It's All About Me

I am becoming aware of the fact that I am very self-centered and selfish much of the time. I tend to look out for my own interests and believe that my time is more important than anyone else's. I can't tell if I've been this way all along and God is just now bring it to my attention or if maybe it is getting worse.
My mother recently wrote about narcissism being manifested in two ways - overt and covert:

There are those who construct a reality in which they are exalted at the center, and then there are those who construct a reality which ensures they are completely insignificant. Both are narcissistic. . .The deflated self has a sense of entitlement as well. The entitlement of reciprocity. They (we) have a complicated scheme for getting our needs and wants met, but they must be met indirectly. Asking for what we need, taking responsibility for our wants, is the ultimate shame. Instead we have a list of good behaviors that should merit attention. Subtle needy actions to arouse compassion.

While I usually can ask for what I need without much shame, the sense of entitlement is there. I think that most of the "selfless" acts that I've done for others were always and attempt to get others' attention, compassion and interest in me. As a result, I have put off doing most of those things because I realize that it almost never produces the expected returns.

So I have let myself become more overtly selfish. I have stopped giving my time away lavishly to those who want it. I seem much less willing to give it away to God, that's for sure. I've also stopped reserving judgment and am again engaged in a battle to prove myself right all of the time. Other than God, this affects my parents, my residents, my staff, and my friends.

I have become that college senior that I despised when I was a freshman and sophomore. The seniors I knew at that time were totally self-absorbed as if they were the most important beings ever. They stopped investing in people because they were going to graduate and had a big, bright future ahead of them. It was all they seemed to think about. Their lives were exciting and they let everyone know it.

I don't want to be that way. I realize that I have many options for my future and that the possibilities seem endless. But I am hearing from God to wait on his timing and provision. The future is all about Him anyway, and He is making me wait. Part of waiting is breaking the tunnel vision that I've acquired and throwing off my selfish ambitions for what He would have me do now, today. He's got the future under control. God is God and I am not. I pray He continues to hit me over the head with this one.

In the Name of Jesus 2

I've been reading more In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen. In his second chapter, he touched on what I think is an essential element in Christian leadership:

True ministry must be mutual. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. . . [Christian leadership] is a servant leadership. . . in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need their leader.

I think this quote hits on some big issues.

First, it hits on the kind of class system within the Church. A significant leader in my life commented on his perfect church as not having such a distinction between the leaders and the followers. If ministry is mutual, then there are no one-way relationships.

I had a type of one-way relationship with my direct teacher/mentor in Crusade for two years. We used to meet for lunch and go over various Crusade follow-ups and ideas that I needed to know in order to share with those whom I was discipling. He also would ask me about my week, how my small group was going (which I led), what God had been teaching me, and about my struggles. I would disclose and he would encourage me and attempt to speak truth.

In some ways, I was expected to pour myself out to him, but he almost never did the same in return. He probably thought he was being a selfless leader, but instead his heart was veiled and I felt alone in my struggles. If he were really selfless, however, he would have made real sacrifices. It would have been a greater sacrifice for him to share his heart and admit his faults and brokenness (which I believe everyone has in some form) than for him to sit and sympathize with mine. I ended up feeling alone and powerless.

My teacher/mentor in Crusade held all of the power in our relationship. He knew everything about me and used that knowledge to get me to do what he wanted, although this was very subtle. I didn't realize he was doing this until I began to strongly disagree with him. He used his knowledge of my weaknesses to disqualify my opinion in the matter. It was so subtle that I actually agreed with his assessment at the time. When I was asked to leave leadership because of our continued difference of opinion, I found out just how much he and the Crusade leadership didn't need me.

Am I alone?

Two posts in a day. Watchyaself! These topics were different enough to justify separation.

Lately, I've thought about how easy it is to feel like I am the only one who struggles with certain things. Though, I developed a way of keeping myself from isolation in my struggles that dates back to my high school leadership camp experience. This was the first time I heard, "if you're weird, they're weird." It is a simple expression, but to be honest, it brings the whole world together. I mean that if I am insecure about something, then it is likely that someone else shares that insecurity, and so on.

Dawn and I (I hope this is ok to share, Dawn) have been feeling alone in the struggle for purity in our relationship. We can't think of a single couple that seems to struggle with this, and if they are struggling, they don't seem to let on how difficult it is. I mean, when we have victories, people are happy for us. But not in the "you-did-what-you-should-have-done" way. It's more in the "that's-amazing, I-don't-think-I-could-have-done-that-and-I-don't-know-anyone-else-who-could" sort of way. So instead of talking about how our effort is worth it, they isolate us by saying that we are quite odd for fighting this hard.

