The Spirit Within

"We all go a little mad sometimes," says Norman Bates in the film PSYCHO. The same could be said for us Christians.

For one, I'll never understand how simply being with other Christians can somehow internally irritate me. I mean, I guess I understand how "theologically" this happens but I still find it hard to swallow practically. It just doesn't make sense.

Why am I irritated by those I love the most so easily? On this note, I can empathetic with Oscar Wilde when he wrote, "I always want to know everything about my new friends and nothing about my old ones." But then, on the other hand, there are those few friends in which I still (day by day) deeply desire to know more. They are the ones (of course) that are far away and so perhaps if they all lived next door to me they would cease to be interesting anymore.

I don't know about that, but maybe.

Anyway you look at it, it's almost impossible to always figure out the spirit within. The one you always seem to question. The spirit that tells you to love yourself and be unhappy with yourself all before you go to bed at night. How can you discern which is right? Of course unhappiness with yourself in a "good guilt" kind of way is essential for the maturing Christian. But then again, I think of Brennan Manning and how he goes around preaching and preaching and preaching about how "self-hatred" is the biggest hurdle for the gospel to overcome. Not wars. Not genocide. Not gay marriage. Not abortion clinics being erected on every corner. No, the scariest moment for him is when he meets a Christian who doesn't really believe God loves him/her. And every day I keep living and living, I am constantly forgetting the idea that "God loves me" or rather, "God likes me." Part of this is because the enemy is trying to tell me I am unloveable and part of the reason is because I really am, in pure human terms, unloveable (by worldly standards at least). I will never measure up, so why do I try?

I try because I believe in love I guess. Because I believe that grace and mercy is better than judgment and criticism. I try because I want to believe that at the end of the day, the person that has loved the most has won rather than believing its the person with the most money in his/her pockets. I try because it hurts more to try to love than it does to not love at all, and in some sick way, I find that to be more fulfilling, more important, more eternal. Loving people is hard. Yes. And most of the time if I have the choice to talk to an old friend of my parents' or try and make new ones in a very short amount of time, I simply want to throw in the towel and say, "the hell with it." But one day out of the month, a light comes on. A click finally clicks. And the spirit within is finally awakened from its dead, cold, unlove-filled sleep.

And then my eyes are open.