This week I learned of a situation where a person struggles with feeling are they really “a part of”. It shocked me, I don’t want to go into details of their life, but I do to. In the most peculiar ways, when every covert message and overt message says I actually am, I still feel it and sometimes feel it in ways that make me just go someplace else … in an unhealthy way.  Aka Run, or just not go there, go-to the other side of the room, stay home, comfort myself.  There was nothing at all, zero, nada in this persons life that would have told me this about them other than that person becoming vulnerable.  Really it shocked me and at the same time it made me feel a new kind of love for them.

That’s how filters work from our own brokenness, they nudge us to act differently than we would have otherwise. We often come by them honestly and sometimes the causes start at infancy or very early childhood so they are reinforced over a life.  Do I hear steal and kill here??  Do I hear a “Lie” ??  Do I hear stronghold ??

A few years ago I tried to capture this feeling, this self awareness in a song, this is it. What came out is a sort of quirkiness. It reflects a start and start to life, other odd sounds and odd beats that come into play in this kind of life. I was surprised how difficult it was to find the same deep melancholy I experience in real life, it just would just not come out in song.   I picture Holy Spirit at work here, in the pursuit of creativity myself revealed something about myself.  As if in one part of my mental landscape I could sense deep sadness but in another part I could sense a sort of dancing type freedom, in other words I am dualistic in this problem, I carry both sides of the coin inside of me.  Me thinks one part of the answer is to focus on the funner part while I work through the not so fun part but sadly, if you don’t experience this you have no idea how hard that can be, especially when other kinds of brokenness finds friends in misery between the brain people inside of me in the conversations of internal life.

It is good to be a part of and its also good to not be because a true journey into the underlying causes of all of that changes you in good ways.  The world needs humans that have been through this, that can tell about their experience, that can tell “How they Survive”.  It needs people that can be sensitive to other people struggling with this.  Some of us are blessed and cursed at the same time but God Redeems all kinds of human conditions.  The world needs independent thinkers that understand the importance of being a part of in healthy ways but not fully immersed in the group think that can go on when you give in too much too being a part of.  There is also problems in being too much a part of so that can be equally bad, at least at this stage I believe that.  Carefully choose your poison !!!

Anyway here it is.