Fear Series: Fear and Insanity

  
Today is not yet Armageddon.  Today, while most of the rest of the world is abandoned to destruction, we are buying baggies and baked ham.  We are stuffing boxes full of all the stuff we just can’t pack any more of into our houses, and sending them down to the Salvation Army, dumping them into those big red abundant garbage cans.  They are big enough to live in.  I bet they’re warm with all those smelly shoes and old flannel shirts and jeans with broken zippers.

    Can’t you just feel that dark ominous threat brooding over us, waiting to burst open like Mount Saint Helen’s damnation, pouring brimstone and gasoline all over our lives?  Something broods over us.  How high?  Oh, I’m afraid I’m crazy.

    Crazy people have interesting relationships.  Crazy people have special relationships with Jesus.  Crazy people who think they are normal and fine don’t have relationships.  There are a lot of them around.  Ever notice?  Those who know they are crazy often have special relationships with Jesus.  We have to, because of helpless fear. I know.

    I know in my head that I don’t have to be afraid.  He tells me over and over, patiently, gently, over and over and over.  “Don’t be afraid,”  he says.  I know that.   Perfect love casts out fear.  But the love part is hard to find.  And without the powerful love, fear smirks.  When I begin to go through my soul, throwing stuff around like clothes out of the bureau, looking for the powerful love, when I get to the bottom of the stuff and the bureau is empty, love isn’t there.  It’s empty.  It isn’t in me.  That is Fear.

    I have a hard time finding Faith, too.  Faithlessness.  That is Fear coupled with Impatience.

    Sometimes after I’ve slogged around in the muck for a while, screaming because I’m faithless and hysterical because I’m scared out of my wits and whining because I’m spoiled, Jesus comes along and He just sits close by.  Sometimes I hold still enough for him to hold me and stroke my hair.  He doesn’t say much, because he won’t compromise.  This is not a time for words anyway.  He knows I’m wild.  You know how you hold an animal gently that is dying?  You just hold it and touch it, if it will let you.  If it is wild, sometimes all you can do is sit nearby.
    He knows.  Way off in the distance out there somewhere, God is biding his time with me.  There is something old and wild in me which is dieing.  Sometimes, he reaches down into my life with his huge arms and picks me up, and I get a glimpse of what sanity is, where he is.  It doesn’t having anything to do with what we all think is sense.  It sure doesn’t have anything to do with life in this modern asylum.  We are so modern we have become alien.

    Finally, I let down.  Fear gives way to exhaustion, and I cry because he is God and he made me, and no matter what I think, he loves me, and I cannot fathom his grace.  It isn’t in me.  It comes from him.  I cry.  Fear dissolves in the sacred language of the salty brine.

    Later, I sign out.  I’ve been in a long time where it gets really scary, where the wickedness of that bad one just paralyzes crazy people.  I am no longer modern.  I am no longer alien.  I am out.  Jesus validated my release.  He sighs, and I see how hard it was. The queer thing is that He leads me in there, because it’s only in there He can probe deeply, where I’m reluctant and bound up, paralyzed so He can get into those hard places and breathe on me.  It’s work.  But I’m out.  Off critical.  In observation, but recovering.

    I dream that the very worst horrors will pass under me.  I hope that Armageddon will be a nightmare that I watch from a very distant place, praising God and praising God.  But I realize we all go through our private apocalypse.
We watch our worlds blasted apart and everything we held sacred spewed over the contaminated ground.  And we either deny its reality, or we become possessed by it, or we finally throw ourselves down at God’s feet like a beaten dog.  If that, He puts down a pan of cold water, and rivets a shiny name tag to the collar, and reaches for the flea shampoo.  It is a reconciliation.  I’m a dog.  But I’m your dog.  Yes, you are my dog.

    I’m glad I have this reconciliation.  Who could face life if there were no reconciliation?  You would go around saying “I just can’t believe THAT will HAPPEN.”  I guess that is the difference.  That is why I know I am crazy, instead of thinking I am just fine.  That is why I let Jesus lead me into my fear and lose everything.  That is why I die.  How else could I live?  I’m crazy.  I just have to trust Him, because He knows just how crazy and flea-bitten.