Why Campus Ministry? :: PC Walker.

ragamuffinwrites.blogspot.com

and “follow” off to the right, or you can rss or bookmark it.

thank you for reading

I have reached a time when there are rarely any views of my posts at wordpress, and it even fewer interactions with those who are reading. I am also copying and reposting each blog at my blogspot and xanga where I am beginning to see more interaction.

Even though it pains me to even consider this, could my relationship with wordpress be nearing an end?

What do you say?

“I don’t feel anything anymore. Does that make sense?”

“More than you know!”

“All the stuff I do, or what people react to is not something I even care about anymore.”

The truth is we all do this in one way or another. We numb things so we do not have to feel them. We either fight or fly. Therefore some who get angry because if they are angry or fighting, they don’t have to feel pain. They’ve numbed it.

There are others of us who can block it from our hearts and minds. We can literally pretend it does not exist. Both are equally numb.

I am the latter. My friend: the former. Both numb the pain so we do not have to feel pain. The problem is that both hurt those who are closest to us.

One hurts people with his anger. The other hurts people with his lacking emotional presence. When we numb in either way, we hurt those around us.

“Yeah, and I just keep people at a distance.”

Of course! If they get close, they may hurt you, and if they do, you will try to numb the pain of that hurt by blowing up. Then that hurts them, and you don’t WANT to hurt them. So it makes sense to keep them at a distance so it never comes to that.

Bruce Banner escapes to a remote area in order to keep himself away from people who may hurt him and enflame his anger. It is simply safer that way. He does not wish to hurt anyone, but he knows what is capable of becoming. So he isolates and distances himself from people…from the possibility of love and relationship.

With relationship comes the possibility of hurt.

But the great story behind the badass special effects is watching Bruce Banner learn to love again; watching him learn to control the anger in order to feel other things as opposed to numbing and isolating.

Each week brings a new topic or characteristic for me to enter into. Last week I fell behind. I admittedly got lazy and failed to come to scripture in order to see what God may have had for me to see and learn. I further admit it may have had more to do with the topic of the week: humility.

My head and my heart seemingly did not want to read about, learn about, much less be challenged to humility.

So, stubbornly, since I had already fallen behind on the week, I just flew through the remainder of last week’s readings so I could just move on to this week’s topic: obedience.

I will just let you rest in the humor of that little jest of God’s on my behalf.

* quote by Susan Annette Mutto

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The prayer was formed by the early Desert Fathers, and it eventually became a classic and common form of prayer. You see a similar statement in Luke 18:35-43 with the blind beggar, and you commonly see historic uses of it in rhythm with your breathing. (Inhale “Lord Jesus Christ….Exhale “have mercy on me…”)

I have been reading and praying the Jesus Prayer this week with refreshing realizations. In one simple prayer, you profess adoration and attrition. You profess the glory of God and the sinfulness of man. It is penitential while also being joyful and confident. It is fundamentally Christilogical.

It is simple enough to begin as we realize the most common block to prayer is the act of simply beginning. The prayer is discursive: it does not move from one thought to another. Yet, some have said, it sums up the whole Gospel.

It professes the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the reality of the Incarnation by addressing Jesus. It is a profession of what Jesus is; Son of God, which opens a profession of the Trinity (SON to the FATHER; something we’d only believe with the help of the SPIRIT).

It also professes and confesses our dire need for mercy and grace, which theologians stuffily refer to as “depravity”. The prayer leads our thoughts to the life of Christ while facing us with the story of our helplessness. It is a petition of a poor, humble, and recognizably sinful soul. It is a CRY for mercy.

In most cases, it is intended to be repeated frequently throughout the day to help accomplish what Paul challenged us to do; PRAY CONSTANTLY (1 Thess. 5:17). When repeated frequently, it can lead to a real life change. It reorders our priorities.

It can be practiced and prayed anywhere at any moment. It does not have to be vocalized, and at different times, can find its deeps soul-connection in the silent meeting of the heart. C.S. Lewis wrote, “I still think the prayer without words is the best–if one can really achieve it.”

I have found that to be quite true of the Jesus Prayer. I may not find my soul to meet in that silent prayer each day at all times. It would be the Stoic Error of “thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.” But I continue to remember the Jesus Prayer this week. I intend to write it out, to vocalize it, and to silently drive my soul to pray it as constantly as I can muster.

LORD JESUS CHRIST, SON OF GOD, HAVE MERCY ON ME, A SINNER

He makes me what he teaches me to be.

My sense of not being able to fulfill the Beatitudes and the life Jesus teaches me to live is exactly the poverty needed of me.

I really liked seeing Bradley Hathaway do what he does as a traveling poet. I would mention him to my brother a few winters ago and my brother acted unimpressed and nearly cynical at Bradley Hathaway’s art. I listened to my brother rant for a short time before I said, “Wait! Do you not like Bradley Hathaway because he’s doing something you could have done, but he thought of it before you?”

He thought for a second and humbly surrendered, “Yeah….I think that may be it.”

Unless a speaker or writer really says something to make me be impressed or think differently than I had before I heard them, I am generally dismissive of them as a speaker and author. Now granted, I HAVE heard them speak somewhere before a group I was a member of. I HAVE purchased their book that at least they wrote and published. Two things I have not pursued or gone after! But something in me is dismissive and unimpressed.

This thing within is jealousy. Jealousy is basically a part of you that is convinced there can only be one of something, and you are not that one.

The problem lies in that most things can have more than one of them. It is possible for there to be more than one artist within whatever artistry you pursue. But that part of you that gets FRUSTRATED when someone else accomplishes something you know you can do is jealousy.

Jealousy is the belief that there is only room for one.

As I reflected on that today, I get frustrated with the jealousy within me because it has debilitated me from moving toward the things I know I can do.

But the other reality that struck me is that I serve a jealous God. We fight the jealousy within ourselves because WE should not be a jealous people. There is room for other artists, other friends, other…

But we know, as Christians, there is no room for other gods. We serve a jealous God, and that means we serve a God who believes and authoritatively states that there is only room for one of himself. There is only room for one master (because you cannot serve more than one). There is only room for one God (we cannot simply “coexist” with our many gods…though we can coexist as people). There is room for other people and all the diversity they bring, but there is room for only one God, and our God realizes that.

Our God is a jealous God.

- Thomas Howard