Just Like in the Cartoons

   One of the most interesting and important ideas of Christianity and really a moral law of the universe, is that "He who loses his life for Christ will save it, and he who tries to save his life will lose it."  It is something that happens in big and small ways and could be part of scenarios like letting someone have the last piece of dessert and then that is right when someone brings out a better dessert that you get to have.  That is kind of a stupid example but there really are ways that unselfishness pays off in little moments and in great spans of history or just across a lifetime.  It has kind of driven me crazy to try not to be on the losing side of that principle, but I think letting my OCD kick in to obsessively try not to lose anything actually would be one of the instances where I end up losing instead of gaining.

   But anyway the thing I want to mention about it is something that I had to learn pretty early on in my life, which is that things can be confusing when there are situations where you really do need to save your life or someone else's.  That is what happened to me when depression threatened to win out and made me suicidal.  I abruptly had to stop looking for opportunities to suffer on purpose and started having to do everything to hoard as much happiness as I could find.  It changed the way I interacted with people and looked at friendship, and ironically, I think that it helped me be a truer friend instead of looking at people as potential good deeds.  Probably that whole idea of going ahead and losing some Christianity points and choosing some kind of authentic life actually is just another basic example of saving your life by losing it, but it is disguised, because didn't I save my life by saving it?
  God is very clever and He is the one who saves with all of his laws of nature and with all of his intervention beyond those laws. Everyone who trusts in him is guaranteed to be in what basically amounts to a Scooby Doo episode where at the end the villains will say, "Curses, foiled again."  Even those of us who start paying attention to all the patterns around us and trying to deliberately beat the system are like simple Looney Tunes road runners who just go where we are going while all the evil coyote plans backfire all around us.  And in the end, we will be winners, diving into piles of gold like Scrooge McDuck and his nephews in the Ducktales cartoon.

Because or Despite?

This is a post that could go on my mental health blog and I might do another one like it for that list of posts. I am just thinking about friends from a long time ago who were there for me, and I have to say that church people have really not let me down, even after sometimes being taught that people like me are bad people. It is common for people with mental illness and problems like that to be misunderstood and rejected for bad reasons, which has happened to me and a lot of other people, and has happened in church settings.  But literally hundreds of church people have come through for me and included me in their dearest groups of friends.  There have been times where I could barely have a conversation with people and could barely even sit up or hear what other people were saying.  But some of the greatest people in the world became my sincere friends.  I have tried to do that for others, and I would say that friendship with me is not usually complete charity.  But when it has been kind of like that, people did come through.  There is still no excuse for pastors to teach that mental illness is sin, or that people who take medicine for depression might not be real Christians, but the consistent help and "inclusion anyway" from their congregations is not something to be overlooked when looking at how the church treats suffering people.

What if I did say this?

Something I have been saying lately is "I did not do or say that but what if I did."  It is a little something that I thought up because people try to get on everyone's case about every little mistake, and I am saying what if I do say the wrong thing and even what if I do have some character problems?  You know, what if I do?  Everyone has to get out and live their lives without being perfect and it is a brave thing to do.  And as the flaws increase, the courage to face the world anyway increases, which is not something to feel bad about.

The miracle of suffering

   I have realized sometimes that my survival in life has been somewhat miraculous, and have even had to think about whether there can be such things as twenty year miracles.  I mean in the Bible some of the miracles just took a few minutes and then people enjoyed their health.  But when you have a chronic condition and survival really isn't a given, finding yourself to be alive after twenty years of daily suicidal ideation or some other dangerous symptom is really cause for thankfulness and reason to be certain that God has helped you.

  But that is not what this post is about.  This post is about something else that I don't always think about and will probably immediately retract next time I feel awful.  This post is a reflection about what might also be a great miracle, which is the suffering itself.

   I am only speaking for myself, though other people might have similar stories.  There are mysterious reasons for suffering, and there are benefits that affect other people and can do things like help people know God better or have more compassion.  For me personally, I think that some of my suffering has helped me with some of my hypocritical tendencies, and I think that some of the extreme humiliation I have experienced has some kind of value as a Christian witness.  Most importantly, I feel securely able to pray to God as much as I want and have gotten to know him better.  There are probably other benefits, too. But even that is still not exactly what I am saying is a miracle.

   What I am really saying is that it is a miracle that someone like me could suffer at all. I just grew up in a great environment with awesome friends and cash for great grocery stores, and parents who cared and provided for me, but who weren't necessarily eager to support me as some kind of life-risking Christian missionary.  When you have blessings and resources like I had, which included getting to go to college and having a lot of opportunities and good health, then it really usually is morally questionable to just waste that stuff for suffering's sake. I wouldn't be allowed to go to some dangerous place to live for a worthy cause, and it would be an intolerable offense to try to replicate those conditions in my own life, so what are my options? Well good service and giving for other people are great options.  They really are and I will always tell people who feel happy and well to make the most of their blessings and don't underestimate what people can accomplish by helping others and being honest and good.  
   But for me, I was interested in some of the more extreme messages about the cross of Christ, and it seemed like that kind of adventure might have been intended for other people. However, I think that is not what happened. I have had a great opportunity to feel worn out, to forgive, to show up and be a part of other people's lives despite pain, and, well, to wish I was dead for years at a time. And how stupid to call that a miracle, but how stupid not to, because God has been good to me, and though I deserved to be treated better in life, I got better than what I deserved.

