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."