Starting Monday, January 19th aught nine, and continuing till Sunday for as long as I can stay on a single subject, more or less.
Have you ever tried to get into a room that you were already in? How did that work out for you? It seems to me so prevalent that there is heard all this talk these days of us and all that is within us being, if not altogether evil, then at least base in comparison with the kingdom of God, but here is Jesus saying that within us, that is, inside of the boundaries that compose each of us as individuals...lies all that God is about, ad infinitum.
It sounds like we're talking about quantum something or other...physics, mechanics...I didn't study for that one this week, but the here and now of it is that nothing external can help me in the way that I need help in order to fulfill my potential, which is what I desire most to do in life. See, I don't want to speak for anyone else here, but I have discovered through experience that I need help. Now that I'm in the last year of my twenties, I'm thinking more and more about what it is my fruition in life is intended to look like, or rather, as I read once, what do I need to do on my part in order to ensure that the me who exists at 35, 40, 55, is the best possible outcome of who I could have become based on what I did with what I had to work with.
The beauty of it is, if I have the kingdom of God inside of me to work with, I have kind of a lot of resources going for me. If I look at it in terms of an obligation or a requirement that I have to fulfill, I automatically am bound up by fear and can't be of any use towards any furtherance of anything anyway, so I'm required to view the matter more like an opportunity. I don't know how normal all of this seems to anyone else, but I was raised in a world where God, if there is a God, which scientists were, of course, yet debating, many believing otherwise, is way up there somewhere, and we're way down here, and every once in a while, somewhere on earth, maybe He does something or maybe not; maybe we'll never know.
By 12 or 13 or so, I'd found myself having to side with the dissenting scientists, since it just seemed like too much fantastical grandeur, without any supporting evidence of any type, to be credible. Then I came suddenly to believe that there must really be a God, and that everything about Jesus must be true, I was just so certain that it must be so, but I had no real conviction, no absolute certainty...just this feeling in the middle of me that it had to be the truth. The circumstances surrounding this change were serendipitous and, as such, deserve some treatment, I think, SO...
HOW BEN CAME TO BELIEVE THAT BELIEVING IN GOD WAS SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY CAN DO AND NOT BE A FOUR STAR MORON:
I began talking to a girl in my 10th grade English class who I thought was the coolest person I'd met in a long time, and who I liked as a girl, too, which is, you know, nice, especially in high school, when you tend to be most critical of yourself and insecure and everything. So this girl believed in God and went to church with her foster mom which I learned one day after having it out with this chick about how it was stupid to believe in God and in turn receiving an open invitation to get picked up on Sundays, go hang out with her for like three hours every week, and have lunch somewhere.
There was nothing I would have rather been doing on Sundays, God knows, when I was 16 years old, than hanging out with a friend who and getting free food. It was a weekly event cool and fun enough not to have to be high for in order to enjoy, and I think that at that point in my life it was the only one that was that I knew about or had access to. Not like we didn't get high, don't get me wrong, I mean we hung out during the week and at lunch and everything, too, and eventually all the time after awhile, and we got high a LOT. I think maybe that's why I was even capable of being able to be willing to accept the possibility of there being a good and an evil, and a divine entity to have set such parameters in place; I was introduced to a God who loved me where I was at and saw me for who I really was, and not what I'd become because of bad living and poor choices, not who I was based on my track record in any respect.
This God wanted to be joined to me and free me from death and fill me full of life and joy and fulfill who I was meant to be, not frustrate, berate, humiliate and dehumanize me, which had been my only experience with people who were super Christian and stuff. He knew I was at a point where I was as fragmented and confused and broken and scared as I could be of reality, and wanted to tell me that His intentions were to build me up, and not to destroy me like my mental hell had with all the fruits of depression, rage, addiction, burning and mutilating myself out of some weird anger or something, existing in a reality construct based solely on a fear of rejection and terror at some all-paralyzing sense of loneliness that my entire consciousness existed in, without any way to communicate what I was experiencing in any kind of a helpful, alleviating way, and so remaining alone inside. He had a way worked out for me to be able to get help in order to change, and to get started in using my life for what it was intended, something of which I was weirdly certain at some point before anyone ever mentioned to me that it was so. I took the steps as they appeared in front of me, and things went miraculously well, until I got all finished with one step of the process, which was actually finishing the rehabilitation program I wound up living at. All of this time was spent cultivating the ability to believe in something that was real that was ordinarily outside the human sense of perception, and to interact with this something to a point where I was capable of believing that it was a distinct, real entity with Whom I was communicating. It's a pain using caps on all those words. They should have a "Christian" setting on the spellchecker options, so it would do that all for you, like it capitalizes the first word of each sentence, and how it capitalizes "I" and Christmas...I think it's silly that we're supposed to do that; they don't even do that in the Bible.
