Epiphany

I ran into an old friend at church last night and talked to him a while. He's been doing a lot of disappearing acts lately. He's been in the application and training process for Blackwater. Fairly recently he apparently got picked up by the CIA and they're sending him essentially through officer training school to get his masters in counter-intelligence (From CSU San Bernardino of all places). He said he had no idea the CIA was interested in him (he wasn't pursuing them) when a guy walked up to him on the street one day and slid a folder under his arm, which contained a detailed dossier about him. Apparently the full dossier is about five times the size of War and Peace. He said they had been monitoring him and everyone he knew or was in any way connected with for over a year (kind of scary that that would probably include me) and had collected mountains of information about him before they even offered him a college scholarship. He was telling me a little about global politics, how they had been monitoring Bin Laden for several years at that compound and were using him kind of a like a pawn in their strategies, etc.

Also he said something extremely profound. It actually stops me in my tracks every time I think about its implications. He told me that everyone thinks government agents are brainwashed in order to be able to do the things they have to do. He said that's absolutely false. "You brainwash yourself. The man or woman makes the job, the job doesn't make the man or woman." Then he said, "You're not an assassin because you joined Blackwater. You joined Blackwater because you're an assassin." That's very profound to me. It says, essentially, that you are not in any way controlled by your circumstances, but much more-so by your personality, by your likes and dislikes, by your gifts and talents. This sounds almost like genetic predeterminism.* So by that logic, you're not a warrior looking to "get some" because you're a Marine, you joined the Marines because you're a warrior looking to "get some". I applied the logic to myself and it came out like this: I'm not a lazy and disorganized employee because I have a job that doesn't challenge me. I have a job that doesn't challenge me because I'm a lazy and disorganized employee. Man, that cuts.

That was my first application of the formula. Then I started thinking in terms of my Christian walk. I am not a Christian because I'm a good person. I'm a good person because I am a Christian. Along the same lines, I'm not going to heaven because I'm a good person. I'm a good person because I'm going to heaven. The Bible makes this point dreadfully clear. I don't love others because I get something out of it. If I didn't love first, I would never get anything out of it. So I get something out of it because I love others. I don't seek adventure, physical fitness and discipline because I want to join the Navy or the California Highway Patrol. I want to join the Navy or the California Highway Patrol because I love adventure and physical fitness and discipline. What you are determines what will make you happy, and in some cases what you will do with yourself, not the other way around. 

So the question of the day: What are you? Barring all excuses, hold backs and fears, what are you? I'm slowly figuring this out for myself. Until you know, you will never be happy or fully usable by God.


* I have mixed feelings about genetic predeterminism. You could say from one point of view that it sounds evolutionary, but on the other hand, we're all descended from Adam and Eve, and then from Noah and his sons, and our genes seem to carry the curse of imperfection that fell on our forebears in the garden. I'm a little more solid on the idea of spiritual predeterminism because the Bible seems to make it so clear that God indeed predestined us who believe. But since the predestined were based on those who He foreknew, which essentially means He knew what choice they would make before they made it because He is outside of time and space, I think this question is kind of irrelevant. Either He made the choice, or you did. Either way, He created the choice, and He created you (to possibly make the choice). So He made the choice in that manner of speaking. So shut up and focus on more important things, like Jesus, and how amazing it is that He sacrificed Himself to save you and me from our pitiful self-defeating destructive lives and the death that was inevitably to follow. 


This kind of predeterminism I think has much more to do with gifts and talents that were born in you and in some ways define who you are, which I think is essentially to say, "who you are is found in the specifics of how God made you special."

Murderous compassion

I took a personality/spiritual gifts profile test for the ministry class that I'm in. The results of the DISC test came back that I am a high SC, which are characterized as steady, tediously detailed and over-accurate, organized and non-confrontational. My high spiritual gifts came out to be teaching, knowledge, giving, and then right under those came prophecy and a few others. There was an interesting side note in the report that mentioned that Jeremiah was very likely an SC personality type, and obviously he was a prophet. It said that was an uncommon and kind of paradoxical mixture. For one thing, SC's generally are not bold in proclaiming anything. They are not drivers. They'd rather not rock the boat. They also tend to be extremely compassionate toward others. So when you add in the gift of prophecy, you get someone like Jeremiah. A murderous compassion. Preaching doom and gloom, cutting throats with his words of apocalypse, and then literally crying about it in the very next sentence. He begs God to forgive the people over and over, or to turn His wrath away from them. He prophecies against many nations and peoples and when the things he had prophesied come to pass, he writes a book of Lamentations, lamenting the terrible destruction. It almost sounds bipolar.

But it isn't. And I'll tell you why it isn't. S is characterized by sturdiness. Someone with a strong foundation. S-type people are very slow to anger, slow to act (till all possibilities have been logically weighed), and are generally considered to be loyal and reliable by others. Jeremiah's foundation was God. In Jeremiah 1, God put His word into Jeremiah's mouth. He then threatened him, saying that if he was terrified of proclaiming it, God would terrify him in front of the people he was terrified of. Jeremiah was a steady kind of guy, and at that moment, his steadiness changed foundations, or at least matured. His love for Israel is extremely apparent throughout the two books of the Bible that he authored. That stays the same throughout, as well as his compassion for people in general. He loves people almost like God does.

Human beings are fairly emotionally complex. We are created in God's image which means that He must be too. But emotions are not foundational to a person. Personality is. Emotions come and go. Personality really never goes anywhere. God's personality is loving, kind, forgiving, and yet perfectly holy and just. Jeremiah's was similar to that. So while his emotions go haywire (much like God who does or almost does seemingly rash things at times in His "burning anger"), he himself is still the same steady, compassionate prophet. He based his life on God's word (literally), and while it changed what he did with his time, God chose him, I am convinced, precisely because of who he was. He was loyal to God just as he would have been to anyone else. He was compassionate to people in their heart-rending judgment just as he would have been in other circumstances. He remained wholly himself while being used wholly by God.

Now here's the part that freaks me out. I have these same characteristics. Now that I know what God can do with someone like me, I'm a little anxious (and frankly scared) of what He might have in store for me. I'm going to be reading up on Jeremiah this week. I think this is going to be a wild ride.