For This Reason 7

[HKHaugan]

After I finished high school I had to leave the urban jungle and the gurgling sounds of what to me was the death rattle of toxicity, ‘toxi-city.’ So I got a job in a resort bartending one shift, kitchen staffing on another and then working the beach and tennis courts. There was a group of West Virginia kids working the same place who invited me to go home with them at the end of one Summer which I did. I knew their ‘genu-wine’ accent was like one I recognized but it wasn’t ‘y’all’ it was ‘you-uns’ and back there they ‘pooshed’ the door open and ‘gawronteed’ I’d have a good time. Beefsteak tomatoes, turnip greens and baked ham were familiar tastes in my past and they wanted me to stay and work there. One thing about having lived in the country, having parents from the ‘old world,’ you know there’s another world out there and even in between school years I ventured into hitchhiking so I soon got on the road again and found my way further south.

When I was on the road hitchhiking from place to place I had no idea where I was headed or why. I just had to keep going. I worked here and there and ended up in Jacksonville, Florida. Why was I there? What was I doing with my life? I got a job working in a shipyard and began to level out. A downtown boarding house cost me fourteen dollars a week and I got all my meals there. It was a mixed group of people mostly from southern Georgia and all the people I worked with were grits and fatback folks. I really enjoyed it.

Basically I was just surviving but I knew there was still more. I had this drive to go to college. I never lost it because my high school experience planted that deep within. The job allowed me to work at night so I went to college during the day. What I didn’t recognize at the time was the gentle hand of God covering me, guiding me and shaping my decisions. I was being graced but never knew that word until much later. Yes, it was free will but He was always there. It was hitchhiking in the Spirit but thinking I was in control.

As I survey the landscape of most of the people I’ve known their journey has been similar in many ways, not the same but similar. It’s a journey in which everything is really a series of questions. All of them boil down to three, three traveling questions that we carry in our kit bag every day---Who am I?---Where am I going?---How am I going to get there? One leads to the other. I’m sure you have asked the same ones. The world, that is secular society and its prince, are determined to keep you sidetracked from really searching them and accept their success standards. Keep the pressure on identity wherever you are in the moment and afraid to delve into where you really are in your heart in the long journey.

Those questions are not new but they do appear in different forms just under the surface of every person’s active daily schedule. In college they are the subject of many philosophy classes and for many remain unanswered only to be activated in fraternity drinking bouts, frantic frenetic social causes and professional pursuits. They really are the three questions that Jesus answers when He says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Ultimately everyone has to discover and answer this one thing, control, to whom does it belong, me or God?

Man was made to be tripolar, a positive dependency in which God created us in His image to be like Him in mind, heart and spirit, to be a reflection of Him, His love, His grace and His truth. That’s when you feel full, fulfilled. It was when Adam disobeyed God he became bipolar, his spirit died and sin became his spirit and ours. He found himself a lonely hitchhiker, a wanderer, a drifter looking for His origin. That’s when pride and fear became his spirits and he bought into the idea he could be in control of his life apart from God. As a result the world is a bipolar nightmare in every individual, pride replacing God’s Word as their authority and fear replacing the Holy Spirit for their motivation. They lost the balance of structure and individuality that made them human as God intended. Oh yes, did Henley sum up that condition when his pride and fear collaborated to atheize these words from his famous poem Invictus, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

What we have is a world in bipolar suspension, divided on every level, gender, socially, politically, internationally, relationally and spiritually. It is a maze of written and unwritten legal systems in every social grouping that thrive in an atmosphere of fear where pride dominates. The tribe, corporation, gang, team, community, nation, denomination, religion and ethnic identity are all attempts at self-regulation and interpersonal survival. What we have is the leader and the led, the king and the subject, the superior and the inferior, the strong and the weak.

Spiritually bipolar people are like themeless characters roaming around in search of a reason, a director, a script and an author---precisely the problem. It is the loss of the Creator’s Spirit that threw man out of balance. It’s like watching a sightless person without his walking stick and seeing-eye dog. People are blind to their real identity, their meaning, their purpose and their origin. What does it mean to be human, to be a man, to be a woman, to be married, to be a friend, brother and sister? And we long to be right when we finally decide, but are never sure what that means either. We long to be able to understand but to understand what? We long for relationships but fear the rejection if someone we want doesn’t respond.

The whole of man’s searching is spiritual hitchhiking. We were created for a relationship with God which meant dependency on Him to learn how to function relationally. Apart from God each human being is divided within. He needs structure and he needs spirit and the balance that makes them act as one. What makes Paul’s mission and ministry so important is the revelation and the insight he received from God, that Jesus is the answer to the mystery of the bipolar heart living in a bipolar world. He brings together the fragmented self, the spiritually divided heart and makes it one in Him.

What does a bipolar heart on the mend look like?
First, there is acceptance we are self-consciously alone. Before Jesus there is no one in your body but you. You think alone, you feel alone and you act alone. In Jesus you are never alone again. He in us and we in Him.
Second, there is a moral pressure from within. It’s the desire to think right, feel right and act right, each person’s deepest urge, need and inner demand. What we really want is to know that in every next moment no matter where we are or who we’re with, we are totally self-confident and anxiety free. This is the work of the Holy Spirit every next moment in our heart.
Third, we are always in need of fulfilling relationships with purpose. That is the Body of Christ, God’s family of brothers and sisters sharing, learning, witnessing in ministry to one another and reaching into the bipolar world to bring its victims home to their Creator. As disciples of Jesus we are no longer spiritual hitchhikers grifting, shifting and drifting.

“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen (Eph.3:14-21).”