I’m asleep at the wheel and the car is a self-driving humanist with a mind of its own. What happens when life barrels onward irrespective to your attention? You might find yourself awake and six lanes away from the exit.
Writing anything I plan to share feels like a very large undertaking. Every time. Color me impressed by those who regularly churn out content! I suppose they might payroll a production staff, their writing and podcasts producing regular paychecks that motivate the whole of the office. But what about the power of sheer, unbridled passion? And the days when you want to say everything and nothing with no niche to stilt you? An empty subscriber count and negative readers consulting your work for commentary on the news? No discipline? What if you just want the self-driving vehicle to take you where you need to go so you can sit and scroll on your phone and fall asleep at the wheel?
A friend and I use a phrase pretty much every time we exchange the common nicety: How are you? “Oh!” we’ll say. “You know, I’m fine. Life continues to barrel onward…and the train has left the station.”
Over the last few years, my attention has turned inward on itself. A metacognition surrounding attention, a fractured attention. My twenties hold the consumption of books and articles about digital minimalism and asceticism, Reddit threads warning of the hours you lose in submission to the tyranny of the screen, YouTube videos from creators reporting on life in technological postmortem. See, here is the thing about today’s Zillennial: we remember a life before the smartphone — a life where boredom produced mediocre art and bare feet on grass and pruning fingertips in the summer and new games and an overflowing bookshelf. We remember receiving our first device because it felt like getting a new game. We don’t remember the moment it became far more than just a game.
My Lenten sacrifice this year was Reddit and YouTube. Having broken my Instagram addiction a while ago, I developed a more severe one to the aforementioned. I wrote this the morning of Ash Wednesday:
“We are in dire need of a blade sharp enough to cut through the thick unseriousness of this world, the constant laugh track and mockery. These apps I look towards for intellectual provision. My mind is too crowded. All of our minds are.”
It is only when the weeds of the mind are removed that we can hear God’s voice regularly and recognize it. “My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus says. (John 10:27) If you are familiar with Buddhism, you likely know that the Four Noble Truths make up the pillars of the spirituality. Though I am not of the Buddhist faith, I believe the Four Noble Truths find their origin in true, ancient wisdom, and the Noble Eightfold Path prescribed to aid the individual on their journey towards transcendence and detachment is the same. Christian or not, Buddhist or not, we all WANT and SUFFER. Such is the problem of humanity. Buddhist meditation roots itself in the idea of clearing your mind and facing your suffering. Where I’ll deviate is here: Christ Himself meets us in the quiet and suffering. There He can wrestle you. There we give Him the undivided attention he so deserves. There He calls us to prayer and allow Him to fill the empty space with His Thoughts.
The technological revolution has revealed most acutely what we have always known about our kind: the extent to which we are willing to avoid our pain, our suffering, and most chiefly ourselves. Our world provides innumerable avenues to do so. Choose your own adventure. Design your own selfhood and life. Create your own God.
I wander through this life with a smile on my face and end some nights in tears without any real cause. Since I was young I’ve given standing-ovation level speeches in my head, using interpersonal theorems and pathos and ethos to get whoever to see my side, to accept my case. I begin with a person in mind until I realize I am talking at a mirror, and the tears come. I hide away in this secret world of my own making, striving and sweating and thinking I will finally cut down into the marrow. Instead my teeth break on the bone. I come back up for air. I do it all over again the next day. I come to the secret place and I ignore Him. Some nights I just can’t face Me, and I especially can’t face Him. I need the screen and the thoughts of others and the nice pictures and the obscure Q&A forums from 2008.
It shouldn’t feel strange to take out a pen and a journal in public, but in a sea of iPhones and laptops, it does. I was in the airport recently and decided I needed to write. Airports have a way of reminding me where I am on Plath’s fig tree (See: The Bell Jar). I soak in the beauty of taking the winding lane, the scenic route, the God-blessed broken road. I try not to panic that I am only a few months shy of turning the corner on the first quarter of my life, if I live that long. I am as anxious and nervous as ever, petrified that I will absentmindedly arrive at the place of damnation, the final fork in the road, and make the fateful turn downstairs to the place where the good desires of my heart go unrealized, seeds left neglected and unwatered.
Stop. Remember. The price has been paid, Christ finished the work on the cross. But I still do the very thing that I hate and bewilder myself in the process — I can easily decline the second bag of pretzels on the Southwest flight so as to not spoil my dinner — but to make decisions in light of an Ultimate Relationship that demands every ounce of myself?
If I am a mystery even to myself, how much more of a mystery is God? For if I in my undoubtable finitude contain multitudes (Whitman), the existence of an all-knowing, benevolent and loving Divine Intelligence puts that to shame. Crises of faith for me have never been about the improbable existence of God versus Hawking’s unlikely spaghetti monster or the atheist’s position of absolute nothingness, but rather, a God whose will clashes against my own. That was the quandary of Eve in the garden at the beginning of time, that was the quandary of Jacob as he wrestled with God, and that was the quandary of Christ in the garden of Gethsename: “Father, if it be Your will, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” Matthew 26:39
We know that the Father willed not. Not my will but the Father’s be done is the scariest prayer a human can utter. Jesus did at the expense of His life, insurmountable grief, for the salvation of the world.
