What is My Source of Life?

Every person, no matter how sweet, nice and loving, has the inward seeds of selfishness and death. But they also have the evidences of life as demonstrated in their compassion and caring for others. So they appear to a greater or lesser extent to be a source of life to others who are thirsting for life themselves. But they are only second-hand sources of life no matter how wonderful, thrilling or satisfying their presence is.

In our desire to bring more life into our souls and bodies we attempt to form relationships – intimacy at some degree – with others who attract us by the evidence of life we see in them that we crave to experience for ourselves. The most obvious examples of this is in our attractions to physical beauty in all its various forms. Body language in gestures, mannerisms, voice tone and facial messages are closely related. We see these in varying ways as communications of life that we desire to share and assimilate.

Pleasure is an aspect of receiving life that is high in our priority. Pleasure means different things to different people and is sometimes opposite, but it is always a craving for life in some way. Often however, our lust for pleasure imparts some measure of death to others in our attempts to extract life from them for ourselves. We are operating on the false assumption, though usually subconsciously, that to add life to ourselves we must subtract it from others. Or, conversely, to impart life to others is to subtract it from ourselves.

These basic assumptions and cravings underlie most of the interactions between people in this world both individually and collectively. It is some of the essence of selfishness and is what we all inherit from Adam. When Jesus stated that we must hate our family members in contrast to loving Him to be enabled to be a disciple in His kingdom (see Luke 14:26), He was trying to draw sharp attention to this issue of where we try to get life from. We are so naturally and almost exclusively dependent on drawing life for ourselves from those around us that we can't see the ultimate danger in our dependence on those sources. We are only working with second-hand life which is all that any of us possess no matter how alive and attractive it appears. And in extracting life for ourselves from those around us it is further reduced in its satisfaction content.

So we increase our frenzied clamor to get more and more from others and from possessions, or we sink into despair and depression and surrender to the death-inducing effects of others extracting life from us.

Theologically we say that God is the only source of life. But what we really believe is demonstrated by how we live, particularly in our “free time”. What we do for entertainment to receive relief and pleasure is the clearest indicator of what we really believe can give us life and satisfaction, even if we deny it verbally. Those who insist they don't use entertainment to satisfy themselves usually look to work or other achievement oriented activity to create a sense of self-value and identity.

Our need to receive life revolves around our need to feel valuable and our perspective on our identity. Our perceived identity is usually the composite and accumulation of all of our previous preferences of how we have tried to get life for ourselves in the past. Our identity also is perceived by what others think of us and how they have treated us, strongly affecting the way we view and value ourselves.

But most of these factors that have such overwhelming influence on shaping our perceived identity are not necessarily factors at all in identifying or revealing our true identity. Only in true reality which is rooted outside the artificial, fake environment of this world, can our true identity be found by communication with the original Designer of our heart and soul. Our real identity is not even a compromise between the two realities. Our real identity and value is solidly rooted outside the distorting atmosphere of the complex illusions created by the relationships and messages around us.

All our relationships other than with the real God are sources of second-hand life mingled with seeds of death. We are all under the drugging influence of seeds hidden in the fruit of the Tree of Death, the so-called good and evil fruit that our parents indulged in from the Garden of Eden. The only antidote is accepting God's redemption through Jesus and reestablishing our connection to the Tree of Life. There is only one source of life that does not contain poisonous seeds of death as all the other sources do. If we reject that source in preference for other sources we will eventually succumb to the death-producing effects of the hidden poison that we ingest. No matter how intense our pleasure or perceived satisfaction we receive from our human sources, we are still receiving hidden sources of death if we trust them to be our vital source of life.

Her Stuff, My Stuff

Because her stuff resonates with my stuff, my desire and even ability to struggle to see her real heart is often blocked. Her anger masks the underlying pain and shields it from honest examination. It also triggers my fears and sets my mind in a defensive mode instead of maintaining compassion. The cycle is cross-linked and functional until I can disengage and resolve my stuff and get healing for my fears. We both are afraid our needs will not be met. We both secretly want the other to give us some life. Another god exposure.

Prejudice

Prejudice means making a judgment without looking carefully at the evidence. It usually involves a bias towards what we want to believe or what we have been programmed to believe. Our picture of God is the most vulnerable victim to our prejudice and the most damaging to every other belief. Because it is a maxim that we inevitably transform into the image of the god we believe in, our prejudices about what God must be like translate directly into how we relate to others and even to ourselves.

Cooperation with gods/God

When I focus on and talk about the problems in our lives too long I allow them to become my gods. They are given permission to block me from access to abundant life so they are allowed to become a stronger influence than God in my soul. By working harder to figure out resolutions to these problems and then trying to implement them with some help from God to enforce my solutions, I am really cooperating with my gods and trying to borrow power from God for them to use.

There seems to be two kinds of righteousness in the Bible. One has to do with saving merit and the other has to do with rewards.

The first is like Write/Read format. God has to take the merit of Jesus and write it into us so others can read it. It cannot be mingled in the slightest with our own attempts for merit or it becomes useless.

The second kind is like Read/Write format. When we cooperate with the Holy Spirit to be an influence of life to others by letting them read the face of God in our life, God writes the results in the records of heaven to be rewarded. This is not salvation merit, this is rewardable cooperation.

Inept Heart-operator

I feel empty, confused, hurt, frustrated. I want to love in a way that can be accepted and felt but I seem to be almost totally blocked. I must be incredibly selfish by the subtle messages I see mirrored in those close to me. I am very inept at operating the vehicle called my heart. I either stall out and don't move or careen around crashing into others causing emotional havoc and liability.

I have so much fear of pain and not being understood or accepted that I spend most of my time and emotional energy in image management. But simply knowing about this enormous fear does not disable it. It is much bigger than I am.