Blame

Many Christians have debated with existentialists about some of their beliefs. Some sects of existentialism hold beliefs that there is no one way or right way of living and thus Christianity doesn’t have a leg to stand or that it serves the same purpose as other religions and there is nothing all that special about Christianity. These existentialists believe that human’s main motivation is to alleviate the fear of death and the role of religion is just one way to assuage this fear. However, just like there are many denominations within Christianity, there are many differences of opinions within the existential community. Victor Frankl, an existential theorist and holocaust survivor, believed that men and women’s main motivation is not fear of death but fear of meaninglessness.
Yes, we need our lives to be meaningful but most of us are terrified of taking responsibility for our lives. We blame God for our current circumstances of failure, misery, and despair. We blame God for our lack of opportunities, for missed opportunities, or failed opportunities. We get angry because we want all the freedoms and perks that life has to offer and none of the responsibilities or dues.
But as long as we blame God or others for our current state of being, we can never change our current state. If we blame, we feel helpless not because we actually are helpless but because we choose to be helpless. God always gives us a choice. We don’t always like the choices we have, but we always have a choice. We don’t choose to live in a culture of social injustices but we do have a choice to accept it by our silence or to speak out against it. We don’t have choice over accidents, natural disasters, or death, but we do have choice how will wrestle with each issue. We don’t have a choice as to an insult from a friend, but we can choose our response. We don’t have choice over things that anger us, but we do have a choice in how we will react.
There are things that we cannot control and there are things that we can. M.Scott Peck writes perfectly about our responsibility in life. He writes that many of us take responsibility for things we shouldn’t: we are called neurotics. He also writes about people who don’t take responsibility for things we should: we are described as having a character disorder. Chances are, if you are anything like me, that in some areas of your life you take too much responsibility and in other areas in your life not enough. If we have no friends, do we question our own friendliness? If we feel like no one knows us, do we question our transparency? If we feel unlovable, do we question are own ability to love? If we feel judged, do we question the fact that we compare ourselves to every man we meet? Most of us don’t questions ourselves rather we blame the church, God, our spouses, or society for something that we can actually change.

Fortress of Solitude

We will become like the heroes we worship and adore. There is a superman in all of us, at least that is what we tend to believe about ourselves. Although we may not be faster than a speeding bullet or able to jump over tall buildings, we do believe that we are able to accomplish great feats like putting together our child's some assembly required playground equipment. But our ego gets wounded when the external world does not match our internal perceptions. We get angry. We get frustrated. We are left with the dillema to either forge ahead in our ignorance, read the directions (ask for help) or go off to our own Fortress of Solitude. On the lighter side, some men choose to go fishing, others choose to go the internet or play video games, and some choose to sit in front of the television engulfing their entire being into sports. On the darker side, we choose alcohol, sexual encounters with strangers, or drugs. All serve the same purpose, to place ourselves in a fortress against feeling like a failure. Men hate to fail but we hate feeling like a failure even more.

Nature of wounds cont.

Walk into a room of men, be it a locker room or otherwise, and ask them to show you their physical scars. Inevitably shirts come off, pants come down, and hands start pointing. Most men are proud to show other men their scars they received from old sport injuries, heroic acts, and even from ridiculous behavior. Yet, ask those same men to talk about their emotional scars from childhood traumas or relationship failures and the room grows awkwardly silent. Ask them to show you where they hurt after a best friend betrayed them, a failed marriage, or the death of a father or son. Ask another man where he feels fear or rejection and you will almost always be met with a blank stare. What man wants to talk about the pain of feeling isolated, betrayed, abandoned, or rejected in the company of other men? So we remain silent, in our own cavernous isolation of Hell. Sure we can go to work and talk with our co-workers or hangout with the guys to watch a game or two on tv. But do we ever really know the man who is sittin across from us at the card table or the more importantly the man staring back at us in the mirror. For all of us our silence compounds our pain. We don't realize that our experience is a shared human experienced. That all men long for the same things, struggle with the same fears, and even succomb to the same emotions. Dr. Larry Crabb in his book, the Silence of Adam, proposes that it was not Eve’s forbidden fruit consumption as the first sin, that it was in fact Adam’s silence in preventing Eve by warning her. In Genesis, Adam in instructed not to partake of the Tree of Knowledge but Eve is not mentioned. Dr. Crabb expounds that the male sex is the silent sex. We live most of our life in emotional and relational silence.

