Reading the Unread

There's something strange and hard to describe going on in my mind when I go back and read posts that I have written. I have been trying to analyze the different feelings and symptoms that I can capture but I'm not sure that is all there is going on inside.

When I read them I often get the strong feeling that I don't recognize or remember those thoughts while at the same time it is familiar enough that part of me remembers enough of it to recognize that I was the one who wrote them. Actually I seldom go back and read them, which is a whole other set of emotions going on inside me. Again, part of me is almost astonished at what I am reading and I wonder why I don't read them more because they seem so applicable to practical life. And yet another part of me recoils at even thinking that way because is smacks so much of pride and arrogance which is one of the main reasons I find it difficult to go back and read them – it makes me feel guilty and accused for my false pride.

On the other hand, my pride seems more like a temptation than a reality because I am quite certain that many of the things I have written could not possibly have come from my own wisdom because I simply don't have that kind of capacity, so it must simply be some sort of expression of a little bit of God's thinking that He shares with me. But to think that also invokes my anti-pride sentinel which again sets off alarms about making claims that God is speaking through me and how arrogant and dangerous that must be.

Did I say this is all very complicated in my emotions and thinking? If you are confused by now I must be expressing myself somewhat accurately. Even putting this all down in writing seems a bit arrogant and presumptuous. But since it won't leave me alone and I promised one of my readers that I was going to post on this topic soon, I feel obliged to bare this part of my soul as well. I'm not sure that expressing this in the open will resolve these confusions or simply complicate them but here they are for whatever comes of them. If nothing else, I suspect that maybe I am not the only one struggling with these conflicting inner voices. I suppose that this is simply another attempt at being more open and honest about who I am and how I feel even if it is not terribly coherent or profound or tidy.

So, now that I have quickly covered the major items in this issue, let me start over at the beginning and maybe it will help clear my mind a little more. Part of me desires to go back and read many of the things that I have written simply for the refreshing of my mind of what I believe God has shared with me. I need reminding of many of these things and am often quite surprised that I have so quickly forgotten much of what I find there even in very recent posts. Of course there is the added advantage of finding all of the grammatical errors that need to be corrected. Unfortunately I very seldom edit anything I write except what I do on the fly. I seldom even reread it when I am finished and simply post it as is which sometimes can be confusing and not particularly accurate as to what I had in mind. This is partly due to lack of time and partly to the inspiration of the moment.

I find that I need to be somewhat inspired in some way to be able to write effectively. I need to have the emotions of the thoughts somewhere near the surface if not overflowing to be able to express myself more accurately. Even when I am writing about things I see emerging from immersion in the Word I need to at least have an initial insight as a catalyst to get me started. As I have written previously about this area, I usually find that the very act of writing seems to open up a channel in my mind and the thoughts and connections begin to flow quickly and I generally find myself just following them wherever they lead me without knowing where I may end up until I get there.

But this is not about writing but about reading it later. Maybe another reason I feel reticent to reread some of the things that are recorded is that I may feel guilty that I have forgotten so quickly things that seem so obviously associated with me since I am the one that wrote them. That may seem a little silly but that is how I feel. When I read these things I realize that anyone else who may have read them will assume that these thoughts define how I feel and believe all the time. That is where the internal confusion comes in. Since I can't remember many of these things immediately or maybe even at all, I am afraid that people will think I am two-faced or maybe even disingenuous. I secretly fear that someday someone will come up to me and start questioning me about things I have written and then become very disillusioned or even upset with me and judge me because I will not be able to recall or immediately connect with ideas that I have previously expressed. I suppose this is flushing out my fears of what people think about me and my lifelong issue of image management. Maybe people will think that I am not honest. That has been a hot-button issue for me most of my life for whatever reason.

Some time ago I was going through some old papers in my garage and came upon a paper written many years ago. As I read through it I became literally sick to my stomach and wondered who could have written such an attack on the things I feel so strongly about. Very slowly I began to sense that indeed it must have been myself that wrote this so many years ago when I was nearly diametrically opposite in many of my beliefs to what I am now. I was so sick about what I was reading that I threw the paper away so no one else would find it and become discouraged.

That brings up another concern that has lodged in my mind over the years. I have touched on this as well in previous posts. If I write about things that are still in incubation in my life and later I become quite different in my views I feel vulnerable having my previous ideas still available to be used “against” me in a way. I suppose this is a very common fear in many who write in this way, but I find them a part of my thoughts lurking in the shadows.

