Confessing … August 8th, 2015

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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XIV.

I confess so I can heal.

If I deny, I remain sick.

When I began this series on confessing, I made a private covenant with my ego to avoid revealing current events and basically stay focused on sins of the past, long ago resolved.

But unfortunately, I continue to transgress.

I travel on the road.

That’s what I do right now because it’s my way to try to speak some simplicity into the complexity of our world, and sanity into the raging din.

Arriving at my lodging on Monday, I found myself disgruntled. It is summertime, so motels and suites are more expensive, and therefore my budget does not allow me to stay in the top-of-the-line institutions, but rather, places me in Mom and Pop establishments, which are often a mixed bag.

Usually I have pretty good perspective.

For instance, I don’t call the carpet “shabby,” but rather, “quaint.”

I don’t refer to the furniture as being “outdated,” but rather, “antiques.”

But for some reason, this particular week I was fussy. I didn’t like the room. Rather than considering it spacious, I thought it was convoluted.

It put me in a mode: “I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

That sentiment is the soil for the seed of all iniquity. If you catch it early enough, you can keep it from going any further, but I was in no mood to be introspective, so I went to Phase 2: “I feel like blaming you.”

Self-pity never allows me to take any responsibility, so we grab the closest innocent victim and thrust him or her into the role of the villain and the source of all inconvenience–and that particularly dastardly profile was placed on my partner, Janet Clazzy.

So I growled at her a little bit. I expressed my superiority to the meager station of my surroundings. Since she’s the one who acquired the room, it was obviously her fault that they had not changed the paneling since the Eisenhower Administration.

We argued.

It wasn’t really an argument–just a general “blooming onion” of complaint, which had no real center to it, and therefore, no completion.

Shortly after finishing my griping, I went into the third phase: “I’m feeling stupid.”

This is the most important phase. From this point of feeling stupid we can either move to repentance–or we can simply recycle and start all over again with “I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

Matter of fact, I will tell you that a good portion of the population lives in a meaningless, constant circle of feeling sorry for themselves, blaming others, feeling stupid to return to feeling sorry for themselves.

It must have been a good day, because fortunately, rather than feeling stupid and going for another try at feeling sorry for myself, I repented.

I apologized.

And it was amazing how quickly the room went back to being a room instead of a prison cell.

I am the master of my own destiny. No one’s calling the shots but me. If the shots suck, it’s because I suck–not having the sense to avoid feeling sorry for myself … insisting that I got screwed over.

 

 

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Where They Agree … June 5, 2013

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Atheists and religious folks do have one place where they agree. It seems that both of them don’t really care that much for people.

They love to tout their differences by emphasizing their contention about the existence of a God. The atheist wants you to know that it’s non-intellectual or superstitious to believe in such a mythical being, and the religious person wants you to know that it’s an issue of faith, and that he or she is enriched by holding onto the concept of a Divine Being.

This would appear to put them at odds with each other, but they actually cross-sect in their mutual disdain for humanity. Atheists generally have a gloomy vision of mankind, deeming them to be  animalistic, self-motivated and devoid of altruism. Religious people likewise think that humanity is pretty animalistic, self-motivated and absent a desire for goodness.

So the greatest commodity we have on earth–now upwards of eight billion units–is human beings and is rejected by both groups as either inept or totally worthless.

So I conclude that atheism and religion join together in a mutual mocking of a God who believed He was creating something in His image. We are now telling Him that it was a failed project.

As I get ready to go off to Little Rock tonight to share my heart and soul, I realize that coming from the perspective of the atheist by removing faith from human beings OR pursuing the agenda of the religious, by preaching against a common enemy and devilish concerns that taunt our world with weakness, is really just a proclamation of doom and gloom from different sides of a coin.

The uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth was that to his dying breath, he continued to love and believe in humanity. For after all, it is very difficult, when pierced with three nails, to pray, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” unless you have an abiding affection for your fellow-travelers.

An atheist could certainly come up with “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and a religious person might muster the energy to proclaim, “into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”

But it took Jesus to still love and forgive a world that had screwed him over and stabbed him in the heart.

That’s what I want to bring to Little Rock. I am sick to death of pseudo-intellectualism which chases God out of the tabernacle of our thinking because we believe we have become so grown-up and smart. And I am equally fed up with religion which keeps looking for an enemy to avoid dealing with our own problems and repenting of our shortcomings.

Where the atheist and the religious person agree is in the decision that the human experiment was a failure.

I don’t believe that. I refuse to believe that.

And when I arrive at the church tonight, I will be looking for brothers and sisters, not failures and enemies.

This is why I am Jesonian and not just religious. It’s why I’m Jesonian and not an atheist.

Jesus knew that human beings were God’s favorite creation. He refused to insult his Father by giving up on them.

And I refuse to reject the heart of Jesus by hating people.

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