In fact, I know many Christians who have given in to these kinds of temptation and seem to have "gotten away with it." They screwed up, felt some shame and sorrow, repented and received forgiveness, or not, and seem to be doing just fine. Sometimes I envy those who can really "hide the stink" well. They don't have to be vulnerable, like Nouwen's "Christian leaders of tomorrow;" they get to look good, and seemingly feel good for most of the time. Even if sometimes they can't hide the stink and are exposed or have a breakdown, a good 90% of the time, they look good and feel good (Mom, please refute this). See how appealing numbness is to me? See how appealing it is in our culture to define our own reality?

I mostly just want to say, "Great. Not only do people get to smell my stink, but I also get to look foolish for pursuing things like purity for the sake of a God I can't see." I usually say this before banging my head against the wall several times in a row.

The reality is that, yes, if I don't dig any deeper than the surface, then this reality is quite appealing. However, on the inside things are quite different. Here's what Henri Nouwen has to say:

Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.

I'm complaining about the counter-culture Christian lifestyle that I'm trying to get used to over and over. The only justification for this is that God is all I need. He's my one-stop shop. He wants me to win this battle so that he and I can stay together. He wants me to be close, not to separate myself. He has all of the items I need - strength to fight and endure, grace for when I fail, and a wing under which to rest when I'm tired of fighting.

In the Name of Jesus

Hello everyone. I'm back after a significant time of numbness. I like this blog because I can measure just how long I've been numb, because when I'm not numb, I feel like writing. Thanks Dawn, for continuing to chip away at the ice.

I've been asked to read In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen, and I am realizing how annointed he is. That is to say, Henri Nouwen is annointed. Jesus is annointed too, though. Yes.

I've already been bowled-over, and I'm only in the first third of the first chapter:

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. . .The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there."

This makes me think - am I a Christian leader of the future? Look back to the My resume of failure post. Talk about encouraging. I love how certain speakers or writers can, in usually just a few words, validate my whole experience in life. It must be God.

Personal Website

I haven't had the time to write lately because my life is getting fairly complicated and busy. However, I have just completed a website that I designed and coded from scratch for my Music Technology class.

It is one of the first projects that I actually completed more than a week in advance of the deadline. Maybe there is hope for me yet. I will add much more to it in the coming weeks, but until then, enjoy!

https://webfiles.colorado.edu/mathisj/index.html

A sense of wonder

Tonight I attended a concert called "Premieres and Classics" featuring David Korevaar, Professor of Piano here at the university.

I am having trouble finding words for how this performance made me feel. I can only think of a few. Sublime. Magical. Wonderful. And when I say wonderful, I mean that it filled me with wonder. I sat there in my chair, squinted my eyes, shook my head, and tried to control the chills that went down my back and legs. I thought, "How could music that is this beautiful and amazing possibly exist? How can a man sit in front of 450 people and play over an hour of the most difficult music I've ever heard from memory?"

This feeling of wonder can only be compared to looking up at the stars at night away from city lights. It penetrates me the way the gaze of the girl I love does. I feel exposed and undressed. But never more real, more myself. It is impossible for me to walk away from a performance like tonight's without living more in my heart.

Tonight is not the first time I've felt this sense of wonder. No, the first time I remember feeling this is back in the days when I believed in Santa Claus. But enough about yesterday. No, really - the thought of a man who travels around the world in one night, giving out endless amounts of presents, who knows all of my actions (naughty or nice) but is still the most warm, joyful person I can imagine filled me with wonder.

As I thought about this, I realized that this sense of wonder has helped shape my concept of the supernatural. I found myself asking some of the same questions about God. I mean, if the stars are so great, how much greater is my God? If I consider the music I heard tonight to be the definition of beauty, then how much more beautiful is Yahweh? He is infinitely greater and more beautiful. Blows my hair back is what it does. And I realize that's saying a lot. (That's funny right there, I don't care who ya are)

Anyway, if you get the chance, listen to Le Tombeau de Couperin by Maurice Ravel. You can get either the solo piano version or the full orchestral arrangement - they are both performed about as often. Try to eliminate distractions, and use headphones unless you have an amazing surround sound speaker system. See if the music inspires your creativity. See if it penetrates you.

A song I grew up on

I grew up in a house which was filled with music. My dad has been a guitarist for longer than I've lived, and he's probably lead worship more times than I could imagine. I have really fond memories falling asleep to contemporary worship songs with amazingly intimate, poetic, and deeply expressive lyrics. This is a song I've been thinking about recently, and it's probably one of my all-time favorites:

In the stillness of this hour
I worship you my Lord
Crying holy is the Lord on high

In the quiet of my heart
I sing this song of praise
Crying holy is the Lord on high

And for all my days
I will bow down before you
Giving glory and honor
To your name
And for all of my life
I will worship and adore you
Crying holy is the Lord on high.

