Sunday, 20 February 2011

• Drowning, Comatose, & Heart Surgery (Part 3)

  The Great Update (Part 1) - In the Classroom of Community (Part 2) 

  This post was difficult for me to write because it’s my attempt to find words that will accurately describe my own personal love encounter with God. Often times I become frustrated and settle for the phrase, “You just have to experience it to know!” I recognize that’s not the most helpful thing to say but I still think it’s the closest to the truth. If you haven’t experienced something first-hand then it really is hard to fully convey that to another human being. I mean, that’s really what our entire life struggle with communication is predicated on, right? Our (in)ability to communicate and impart our personal experiences to one another. While written and spoken words are definitely viable forms of communication, I believe there’s a great, oft neglected, value in both visual and non-verbal communication as well. For me, that’s usually portrayed through my use of analogies, sketches, illustrations, stories, movies or even talking with my hands and gestures. That being said, I have a few analogies that I think will help describe this process I’ve undergone.
   

  Drowning

  Drowning > Dying > Resuscitation > Coughing Up Water > Gasping for Breath!

  
  Drowning: For a substantial part of my life I felt like I was the only one who couldn’t figure “it” out. I had this ravenous victim mentality where I was only able to perceive negative aspects my life and constantly felt like I didn’t belong. I was the proverbial black sheep of the family, never quite fitting in, often feeling like I was switched at birth or grafted into the wrong tree. I felt like I was going through life trying to hold on to what precious little oxygen I was born with, holding my breath for dear life because I couldn’t figure out how to breathe in new air. And if I did manage to risk taking a breathe, I was undoubtedly met with the discourage reality of water in my lungs. We’re all born underwater.
  
  Dying: The problem with our sinful human nature is that it doesn’t want to die easily. It’ll do anything it can to preserve itself, even if it’s a miserable existence at that. Eventually, I was at the point where I knew I had to die to myself, all my fears, my pride, hurt and rejection. I had to finally grant full access of my heart to Christ, including the parts that were still shrouded in darkness. This preexisting sinful body needed to die so that I could find true life. The only way to true life was from suffocation of this old self through surrender.
  
  Resuscitation: In the case of death by drowning, the results are that all the oxygen (read: life) has left your body and been replaced with some sort of liquid (read: death). So the only way for resuscitation to successfully take place is to remove all the crap from your lungs and breathe life back into them. Someone has to come along and literally thrust all the liquid out by physically pumping your chest, almost violently. I’ve even heard that they caution lifeguards during training not to also break someone’s ribs in this process. Once the majority of the liquid has been removed someone has to be willing to plug your nasal passage ways, place their lips on yours and then breathe air directly into your lungs from theirs. This is the most literal depiction of an “exchange of life.” Does this not sound like an incredibly intimate procedure for saving someone’s life?
  
  Coughing Up Water: The force of this foreign air coming into your lungs serves to displace the remaining liquids and whatever else is obstructive your breathing process. In the same way, life floods into our dead bodies in the form of truth and love to displace the lies and expel darkness. At this point, you, as the victim, might not be fully conscious due to the prolonged lack of oxygen. Suddenly, your brain receives a rush of life-giving oxygen from the freshly cleared lungs and jumps back to consciousness. This abrupt awareness is followed by a violent struggle to empty the remaining contents from your body as the gag and choking reflex kick in with full measure. Water will most likely be coughed up in copious quantities.
  
  Gasping for Breath: The final phase of this journey towards true life involves gasping for sustained breath. This intense desire to suck in as much life as physically possible, almost like an insatiable thirst. New life has come and there can never been enough! Our appetite for the things of God, our pursuit of Jesus is never ending.
  
  This process serves as an illustration of salvation in the life of every believer and this metaphor becomes fully realized in baptism. We die to ourselves, are fully submerged and raised to new life in Christ Jesus, daily empowered by the Holy Spirit who dwells inside of us, and receive the new title of sons and daughters from our Abba Father.