So, anyway, this whole time I had not gotten it that God had actually entered into covenant with me, a covenant stronger than anything, stronger than me, stronger than death. What I mean is, I had never been given to seriously consider, in all my spiritual incubation at this place I went to, that my spirit had undergone a fusion with the Spirit of God, Who this entity was, which made it so that Christ was in me...and this is the hope of glory, or the potential for the fulfillment of all that is good through me, to put it another way. I believed solidly in God and knew who He was enough to be healthy and growing, but fear still played a part in my thoughts, and not proper reverence or anything like that, I'm talking some bad fear of rejection which manifested through my thoughts as a paranoia about "missing it," or failing at some goal in life which will damn me after death, Jesus or no Jesus. So when this began to grow in me, fueled as it was by the mentor ship I'd been convinced that God would have for me, lest I "miss it," I grew more and more apart from any kind of realization that God had chosen me as a bride, with all the traditionally recognized sacredness of such a demonstration of love and affection, and I began to live more and more in a world where God had driven me from the wedding to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, some years prior to its incineration, and told me to listen to David or I would go to hell, and then left.
At this point, it seemed like believing in God had become much more a curse than it had ever been a blessing, but I couldn't forget what I'd experienced and known firsthand, even if I completely turned my thoughts away from God and tried to give credence to the arguments of people who thought, as I once had, that believing in God was stupid, I could never change what I had seen and known. I went through kind of a lot before I was able to completely accept that I wasn't going to be able to go any further if I stayed in the cult I had wound up in, and making a break from it all was like quitting a 6 year heroin/cocaine habit. I had to overcome impulse after impulse, disregard phone call after phone call from the leader of the cult and his go-to guy who had interpreted my leaving with my wife as merely a temper flare-up that needed to be dealt with through "discipline" (intimidation, manipulation), and didn't anticipate me actually being finished with them. Years later, in fact, I discovered that they had told all the other people in the group that I had been kicked out. For months afterward I looked at the world from a well-i-blew-it-and-now-I'm-just-waiting-to-go-to-hell standpoint, being literally, I now believe, incapable of anything else.
To what do I attribute my having been weak enough to get wrapped up in a cloned Christian farm overseen by a con man in the first place?
D-lysergic acid diathalamide 25. (Kids: don't do acid. )
The whole thing was based on systematically breaking down the belief systems of newly converted born again teenagers whose understanding was that God was with them, and rebuilding them with faith now placed in the understanding that God was with this one man first, and with us second, depending on whether or not we fully submitted to him without question.
I had done my fair share of LSD as a teenager, and one of the things that happens when you do that is you become more susceptible to third party suggestion. Some of the effects of this chemical linger in the system, and I personally come from the school of thought which holds it as a basic truth that every time you trip, you change in some way, certain psychological traumas having been experienced which will forever alter the perspective to some degree, in whatever fashion.
The way my brainwashing took place, a good year and a half after the last time I'd done it, was by being cornered into hundreds of sessions in which I, either alone or with any number of friends, would be assailed for some time, often hours, with this man's very forceful and deliberate rants detailing how things really were, which was, we were all given to understand, something we were going to need to do in order to actually make it to heaven, and that if we didn't learn it from him, chances were we'd wind up missing it and land in hell just like we'd never even tried. I just wonder how much my giving credence to such obviously disturbed sentiments can be attributed to a mind as chemically eaten as mine was (there was quite a bit more than just acid going through my system for a while prior to my getting sober).
This removed the kingdom of God from inside of me and placed it outside of me again, something to be attained through the methods prescribed by the ravings of a crazy con. This sounds insane to me now, but that's what it was in all actuality, and I just fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
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