Some have confronted me about writing my thoughts and posting them on the web asserting that I am avoiding direct dialog with others in person by doing this. I will have to agree in that it does feel much safer to write very vulnerable things about my feelings and place them where there is very little chance of most people who know me ever reading them and talking to me about them. Not that I don't want to interact on this level with people. In fact, the very reason I have been doing this over the past few months is to jump start myself into being more open and honest and vulnerable in hopes that I could begin connecting to people on a deeper level. How that is going to happen through this medium I am not completely sure, but at least it is a beginning for me and so far I have had a few very satisfying conversations with one or two people as a result of their reading my blog. I have also met a few others who seem to have similar interests that I would likely never have met if not for this medium which have encouraged me at times.

I guess this is a step up from the many years that I simply wrote out my feelings in a notebook or on a pad when I could not contain them any longer and then simply slid them under my chair or hid them in a drawer never to be seen or read again. Many of those apparently have been lost over the years and in the various moves we have made and I sometimes wish I could go back and find them just to reacquaint myself with where I have come from.

I have been struggling with this post for a number of days now trying to squeeze out what is inside. After I finished my last attempt last night and went to bed it was like something opened up another cavity in my mind about this, something like an unexplored cave with important aspects I had not yet been able to uncover. The question came to my mind, “Who do you think these things you have written were intended for – you or other people 'out there'?”

Well, the conspicuous answer would not be others. If all these things were intended for others then I have been doing a great amount of avoidance and have an enormous ego thinking that I am the selected messenger for everyone else's edification. NOT! The almost exclusive reason I have written any of these things is to capture them externally so that I would not lose what I felt were important lessons and insights that God has entrusted to me for my own growth, nourishment and discipline. Any other benefits to anyone else looking in were strictly peripheral or incidental. Yes, sharing what has been going on inside my head offers the opportunity for others to connect with me at a deeper level which would be a wonderful blessing for me, but the thoughts and insights were not intended to instruct others, though many times I have to remind myself of that when I am tempted to apply convicting passages to others before myself.

Then the next impression exploded in my mind and I wondered why I had not thought of it much sooner in my attempt to unpack this subject. Maybe, it just might be in God's plan for me to use others who are interested enough to “read my mind” in my shared musings and have a sense of what is going on in my soul and watching my heart grow; just maybe, from their perspective and objectivity, God might use them at important times to remind me of who I really am when I forget myself.

One reason that I have been trying to gather together the various things I have been learning and experiencing is to discover my true identity. Since my mind is not sharp enough to recall all of these things in one nice big picture (I have a difficult time remembering what I wrote just yesterday) maybe God will use others who have more capacity and objectivity to see patterns and aspects about my identity that I cannot perceive from my viewpoint. Maybe God intends for my self-exposing communications to be a means of linking me into closer community relationships with others. And isn't that the real definition of what it means to live in true community?

By what I have been learning about the subject of living in community recently, this kind of living involves being much more open, honest, accepting and interdependent emotionally as well as physically and spiritually. It is an environment ideally where people care about each other and challenge each other in a spirit of kindness and compassion to grow, to face their fears in a safe circle of friends standing guard to protect their heart, and to give them extra capacity in times when they are overwhelmed and cannot see reality. It is an environment where genuine friends are always nearby to remind one of their true identity and affirm them in their growth and their gifts. These are friends to help expose the fact that much of what we have believed about ourselves is really based on our false identity displayed through our mistakes, our failures and our triggers. They remind us that these things do not define who we really are, that our externals do not often reflect the true heart that God implanted in us and designed for us to live from. That, to me, is what I have been learning (theoretically) about the meaning of community.

I have been hearing a lot of interested talk about community lately, but I have been also puzzled that many who eagerly discourse on this idea seem to often live in relative isolation, withdrawing into their private families to process their problems and try to hide their issues from others. I am certain there are plenty of very strong and valid arguments in favor of these actions, but in my mind it still seems to fly in the face of much of what they are claiming and promoting about community. So I still continue to keep my eyes open and my heart cautiously keeps peering around the corner to see if I might stumble onto a real demonstration of community that would be safe to participate in. I firmly believe that God fully intends for us to live much more openly and connectedly than most of us do now.

So – maybe I should go back and reread what I have written to remind myself of what God has been doing in my past and has been sharing with my heart. Maybe I should face my trepidations and see if they are valid or are just stumblingblocks that the enemy is trying to use to thwart me from growing more. Of course that takes time that has to be prioritized and removed from other activities. Maybe I have to learn to receive more graciously the reminders from others of who I really am as they see me through the eyes of heaven in ways I have difficulty seeing myself. That too, raises a certain amount of trepidation, but also anticipation as well. Maybe God is working at the grass roots level, even with the internet, to form and shape His family community through these communications. Maybe....