  I have to admit, even after I had my first real love encounter with God things didn’t instantly improve. I had no idea what I was supposed to do! In fact, one of the things I left out of the original story was that, while I was on the ground crying from this intense prophecy I had just received, I was praying that God would bring everything to pass just as he had said. I didn’t want to get in the way of his work or mess anything up, I just wanted to partner with his promise of restoration and healing for my sexuality. While I was still in prayer, one of the leaders came over to me and began praying aloud the exact words that I was thinking internally, verbatim. I opened my eyes and looked up to see him standing over me and out of his mouth was pouring what can only be described as “a stream of blue”, if that makes any sense. Later during the week Amy was teaching more about “seers” and mentioned that they tend to see different colors in the spiritual realm and each color typically has a specific significance. I quickly asked her what blue meant and she said it typically signified the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit. Haha, well duh!
  
  It’s interesting as I reflect back on the closing of my YWAM lecture phase because I honestly don’t remember how I ever moved forward from that crazy day. In hindsight, I can say it was incredibly foundational for this entire new direction of my life, but at the time I had no idea how to fully process or handle it. I think just the sheer fact that I finally felt God’s love in a meaningful way was enough to propel me through the upcoming months of tribulation. I’ve plainly stated how much I love YWAM but that’s not to say it didn’t have its share of difficulties as well.
  
  This second analogy is bit looser and broken into two parts that play off of each other:
  
  

  Comatose

  (a state of deep unconsciousness for a prolonged or indefinite period,
  esp. as a result of severe injury or illness)

  Vegetative state/paralyzed/numb > senses/awareness > responses/movement

  
  Vegetative state, paralyzed, numb: I would define this stage of my life as having limited, passive senses.. I was aware of life moving along all around me but seemed unable to participate myself. I’d hear from people I knew in church about how they had this growing intimacy in their relationship with Christ but the whole concept seemed utterly foreign to me given my lack of personal experience. All of my attempts to join or reproduce this journey in my own walk failed miserably. My response to this perceived rejection was to shut down all unnecessary functions, sort of like a self-induced coma. I successfully compartmentalized certain sections of my life that caused me too much grief, guilt and shame. Primarily this centered around my struggles with my sexuality and my faith. The idea of ever trying to reconcile the two was too painful so my body just walled off that whole portion of my being. I continued to develop physically, mentally and, to a limited degree, relationally and spiritually but remained in a deadened state emotionally and sexually. Whether consciously or not, I learned how to navigate through my  life with an entire section of my soul closed off from the rest of me, essentially missing.
  
  Senses, awareness: my love encounter with God was like the lights coming on for the first time. I was fully aware of my tragic state. I realized how, due to fear and pain, I had neglected the healthy development of my emotions, relationships, faith and sexuality. I was effectively stuck in the beginning stages of adolescence and faced with the realities of new “growing pains.” God wanted to bring restoration to this rejected area of my person-hood. I had graduated from limited, passive senses to active awareness. Love became the catalyst for deep, personal transformation. Knowing that God saw all of me, even the parts I pushed away and ignored, and yet still loved me challenged me to receive that love for myself as well. When you’re broken/paralyzed you feel unworthy of love or attention, it just seeps right through your fingers and out of your life. Christ’s transforming power brings this radical wholeness that contains, retains love.
  
  Responses, movement: to quote a famous film, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Likewise, with new awareness comes new responses. I was suddenly accountable for all that I had seen, heard and felt. These new experiences required a reaction, demanded reciprocation. Referring back to the previous state of comatose, I now was fully awake and had to deal with the root issues that brought me that state originally. I had to finally tackle these core components of my life.

  You’d think it’s be relieving to start truly “feeling” for the first time in your life but you’d be wrong if the only thing you initially felt was hurt and pain. During my time in Panama and South Africa I was keenly aware of how much pain I had been in all the years of my life up to that point. It was as if I had compiled 23 years worth of emotion-debt and finally had to pay the bill. Meanwhile, God was still digging around through my heart, trying to clean all the crap out that had accumulated during that time. Why couldn’t he have done the surgery while I was still numb?! Which brings me to my final analogy:

  Heart Surgery

  I was born with these restrictions, these containments around my heart. It’s as if my heart began in a small metal box which it quickly outgrew but couldn’t escape. Subsequently, it was never able to function in its full capacity. My blood flow remained restricted, at best, and circulation became a perpetually labored task. The rest of my body suffered accordingly due to this deficiency of oxygen. And yet the demand only increased as my physical body continued to grow in size. My heart couldn’t meet the demands of my physical body and I was faced with the realization the I had to confront these shackles, these chains. The problem with heart surgery is that, no matter how qualified you think you might be, you can’t perform it on yourself. We all need Jesus, the Divine Physician to come in and operate on our hearts.

