He’s Come Undone.

“Who do you need, Who do you love, when you come undone?”  -Duran Duran

“In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.   Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.  And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.  And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.  Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.”  Isaiah 6:1-5 KJV

I know I’m ripping off a title of a recent Oprah’s Book title, but the title seemed appropriate.

I’m kind of starting to melt down a little bit.  I’ll be relieved when this work is over.  Again, I’ve been working all week to catch up, but I feel like I’m about a day behind where I want to be.  I hate the feeling of being behind.  I think tonight is the night I get to catch up.  At the rate I’m going, I’ll be not quite ready to leave when I’m planning to leave for the summer.  Such is life.

As you might have guessed from the title and the quotes, I feel like I’ve come undone.  If I were a pair of shoes, I’d be unlaced, with the tongue hanging out of the front of them.  There isn’t an area that hasn’t been touched and screwed with. Not one.  Let’s go through them, shall we?

First, my brain has been stretched, twisted, pulled, pushed, hammered, shaped, forged, and about fifteen other things this year.  I can’t explain to you how much thinking I’ve done about God and Christianity and the way stuff is.  There have been occasions where I’ve had to radically change my beliefs.  Though that’s good, and I’m a lot more comfortable in my beliefs now than I’ve ever been, after a while it starts to wear a bit.  And also, when you change one things in a value system, and then come back and revisit something you thought you knew, it changes it slightly.  So what has happened several times is a state of affairs where you change something, and just as you finish it, something else changes and you have to go back through the whole system and analyze it again.   I love cognitive dissonance, but sometimes, it’s a real pain in my backside.

Second, my spirit has been tested.  The amount of temptations to do things other than what are best for me in this bigger city is almost limitless.  While I’m not sure that the way I’ve gone about dealing with that is the best (If you’ll recall, I sit around my house a lot), I do know that I’ve come through it pretty much unscathed.  In addition, the realities of what the rest of my life are going to be like weigh pretty heavily on me from day to day.  The instance I wrote about last week where I asked the despair-filled question, “What am I doing this for?” was not an isolated instance.  Quite frankly, working inside a church construct for the rest of my life presents a number of questions about my character, and if I have what it takes.  Working in ministry, as any pastor will tell you, is about perserverance and having a thick skin for criticism, while at the same time loving the people in your congregation, often times the same people who are criticizing you and giving you a hard time.  It’s not a job for everyone.  I’m still not sure I’ll be able to handle that aspect.  I’m hoping that my skin gets a little bit thicker and that I can learn to love people better over the next three or so years.  I don’t want to be too confident in my abilities in this area, because as we all know, “pride goes before the fall.”

Third, my emotions have been tested.  From the day when I got in the car and said goodbye to Wisconsin, weeping as I left, to my trip home over Christmas, to planning to return now, it’s been one challenge after another.  I spent the first semester scrambling to reconcile being apart from my family for long periods of time with what I know God has called me to do and to teach.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve felt completely and totally alone here in the metro-Denver area.  While the anonymity of the big city has its advantages, there are also some pretty obvious problems with it too, especially when you are a person who relies on people who know you to call you on it when you’re doing something that isn’t good for you.  I’ve not had that kind of connection and support network here in Denver.  That’s not to say that I don’t have people here, but not people who know me on a day-in-day-out basis.  Anyone will tell you, it’s different.  Dealing with the pride issues which I’ve talked about for the last few months has also taken it’s toll.  I feel like I’ve been run through a meat grinder, and that’s not a joke.  To realize the sheer volume of things that my pride kept me from doing and the number of people I’ve wounded as a result is not pleasant to have to deal with, and that’s what I’ve struggled with this semester.  There was literally a part of the middle of the semester where I was sleeping like 18 hours a day.  I was just spent.  Exhausted, worn out.  I was done.

On a related note, I’ve also had some other things happen that I wasn’t expecting.  I’ve had my entire “self-protection by rules” structure thrown back in my face, and then summarily trashed.  I can’t tell you the panic it caused.  There were some emotions that I was feeling that were only held back by those rules, and when they went away, I was left facing some things that did (and still do) scare me to death.  I have not loved people the way I should for a long time.  When the rules the kept you from doing that get taken away, and you’re left with these feelings, it’s hard to get the rust off and love again.  You all might think I’m talking about my female relationships, and while it is happening there too, that’s not really the primary area of my concern.  You may recall me freaking out about taking risks and stuff a couple of months ago.  That risk taking is all about the risk of love–loving someone who for whatever reason you know is going to hurt you, either intentionally, or the more likely option– unintentionally.  The reality that I’m going to have to deal with that pain and love the person after they’ve done it has been hard for me to take and reconcile myself to.  I don’t claim that it’s easy for anyone, but after not really having made that concept real in my life for five years, to come back to it knowing you have to isn’t easy either.  I’ve had my conceptions and motivations for why I want a family and a wife questioned and posed back to me.  The answers I’ve come to on the issue are, in one sense, very comforting.  On the other hand, they’re also quite frightening.  Figuring out my intentions in all my relationships has been an enlightening and fearful process for me.  It’s not done yet.  I have a f