Contents:
-Parable of the Rope-
-Determination Analysis-
•Prologue• •Fire & Ice• •January Begins• •Regression• •Conclusion@Hand•
There is a rope. It is a very long rope; in fact, no one has ever been known to reach the very top of this rope that seems to rise forever, affixed to some anchor at its supposed top. There is a tale about this rope, and the tale says that all of your dreams and wishes will be fulfilled by the miraculous treasure found only at the top of this rope. The tale also speaks of one person who indeed reached the top, many years ago, and that he slid back down to tell everyone about the amazing wonder of this treasure.
One man decided to climb the rope. He recognised that it was very long, so before he started, he packed many supplies to hoist up along with him on the trip. As he made his way up, however, he began to notice that all the things he was carrying made the climb that much more difficult.
Another man sought to climb the rope. He climbed and climbed and climbed until he became frustrated with the monotony and labour of always going straight up. At one point along the rope, this man thought to himself, "Perhaps if I start swinging the rope from side to side, I will be able to swing hard enough to make a loop in the rope & rise up faster, without having to climb as much.” So, the man began to swing back and forth for a long time, but despite his efforts, he could never get the long, heavy rope to swing around enough to make a loop.
The third man was a thinker. He logically assumed that if there indeed was an anchor at the other side of the rope, he could pull on the rope instead of wasting his time and energy climbing it. He sat down and made many calculations, figuring out how best to pull the rope and at what angle in order to cause the rope & the treasure at the top to come falling down to him. After he had created his plan, he put it to task and he began tugging the rope with all his might. Not being able to budge it at all, he then began to build a ramp. As soon as the ramp was built, he rolled a heavy weight to the top & tied it to the rope. He pushed the weight off the ramp with triumphant expectation, but the rope did not give. Plan C was to make a machine that would pull the rope with ever-increasing force until the long cord finally gave way. However, even this machine failed at pulling the treasure any closer to the man.
The fourth man eagerly desired this treasure as well. He desired it very much, but as he watched the previous three, he became very discouraged. "What shall I do?" he asked himself, "I have seen these previous three try to get this treasure, but with no success! I also desire the treasure very much, but in light of these others, the rope seems utterly unclimbable." He sat and thought for a long while about the problem until coming to a solution. "Aha!” He said, "I cannot change the difficulty of the climb, nor can I change the greatness of the supposed treasure at the top, but I can change my desire for it. If I just make myself so miserable and lacking in life here on the bottom, this will make me want to climb the rope & I will get to the top easily!" So the man, instead of climbing, went around the world doing all sorts of foolish activities and wasting the things he already had in order to develop a greater need for the treasure. As the years passed, his desire for the treasure did increase, but the climb always seemed to get harder and harder.
There was also a fifth man. He was deathly afraid of heights, but hearing the story about the one man who had reached the top filled him with hope that the climb was at least possible. He resolved to climb the rope, and climb he did. Every once in a while, the man looked down, and he became exceedingly frightened. He couldn't handle the height at which he was, so he slowly slid down the rope a little, looking up, so as to avoid the petrifying sight below him. As soon as he had slid down a little, however, the man was filled with despair, for he realised that in sliding down the rope, he had that much more rope to climb again—not only this, but also every slide down made his hands a little more raw from rope burn. After this realisation, the man stopped sliding and began to climb the rope again, only to slide back down a little further up. He was caught between his fear of heights and his desire for the treasure at the top of the seemingly endless rope. His desire, however, outmatched his fear, for little by little, the man was actually making his way up the rope. Rumour has it that this very man is still somewhere up in the sky climbing that rope, and every once in a while, people who look up from the bottom can just barely make out a tiny figure very high up. These sightings have become less and less recently, they say, as the man continues to climb up & slide down a little only to start climbing the rope again, determined to reach the treasure at the very top.
Determination Analysis
It has been a little over a month since 2005 has begun, and if you have been an avid reader of the Lucid Elusion chronicles, you will note that I had made a firm resolution to seek God Most High with more fervour that I have in the resent past. This portion of the post will recap my take on this the first month of these efforts.
I am blessed. The Lord watches over me more than I can fully appreciate, for at the beginning of the New Year, my mind was not really on the whole concept of pursuing Christ with all my mind, strength, heart and soul. In fact, I was feeling quite discouraged with the whole "God" thing at the end of December, especially due to the fallout of Christmas, where my family—true to form—filled our mutual conversation with the constant reminders that I am useless, that my efforts will amount to nothing, that I am wasting my time & my life in the pursuits that I have chosen. The notion of me being a stupid, failure-bound, underachieving fool was readily (and potently) reinforced as we were about to sit down for the Christmas dinner. A couple of days later—these thoughts and perceptions predominantly salient in my consciousness—I left to meet with several peers in the
This weeklong interaction had caught me a bit off-guard, for I was with a similar congregation of individuals the year before at the same location. My previous experience had been filled with a social atmosphere of relative ambivalence & low interaction. This year, however, I was immediately met with much more esteem, interaction & inclusion—something I was not expecting at all. It had ramifications, to be sure, and my family Christmas mentality began to melt away. Not only this but one of the evenings at this week-long adventure pushed me head-long into a fervent pursuit of deepening my relationship with the Living God.
