Have you ever caught your thoughts lying to you? As if you are somehow secretly gaslighting yourself?
If you try hard enough, you’ll catch your thoughts lying to you. Maybe it’s self preservation. Maybe it’s denial. What else could it be?
I find it increasingly difficult to think of myself as “self-aware”. What a joke. The more accurate label is “selectively self-aware.”
There are levels of realization and truth that I’m willing to handle. I’m willing to call myself out on types of hypocrisy. But go a level deeper. There’s still a hypocrisy I haven’t addressed. There’s still a false belief comforting and propping up the world I think I live in.
How do I know? Because I live with a guilty conscience. Call it my church upbringing. Call it my questionable Christian worldview. But call it “feeling guilty”. Because I do.
Somehow I adopted a belief that God has a perfect will, like a script He wrote dictating every minute of my life from before I was born until I die. And each day that I don’t seek Him and follow His script, I am living outside of His will.
Following the crumbs back to the source
Where did that really come from, and why would I cling to such a horrific belief? Well, it has to do with the charismatic Christian belief that God speaks to His children. And that we have an opportunity (obligation) to wait on Him and listen for it. But if we rush out and do whatever seems like a good idea, we’ll never know what God would have sent us to do or who He would have sent us to talk to.
This comes from years of hearing testimonies of “divine appointments”. Surely some of you know what I’m talking about. These guest speakers, youth workers, and elders of the church stand on the stage and tell the audience about their latest divine appointment where the Holy Spirit prompted them to turn left at a stoplight they normally turn right at, or to enter a storefront they were going to walk past, or to ask a question to the person in the Walmart parking lot, and it turns out that God had a special revelatory word or action planned for that person.
After so many testimonies, I was left wondering whether God was patiently waiting to guide to the people I should speak to, except I wasn’t stopping to ask or listen.
A few times I did. A few times I followed through. Once or twice I felt exceedingly stupid when I didn’t have a response to the person’s reaction.
One time I walked into a 7-11 and felt led to tell the man behind the counter that Jesus loves him. So I walked up to him and told him. He looked back at me, seriously, and asked, “How do you know?”
Flustered and unprepared, I blurted out, “I just know!” Needless to say, he was not won over by my eloquent defense or preparation.
Then there have been moments I was just not willing to consider doing anything. I remember driving past a gas station and seeing a teenage boy sitting on the curb beside the building. I felt a prompting to go talk to him. But I didn’t want to. Why? I don’t remember. But probably I just didn’t want to feel embarrassed by approaching a stranger.
There are other times I have stopped and offered to give someone a ride home. I drove an older woman across multiple state lines once. She’d been standing on the side of the road with a suitcase and a giant bible in her arms – clearly to communicate that she wasn’t a bad person. I was driving across multiple states anyway, so I offered to give her a ride part of the way – she was headed further than I was. And THEN we got stuck in traffic that turned what should have been a 3-4 hour drive into a 10 hour drive. THAT was awkward.
I don’t go anywhere most days. I’m pretty stationary. I have 2-3 days max per week when I get out of the house and do stuff. And when I leave the house, I have a plan and a time limit. Get things done and get home back to work. There are no real casual periods where I’m just hanging around, listening for the Lord to speak. But if I don’t listen when I run my errands, am I missing His voice? And if I miss His voice, am I living outside of His will?
It turns out that feeling guilty and blacklisted has a few warped and twisted benefits. For one, I have an explanation for why He hasn’t answered my prayers.
Rather than challenge my faith to explain some other reason why God has not done what I’ve asked Him to do, I can save time and energy by assuming that He’s unhappy with me. He’s not pleased. After all, how long has it been since the Holy Spirit prompted me to do something? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? And if so, then He must be unhappy with me. Maybe He’s so frustrated with me that He stopped trying. And if He stopped trying, then in some way, aren’t I off the hook from asking?
As I said, I’m really not all that self-aware.
