So there I was, lying in the road, bleeding and broken, broken and bleeding, life slowly ebbing away as I strained to see the truck that ran me over speed down the road completely ignorant of the havoc it caused. I had walked this road for many years, yeah i knew there was danger involved but since when would that stop me? I had seen the accidents, the hopes and dreams crushed, the innocent lives destroyed on this road but I never thought it would happen to me. I'm too careful, I'm in control, I would reassure myself as I carelessly walked into oncoming traffic. Day after day, night after night, I would feed myself these lies about being in command of my destiny. In blissful stupidity and prideful ignorance I would shrug off the signs that could lead me to consider logically what I had gotten myself into. I knew what was best for my life and no one, I MEAN NO ONE, would tell me different. I had convinced myself that I could indulge all my disordered passions and just before they took over, just before I was consumed by my own selfishness and gluttony, I would stop. I would get off the road and exercise the control over my lust for life that I knew I had deep down. Darn it, was I ever wrong. I hate being wrong. But I was really wrong this time. So there I laid, victim to my own ego. Not sure of what lay ahead tomorrow, Heck, not sure If there was going to be a tomorrow. So I did the only thing I could do...for the first time in twelve years I prayed.
Life seems to always have a way of teaching us the lessons we don't want to learn in ways we don't want to learn them. For example, I learned I was not Superman by jumping off my garage roof and experiencing the sensation of falling. I did not want to learn that I wasn't Superman and more importantly I did not want to learn it that way. The same goes for freedom. Many people in the world today will have you believe that freedom is this 'do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want' kind of mentality. Well, I bought into that with all my chips; I believed with all my heart in that definition of freedom and all the 'promises' of happiness that comes along with it. I ignored the evidence to the contrary. After a while of living this way, abusing drugs, alcohol, women and myself, I was beginning to see that maybe this lifestyle was a lie. Maybe, just maybe, I had given my heart to a counterfeit that in the long run turned out to be worth nothing. Like the sun's rays struggling to break through the dense web of trees in the forest, I began to see slivers of the truth trying to trickle into my heart but as quickly as I could I stifled them. I did not want to see the truth; I did not want to see the lie I had given every thing I was to collapse right before my very eyes. I wanted to believe that this lie was true, I had to believe it; I had given too much to it already, it was too late to turn back now. What was I supposed to do, just admit I was wrong, turn around and walk back the other way? No, that was too hard. It would take too much strength, strength I no longer had. I was tired of believing in anything, especially myself. I 'll just continue on this road, no use turning around, just keep on going forward, I'm sure it'll all work out in the end. If not, what's the worst that could happen anyway? Then it hit me...
I was beginning to enjoy the feeling of not be able to move much. I had been running so long I relished in the opportunity to stop and wait. That got me thinking...I had been running so long...Running from what? From who? Running where? I guess I was running from truth, running from God, running...just running to nowhere. I began to see that I had never felt peace. Or joy, or anything else that 'normal' people feel when they do that religious thing. I just felt...stupid. I had never be introduced to Jesus as a person. To me he was just an idea, a piece of wood over the altar, a goofy picture. Jesus wasn't real. So if Jesus wasn't real, everything that he is couldn't be real either. Peace was not real, truth wasn't real, nor happiness, nor joy, nor love. Love wasn't real to me. If then, I believed that love wasn't real, how could I believe in anything being real, even myself?
But could that be it? Is that the great lie I had believed? That love is not real? Had I based my self destruction on the assumption that love isn't real? There had to be more...so I continued the excavation of my dark heart. If love was not real why would I run? What would I be running from then, a figment of my imagination? No, love had to be real because I was running from something, from someone, that was real. A phantom wouldn't scare me as much as this idea of love had. So then what was it about love that scared me so much that I would spend twelve years of my life running from it? Here was the core of the apple. What about love is so terrifying that I and millions of other people would try to run from it's true meaning? I was about to answer the most important question I had ever been asked. I had this sick feeling in my stomach that I knew the answer already and that was even more horrifying then all the demons I had confronted up until this point. I had a feeling thatthe answer was not something...it was someone...and I was not ready to meet him. But ready or not, I had to answer...my very life depended on it. So I took a breath, swallowed hard and for the first time in over a decade whispered the words "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus"
No comments:
Post a Comment