Copyright © 1989 Mercy Publishing. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

Lord, make my hour still and my heart quiet. Let me find you there.

My resume of failure

Lately I've been feeling like a no-good failure. I am trying to market myself to graduate schools which requires a resume. My list of acheivements is very short. My test scores are terrible, my awards and special honors are close to none, my ensemble chair placement is very low for my class and experience level, my GPA is average at best, and my work ethic is terrible. I am not very productive or efficient. I have trouble completing very basic tasks which are essential to my future. The good teachers out there work hard to cater to a variety of learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. My learning style doesn't easily mesh with any of these styles. In short, the world considers me mediocre, if not a failure.

My mother wrote on this subject recently:

Then I think how easily we misunderstand what's required of us. How we bounce between shame and bravado. How we just don't get it that our only option is to fall on the mercy. That only the mercy can save us. That only the mercy has power.

I'd like to say we don't get to disqualify ourselves because of failure. We're called to serve: Feed my sheep. Hail Frodo of the Nine Fingers. Four precious children to raise.

Shame has no place in mercy.

And we don't get to qualify ourselves because of competence. It's only the mercy.

Failure + mercy = power. Power released through humility. Redemption empowered by grace. Treasure in earthen vessels. Strength made perfect in weakness. The depth of the riches of the glory of Christ...

Dawn thinks it's a blessing that my strengths are not quantifiable, and I've had to take some time to consider why she said that. My strengths can't really be measured with awards, tests, special honors, ensemble chair placements, or the way I learn. The members of the panel who are to decide my admittance to their school will never comment, "Look at the listening skills on that guy!" just as a typical college guy won't say, "Did you see the brains on that girl?!" They frankly don't care. The world demands tangible proof of my worth.

Since I can't usually prove my worth outside of the Bible, I end up being pulled towards humility. And not by choice. Dawn probably considers this a blessing because worldly success is actually a curse. It causes us to seek pleasure, wealth, affluence, fame, happiness, and everything else which doesn't last or satisfy. Worldly success also gives us the illusion that we belong in the world, and that we certainly don't need God: someone who is also not easily quantified.

Praise God that when He opens up personal assistant positions, my resume of failure is exactally what He is looking for.

Contemplating lyrics

I am about to give out the url to this blog, so I'd better get writing. I have received some great encouragement to get going, so here it goes.

I think that God speaks to me the most tangibly and most frequently through music. Sometimes the music has words, sometimes not. There is one song that has affected me every time I hear it, as though the Holy Spirit were right next to me, telling me, "It'll be ok."

"Fade to Grey" by Jars of Clay

It's not hard to know what you're thinking
When you look down on me now
Your trance of love is seeking
To turn this world around
But in my state of blind confusion
No, God can pull me out
I see your love is willing
To turn me inside out

And then I see you there
The lonely tears I cry
I wish they'd release me

It's in despair that I find faith
Summon the night to bow down to day
When ignorance is bliss
Save me from myself

Chorus:

And then I see You there
With Your arms open wide and You try to embrace me
These lonely tears I cry
They keep me in chains and I wish they'd release me
Cold is the night but
Colder still is the heart made of stone, turned from clay
And if you follow me
You'll see all the black, all the white fade to grey

The references to blind confusion, tears keeping me in chains, seeing God with His arms open wide through tear-filled eyes, and the metaphor of the heart. The night is cold, but colder still is the heart if it's made of stone, turned from the clay that God formed it with. His love is willing to turn me inside out. I am not sure who the speaker of the last two lines is. It is either God, or the speaker whose tears keep him in chains.

Either way, I love this song because it always de-numbs my heart. It makes me wake up out of my everyday hard heart, breaking away the hard shell that forms around it because of the world I live in. It helps to bring the despair that is on the inside outward, because "It's in despair that I find faith."

I'm so glad that I blogged today instead of playing more computer games.

The Nutcracker

Merry Christmas-Eve! I must be getting older because I feel less and less excited and nervous today than I've felt in previous years, even as a teenager. However, I am starting to grasp just how amazing it is that God became one of us, died for my cruddiness, and rose again to prove His divinity. The grace that I experience from God amazes me daily.

I've been listening to Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Ballet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the better part of the day. Tchaikovsky is one of my favorite composers because he satisfies almost everything I look for in music: exciting rhythms, beautiful melodic lines, a variety of moods and tempos, a certain level of unpredictability, a diversity of instrumentation, and creative inspiration. The music speaks to a wide spectrum of emotions, leaving out only a few. Tchaikovsky stimulates my intellect, feelings, spirit, and creativity.

