Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy

You're all probably wondering why I haven't blogged lately.  I haven't been so concerned with relaying the science behind picking up the shattered pieces of your life and making yourself happy again as I once was.  All the pep talks are still in my older blogs.

A recent study I read from Psychology Today says that placebos have exactly as much affect on people when they know it's a placebo as when they don't.  Evidently there needn't be any manipulation or lies to make people feel better.  The very act of faithfully swallowing a sugar pill becomes an aspect of prayer.  Every affirmation, recitation, ritual, or wish.  Bring it to the god you serve.  When you envision the most important thing to you; the thing you dedicate all your decisions toward, what do you see?  That is who you pray to.

That's what's been weighing on my mind mostly lately.  Who do I belong to?  Here's an excerpt that my friend Brandon Walker pointed me toward:


"If we use Kierkegaard's definition we can categorize various "god-substitutes" and the particular kinds of brokenness and damage that each one brings into a life.  So we could discern some of the following:

• If you center your life and identity on your spouse or partner, you will be emotionally dependent, jealous, and controlling.  The other person's problems will be overwhelming to you.
• If you center your life and identity on your family and children, you will try to live your life through your children until they resent you or have no self of their own.  At worst, you may abuse them when they displease you.
• If you center your life and identity on your work and career, you will be a driven workaholic and a boring, shallow person.  At worst you will lose family and friends and, if your career goes poorly, develop deep depression.
• If you center your life and identity on pleasure, gratification, and comfort, you will find yourself getting addicted to something.  You will become chained to "escape strategies" by which you avoid the hardness of life.
• If you center your life and identity on relationships and approval, you will be constantly overly hurt by criticism and thus always losing friends.  You will fear confronting others and therefore will be a useless friend.
• If you center your life and identity on a "noble cause", you will divide the world into "good" and "bad" and demonize your opponents.  Ironically, you will be controlled by your enemies.  Without them, you have no purpose.
• If you center your life and identity on religion and morality, you will, if you are living up to your moral standards, be proud, self-righteous, and cruel.  If you don't live up to your standards, your guilt will be utterly devastating."

-Timothy Keller
Quoted from the footnotes of "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism".

Both this book, my pastor, and Project 86's newest album "Picket Fence Cartel" featuring THIS song:

(warning: loud music)


 Managed to feature the same theme at the same time in my immediate perception, which usually means God's stressing something, and NOT JUST TO ME.

The idea is that people are naturally slaves.  Not that we intend to be slaves, we just are.  Even if you say "I will not build MY happiness or significance on any one or thing," you are actually building your happiness and significance on freedom and independence.

"According to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things." --Timothy Keller, the Reason for God.

Good book.  Seriously.  It goes on to illustrate how in every scenario, serving any master other than God means to build your identity on something finite that can be destroyed leaving you without a self.

We all have our little weaknesses; our masters we tend to want to serve, our idols... our enticing false promises of immediate gain that in the end won't make you happy.  I won't tell you mine, because I'm goofy about when and where I reveal my heart's desires.  The problem is that we think if we got everything we've ever wanted, if we finally achieve all those goals we set for ourselves, that we'd be finally permanently satisfied.  I am finally rich and famous, upperclass, powerful, top office, wife, kids, mansion, six horses, eleven limos, two turn tables and a microphone... but statistically, people are even MORE depressed or balls-to-the-wall crazy AFTER they've achieved everything they'd wanted.  That's because they'd been trying to quench the unquenchable.

It's like the movie "I Love You Beth Cooper," where this nerdy dude who's had this borderline creepy crush on this cheerleader for YEARS, finally sorta gets the girl and starts hanging out with her only to get hit with the reality of who she really is.  He was in love with an imaginary version of her in his head: a lie to himself that kept him driven to achieve his goal.  Most goals are like that; different than how you thought.  Of course, in the movie, he decided the real Beth Cooper was better than the fantasy version and went with it.  Movies are cool.  They give you examples of how to "go with it."

You've all heard of Job right?  The account from the Bible where Satan makes a wager with God that he can break the faith of God's favorite servant Job, and he proceeds to do so by slowly and tortuously taking literally everything away from Job, including his health?  In the end God blesses him with way more than what he had to begin with, of course.  Which is awesome.

There's another story where the Devil makes a wager with God that he can break his favorite servant.  It's a more fictional account, and instead of Satan taking everything away, he GIVES EVERYTHING to this man.  This is the account of Faust I'm speaking of.  This story is quite a bit more convoluted and therefor makes a terrible fable to use an example.  But I do find it interesting that all the Mephistophelian character was trying to do was get Dr. Faust to desire to stay on Earth away from his heavenly father for even a second longer in order to win the wager.

That's all a devil needs sometimes is an appeal - a little foothold.  It use to be that people had a PRETTY good sense of truth and falsehood too, but these days with the entertainment media, and with capitolism, and ESPECIALLY with the post-modern idea that the truth is somewhere in the synthesis of a fact and its negation; people have become largely ambivalent and don't do a lot of thinking for themselves.

We live in the age of information, where all human knowledge is accessible readily to any one person, but if you ask someone for a simple truth like "is murder wrong," this is the first time in history you might actually get an answer diluted with moral relativism or at least a justification regarding some tricky circumstance.

I'm not innocent either.  VERY early on, I was twisting my parent's words around to find the grey area where moral relativism lay so that I might get out of some punishment at the cost of learning important lessens.

The most classic combatant to this comes from Jesus Hisownself, from when he was healing people on the sabbath.  The idea of sabbath was to make sure people didn't overwork themselves and employers allowed employees and servants resting periods.  Jesus argued that if your donkey fell into the river on the sabbath you would still pull him out.  The law was made for the benefit of man, not man for the benefit of the law.  One shouldn't invent a hypothetical situation where a general wisdom, such as don't steal stuff, is no longer wise and then use it to testify against the whole wisdom.  That would be disastrous.

Anyways... uh.. .where was I?  Yeah, so I've decided that to truly live a happy life you've got to give up everything and follow Jesus.  When I say everything, I mean it.  When Job was in the midst of tribulation, his so-called friends (by no one's suggestion, not God's nor Satan's) abandoned him.  I bet the friends he made after that were a bit better.  Probably even the elimination of his old wife and kids were a blessing in disguise, though the scripture doesn't say it.  I speak from experience here, having dropped school, house, friends and girlfriend all at once to live out on the streets and try to hear from God.  If you can get away with NOT doing what I did, blessed are you.  But you DO have to give up worshiping whatever you are worshiping in place of God.  Truth is, it's not going to quench your thirst anyways.  The master you currently serve is an abusive tyrant.  How many times have you seen someone stay in an abusive relationship for seemingly no good reason?  That's you and your current master.

I know, I know, I'm preaching, and I'd always said this wasn't a God blog.  That's why I haven't been posting lately.  All I want to do is tell everyone I know that salvation and freedom from tyranny rests solely, eternally and easily in the hands of Jesus the Christ.  Now everyone can say goodnight to the bad guy.

--J.m. Gatewood
   Christian



P.S. One more track cause I'm funky.