The moments in which I am most intimate with God are the very moments where I have been brought to the end of myself, the end of my being. Moments of holy clairvoyance after a prolonged stay in the gallows, where there was water on all sides and no land in sight, where the truth glows in neon letters. On this side of eternity I will suffer. That suffering compels us to cry out to God not because it is right but because it is necessary.
The easiest lie I’ve believed is that others have it easier. Periodically, I bemoan and lament the fact that I cannot seem to lead the conventional, easy life, that I can’t just swallow my pride and operate as a good, faithful Christian. It wasn’t for lack of wanting or trying. “Why is my flesh so much weaker than theirs, God?” I’d wonder into my pillow every night. I’d be remiss if I did not mention that for the most part, my life looks excellent, sometimes enviable on paper. What paper does not reveal though is the same life pervaded by incurable loneliness and confusion. For the whole of my life I have felt inferior to my fellow man and absolutely powerless to the innumerable thorns in my side.
As if self-pity weren’t enough, I turn my nose up in supercilious anger at all of the brokenness AROUND me — asking God to fix it and doing nothing to get my hands dirty. Anger at a world whose values are so frivolous and shallow. Anger at a self whose desires are the same. Anger at a world that does not orient around life itself or imminent death. Anger at a world that indulges itself in the cheap pleasures of now. Anger at the breakneck speed of life encouraged and reinforced by a world who moves on from anything substantial in its usual hurried, compulsive consumption. Vitriol courses through my veins at the thought of hedonism while people are dying and hungry.
“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good.” Romans 12:9
My relationships feel so disordered and convolute. So intertwined with the convolution that in weak moments I begin to believe that nothing is sacred: all friendships are breeding grounds for sin. Mustard-seed faith and utter desperation (Need-Love, as CS Lewis names it) lift me from my bed in prayer. Brought down to my lowest, down to my knees, down to where I should have been all along in childlike dependence and obedience, I form half-thoughts and sentences, asking the Spirit to translate the tempest in my chest into petitions and pleadings and humility.
I had coffee with a friend recently. It was someone I hadn’t spoken to really in a long time. We had a very honest conversation. I confessed that I was sick and tired of heartbreak, that it now petrifies me in new ways having been deeply heartbroken many times before, and that I don’t know if I have it in me to face it again. They told me that two things are true: Heartbreak is inevitable, and there will be a day where you face God and He takes all of the pain away. (“He will wipe every tear away from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed.” Revelation 21:4) To live in avoidance of heartbreak is a fool’s errand. (“In this world you will have troubles, but take heart, for I have overcome the world.” John 16:33) The faithful person lives by the Spirit, by the hope of Christ. Not as I will, but Your will be done.
And so I thought: Father, please submerge me in an osmosis of your eternal reality.
There is the heartbreak that comes as a result of our own choices and the heartbreak that comes at the expense of following Christ. Most devastating on this side of eternity is the heartbreak that befalls us as a condition of living in a fallen world as descendants of Adam. We do not get to evade pain when we respond to Christ’s invitation, nor do we avoid suffering when we walk away from the Christian life. For now, heartbreak is as natural the sun’s rising. And heartbreak is the closest I’ve been to death.
“Nothing about us except our neediness is, in this life, permanent.” - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Some will read my words and believe it is an intellectual deficiency of mine to evangelize the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the one True answer to the meaning of life, that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever (Westminister Confession of Faith). Some will believe I’m brainwashed and indoctrinated. That’s fine. I’m over that. But it does not change the fact that we will all come to the end of ourselves whether we like it or not. We were made for more. Love and acceptance and equality and justice mean nothing if a holy God isn’t sovereign over any of it. Grief and loss and pain and injustice mean nothing if hope doesn’t end the sentence. Free-will is a gift — let us not conflate it with a right to sin.
Many days I do not understand what God is up to in the heavenly realms or how to identify His hand on earth. Many hours I’ve squandered trying to go it alone. But I am simply past allowing an ego to trump my Savior. I’m tired. I want the easy yoke and the light burden of the One who knows me and loves me and will not let me go.
You can kick and fight and scream very loudly, you can feel frustrated and furious and frenetic, you can wander off and flirt with all the world has to offer. But if the Holy Spirit lives in You, He will press. Take it from me. He will ask you to come home. He will water-log you with the truth in some way or another. He will probably piss you off. He will wake you six lanes from the exit. He will ask you to come home and show you the way there. He will ask you to humble yourself and teach you to ask for forgiveness. He (Father, Son, Holy Ghost) who is communal will urge you to return to community. He will show you His light burden and easy yoke, that the Father in His loving kindness gave to us through his Son.
What is eternal trumps what is temporal.
Soli deo Gloria: To God alone be the glory. Amen.
I shed many tears to this tonight. My achey and heartbroken soul found immense comfort in your honest words. Praise the Lord for the way He’s undoubtedly chosen you for this gift and how much it’s gifted me through this silly little app!!!
Love your heart and brain!