from the matrix and see reality as it and from there we are able to find true reality and true understanding.
Because as much as I want those things. I want to be a famous speaker, a famous author, I want to be a war hero, I want to have fame, to be rich, I am ambitious, and my heart dreams of such fairly tales to exist. But what is the cost exacted from such pursuits? To what end will I sell myself out to attain such worth that will only drown in the existence of meaningless?
Because what I want more is me. I want to be me, not this abberation of me. This skewed perspective of my own needs finding immediate gratification for the things that my heart so desires. I dream more of my wife at the door with a bathrobe on...the reality that who we are today as men of God exist beyond the dreams of this world. Our own souls and lives are hanging in the balance of this economical exchange by which we subjects ourselves to daily depending on the choices we make. Each day we exact a cost that will determine the trajectory of our lives.
We have rationalized our lives and believe that logic will prevail. Inside we long for something greater, we feel the pulls on our hearts, but yet we ignore them for the triumph of logic, but I warn that it is in this arena we have forgotten about God. Our hearts are calloused to the Holy Spirit. The Hound of Heaven is consistently pursuing us yet we only find God in the means by which we can attain our desires. God becomes a role player in the story we’re writing about ourselves. God becomes our subject and we become God. The problem is God is God and we are not. This kind of belief seen in our actions will only continue to perpetuate the disillusionment we not only see but experience in our lives. A consistent wonderment of why we are so disconnected, but the very fact is we have chosen disconnectedness b/c we don’t want to submit to God.
1 John 5:2-4 “This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. This love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even ou faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who blieves that Jesus si the son of God.”
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