An apology - "What God wants is tied to what I give, and not to what I want."

I suppose that it is in the midst of brutal pummeling and pain that we are shocked out of our slumber – we wake up to why we are being beaten.

This weekend I think that my soul has been hit more than just about any other time in my life, and perhaps it’s because the same place is getting hit over and over – it’s like laying down on train tracks and being run over… after the first few you just start counting the cars.

I used to do this when I got spanked as a kid for being bad – I would count how many times I was being spanked so that I would know when it was going to be over.

This weekend was an especially long train. But it has woken me out of a place that I am still a bit lost – I don’t know how I got there. And I am scared to death to be out, but I wouldn’t go back in for the life of me.

The simplest way to express the truth that was revealed is the following:

What God wants is tied to what I give, and not to what I want.

In the scriptures, the core energy of all loves is what Paul identifies as agape… this isn’t meant to be a higher love in terms of being perfect and inaccessible. It’s actually more basic and organic – fundamental – for Paul, agape is the building block of any other kind of love that a person can conjure up in their mind. Every other love is a brand of car – agape is the gas that fuels it. Without agape, there is no life to love in other ways. It is creative energy in its unrefined state – straight from God.

Up until this point, for me, love has been a matter of what I want. And there have been good things and bad things in that list, but over time I felt that this list had gotten shorter, wiser and more precisely tuned to what I wanted in a mate. When I look at it now, it still looks like a great list. I want all of the right things. And when you want all of the right things, it is very frustrating when you do not have them.

In fact, it is downright scary. I have never had a really long list of things that I wanted but as I write thing I feel pangs of betrayal. There is a part of me that believes that even declaring it, sharing what I want – that it’s like telling a wish – if you say what you wish for it will never happen.

It is possible to want the right things, but this is not the same as wanting what God wants. Both of my parents – and I’d say my whole family – has operated on this right-sounding principle: that love and righteousness and light and living the Christian life is all about conforming your wants to what God wants for you. If I want what God wants, well then that is right and good and that shows that a person loves God.

Nothing is farther from the truth. The painful reality that I have been forced to face this weekend is the frightening reality – love has absolutely nothing to do with what I want. Regardless of how good or noble it is it has nothing to do with what I want.

Love is entirely based on what I offer and give. And if I look at my life over the past few years there is nothing positive in this list. Here’s a brief look:

Embrassment, anxiety, discomfort and awkwardness, fear, anger, resentment, confusion.

That’s what I have offered to people in exchange for what I want. It’s terrible. What an awful deal.

And even more terrible is knowing that I have to give up wanting. This is something that I did briefly in March of 2007 because there was no other way for me to cope with the loss I was feeling at that time. Self-medicating through retail therapy or drinking wasn’t working. I did something that was scary for me but somewhat experimental – I made a point of not trying to make my life more pleasurable. I denied the typical impulses that I felt to try to satisfy every little thing that I wanted. I won’t go into details but this covered everything. I didn’t run away from comfort, but I vowed to not act on impulses to create it.

I was afraid of doing it at the time, and was obviously going against what our society is built upon – the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In America, the pursuit of happiness today has somewhat hedonistic overtones – except when you want what is good, or righteous or what the scriptures say is valuable – that’s the beauty of the trap.

I figured that if I didn’t make myself happy, I wouldn’t be.

But I learned a valuable lesson during that time, and it is a lesson I am applying again now. When you stop trying to bring pleasurable sensations of all kinds into your life, the fear of living an unhappy life is unfounded. In fact, what a person discovers is just how difficult it is to avoid pleasure in life. There are many aspects of life that are pleasurable once you move out of the way and allow them to happen.

Shortly after I went through this process – I read about crystal meth and the physiological effects that it had over the short and long-term… and it brought a lot of insight regarding how drugs do nothing more than throw your natural body functions out of balance. And it explained why, when I no longer tried to make my life more stimulating, my sensitivity to common pleasures in life increased.

I saw and enjoyed more. You would think this would have been enough… but that train looks so far in the distance.

It didn’t change the fact that I felt that pursuit of righteousness was the key to happiness. That wanting the right things brought happiness. Or that loving God was wanting what God wanted for me.

In confronting all of these things – and this is so hard to type for me – I realized that despite all of my best intentions and hopes, all I had to offer on my own in a relationship setting was a broken heap – IF I simply looked for what I wanted. Even if what I wanted was admirable, justified, beautiful, responsible, etc.