The evening of Wednesday, the 29th of December 2004 there was a sauna. It was the third night into this week of camp and it was the first chance I had to hop into the small, wooden shack for excessive heat. We began at around 10:00pm, stoking the fire and sweating every drop of water out of our pores. The night progressed and the wheat was separated from the chaff, for some folk could no longer take the heat. As the retirees increased, they were somewhat replaced by new recruits, eager to sear their flesh in the >80°C wet-heat. After a while, the population stabilised to a small six individuals: 3 guys from the beginning, another late-comer, a girl who had meant to just stop in and ask a few of us about sleeping in the newly-constructed snow shelters, and a guy who had just intended to say goodnight to us all. We started singing songs of worship & praise in the dark, humid and hot wooden crucible. The wood reserves for the stove began to get low as time progressed, and as time progressed, the worship began to shift slowly to a time of prayer. Praying began. It got intense. Hours passed. We started to intermix prayer with worship again. More time passed, and as it did, we barely noticed the temperature in the room drop to barely above zero as the sun outside began to peer through the windows like a curious toddler, wondering at the handful of sweat-encrusted people who inadvertently forsook sleep & security to come before their God as one unified whole—hiding nothing from any of the others in a perfect humility and oneness.
That night was one of the first times that I had ever experienced a form of Christian community that I believe is expected of the Church: open, accepting love and relation—no masks, no walls, no defence mechanisms. It was glorious. We worshipped together in our brokenness & inadequacy. It was a group of Christians in which I did not feel alone.
Barriers down, we met at the end of the week again, by what seemed like chance, and we resolved to keep each other in prayer & in community to the best of our abilities.
So, January Begins: Progression
I now began the year with something that I never felt I've had (or knew of) before. I was weird to have a handful of people who were around to encourage me to keep on keeping on, to go for God regardless of the cost, to seek Him first in all things. And this I have tried to do. I have reinstated one night of the week to solely commune with the Lord; I have picked up bi-weekly corporate prayer again; I have kept reading my Bible. Fridays are now spent meeting with those individuals from the sauna meeting who live in town to worship and pray (you are invited to come, by the way. E-mail me for more details). I have even begun to listen to the Voice of the Lord again, which is something I have difficulty doing or even comprehending.
At the beginning of the school term, I submitted my undergraduate program for review by the Faculty of Arts to check my graduation requirements & to determine my eligibility for entering into an honours psychology program. The results would not come back to me for two weeks, and in the middle of that, duration, we had a meeting on Friday. At that meeting, I asked the people present to pray for me—especially for direction and for what I should do with my life. As they were in the middle of praying, the Lord spoke to me in the most undeniable way He has ever done before. He told me to pursue church leadership. My heart leapt for joy, for I was immediately given an answer to a request from the Lord. It was amazing. It wasn't something that I was overly expecting, since I don't really feel very adequate to pursue church leadership, but it was an answer nonetheless. Since then, when I have told people this, many have told me that I would do well in this capacity—something that seemed a little odd to me and still kind of does, for my feeling of inadequacy is still very much present in my head.
Not being one to follow what some may classify as whimsical fancies, I asked the Lord to confirm this to me in a more concrete way. 6 days later, when I received my program check back, I was informed that it was impossible for me to begin an honours psychology program. Although I met all the main requirements, I had two very strong obstacles: 1.) my course load the previous term hadn't been 5 classes, so if I wanted to apply, I'd be forced to wait until the end of the following year—after two full terms of 5-class course load. 2.) I had too many credits in my academic career to "transfer" into this other college of the faculty. Maximum allowable transfer credits equals 60. I currently have 99. Were I to start an honours psychology degree program, I'd have to take 10 courses next year, equal to 30 credits, I would have to forfeit 70 academic credits, and spend 2 more years trying to find a way to take the courses I already completed in order to meet the honours psychology requirements. In a phrase, it would be impossible. The Lord closed that door, locked it with 85 different locks and encased it in 36 tonnes of blast-proof concrete. My calling had been confirmed.
And January Ends: Regression(?)
As much as the previous section seems out of this world & exciting, it has an unfortunate flipside. It scares the crap out of me. I feel quite at a loss with what to do & how to proceed—knowing that going up is the way to go, but being paralysed by a terrible fear of heights of my own. Listening to the Voice of God is exhausting for me on many levels, one of those being my persistent unsurety in my ability to discern God from myself and from other non-benevolent spirits. School & its troubles are sneaking up on me, and they desperately try to seize all of my God-apportioned time. My desire to spend time alone with God falters with my distractions; my time reading the Bible has been shrivelling up to almost nothing. Worry & anxiety begin to replace joy & confidence. Frustration subsumes discernment. My time gets eaten up by busyness again, and I feel myself becoming everso much off-target. I need to change this swinging pattern. I need to stop sliding down the long rope. I need to remember that it is not by my strength that this rope can be climbed: in my ability alone, I'd freeze out of fear six inches from the shortest blade of grass. The strength and the hope that only Christ can give needs to support and sustain me. But accepting this is hard, especially if—like me—one has an anxious-avoidant style of attachment: I tend to push away those things which desire to draw near to me, out of fear of abandonment as demonstrated to me from historical interaction (See Ainsworth's Attachment theory.).
I struggle. Pursuing Christ is hard. It's the hardest thing that I have ever done, especially since my natural tendencies are towards self-sufficiency and towards isolationary self-preservation. However, pursuing a relationship with Christ necessarily requires the abdication of self—both in its sufficiency and in its preservation.
My hands are raw from rope burn, but I cannot assent to my desires of giving up—my desire for Christ is too great. I will press on. I need to press on. That which I value can only be reached if I pursue it with all my heart—holding nothing back. The choice is hard, but the choice is necessary, and I make my choice with immutable resolve: I will climb. Though I am prone to slide down a little, I will nonetheless climb.
Trust me: it's worth it. So, what are you waiting for? Grab that rope.
A wee factlet for today:
If you only eat one small meal all day 6 hours before starting your 90-min. bodybuilding workout, don't expect to finish it.
Take this psychometric quiz to find out your attachment style & let me know what you find.
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