There’s this song on the radio that’s been stuck in my head and has played on repeat up there for a while now.  A part of the chorus has this great atypical melody that’s just different enough to engage my inner music-nerd.  I listen to this line and over and over I echo the lyrics “I can’t change, even if I tried, even if I wanted to”.  I’m engaged by the music, but every time I twist and roll this line in my head, I’m repeating the words.  It isn’t some profound musical achievement or poetic masterpiece.  I just like the tune and it stuck.

But I think people can change.  In fact, i don’t just bet on that or believe that or hold onto that hope.  I know it.  I know people change because I’ve seen it, I’ve witnessed it and I’ve experienced it.  I’ve changed, profoundly and significantly.  But this isn’t a story of self-will, self-help or self-love. Because I did not want to change.  I didn’t take a long hard introspective look at my life and bravely take the road less traveled.  I was pulled into this season kicking and screaming.  And when I stopped kicking and screaming I gave up, completely.  I didn’t pull myself up by my bootstraps and charge into battle.  For a while I didn’t acknowledge there even was a battle.  This also isn’t the story of how I found health, wealth, happiness and success.  While, yes, there have been happy moments and some success, I still have a mountain of debt, chronic medical issues and am no closer to knowing what I want to be when I grow up.

People don’t change because they can’t change themselves.  I can’t make myself change.  I can rubic’s cube around my circumstance to make stuff make sense because it matches up.  I can feel better about my circumstance by altering my perspective or adjusting my attitude.  I can even improve my circumstance by spending less and saving more or micro-managing my time.  But I do not have the power to intrinsically rewire my defaults.  When you strip away psychology and behavior modification, Jedi mind tricks and Unagi (the theory not the sushi, obvi),  I still am inherently selfish, imbalanced, judgmental, obsessive (etc. ad infinitum).

But something happened.  Something slammed into my heart nearly two years ago and shattered the citadel of control, arrogance and defiance I’d built around my guilt, shame, doubt and fear.  And my best efforts to mend, rebuild or rewind failed.  And guess what I realized?  I’m not good enough!  My worst and deepest fear realized in a literal, physical, undeniable way.  I will never be good enough or do enough good to change.

This cataclysmic, heart-slamming shifted everything.  And I know, with every bit of my being, that this “something” was the perfect love and grace of the God who created the universe.   And in His great mercy, knowing my nature, knowing I would try and fail said “I know you can’t…but I can”.  And this Love, this ultimate, sacrificial Love made manifest, covered my failure and forgave.  The realization of this sacrifice and this Love changed my heart.  And my life, as a result, changed.  I changed.

To pull it back full circle- this song that’s playing on repeat in my head IS PROFOUND.  It is a catchy tune attached to some silly words that happen to regurgitate the deep rooted false belief of my own irrelevant effort and meaningless existence.  Play it again, right?  No. I won’t play it again.  And I’ll have to remind myself over and over to turn off that literal and proverbial tape when it plays anyway.  Because the quantifiable fact, the absolutely undeniable truth of my life is that lives are changed by the life and work and love of Jesus Christ.

A pastor shared a conversation he had at the beginning of his 25 year career where an older business professional laid a hand on his shoulder and in a particular flavor of acquired cynicism that only comes with age said, “Bill…people don’t change”.  Bill’s response?  “Well I’m betting my life on the fact that they can and do.”

I lost my childhood and found reality

I lost a best friend and found my own voice

I lost my voice and found the still silence

I lost a love and found a passion

I lost prestige and found humility

I lost good luck and found hard work

I lost dear ones and found eternity

I lost my optimism and found introspection

I lost mental health and found divine healing

I lost control and found submission

I lost my confidence and found repentance

I lost my will and found forgiveness

I lost my worth and found my identity

I lost my life and found freedom

I lost my religion and found faith

I lost my faith and found my savior

Truly, genuinely, honestly…nearly every significant experience I’ve had with the God of the universe has been in the midst of a significant, literal loss.  Loss of people, loss of dreams, loss of plans, loss of hopes, loss of possessions, loss of integrity, loss of more people, and on and on and on.  Sometimes I think that is God’s love language to me- or maybe that’s the only way he can get my attention because I certainly did NOT go gently into those good nights!

But being nearly fully on the flip side of losing almost everything but the divinely-permitted air in my lungs, I can stand in joy with gratitude of the unique grace of God that built me back up in such a bold and blatant way that even this cynic cannot take credit for or explain away.

What IF you step into loss expectantly, walking in confidence of your inheritance of the incomparable comfort of your savior- by him, through him and of him who made you, who loved you, who chose you.  And what IF the Lord uses this loss for the purpose of gain…gain in His name, for your joy, to his glory.  Praise God from whom all blessings flow- in the blessings of bounty and of burden.