When I was talking to my friend Erin about this, many questions came up about what made the rest of my life different. And that was when I saw it – in every other part I pretty much pass on what I receive. I see what I need to give and out it goes. At first I used to wonder a little bit about whether I wanted to do it but after a person gets into the flow of it that becomes pretty easy – you get up, here’s another day, you observe and not overthink, you see a need, you reach into the proverbial sack of God’s abundant love pre-paid to you and you do what you can to plant life where the patch is growing a little thin. The more you do it the better it works.

I hadn’t realized that every time I was out looking for someone that I wanted I was uprooting their life from the soil, or trying to… I guess with the quality of people I was trying this on the roots always went too deep. It was like trying to pull a tree out of the ground with my bare hands and carry it around with me because I wanted shade.

It sounds funny but it hurts like hell. I know that in one particular case I stupidly tried to uproot someone that had relied on me for growth. Shameful. Shameful.

“So Jacob, you are a smart and compassionate guy? Why would you be such a retard?”

The answer is that somewhere along the way – I don’t know where or how – I adopted the belief that the only way I will ever get anything that I want in life is by doing it myself. No one is going to do it for me. If I want it, I need to go out and get it. Embedded in this belief is a faithless assumption. God’s contribution of energy to the process is ignored.

Erin once again challenged me – I told her I was not faithless, just impatient. She responded that was the same thing. And yeah I didn’t like that very much.

Then what sprung to mind was the unravelling of the romantic exploitation in Hal Hartley’s film, “Surviving Desire” where two people who want what they want but don’t know why end up leaving a relationship that seems to have ended all too realistically… the girl’s response in her journal was:

“He lacks faith and therefore patience. The giving of himself has made him empty and old before his time.”

In this context, the giving was not a selfless giving – but based on two people wanting everything from each other, only to find out that in the end their lives poured out like water and whatever good could have come out of the situation was entirely spent. Hal cleverly has the protagonist have her read the statement above using female pronouns – leading to the discovery that the lost – the waste – is mutual.

My faithless assumption is so commonplace – it is held everywhere and so many people live by it successfully. I don’t know why I could not, but there are many things that God selects me for and I guess this is one of those.

I don’t believe I will ever get what I want, as of this writing. It scares me more than anything else in the world, after my difficult time growing up and all of the different things I went through I believe that somewhere along the line I would get what I wanted. That life would be okay.

The Morrisey song “Please, please please…” gosh it’s playing in my head now. The only song of his that I know because Dream Academy covered it…

But in the midst of fear faith steps forward. I know not where. At times like these I remember a great story from my friend Dan who did a lot of cross-country running, training and coaching. I don’t remember who the runner was who was being interviewed but they were talking about how people with great mile charts are able to run so long, so fast… and the comment was well, yeah you hit the walls like anybody else and it gets more and more painful – but there is a point you reach where the pain doesn’t get any worse and you just run it out.

To give… to people. After you have been hurt many times, to give to people is very hard. And I know that people will be skeptical and rightly so. There is nothing worse than someone who does genuine things one minute and sketchy things the next. Maybe some good things have been done. I know that there are times when I have seen a need and responded right. But it wasn’t always pure – I hoped for some sort of recognition or attention. I wanted the getting for as little as I could possible give.

The other thing… when I felt like I was about to get what I wanted finally – and this has happened twice in my lifetime. Once this past week. It changed my attitude. The feeling that I had was that of a debt being repaid – I felt like God didn’t owe me any more and so I could stop ‘holding out’ until I got mine. Not to say I did nothing in the meantime but…

My generosity was based on getting what I wanted, and not on facing the needs in front of me and getting things done. Not generous at all, in fact.

Suffice it to say that there are a lot of needs that I have ignored because I was waiting for God to fulfill my dreams before I acted.

Terrible. Terrible. So much time and energy wasted. I’m sorry. To the people I have hurt and confused especially I am sorry.

I don’t know at the moment I feel pretty sore but I will do my best. Resisting to serve my dreams is going to be very hard and if I am negligent in taking appropriate risks and caring about things when I need to… well I am trying to get back into it and I hope that I haven’t done too much damage.

Please take me as a warning – there are so many scriptures that have been interpreted to state that loving God is wanting what He wants… but it is actually giving like He gives.

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