InMediasRace

I arrived home late last night–around 3am–from a friend’s birthday party. We had danced for hours, and I was already on less sleep than humans should have, so my mind was not quite with me as I backed my car into a parking space beneath a low tree that grew up and out over the road. I hit the gas to ease into the space and heard a crunch. My taillight, I thought. Well, that sucks, but it should be easy to fix.

I got out of the car and inspected the damage. It wasn’t my taillight: the crunch I heard had actually been a crumple of the metal on my Subaru Forester’s hatchback door. A small stub of a branch protruding downward from the trunk, which I hadn’t seen from the driver’s seat, had caught the top of the car and punched a vertical dent just above the rear window, about four inches long.

To me, cars are tools. We use them to get us from place to place. And they’re not only transportation but protection. If a rock hits our windshield, the glass is designed to protect us from injury. Any one of these things can happen while driving on any day in any kind of car no matter how expensive, so I’ve long been of the opinion that when a car gets a ding, or a sizable dent as mine had just received, it’s part of its lifespan. If it doesn’t affect the drivability of the car, it shouldn’t be repaired; fixing such innocuous issues seemed simple vanity to me.

Yet now that I was looking at my car’s first major blemish, I couldn’t stave off disappointment. I felt I’d failed to take care of it. This little imperfection would be visible to anyone driving behind me, a statement that I didn’t care enough about my possessions to care for them and fix them when they get broken. Maybe the driver behind me would assume I’m not affluent enough to afford the repair bill. Maybe he’d assume I was a bad driver since it was a mark from an obviously botched back-in. In any event, it just looked ugly.

It bothered me, and it bothered me that it bothered me. Luckily, I was too tired to think about it much and headed to bed. (Fatigue can be a great ally when trying to gain control our thoughts or fears.) But when I got up this morning and remembered what had happened, I got that little feeling of sadness again. Should I repair it? Why did I care so much? Had I been totally fooled in believing that I was above this kind of vanity?

Growing up, I had a very strong sense of perfection versus imperfection, of beauty versus ugliness, and the exemplary versus the mediocre. I learned early to order things via hierarchies: best, good, bad; large, medium, small; McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s–and to know when things were out of place. This sense came very early, and I have no doubt that it was from nature, not nurture. How do I know this? When I was a baby, one day at breakfast some of my Cheerios dropped to the floor. I pointed at them and made whiny noises to my mother until she picked them back up and put them on the tray of my high chair. That’s my particular blend of obsessive-compulsiveness, and it’s been aging for twenty-nine years.

Such tendencies have abated in recent years, but they still manifest themselves in events like these. My car’s body was no longer perfect. It was stained, blemished, and for that reason part of me rejected it. Wanted to fix it. Make it right.Yet as I do with so many events, I began to think of this allegorically. My own body is scarred in multiple places. That happened in a car as well, when I nearly died on a sunny winter day at 17 years old. God healed me and I survived to make a full recovery–but certainly not unscathed. My scars number around eight, on my arms, legs, and torso. The emotional scars I’ve sustained in life I’m sure number far greater. I am not perfect either, and have not ever been. Now in a way, I was demanding something–from my car, of all things; an inanimate object–that I couldn’t even lay claim to myself.

Scars. We all receive them, visible or not. They are a universal part of the human experience, and I can say this with confidence because even the only perfect human who ever lived boasts scars; and not just one, but five. I was reminded of something a friend of mine said around four years ago: “Jesus Christ is content to walk around as the only blemished thing in his perfect heaven, in order that we can be there with him.”I was awestruck at that statement, but I am more awestruck now as I see it from the other side of this simple lesson. God himself is not above scars. And if that is the case, then his idea of perfection (as with so many things) is totally different from mine.

Far from the opposite, when we align ourselves with our Maker our wounds are what temper us toward perfection. Jehovah in his wisdom has seen fit to keep the world as it is, with all its danger, adventure, risk, and reward, and with that comes the certainty of injury. Rather than coddle us like an overprotective parent who seeks only to guard his children from scrapes and bruises, he throws us into the world and tells us to subdue it. Risk ourselves. Take our treasure, put it out on the market, and realize returns. That is why I love him and believe what he says. It terrifies me that I may not risk everything he wants me to risk before I leave this world, but I will choose to risk some of it, and that is infinitely better than a lifetime of Floaties, booster seats, and child-proof locks. God doesn’t gate us off from some rooms; He leaves his house and all its wonders open for us to crawl around and explore.

