MESSY LIFE

A buddy sent an email a while back and talked about “messy lives.” I was so impressed with his thoughts that I dropped the email into a sermon file. Since I’ve had the opportunity to preach a couple times this past year, I suspect there may be another opportunity in the future. This is a subject I feel God is urging me to address. The concepts resonated with my heart immediately.

I am an introspective person. Always have been. No doubt it has caused me problems at times, and it may be doing it again. I am not without some success in my life, but I still struggle with a general feeling of near total failure. I have had confidence many times, but face a great deal of timidity. I do not usually compare myself with others, but compare myself with what I believe I should have been or should be. While I refuse to call what I do “worry,” I often feel like I do not measure up. This is why the idea of “messy life” connected so strongly.

I am attempting to read through the Bible in a year. I usually get hung up in Leviticus and return to the Psalms. Proverbs and the New Testament. The law annoys me. It seems so ridiculous I cannot seem to stick with it. I am sure there is something to learn, but I never get far enough to learn it.

I grew up in a church that believed in the law. Not the Leviticus law, but some made up law that lead me to think that my church believed that if it was fun, it was sin. That is not that far from the truth. If one were to make a list of everything they ever heard some church said was wrong, it was believed in my church. About the only thing they never came right out and objected to was kids necking in the car. Of course, they considered it wrong, but never mentioned it. I think we were just expected to know it was wrong. I’m sure we all did, but it was still a common activity.

My life has been messy as far back as I can remember. I kept everything inside. I mulled it over and over and over. I carried enormous amounts of guilt for just about everything that ever happened. I know that what I heard in church had a great deal to do with that guilt. But because I kept things bottled up, my thoughts were never discussed with anyone else. I simply believed I was abnormal and one of the few kids emotionally dying under the pressure of what I was being taught. I was a young adult before I ever began to question the extra-Biblical teaching of my church. As a result, I consider myself pretty screwed up and not especially happy. I knew others just did want they wanted to do and few seemed to ever feel guilty. I felt guilt about everything. It didn’t stop me was doing many of these things, but I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to be a follower of Jesus Christ. I wanted to be a Christian. In my teen years I was desperate to be forgiven and accepted into the kingdom of God. To that end, I walked forward at more alter calls than I can remember. There were times I was doing it weekly. I lived in terror of going to hell.

Movies were anathema, but I went to my first one in eighth grade. I went with two black buddies who were refused entrance to a roller skating rink where our class was having a party. Since I would not go in without them, we went to a movie. It was a western in which a sixteen-year-old boy was mistakenly hung for cattle rustling. I became that boy and I was being hung for even being in that theater. I felt so guilty I could hardly wait to get out of there as I was convinced the Lord would come and I would go straight to hell. Do not pass go do not collect $200.

That feeling had crossed my mind many times as a youth. I finally convinced myself that I was unredeemable. God could not love me nor accept me. Get used to it kid, heaven was not in my future. Messy life. The mess continues, but the guilt has greatly declined. We’ll talk more about this,