What Block Blocks the Way on the Block?

[HKHaugan]

What Block Blocks the Way on the Block?

When we were kids we played with sets of blocks and created all kinds of forts and buildings. We stacked them one on one. When we built a tower we knew the higher it got the more it would teeter. It was really fun to watch it tumble and rebuild another one. Of course we had to be told to pick them up and put them away because, strewn about, they were a hazard. Blocks were fun. But there are other blocks too. The kind you can't see but can stumble over.

There is a phrase familiar to authors and dramatists. It's called writer's block, the momentary inability to write anything. There is another kind of block that follows. It's called reader's block, the momentary inability to read anymore. Come to think of it, there are other kinds of blocks as well. There are mental blocks, memory blocks, understanding blocks, physical blocks, emotional blocks and what might be called a spiritual block. They are experienced in every person. But it's that last one, spiritual block, that concerns me most. It is a moment or string of moments when we may experience a sense of being dry, empty, fatigued and even depressed. It's an inner thing. We can't seem to get over it or we just keep going through sheer effort. It exposes something within. It's a nagging feeling of being alone. No words can name it. No one can fix it. It's a mood condition that seems unbreakable. We don't understand its origin nor can we know its end. The world around us continues but nothing significant seems to be happening.

David cries out in Ps.69, 'Save me O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depth where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me. I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for God (vs.1-3).” It's not that he doesn't believe in God. He doesn't feel His presence. The world around him is collapsing and he can't understand being a believer why there is this block. The bulk of the Psalm is circumstance as he sees it and feels it in his aloneness. Yet he does resolve that God has an answer for him that will be the salvation of future generations. Aware of his sins, David places his plea for a better future even though he feels he deserves nothing from God. Many of David's Psalms reveal he experienced some real blocks in his life. His spiritual block with Bathsheba, his relational block with his son Absalom, his emotional block as he retreated in his fear of the enemies surrounding him, to name a few. All of his blocks were rooted in the one that was at the heart of them all and that was sin. As he said in Psalm 51:3, “I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me.”

There is a good news key here and that is David's faith. It's not what he feels, which he is quick to tell God, but who he ultimately trusts, namely God. David is venting out of his primary sin-bred condition, aloneness. If we are willing to cut to the chase and admit it, David is saying what we all feel. We are part of an earth populated by people, all of whom, have the same condition, most of whom do not want to talk about it and with whom we need to share the answer for it. What really happens around us among nations and their struggles, relational family issues and our own sense of losing grasp on daily living, is stirred by the frustrations of personal aloneness. We are not alone in being alone and feeling alone. It's the one basic condition that all people share and how aloneness is dealt with determines the state of our heart and how we relate in the larger world.

Aloneness is more than just feeling lonely. It is rather coming to grips with our internal reality of living in a body over which we have no permanent control, a mind that has to search and learn, a heart that wobbles and living among others who suffer the same in a world that seems out of control. Alone, we reach out to answer the external pressures knocking on the gates of our heart.

The reason it is so important to face its reality is because we struggle to be in control or give control of ourselves to manipulators. Manipulators are basically motivated by spiritual forces that seek power, security to maintain it and wealth to support them. Manipulators are alone too and they know how to work the blocks in us. Just look at advertising and how that industry works using fear to sell products. Look at political correctness and its power to keep people bottled up in the fear of response. Politics is the social science of manipulation.

Our aloneness is the playground of choice and decision that external forces place on us. Fear of not being right, as we react to each of them, is our inner spiritual battle. That fear of not being able to survive the onslaught is basic. Fear is a spirit which assaults our heart, tempts our mind to figure out strategies and schemes to gain acceptance and recognition. The culture around us says that we earn that right through conformity to obtain whatever is necessary for survival economically and socially. The problem is this, fear is the fertilizer for temptation. Temptation is always there where a choice and a decision have to be made. Aloneness, it's vulnerability to seek the easy way to gain recognition and acceptance, to be right, to look right and to act right present the main human issue...trust. Who do you trust to accomplish these ends? Aloneness is the product of sin. All the self centered attitudes and strategies we use to solve the problem of aloneness are based on fear and sin is the tempting spiritual weakness ready to live for the moment. Fear, temptation and pride work lock-step to keep us blocked.

Without God, life in this world is a moment to moment effort to make it through the day and its end is to find one's self as alone as it was to begin with. Your name and body disappear in the dust of a grave. You remain a fading image, 'Scrooged', in the dusty forgotten pictures in an album that eventually makes its way into an attic to one day end in a garbage heap. History has no memory, only a few books that name a miniscule number of people compared to the billions who have lived and died. 99 plus percent of us are anonymous passersby. All of this the result of Adam and Eve's fascination with being in control of their lives apart from God. The devil and his sin have done their work. Perhaps now, we can understand God's intervention by becoming a unique individual born alone into a human body.

Human beings apart from God their Creator, remain blocked in until they see the one who removes the blocks, accept Him as Lord over the blocks and receive the Holy Spirit who is the block remover. By His blood shed on the Cross, Jesus neutralized the devil's intrusive block of sin, removed the devil's final block, death, and the devil's blocks of pride, fear and his arsenal of the spirits of lust, rage, greed and all their companions. In Christ there is no more aloneness. Never again. One Lord, One Spirit, One faith, One Word, One baptism, One life, One Truth, One God and Father of all.