Mud Puddles

“I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair”
Johnny Cash, “Hurt”

I was cruising an internet forum the other day and noticed someone's rather imaginative given location: “Throne of regret”. Although a typical display of Internet self-pity, it made me stop and consider my life and my past. William Borden is well-known for having written about regret on his Bible-flyleaf life motto: “No reserves. No retreats. No regrets.” Pondering the life implications of such a credo could lead to many blog entries, so the last part will be quite enough. No regrets. Do I live this? Do I believe it?

Describing it as a “throne” implies painstaking craftsmanship, lots of time spent, and great attention to detail. My mental image is that of someone who lives in the past, missing out on the present, carefully working fine detail into this dark masterpiece they've fashioned from regrets and old dead parts of their life. I guess the regrets of my life are more like decayed darkened bones scattered through the duff of my life's forest. I walk along and occasionally nudge one with my toe, but I'm not into gathering them and constructing them into an edifice and memorial to my life's failures.

Rather than the carefully-crafted throne of regrets, sometimes I sit in a mud puddle of coulda-beens and mighta-beens. There's no structure and no attention to detail, just the ground down remnants of ideas, goals, and hopes. It's kind of like C.S. Lewis's idea of playing in a mud puddle “...because [I] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a vacation at the sea.” It's playing at little-kid games when God is calling me to go forth and make a difference in the world. I'm comfortable in my puddle, but all messy and not fitting for “polite company”. Not to mention that it doesn't have any lasting impact or take me where God wants me to go.

I can name one handful of Facebook friends and two handfuls of phone contacts that were merely deposited detritus of either times in my life that are past or of ill-founded illusions of “waiting for something to happen.” I sorted all my phone contacts this week and discarded info for a ridiculously high quantity of people I hadn't seen or talked to in years. Some I used to serve with at church, some I figured I'd hang out with again, but all are pretty irrelevant to my life these days. Mud puddles. Stuff that I thought would be worth something but ends up just leaving me surrounded by clutter. It seems childish, selfish – I want to surround myself with things I want to have or imagine that I want.

How can I get out of this mess and on my feet like an adult? The best and most dependable way is, of course, through God. Pastor Scott, in a past sermon, offered a unique perspective on worship. He postulates that raising your hands in worship is similar to the little kid who runs up to a parent and reaches upward in a wordless begging to be picked up. That when you reach out in worship, it's asking God, “Here I am. Come and pick me up from where I am.” That right there is childlike-faith like Jesus commended, rather than plain old mud-puddle childishness.

Sometimes I remember to seek God when I realize that I'm getting mired in my mud puddle. Other times, I get all wrapped around the axle thinking that I really am happy where I'm at. One of the things I'm working on in my walk with God is to increase the proportion of the former occasions rather than the latter. It leads to some frustration, though, as I seem to bang my head into the wall. How many times do I have to plop down in the same mess rather than taking God at His word that He has good things for me if I follow Him? How many times will I forget and have to be taught yet again how to get picked up, cleaned up, and set on the right path?

How many times?

How many times must I almost drown before I catch that perfect wave?
How many times must I yellow snow before I land this jump?
How many times must I smack my head before I hit this back flip?
How many times must I crush my privates before I nail this rail slide lip?

How many times?

(Go watch this video to achieve the proper mindset. “oh, guys, kick me a fat beat...”)

So goes Matt's poem in “Extreme Days”. For a Christian movie, it seemed minimally cheesy and quite hilarious when I ran across it many years ago. Somehow my first girlfriend didn't appreciate it, although I don't know why not. I think she had concerns about my intellect and movie taste afterward...(she was weird, obviously). Still, it's on the list of movies that I draw from for life inspiration and occasionally quality quotations.

Anyway, the question remains. How many times will I have to actively deny my broken tendencies in order to walk after Jesus? How many times will God bring me down into the Death Star trench of brokenness I don't want to fix with blaster bolts whizzing by my head just to watch me “wave off” before getting to the target?

I was talking with a friend about hard stuff in her life last week. She was saying that she doesn't know how to break her habits that foster brokenness in her life. How many times will she have to tell herself which is the right way to go?

