It baffles me sometimes that when you stop and take a silent pause for even a second… [pause]… you become aware of yourself. It’s sort of like the moment when you’re driving your car through a chaotic rainstorm and in an unexpected blink of your eyes, the standing ovation of lighting and thunder seizes, the 70 mile an hour knuckleball of wind halts and your windshield wipers seem to be wiping, well, nothing. Then the sunshine sneaks out from the black curtain, every bit of nature turns to dew, and you sit there at the stoplight fully aware, yet caught off guard of the said situation. I’m guessing, like me, you’ve had these moments.
It happened to me tonight but in a less metaphorical way. I’m writing you at 12:19 in the middle of the night because I had this full awareness moment and I knew it would annoyingly tap on my sleepy eyes unless I got up and wrote about it. (By the way, I write when I have these transcendent realizations and they almost always happen at night; hence “the pause”). My fiancé… the overwhelmingly wonderful sounding board of my life, is asleep right now so all I have at this time of night is a blank Microsoft Word document. So all of this to say, thanks for staying up and listening to me Mr. Gates.
Anyway, I took advantage of “the pause” as I nestled myself under the cold sheets of my bed while I retraced the highlights of the day. Usually, the “pray before you go to sleep” prayer for me is being conscious of the messes I made in the last 18 hours of my life and asking God to forgive me of it all in hopes that he doesn’t kill me out of frustration before I awake. Yes, it really happens like this… most nights. But tonight, instead of backing up my request for holy forgiveness with the typical excuses, “the pause” didn’t let me hide in my excuses about what’s really going on with me.
And what’s really going on right now is that I’m walking deep into a forest of greed and inebriated pleasure. I have some ideas of why I’m doing this, but it feels like I’m surrounded by tall oaks of instant gratification and I’m hugging those tall oaks tightly one-by-one.
Now at this point, with this sort of understanding of my current perpetual sin, the usual response is to beat myself up to the point where I’m numb enough to believe that because I punished myself, God will find mercy not to unveil his wrath upon me. See, what I’m finding out is that it’s uncomfortable to sit in pain and embarrassment of a moment and not be able to do something about it. That’s why I find the need to interrupt “the pause” and immediately respond in some way (mine tends to be along the lines of inner self abuse). Some people find the remedy in drugs and alcohol. Some find it in the distraction of television. And some simply find it in avoidance of further thought only to dive back into the addiction of numbing pleasure. But the dysfunctional remedy isn’t the point.
(In a future blog I will share with you more about this personal problem of greed that I’m fighting right now, the fact that it’s a symptom of something deeper, and where my battle with it could affect more important things in life.)
But the point is this… “the pause” is simply an opportunity. In fact, it’s actually a gracious space to be in. In other words, it’s a moment where grace is available to be experienced. Of course, more condemnation- brought on by self- is possible, too. But I think God is continually inviting us to a place- rather, a space- where we stop, we let the chaotic storm simmer to nothing, and we become fully aware of our screw-ups so that we can experience the fullness of being understood and forgiven by Him. And then, at that point, we come to believe him more as the waterfall of love rather than the volcano of condemnation.
Pause.