We will become the stories we tell ourselves. In our culture we honor comic book heros such as spiderman, batman, and superman. These are the men that we silently hold ourselves up to. We want the can do attitude of Spiderman, the mysterious life of Batman, and the power of Superman. But think for a moment, If even superman had kryptonite, are we no less expected to have our own? If Batman had a sidekick, then who is ours? If even spiderman had a superpower, than what is our own?
The truth is wounds never absolve on their own. Men who have wounds that have never healed will inevitably hurt other people. Our need for healing will continue to grow with time, not diminish away. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. There are things that even time can’t put a distance between. Some of us choose to medicate our pain with narcotics, alcohol, or sex. But the relief is fleeting. The emptiness remains and the light of hope fades faster each time. We get caught in addictions not because we are whole, but because we are broken. We are caught in vicious cycles of lust, rage, and depression as a result of the wounds we received growing up. Why do so many of our brothers end up cheating on their partners, rape, murder, steal, or commit other crimes in order to be incarcerated? Could it be that perhaps the way we were raised by our parents and our culture is somehow misguided?

The nature of wounds

M. Scott Peck opens his book, The Road Less Travelled, with the sentence” “Life is difficult.” He goes on to say that once we accept this fact as a reality, that we can move on and take responsibility for our lives. I believe in his words as there is a simple truth that rings from them. Yet, I also believe that the word he used, "difficult", does not do the hardships and the hurts of life justice.
I would say that life is more than difficult, that it is downright painful. We are born into the world through pain and some of us will exit the world through pain as well. Think about it, if even our entrance into this world is surrounded by pain (our mother’s while she is in labor) then how much more are our adult lives to be any different? Our lives are mixed with failures, disappointments, grievances, and at times horror. Life wounds all of us in some way; emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, or social. Regardless of where there is a wound, there is pain. It is true: we are all survivors of something. Some wounds are deeper than others, but make no mistake God wounds each one of us. What we do with our wounds will direct the quality of our lives. If we ignore them, we will become addicted to something in order to keep avoiding the pain. If we hide our hurts, we will always be suspicious and envious of others; we will hold people at a distance and then wonder why we feel so isolated and alone. We will judge ourselves and others to a standard that is unattainable. Even If we learn to tolerate our wounds, we may live with a constant state of dread or depression. We will begin to grow cynical, resentful, and bitter. But if we learn how to embrace our wounds, own them, and share them, then we may begin to live a life of freedom and connection.
Life will either make us better or bitter. There are no other options. We must make a choice- and not making a choice is making a choice. If we are not proactive against becoming bitter then we will eventually succumb to our pain and we will by default join the masses in groaning about life’s misery. Yet we can chose to give meaning to our pain, to let our brothers in, and become a better a man.

Restless

Jabbok River got its name after the place where the biblical character, Jacob, wrestled the angel of the Lord. After leaving his family, jacob camped beside the river. In the middle of the night, an angel appeared before him. Jacob wanting to be blessed, wrestled with the angel through out the night. In the midst of the tussle, Jacob's hip was displaced and he waled with a limp afterwards forcing him to face his brother whom he betrayed, and to face the man within himself.

Jacob's story is every man's story regardless of what your faith background is. I agree with the late Joseph Campbell who said that we will become the story we tell ourselves. But in this instance, we will more than become this story, we are this story. Every man will wrestle with God during his lifetime, and every man will walk away wounded. We are woundedly creatures. Some of us choose to ignore our wounds, some choose to compensate for it in other ways, and few of us choose to embrace it. This is a blog for those who choose to go on the journey of embracing it.