C.S. Lewis said, “praise seems to be inner health made audible”.  The fuel of this praise is the perfect love of the triune God and the perfect love of the triune God overflows into praise.  This love allows me to feel the pain, feel the loss, feel the fear- but praise his goodness and trust in his plan.  I invite the Lord in to all those messy, dark, twisty places and let him do what he does.

There is a lot of proverbial water under the religiosity bridge and I struggle with not throwing out the baby Jesus with the evangelical bathwater.  I’ve found peace in the fact the body of believers imperfectly struggles just as I imperfectly struggle and the cloud of witnesses that have gone before imperfectly struggled.  Despite our shared imperfection, I can’t help but fear being judged the way I know I have judged.   But I will walk with the Lord in that fear.  And I will go with the Lord where he goes.  And I will follow the Lord where he leads.

“remember that time” is my pile of word-stones, my alter of remembrance-narrative for the burning-bush, parted-seas and manna-from-the-sky moments.

FALL 2012: I was taking a mini-term on “social entrepreneurship” in my final semester.  This was a reflection assignment that turned into a snapshot of an important season in my life. 

I ask, while I attempt to articulate my experience, that you hear beyond my words and understand my heart.  My inability to clearly express my experience may, as I’ve seen in recent communications, be perceived as blunt and sometimes harsh.  But please know that the pace of this broken and lame, cynical sinner attempting to newly walk in stride with the Lord is not smooth or graceful, but rather a clumsy tempo punctuated with many missteps and stumbles.

At the beginning of the week we were asked if we came into that moment with any preconceived ideas, any unmentioned bias.  I certainly am not in a place where I’m comfortable sharing my experience in front of a classroom of people, but in the spirit of transparency and authenticity, I will, in abbreviated version, tell that story now.

I am a recovering alcoholic and addict with a little over 10 months sobriety.  These past 310 “one day at a time’s” out of addiction were incredibly painful and difficult, but nothing compared to the desert that was my life leading into that dependence.  In January of 2006, I bought a one-way ticket to NYC, dropping out of college, leaving my friends, family and faith behind, running 3000 miles in the opposite direction of everything I knew.  I prided myself in my own self-sufficiency and newfound freedom.  For the better part of those six years, I turned off my soul and chased the desires of my sinful heart.  Ironically, I was pretty successful at most things I put my mind to.  I rose up in the ranks at my job, eventually achieving autonomy and the unfailing trust of my employers.  I started and ran my own business, building a pretty solid reputation with many exciting opportunities on the horizon.  I had money in the bank, a great apartment, great friends and was having a great time.  But to maintain this relentless routine, I found myself becoming increasingly dependent on uppers, downers and in-betweeners to perform appropriately at any given moment.  Somehow I rationalized that it was acceptable as long as I was working hard, secretly joining the ranks of a surprisingly massive population of delusional, white-collar, corporate addicts who party all night and still get to work at 8am.  I had just discovered my favorite enhancement “cocktail” when the tower of cards came tumbling down.  And I fell with them to the bottom, very quickly and very hard.  The lies I had weaved, particularly with my employer, quickly became untangled and I was given a bottom line: jail or rehab.  So, in December of 2011, I humbly accepted their overwhelmingly merciful offer and went to rehab.  After 28 days of open-heart surgery, I moved home with a massive, ugly, angry emotional scar.  I lost everything: my job, my business, many friends and my dreams.  Also dealing with a long overdue psychological diagnosis, the first couple months of sobriety were full of prescription ‘pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey’ attempts, self-pity parties, angry outbursts and painful regrets. With a severely under-whelming enthusiasm and literally no idea where I was headed, I took the next closest step and decided to re-enroll in school and finish something I started nearly 10 years ago. I had begrudgingly resigned myself to a penance for my past: the imminent world of suburbia, a pointless, paper-pushing 9 to 5 and the end of any glamorous dreams of personal glory.  But slowly, despite my best efforts to analytically refute it, the Lord softened me to hear, see and feel his divine pursuit of my heart.  Truth began to find its way into my mind and I began to see the ruse of the circumstantial world I had built for what it was: sometimes beautiful and personally beneficial, but ultimately not the path the Lord had made for me.  There was a minimal level of renewed faith, but still an intense anxiety over my future: the future of completing what I hated to admit was probably a pointless degree, the future logistics of a job, bills and a mountain of debt, the future of my non-existent social life and singleness, the future inside my chemically unbalanced and newly medicated mind, etc.  All of that to say, I came into this semester and more specifically, this fall break mini-term with a crushingly divided and confused agenda.

