Trouble

Greetings one and all,

I've spent my life trying to prove that Jesus was a liar. I want him to be a liar, not on everything of course, I’m good with 99.999999% of his words (at least so far this morning) but when he says ‘in this world you will have tribulation,’ well, THAT’s where I want to prove him to be a liar.

I have this fantasy where there is this place in this life on this planet when trouble slips back into the darkness and leaves me alone. When I was in high school I thought that place was college. When I was single I thought that place was marriage. When I was in Illinois I thought that place was any of the other 49 states. When I was young I thought it would be when I was old. Now I am out of college, married for the second time, living in Tennessee and old. Why is trouble still staring me in the face?

I really, really want Jesus to be a liar these days. But as Ray LaMontagne sings on the insurance commercial with the worried dog: ‘Trouble Been doggin' my soul since the day I was born. Worry Just will not seem to leave my mind alone…Trouble Feels like every time I get back on my feet she come around and knock me down again. Worry Sometimes I swear it feels like this worry is my only friend.’

Maybe I don’t want Jesus to be a liar, maybe I just want to rewrite what he said to suit my own selfish ends. I mean, everybody’s doing it these days why can’t I? So let’s reinterpret ‘I have overcome the world’ to mean I will banish aggravation and idiots from your life. It kind of rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? In this world you will have tribulation but I have banished aggravation and idiots from your life.

That does sound good until it is actually fulfilled in my presence and I realize that I, me, wonderful me have now been banished from my own life.

You see things out there somewhere have NEVER been my problem. It is inside me where my trouble resides. Here I am at this point in my life still trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up and realizing just how far I have to go to get there.

The way it looks now I may need two or three lifetimes just to grow up. Because, there is this huge reservoir of trouble still residing in my heart even though I have been in a process of exterminating it for 51 years. When I was young the pile of…sh...trouble in my heart didn't look all that big. Take care of these couple of things and life will be smooth sailing. But those couple of things turned out to be the part of the iceberg that was above the water. Every time I chip those things off it allows the things below to push above the surface. I need Jacque Cousteau to dive down under the surface and tell me how big this thing is but he’d probably need one of those small mini-subs to get down deep enough and I can’t afford that these days. Besides, I think he’s dead anyway.

So now I am stuck between the horns of a dilemma because if one little statement of Jesus isn’t a lie and I can’t reinterpret it to my advantage then the whole word of God needs to be a lie because from Genesis three on (ok the first two chapters can be true) the underlying presupposition about the human race is this: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked…

I long for the days of my youth when I believed all those lying preachers who told me I would not be on the planet past the age of 25. I long to believe the gutters (those who cut open and take the insides out not water removal systems) of truth when they say it’s all good, we’re all good; there is no trouble in our hearts. I long to keep holding on to lies but it is the truth that will set me free – not from trouble but from me. I am my own worst enemy. I am all the trouble that I want to escape from. I want to get away from me.

Maybe I could be you for a couple of days.

Brad