Gaining a taste for adventure, the real kind that actually kind of hurts, did not actually come about simply through me walking into a video store one day. Although that might make for a great joke (A guy walks into a video store…), now if only I could come up with a punch line. My desire for change that led me to view a video store with discomfort and frustration began about two weeks before that. It began surprisingly enough through my own parents.
Coming back from your worst semester of college ever is sort of like coming to anchor after months in hurricane-torn, shark-infested waters. And like a sailor who has spent too much time at sea in a boat, I had to regain some perspective and get my landlegs back. I had to chop off the wiry mane of hair, clean up the language that is more acceptable around rough and ready deck hands, and learn how to act like a civilized humanbeing again.
Suddenly this has become much less metaphorical.
Anyway, I had fallen so far off the map that even though I made an effort to crack open a Bible everyday, I was just flipping pages and gleaning nothing. I had all but forgotten how to study my own Bible. In my self-absorbed stupor I had been programmed to look at anything and everything as a tool that might be able to pull me out of the hole I had dug. It didn’t matter if it was a DVD, a friend or Scripture… things were only of use to me if they were able to make me feel better NOW.
Silly me, I had forgotten that Scripture doesn’t work like that.
Upon returning home for Christmas, it became immediately clear to my parents how far gone I had become and started to take measures of intervention. The first week I was back my dad sat me down for a much-needed verbal thrashing. My mom, however, always the yin to his yang, bought me an 8 week Bible study, so that I would regulate my study time and perhaps regain an understanding of how to study Scripture.
One of the first verses that I stumbled upon in the study was Matthew 6:33, “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” And suddenly it dawned on me that I was going about the whole operation backwards. I had spent all my time seeking MY kingdom and MY righteousness and hoping that all the “God things” would be added unto me later without all that nasty business of actually pursuing God.
Well that methodology had been working out GREAT for me so far. And by great I mean that it had driven me into one of the deepest depressions that I have ever known.
Aristotle was right, we are all looking for happiness, and the first 9 books of his Ethics are correct in deriving that happiness from relationships. But then Aristotle contradicts himself in book 10 where he all but denies the previous 9 books and says that man derives true and lasting happiness from sitting and being a thinking being like “god.”
This makes sense in a Greek mindset, because there is a disconnect in Greek philosophy. The world that they see around them is relational, but the god that they worship is a thinking god, not a relational one… so there is that tension woven into their very worldview.
But my worldview is NOT that way. I should know better. God has from the beginning of time been a relational God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He knows what true joy really is. And here I was denying that He could REALLY know what true joy was. Because I wasn’t happy, I thought that He must not have known what He was doing.
It should have been a bit obvious what the problem was. I was not living as a relational being in a relational world, of COURSE I wasn’t happy. On top of this I was choosing my own will over the will of the ultimate relational being. Talk about dumb, huh?
It’s a bit humbling realizing that you’ve become the villain; that you’ve become one of those Pharisees who knows the Scriptures inside and out and yet derives absolutely no joy or truth from them, but only seeks to twist them to your own ends.
Plato’s analogy of the cave is very apt. After spending so much time in the dark of one’s self, coming out into the light of fellowship with God and other people really is like stepping out into the bright noonday sun after years in a cave.
And what you see in the sunlight, that is perhaps the most surprising thing of all.
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