Work Out Your Salvation Through Fear and Trembling: a 2008 retrospective

1. “Brother” by Annuals
2. “The Lining is Silver” by Relient K
3. “You Can Make Him Like You” by The Hold Steady
4. “Story Problem” by the Envy Corps
5. “Now” by Mates of State
6. “Weird” by Clem Snide
7. “Sax Rohmer #1″ by the Mountain Goats
8. “Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love” by Coldplay
9. “Blue Eleanor” by Old Canes
10. “The Swiss Army Romance” by Dashboard Confessional
11. “My Rollercoaster” by Kimya Dawson
12. “Sinaloan Milk Snake Song” by the Mountain Goats
13. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” by Right Away, Great Captain!
14. “Monster Ballads” by Josh Ritter
15. “Table for Two” by Caedmon’s Call
16. “California Skies” by Novi Split
17. “Talking in Code” by Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s
18. “Makers” by Rocky Votolato
19. “Murder in the City” by Avett Brothers
20. “Price is Right” by Aaron Robinson and the Lost Verses

Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.

We live by faith, not by sight.”

2 Corinthians 5: 4-7

I have never felt truly at home. I have always longed for the next thing, positive that it would be the thing to finally satiate deep spiritual naggings. In high school, I thought college would be my comfort zone. Once in college, I thought that a better walk with the Lord would quiet the racket in my soul. I’ve always tried to fill the hole with a relationship. I’ve even unwittingly tried to fill it with allegiances to sports teams. Now, nearing the real world, I’ve found myself putting my hopes for spiritual peace in a job, a house, and a family. But today, reading these verses, I realize that even being married and settled in to life will not stop the unease that I keep with me.

Marriage is appealing because it offers the ability to know and be known. I long to have someone know me intimately of their own volition. I long to know someone deeply. But the reality of marriage is different than the idealistic portrayal of it. I know this. That’s why I can’t put my hope in it; I cannot pin my desire for spiritual peace on a single relationship.

Even if I have a wonderful, happy marriage (Dear God, may this be so, amen), it is only one aspect of my life. There will be other people in my life – friends, enemies and other – that create the deep longings in my soul. It is not just in one aspect of life that I wish to be satiated. My spirit longs to be in the place where everyone is fully known as they truly are.

I wish for heaven pretty much every day. Not so much in the fact that I want to die (I don’t, at all), but in the fact that I wish things were right in the world the way they are and will be in heaven.  I have no proof that that things will be like this; I have faith that there is a better world out there; one that fulfills my spirit.

I got a very late start on the whole Christmas season because my finals were a week later than usual. I didn’t finish my Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. It’s the first Christmas without my brother Joe, who is still in Marine boot camp. I still have intern work to finish, and even as I speak I have not finished it (I’ll turn it in late, which bugs me, but it’s necessary). My brother John broke up with his girlfriend, so I’ve been dealing with that a lot. I haven’t seen my mom as much as I’d like; I’ve seen my Dad a lot more than usual.

In short, everything is all messed up this Christmas. In terms of this being a holiday like the one I wanted, this gets an F. But a strange thing is happening, in spite of its exceptional non-traditional qualities.

I have often not known what to do around my family. It has always been a challenge to be myself, because I don’t know how they’ll respond. The status quo is, in fact, very uncomfortable for me. In the face of nothing being normal at all, it has become easier for me to relate to everyone in my family (grandparents included). I feel more comfortable being who I am around all the various parties of my family. This means that I have been less hospitable in some ways than I have been in past years; I was aloof the past couple of days because I felt aloof. I didn’t fake being normal. I agree that acting aloof would not be a step forward for most people in most family situations, but to me it’s a major step forward. To be able to actually be what I am and what I am feeling without worrying about what the reactions will be is healthy, I think. And I’ve never done it, because it violates the status quo.

The fact that my family still liked me and interacted with me despite my aloofness was a big revelation to me. I felt close to my family, even though I didn’t feel like I was being kind. In letting them be kind to me, I allowed something to happen that had not happened before. I usually call or raise kindness that is played towards me; this break I haven’t been able to. I’ve had to be the recipient. It is weird, but it is good.

The only thing that isn’t weird so far is the fact we watched It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve. It is one of my favorite movies, because it shows the ends befitting a good, honest and sacrificial man. I often feel like George Bailey.

I’m still looking for my Mary Hatch.

So instead, I’ve been watching crime shows, playing video games, hanging out with my brother, and eating tons of junk food. Being a poor college student, the last thing I buy is junk food, so this is great.

I also feel like I’m in a creative and productive hibernation; thus the lack of posts, the lack of work on Independent Clauses, and my general (sugar-induced?) malaise.

It’ll pass.

It was a good day.

I feel small and humble just considering it.

a. Sin is the problem;
b. “not sinning” is the answer.
c. The less I sin, the better a Christian I am.
d. The better Christian I am, the more God will bless me and the happier I will be.

Unfortunately, Christianity’s goal is not to create sinless people. If it were, it would be titled UnSinTheism. Christianity’s goal is to bring people into relationship with Christ.

The eradication of sin does not produce a relationship with Christ. A relationship with Christ produces an eradication of sin. Even though Christ hates sin (because it runs counter to his nature), he is not focused on it; he lives in a place without it, he came down to Earth to defeat it, and as soon as we repent, he forgets it. It is us, tormented mortal men, who are deeply preoccupied with sin.

And why not? Sin goes on our entire lives. My aspirations of becoming sinless were partially because I want the future me to be better than the present me. I don’t ever want be neglectful to my wife or mean to my children. I don’t want to be obsessed with work to the detriment of my spiritual life, in the way that college obsesses me to the point of destroying my time with the Lord. I want to be better so that in the future I don’t have to deal with all of this crap, and I can have a great life.

In my head, no sin = perfect life; which is true, but it is a physical impossibility to become sinless. I am a sinner just as bad as any that ever lived. I had convinced myself that I was not as bad as everyone else, because I worshiped the lack of public sin in my life. This is stupid. I knew that I was sinning in other ways; I was ignoring it for the sake of mentally praising myself in an attempt to convince God that I was good enough to get something I wanted.

“I keep trying to find the light, on my own, apart from you,” Kevin Max breathily croons at the beginning of DC Talk’s “In the Light,” and his thought is my thought. I aspire to be sinless on my own, apart from Jesus. In using my “I sin so much less” schtick to try to convince God to give me what I wanted, I grew to love and worship “not sinning.” My love of not sinning had in fact become sin.

Since I had recently done well in not sinning, I became proud of my ability to not sin. I had only this to fall back on; I was not getting what I wanted from God. Then, when I sinned in a way that I thought I would no longer sin (because I had eradicated it, of course), it was really detrimental to my mental health. It was an implosion of my entire worldview.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize; I was moody, selfish and whiny for much of November. I am sorry. I wish I could say it would never happen again, but the thing I learned is that this is going to happen again, in some other time with some other sin. I don’t want it to happen, but we are sinful creatures, and “I am still a man in need of a savior!”

Sing it, DC Talk.