  
  Following this analogy, my love encounter with God during lecture phase was like shock paddles waking my heart to life for the first time. But it wasn’t until my time in Panama that He actually started operating on my heart. My sternum cracked open, leaving me completely exposed as I lay on the operating table. He was cutting out all the cancer and lies that had filled my heart and caused it to stop pumping. He was removing all the fears and limitations that restricted its flow.

  By July our team had arrived in Panama to do work with a variety of local ministries and churches. Originally my group was slated to work on raising awareness about “sex tourism” in Panama along with the legalization of prostitution that was fueling it. Unfortunately, our local contact fell through and my smaller team was left to its own devices. Eventually, we found some local Christians who ministered at the health clinics in the impoverished areas of Panama City where all the women trapped in prostitution had their weekly check ups for STDs and other medical issues. It’s safe to say that this was a huge culture shock for me, both as an American but also as a man, same-sex attraction not withstanding! Luckily I was semi-fluent in listening and understanding Spanish while one of my good friends was fluent in speaking it but not a great multi-tasker. Together, over the course of several weeks, we grew in boldness as we tried to communicate the love of God to these women. The substantial majority of them were from Colombia and were told that there was good work for them in Panama. All lies! Instead, they were being exploited by men and held in bondage as sex slaves. My heart broke so much for these women, for the first time I was able to truly see them as lost and dying daughters of Father God. We began to share the unconditional love of Christ with them, even in the midst of a world that felt utterly hopeless and void of love. This experience suddenly activated and reminded me of that new intimate connection I had with God as my personal Father. So I just cried with them and share how much he cared for them and heard the prayers of their broken hearts. I finally understood all of this, not from a limited academic perspective, but from someone who had experienced that same healing love first-hand. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life thus far.

  Meanwhile, as I was doing online research for statistics on prostitution in Panama, I somehow also stumbled across the blog of Growing Into Manhood and managed to read the entire thing in one night. It rocked me to my core! It’s funny how in all my years of looking at porn online I had never once thought about searching for other Christian guys who might be struggling with homosexuality like myself. If anything, it just reflected on how much I believed the lie that I was completely alone in the world with this struggle and no one would ever be able to relate or understand. Thanks to my slightly addictive personality I was able to binge read through several other blogs as well. This was the very first time in my life that I even heard anyone speak about how God had brought freedom to them from their same-sex attractions. God must’ve been working overtime to orchestrate this amazingly crazy journey that my life was taking during this outreach time in Panama! I was going through such a profound internal transformation of my heart that several of my fellow teammates thought I was bipolar. I’d swing from being a total extrovert on cloud nine on day to being steeped in depression and introversion the next. It didn’t exactly help with the whole community dynamic of missions because I still didn’t feel like I could process or share anything I was working through with any other teammates yet. This led me to the realization that, relationally, I had never been able to be real or authentic with anyone in my entire life. The simple fact became that no one ever knew the real me, not even myself. I had spent my whole life so incredibly compartmentalized that even I wasn’t sure what was in the closets of my soul. But God was gentle with me as he pried off all the boards I had nailed over the door to my deepest, darkest, most painful, shameful secret. The one that, if I shared with anyone, I thought would cause them to throw me to the curb in pure rejection. But now I found myself having to confront these lies as I read more and more blogs from fellow strugglers. I was no longer alone in this walk. In fact, I discovered others had already paved the way for me to follow!

  To be continued...

  The Reconstruction Period (Part 4)

  • 2:41 PM
  • 173 Views
  • 2 eProps
  • 2 Comments