An Apology:

Today I opened a book and was slapped across the face. I know this doesn't happen often as books do not have palms, however, on this day it did.

I attended Arcata First Baptist Church Sunday morning. It was the first time I had gone there and it is within walking distance of campus. I arrived a few minutes before the service and sat around half way back in a pew mostly to myself.

Standard Church, white haired guy in the pulpit, guy with a snap shirt and faded jeans playing the guitar occasionally whispering breathy things into the microphone like John Mayer. Maybe not so standard outside of Pentecostal services but fun none the less, two token white haired old woman waving pink, blue, and green, banners along side colorful stained glass windows showing ancient trees reaching up towards the stars.

After the music ended and the hands went down, a man in his middle forties stood up in the pulpit. He introduced the communion supper to the congregation. I don't remember his words but a phrase stuck out to me, “child like.” He said something like “who of you out there are living with a “me first” attitude. A child like selfishness where you are the focus of everything you do? God is just an inconvenience? And how many of you are, believing in child like faith that Jesus will provide all things. That He gives us what is needed and even more? How many of us are satisfied in Jesus and know that He is enough today?”

He said it much better than that. It wasn't near as guilt trippy as I made it sound. He was really just trying to help us examine our hearts before communion, to be reminded that the act was significant...it was more than bread and juice, Jesus snack.

I sat in my pew - the words from the pulpit roused me out of my monotony and disinterest. I had wanted to take communion but he made a good point. What was I doing? Was I actually taking communion in the belief and confession that He IS providing all I need and I AM trusting Him today? Or am I doing an act of the religious fabric in habitual or mechanic indifference?

I am being honest now. I've been struggling a bit lately. It's just happened slowly...and it was the “little things.” It's the things that don't really matter because it doesn’t seem to really change the way my day went...I mean I've still been reading my Bible a bit and spending time reading and writing...a little bit at least...and praying...still doing that a bit too. I wasn't being too legalistic, I was living in the freedom Christ has allowed...right? Not many overt sins of omission nor comission. But I suppose I've let my mind wander. I've been waiting for God to provide me things and even though my voice prayed to God my heart prayed to hope in something else.

I opened my journal and penned “I feel my life has had a lot of the me first attitude lately...I confess and repent. I have an over zealous fascination with my own life. I mean who writes a book about themselves? My desires, hope in my being published, potential relationships, they all were hopes I could crawl inside...really anything that will give me significance.”

I ate the bread and drank the juice but there was still a question in my heart.

The afternoon passed and eventually I found myself in a sitting window in a coffee shop in down town Eureka. I pulled out a book I tried to read months ago and couldn't get into. I had picked it up again on Friday or Saturday and had read only a few pages but I was ready to read it now.

As I opened up to this page...the hand reached out and slapped me...gently..and beautifully in a way. Through the pages of No Man Is and Island Thomas Merton said:

“To consider persons and event and situations only in the light of their direct effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep to Hell....I cannot even make my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain...I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency.”

I think this is true, and so I confess. I think about myself way to much. I cannot say I know how to end this or how to fix it, except that I want to.

Maybe for the first time in my life, in the last year and a half-ish, I actually want Jesus to change my life. I want Him more than anything else and I also know that I forget that on a daily basis. Even though all things are permissible I do not want to take that which will harden my heart against God. I do not want to be Pharaoh and harden my heart so many times that I forget to be in awe of the signs God has given me. And although not everything is beneficial I want to be able to live in the Freedom to see the goodness in God and trust in His person above all other things of this world.

I am sorry ahead of time for failing at this..but I would ask you to pray that I can stop living in a me centered world and start living where Jesus lives. He would live in me for sure, but I would live with Him everywhere else too. I think when He is my hearts desire and I go to seek Him in the hearts and minds of those around me, my heart will be less captive to those images, those things that give me significance that I pine after. I then will remember that I am free to love the world well, because Christ loved it first. I will know that the seeking of a desired object or image or being or whatever, that is the slavery, the constant pursuit of that which cannot salve the rawness found upon soul. There is only one antidote and that only found outside of me.

Thanks for reading,

-JS