draft dec 2010

The crazy part of the season is how the bleak and stark and brutality of humanity stand hand in hand with hope and joy and miracles under a snow frosted pine along the side of the road. The cars are flying by at a breakneck pace and never even see the tree, let alone the beauty of the bittersweet lying crumpled on the ground like yesterday's news.
But that's how it is. We don't see. We don't want to see. We don't let ourselves see.
We prefer deception. We seek it out and create it if we can't find some pre-made in cellophane wrap at the drug store.
You shake your head, trying to lie through it, believing your own lie. It's always, in the moment, easier to believe that the first shock of pain, of reality, of dealing with something, anything, head on, face first is so utterly terrible, the pain so blinding, so scorching, so deadly that it will undo you and so you walk on past. You trick yourself, create your own illusions to live under.
But the weight of it all will crush you alive. Those illusions, those fakes, take your life, slowly and more fiercely than the pain of facing a demon head on will ever be. And the most brutal part is the demons we chose to ignore, the ones we lie ourselves into believing we've faced and conquered, multiply under the cloak of the illusion. Any time we get brave enough to even take a little peek, we feel it stirring and we know instantly how much worse it will be now.
Time made it harder not easier. It wasn't forgotten. It's not gotten over. It's fermented instead. It became more and more powerful and now is eating you alive.
It's hard to live lies and be a shell. It's hard to play a role and be an actor every minute.
It is terror to take off all the lies, the masks and simply be, scars, sins and all, but it's where the freedom lies. Peace is on the other side of that terror.
Life is simply a flip side coin. One side peace the other side bitterness. Everything has it's opposite and we faulted, flawed, broken humans always, always, seem to pick the wrong side, the harder side, deluding ourselves that this is better, this is easier, this hurts less, it harms fewer people. We drive ourselves into being the martyr with a sick sort of righteousness thinking this is what God would have us do.
Maybe.
But I don't think so. That's not the God I meet when I'm in prayer or in my Bible. it's not. God doesn't want me to be a lie that looks all pretty and perfect and Godly and pulled together according to whatever twisted image I have in my mind of what everyone else is holding me up to or what they hold themselves up to or who they think I should be. It's all a trick mirror and smoke screen.
God's not into false images, including our own.
I think God would rather find me down on my face in the muck of my own life, than prissed up in the front of the church claiming to have lived the words in the Book. I think a greater testimony than words would be to live out my life, let everyone see God come and wipe the slime off my face, look into my eyes and say, I still love you. Come home. Come back. Let's begin again. Here is my grace, take it in place of your brokenness.
Far greater I believe. But what do I know.