Good grief

I feel like more and more with media and other things, people have a choice between religion or pornography, when there have been other times when there was more of a variety of things that were just plain good, and when most things in life were more integrated. Some people try to correct the nasty atmosphere with more religious pressure, and then people fight that with more indecency. I think if people would try to grow the amount of goodness and good things and good life then it might also get rid of a lot of the polarization and poverty in our culture.

Purgatorio

I think it is time on this blog now to tell everyone that Dorothy Sayers is my patron saint.  I made that request a long time ago when I was depressed and working at Barnes and Noble, and continuing to go through a very long Orthodox Christianity phase.  The Eastern Orthodox Church is kind of like the Catholic Church where people choose saints to be their patron saints.  I knew that I would never be a communing member of the Orthodox Church, so for my patron saint I chose a Christian author that I liked, and who had similar interests as me.  Dorothy Sayers was an advertiser before she started writing mysteries, and she was friends with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  I majored in advertising in college, and I am friends with Jesus Christ.  I do not think of those Inklings as often as I used to when working in the bookstore, but I am very blessed in my life and think that Dorothy Sayers was probably not mad about how presumptuous it might have been for me to make a request like that, and to me it seems very likely that she did whatever patron saints do for their assigned people. And she wrote a novel about advertising, and I wrote a novel about advertising, but I did not translate Dante's Inferno like she did.  When she translated it, she preserved an alternating rhyme scheme in another language.  So that is amazing, and I will probably think of her when I am a camp counselor in Purgatory, which I do think will happen, and I will also say in this post that I expect that Mitch McConnell and some other people like that may eventually be some of my campers.

Bulletin

I think as people read my writing, some of them might find themselves uttering words like "kook."  Well I do not mind, but people need to know that kooks might end up being a whole Christian denomination, and I think once mental illness is accounted for, our denomination might really beat all the other denominations at life and Christianity.  You know some of the best people from our line of believers actually walk down the street telling people that they are Jesus Christ, and one of the real Jesus Christ's most important messages was that what people do for the least of these, they have done for him.  So it would be a little bit crazy to look down on us too much, and it might not be the kind of crazy that counts as membership in our church.

Cracked Reflection

I was thinking just now about how I brag sometimes even though I figured out early in my life that it is basic Christianity not to brag.  Well there is a lot I do like that and it is because when I was 19 I found myself looking at a life of severe depression and I decided that I had to just live my life and try for happiness and eat and make friends and do a lot of stuff that is normal human behavior instead of sacrificial Christian living.  And yet behind my gregarious selfish extravagance is a very pure Christian motivation to stay alive, not even to have some glorious offering for God, but simply because I am supposed to.  And even with my hedonism, which isn't the "Christian hedonism" that some Christians talk about, but just plain hedonism to stay alive, there is an ongoing sacrifice of my reputation among other Christians, who actually don't brag, who don't seek out wordly fame and temporary happiness, who don't depend on accomplishment for self worth, and who serve a lot more people with a lot more purity and holiness.  I know how they see me and my moral inferiority, which is real considering my knowledge and training. And yet my participation in the church just can't be the same as theirs.  Some people seem to get it even without any explanation from me, and because of them, my little reputation sacrifice and chronic status as an inconsistent and questionable parishoner is, thankfully, limited and minimized so that there are some flashes of service and participation that remind me of life before mental illness. I think all of this must be some kind of help from God that keeps me from becoming a hypocritical monster, and it is something that could provide a great surprise when all the people who did not know to take the glorious Christian path cash in on my prayers that might not have existed if I had been able to truly and successfully walk that path myself.

Paper, Rock, Scissors

My reference to there being such thing as a greater life in that other post reminds me of something I was recently thinking about how God uses different kinds of honor to bless people.  God tells people more than once in the Bible that people should associate with people of low position, and his disciples have several conversations about who is the greatest.  Jesus flips it around sometimes and says that the first shall be last, and he says some hopeful stuff about people being the least. I have found that in life, the best way to treat people is usually to ignore status and to help everyone be loving in a way that rejects meaningless and superficial rankings.  And yet there are rankings, and it seems that not all ranking is evil, and there are hierarchies in heaven.  I do not know what it all means, except that God flips it around a lot and seems to use a lot of it as a tool to bless people.  I also have a current understanding that some of the rankings that are from God and not from the cruel world often have a paper rock scissors relationship, where people might beat someone at something, but that person will beat someone who beats them, and everyone can truly live with the understanding that they can "consider others better than themselves" with relative ease because of people's infinite, immeasurable worth that cannot be confined to lists and position and rankings.