How many times? (how many times?)

In Matt's words...

As many times as it takes.

Roots

“Listen,”

God said,

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I said.

“Do you hear that sound?” He repeated.

Then I heard it. Low at first, but getting louder. Rumbling, straining, cracking.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Roots,” He responded, “breaking loose and pulling out of the soil of your heart.”

Then I understood.

Hold that for a moment.

If you've ever planted a garden, you know how weeding is. If the weeds are small and new, the merest disturbance of the soil allows them to be lifted away. If they've become established and entrenched, it takes a lot of effort to pull them out. If you're like me, you pull and pull then sometimes sit down hard when the weed finally comes out in your hand.

Hold that for a moment also.

When trees are cut down, there's always a stump left. Depending on the feller, the stump might be tall or short. There are several ways of dealing with stumps. With sufficient quantities of explosive, you could remove stumps quickly and dramatically. If it's cut tall enough to provide leverage, hitting it with a bulldozer will get it right out. If patience and observation is your game, soaking it with gasoline helps burn the stump out to the little roots, perhaps taking days. Lastly, just cutting it short and letting it naturally decay, while taking the longest, is definitely the least effort. This last situation causes some complications to operations like mowing around said stump. In my parents' front yard, there is a years-old stump always surrounded with a little uncut patch of grass where the wheel-vs.-blade geometry just didn't work out.

What God had pointed out to me was the tearing and pulling of roots from my previous dating relationships, both the recently-ended one and the becoming-history one. For months, it's seemed like I've been “digging out” from my hurt, but there always seems to be an ugly stump left – particularly from dating Mary. I'd like to have my space back. I'd like to use it to grow other things. Yet it stays “stumped.” In that moment, though, God showed me that He really is going to remove the scars and lingering pain from my life. He wants to pull out the stump of my ended dating relationship.

Sometimes I want to just cut it close and leave it. After all, out of sight, out of mind, right? I think we all know that that's not really the case. Out of sight just means you'll forget about it until the next time you bump into it with the lawnmower. In fact, the lower the stump is cut, the harder it is to get leverage to remove it. Were I to be prudent, I'd leave it cut high and wait for the right process (God) to remove it entirely. Were I to be prudent, I wouldn't try to nibble it down a slice at a time. For the most part, I don't think I have pursued that unfruitful method. I think I've just cut it, left it as it lay, then waited for God and time to heal my wounds inside.

Why is this so hard to remove? Because the roots go down deep. While I was dating, I did the best I could to water our relationship, and feed it as best I knew how, and make sure it got enough sun, and all the things that make a tree grow tall and strong. Being heavily invested wrought benefits then but just pain and frustration now. It's like the little weeds compared to the big weeds – our relationship wasn't necessarily a weed, but it was established enough not to come out easily.

I'm still waiting for a time and a place to plant a tree that God will nurture for the rest of my life. A tree for shade and reading a book under, a tree for climbing and making adventures. A tree that I know I can lean on any time and all the time.

I believe that part of the reason I go through hurt now is that it's plowing the soil of my heart so that other things can be planted more deeply. I guess that's a good thing, but it's like beating my head against a wall.

In movies, you know how when the hero is climbing up the wall to a bottomless chasm, they finally pull themselves over the edge and sit for a minute to catch their breath? I feel like I reached that point a month or two ago. I'm done climbing out of the hole and ready to go climb mountains and soar with eagles again. Only problem is, I don't know know where the mountains are. I don't see intriguing and inviting majesty on my horizon. Just the hole I came from and flat prairie (maybe desert) as far as the eye can see.

In the words of Morpheus, that great prophet of pop culture, “Welcome to the desert of the real.”

As I worked this entry over in my head for some weeks, God pointed out to me the path I must follow. I have a path and a plan. Not a schedule – a schedule has due dates, and I've learned yet again that God doesn't care about my supposed deadlines. Nor does He care for my ill-intentioned attempts to hurry Him.

So I wait in His plan, in His love, and on His timing. Because in the end, that's all I can do.