Returning from church this morning, as I walked to my apartment door I turned back to look at my car. I couldn’t suppress a laugh. I don’t really know where it came from, but I have a good idea who put it there. Somewhere in the morning the disappointment had left me and been replaced with what might be called pride. My car was growing up. It had some character now. And that scar will forever remind me of an amazing night with my friends, a night that had me so exhausted from fun that I’d backed into a tree.

While he was saying this, a ruler came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples.

 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.”

Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” He said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed from that moment.

When Jesus entered the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the noisy crowd, he said “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. News of this spread through all that region.

- Matthew 9:18-26

My study of the Bible has been devoted to the Old Testament for at least a year now. Realizing how long it had been since I visited the Gospels, I began reading Matthew again a few weeks ago. I have been stalled on this passage for a day or two now, believing there is more to it that I need to think on. Writing has always been my best form of organized thinking, so I share my thoughts now here.

(more…)

A classmate of mine was once almost pickpocketed in the Paris metro. He described it as a laughable occurrence, and I have to agree: the thief tried to steal the wallet out of his back pocket, and when my classmate realized what was happening, he simply turned and looked the thief in the eye. The guy stared back, backed up, and walked away.

I find moments in my day when my thoughts are threatened in the same way my friend’s wallet was. I believe Satan tries to pickpocket our sense of peace by stealing our good thoughts. Or maybe he tries to plant absurd, fearful ones. But when I’m in my right mind and the Spirit guides me, I can turn, look the Devil in the eye, and bid him walk away.

Perhaps you don’t believe in a supernatural aspect to this sort of phenomenon. If not, that’s fine; but you should believe it exists. Millions of people face it each day. We are our thoughts, and we become what we dwell on.

Problem is, fending off the pickpocket is not always this easy or practical. Our minds are so blessedly malleable, but that very property, which allowed humans to break escape gravity, build the combustible engine, and write profound fiction, is the very one that can turn our minds against themselves and into depression. Sometimes this happens in the span of days or weeks, sometimes years. Now that my mind has healed from depression I can now in retrospect identify exact moments in time when I sabotaged myself, such as a moment at 18 years old when I began to believe that I should devote 100 percent of my thoughts to my passion of writing, and filter every life experience through its lens. Ever tried to do that with your chosen discipline? Luckily you realized its futility before you drove yourself mad; and if not, well, madness has its lessons as well.

So what do we do when we find our thoughts attacked, either from within or from without? First, we must realize that the attacker is a ninja. And so, we must take a lesson from Splinter: that ninja strike hard and fade away, without a trace. If you can’t identify the attacker–or, indeed, whether there was an attack at all–then you’re doomed to fall to the malicious thought.

If you have identified the attacker, however, then you’re a giant step closer to foiling him. The other aspect of this I’ve found is that thoughts, rather than being instantaneous impulses in the mind, have stages. A perfect example of this is sexual attraction. I catch a glimpse of a girl’s body, perhaps intentionally, perhaps unintentionally, and I have a thought that I am attracted to her. And for a portion of time perhaps indefinable outside of quantum mechanics, I have a choice. I can carry that thought through into sin; or I can let it drop; or I can allow it to ascend into a purely aesthetic appreciation for God’s creation, and thereby see the woman from His perspective, and not my own. The point is that there is a chance for change: our thoughts do not own us when we realize this.

Finally, there is the counterattack. I’ve found this most often takes the form of letting the thought drop, and moving on. If you believe Satan’s in it, tell him to get lost. Whatever your method, eliminate the thought by “taking it captive”, as the Scripture says (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Yet there are still times in our lives when we simply cannot combat these malicious thoughts on our own. What then? This is where practical application becomes difficult. But God has given us a way, and that is simply through prayer. It goes something like the business plan of certain Underpants Gnomes living beneath South Park:

Step 1: Pray.
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit!

There’s almost no definable reason why it should work. I can’t say, “Pray, and then you’ll feel yourself change, and then you’ll have strength to combat your fear and despair,” because the feeling of change might not happen. Our emotions can confuse us, so I believe that God sometimes chooses to skip over them (this is at least so in my case). So the practical application here becomes hard to explain, but I assure you, it works (unlike many business plans).

Thoughts can be mastered, no matter what we feel. The thief comes to steal and destroy, so get your baseball bat. I assure you, God approves.