I changed my piebald life description today.
I have a recurring tidal wave dream. I have it when I'm under stress. Sometimes it hits before I actually feel stressed. I had my first tidal wave dream of the school year a couple nights ago. August is here. Students are coming in the next couple weeks. What happens over the course of the next six weeks affects the next four years. In campus ministry if you miss a freshmen class you pay for it for four years.
I hate throwing up. I'd rather be sick for days, ill and nauseaus for hours than actually vomit and get it over with. Throwing up is so oogy feeling.
It struck me as I was praying during my retreat yesterday that my tidal wave dream and my vomiting aversion might have something to do with each other.
The tidal wave dream is a symptom of anxiety produced by fear. The fear is wrapped up in one of my idols: to have a numerically successful and impressive InterVarsity chapter at the University of North Carolina. The tidal wave dream is my nausea. What's making me soul-sick is my idol. What my soul-sickness really needs for me to do is to puke--to give up my idol of what success means and my warped view that it all depends on me to make it happen.
Instead, I coddle my nausea. I give myself all kinds of reasons to grasp for more control. I try to find ways to live with the pain/sickness/fear/anxiety rather than do the one (admittedly difficult) thing that would actually make me feel better.
There's all kinds of images and words for the Biblical word "repentance:" u-turn, to change your mind...but I think yesterday's image of puking is right up there.
I've known people who have been physically or emotionally sick for so long that they actually don't want to get well--they wouldn't know who they were apart from being a sick person. I desperately do not want this to be true of my soul. And yet if I weren't having anxious tidal wave dreams at the beginning of August, would I even recognize myself? If I wasn't worrying about the start of the school year, would that mean that I was less important or less needed?
In one of the most haunting questions in Scripture, Jesus asks a sick man "Do you want to get well?" If it means I have to actually throw up my idols, go through the painful process of letting go of something that somehow makes me feel like I've got more control (which is a lie and an illusion), my honest answer some days is a stubborn, haunched over next to the toilet bowl "no."
And so I pray today: Lord, give me the strength and courage to puke.
1 comment:
That was quite a graphic metaphor, Alex. But I have to admit it's pretty good. I have to agree with the extreme dislike of puking, it feels like time slows down almost and that "short" process just drags on for so long. I was always hesitant to use my toothbrush afterward too, because I'd have to use the same toothbrush the next morning, yuck! Our sin definatly leaves some pretty gross aftertaste too, thank God he washes us clean like a big ol' swish of listerine.
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