I love how he seems to value closure and resolution so much. Like Beethoven, we works hard to create suspense and tension, forcing the listener to greatly anticipate the resolution. When it comes, it is wonderfully satisfying. Even if the resolution is a minor chord, nothing is left open. I pray that I will experience the kind of closure in my life that I experience in this music. That would be fabulous. It would set my heart to rest.

About the title

A good friend and mentor of mine recommended that I read Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home by Richard Foster. Here's a quote from the introductory chapter: "Coming Home."

Loving is the syntax of prayer. To be effective pray-ers, we need to be effective lovers. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Coleridge declares, "He prayeth well, who loveth well." Coleridge, of course, got this idea from the Bible, for its pages breathe the language of divine love. Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love. This is why the great literature on prayer is frankly and wonderfully erotic. "The Trinity," writes Juliana of Norwich, "is our everlasting lover." "O my love!" exclaims Richard Rolle. "O my Honey! O my Harp! O my psalter and canticle all the day! When will you heal my grief? O root of my heart, when will you come to me?" "Jesus, Lover of my soul," pleads Charles Wesley. "Let me to thy bosom fly."

"O root of my heart." This is the first time I have heard God called the "root of my heart." I absolutely love this metaphor. I mean, look at what roots do for trees. First of all, there is no tree without a root. The roots must come first. Roots give a tree life by soaking up the water and nutrients in the ground. Often, the roots of a tree are quite larger than the tree itself. When the roots run out of room to grow, the tree does not remain healthy. Roots also keep a tree grounded in the face of extreme conditions. They make it very difficult to dig up the tree even when a great amount of effort is spent.

The parallels between the root of a tree and the root of a heart are obvious. God is my creator, my sustainer, the one who keeps me grounded in Him and His Word (John 1), and is my greatest, most important feature. He is at the bottom of my inner, most vital part: my heart. Even if the tree on which I bear fruit is withered or cut down, my root will still exist.

Lord, thank you for being the root of my heart. Help me to love you, to focus on you and to draw strength from both your Living Water and your nutritious Word. Amen.

Format and theme

Welcome to my new blog, root of my heart. I have read various online blogs for a few years now and have discovered that there are many options as to the material I could put in a weblog:

1. The Junkyard. This type is entirely personal. I would simply talk about my daily or weekly activities and any other random thoughts. In some ways, this would be an outlet for all of the junk my brain can't deal with on the inside. Some of it would be stream of consciousness babbling, but most would be negative and almost always centered on me.
2. The Academic Journal. This is the opposite of The Junkyard. Here, I would probably do research and write essays on various aspects of life. I would make philosophical arguments here based purely on logic and evidence and challenge my friends to a duel of rhetoric. This kind could be fun, however entirely impersonal.
   
3. The Themed-Blog. This kind of journal contains some personal and some academic prowess, but the topics would be centered around a theme or idea.

My weblog is of this third kind. A few weeks ago God convinced me to start this blog when I had the time and attention span. Thank God, now I have both.

Recently, I've discovered that I tend to live in two basic states. Either I live in my heart or out of it.

When I live in my heart, I feel alive in Christ and my heart is soft. In this state I care about and experience God, the world, relationships, growth, love, deep thought, and the Fruits of the Spirit. I am moved to live in my heart by my parents, my close friends, musical worship times, and significant absences of degrading sin to which I am addicted.

When I live out of my heart, I tend to be fairly numb and the colors of my reality fade to shades of black. In this state, my heart is hard and does not experience or care for the above mentioned items. The things which draw me out of my heart tend to be computer games, an unbalanced schedule (too busy or too idle), distraction, laziness, selfishness, and various addictive sins of the flesh. Playing computer games and indulging sins of the flesh are active choices that I make to avoid living in my heart. I will definitely get to that later, I promise.

I intend to keep with my theme of living in my heart in every post on this journal, if possible. When I get these thoughts and words outside of me, they affect me. They hold me accountable. This is due to the mixture of a personal and academic format. On one hand, I will read my Bible and other books about the heart and be inspired to write about their philosophies, but on the other hand I will share some of my struggles and apply these philosophies to my personal experience. I hope to avoid becoming an "emotional exhibitionist," meaning someone with a compulsive desire to expose deep feelings indiscriminately (thanks Mom). This might be hard for me.

This weblog is not just for God and I - it's also for you. I hope that my posts aren't too long or wordy for you to be encouraged by my thoughts and my story. I would love to hear your ideas, experiences, encouragement, or constuctive criticism. I am a verbal processor, so this would be especially meaningful to me.

If I am living in my heart, you will see regular postings here. I have not often been living in my heart recently and I have a problem with discipline. Pray that I will get the time and wholeness necessary to write. Again, welcome.