Having been out of the traditional classroom for six years as an online student, the first day of class was filled with trepidation.  I hated the initial introductions and my lame cover story.  After everyone spoke, I felt like I needed to backtrack and prove why I was just as legitimate, despite being an 7th year senior.  So I was already feeling wildly insecure when Mr. Porter* came to speak (*attorney who started a non-profit to use legal tactics to ‘take back’ the neighborhoods in East Dallas from drug lords and pimps).  Always the cynic, I asked him if he did any research or had information on who precisely were the inhabitants of these shanty homes he was shutting down and were there any intermediary organizations that he partnered with to get them help.  His reply was that they simply worked very closely with the Dallas Police Department.  Upon further prodding of the efficacy of simply eliminating the “home base” but not the “ballplayers” he said, “when roaches scatter, they usually don’t all come back up together…they may come back, but in far less percentage”.  I was horrified, to say the least. The Lord so graciously and miraculously delivered me out of that hell before I had to resort to extreme measures to feed my addiction.  But I went to and in-patient rehab and lived amongst, loved on and formed relationships with women that did indeed sell their bodies and all manner of other awful things to survive.   At that point in their lives, survival was not just food and water: the need for drugs surpassed even that of nutrition.  Many of those broken women went to jail and never received an ounce of healing or rehabilitation there.  I could have gone to jail!  I should have gone to jail! I broke the law, multiple times over months and months.  But instead of filing charges, my bosses showed mercy and sent me to rehab.  But these women had nothing.  They have even less when someone looks at them as scum, a stain on the fabric of the community or a bug underfoot. So that day I went home, feeling like a roach.

My insecurity morphed into a mission on day 2.  I had pegged this week as a test in endurance: shut my mouth, keep my head down and make it through.  Honestly, I was probably focused more on the anxiety of how to make it through the morning without a cigarette than anything else!  The less I was able to isolate and the more vulnerable I felt, the more I over-compensated.  Feign interest, act engaged, play the part!  And then we got to Bonton* (*small low-income, crime-ridden neighborhood in East Dallas).  All the pretense and perceived judgment I felt fell away.  I felt among friends.  And I clued in.  As the men* (*former addicts, drug dealers, crime bosses, etc.) told their stories, I was held in complete rapture. And more importantly, I looked around and so was everyone else.  They didn’t run away or turn their noses up at stories of drug addiction, rape or repeated incarcerations. They listened and cared and asked questions and stood for hours in genuine, spirit filled love.  And these men just gave their hearts away: they’re exposing their hearts to us in love, they’re offering their hearts to the community in service and they’re submitting their hearts to Christ in faith. Something happened there on that driveway.  The perfect love of God collided into my heart, saying:  You are forgiven.  You are loved. Do not hang your head in shame and regret.  You are worthy, by the power of the Holy Spirit through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  And you have a purpose, not in spite of but because of your story.

So, needless to say, the rest of the week was a blur.  My head and heart completely exploded. The “Half the Sky” documentary on PBS ironically coincided with the course and it was amazing to see more incredible examples of how real people are testing and stretching the limits of their own ability to weave into the tapestry of others lives.  And finally, Bimnet’s* (*teacher’s assistant) lecture on Friday about finding the purpose God has given each of us culminated all of these things.  A couple phrases literally brought me to tears:

Its not about finding solutions, but finding Jesus in the problem.

Do what you can, using exactly what you have, exactly where you are.

You can be the hopeful.

Will you be the middleman?

This class didn’t just teach me about how I can be a part of changing the world.  This week led me out of my self-imposed darkness, and back into the presence of the God of the universe.  He’s given me salvation.  And He’s given me a story.  Now, I get to give Him my life.

my immediate response to finding and reading a new blog:

“ooooo….talk to me….”

my typical response about two lines in:

“you’re dumb…. next…”

so despite the fact that i mentally process via written (typed) word…despite the fact i’m a terrible verbal-communicator (SQUIRREL!) and can sometimes only find my voice by digging through the word-vomit……despite the fact i often send unsolicited email novellas (of above mental processing/projectile verbage) to a handful of unfortunate witnesses…

despite ALL of these things, i’ve refused to blog.  because I’m a critical, impatient ass, I expect proverbial-you to be too.

but i’m working on engaging the world around me instead of just the world in my head.  so if only one person happens to read this (hi mom), awesome… remaining anonymous would actually be awesome.  but if someone else, by any number of unexpected avenues, happens to intentionally step into my written heart and mind, i very nervously and insecurely welcome you.  and give you this totally obnoxious and probably unnecessary disclaimer:

I don’t claim authority on anything i think.  i don’t claim to be humble, compassionate or kind.  i don’t claim to be right or healthy or balanced or fair.  i don’t claim to have anything…at all…figured out.  in fact, i’m a mess.  i’m opinionated about things i’m ignorant about.  i don’t like to capitalize or use punctuation, i depend on spell check more often than i should and i overuse my favorite adjectives.  i’m judgmental and cynical and self-absorbed.  I don’t return phone calls and I often retreat into isolated busy-ness and non-social numbing.  i also have a tendency to self-depreciate to infinity.

i’m just a big kid with a big heart and a bicycle with a broken chain for a brain.  sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. but…”Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me,

Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.” (2 Corinthians 12:9 from The Message)