Upgrade to 3.0

Ok, obscure title, well, nerdy title, but what did you expect?

It's conference week here where I live and last year was the first year that I went to the conference and it felt like my entire life had been rebuilt from scratch. I wasn't ready for it, didn't know it was coming, but it happened anyway.

In my world when something fundamentally changes we update its number and I suppose you could argue that last year I hit version "Neil 2.0", nerdy, but hey, never mind, these are my words, my way of interpreting the world. It represented a major change where tons of old stuff was removed, stuff that was holding me back, stuff that was there for historical reasons that don't matter any more and frankly needed to just go.

Likewise it felt like a bunch of new stuff was added too, things that will prepare me for what it is that God has for me in the future, in the world in which I operate this represents a sufficiently major departure from what was and represents the vision for the future going forwards. A leap forwards in fact.

Did I say I wasn't prepared for what happened last year?

In my world, we call the process of removing some unpleasant bits, adding new bits and sanding off the rough edges “upgrades”, and upgrades aren't random unexpected things, upgrades are planned, they’re carefully thought about in regards to get from where something is to where it needs to be. Upgrades don’t just happen, they’re expected. They’re a process, they’re how change happens.

Although you can apply an upgrade unexpectedly, but that doesn't mean it had not been prepared for by the author.

Not falling into the trap this time around, this time I'm going to be ready, this time I'm going to be expectant and prepared for whatever changes come. This time I'm ready to receive something. If last year represented a fundamental shift to a radically changed me, and prepared me for the year I have experienced then I'm building towards what's coming during this week so that I can be prepared for what comes in the future.

You can’t want things to change and be unexpectant for them.

I’m not prepared to rest, I'm not prepared to stand still. I absolutely refuse to end this week without something having changed me, without something sanding off more of my rough edges and equipping me, re-tooling me for new challenges and new adventures.

That’s what I want you see, I want new adventures, I want to stop living the constrained inside the box life I had been living until last year and I want to expand my horizons, reach farther, run faster.  I want don’t want conventional, I don’t want a comfortable ride, but I want an incredible one.

So here is me, unsure of what is going to happen, or what is going to affect me, but I'm ready, I'm here and I'm expecting…

… And I can’t wait.

Trust is choosing to fall and knowing you'll be there...

I’m at the point where I need to just spew, I’ve tried multiple times to write a post this month and I’m just unable to organise it into anything resembling anything coherent so here’s the ramblings of a crazed mind.

I sit here, in bed, feeling a cocktail of things I’ve never actually felt before and it’s hard. I want to throw up, I want to curl up in a ball, I want to go running, I want to talk and I want to be silent. My moods are incredibly mercurial these days. I can go through twenty emotions in as many minutes, it’s a real challenge. I was at work this evening, somewhere around eight, weeping, over nothing, thankfully no-one else was around to see it. Then, just like that I was happy again.

I did the maths, it’s been eight years. That blew my mind. Eight years since I’ve felt… “Human”, that’s how my housemates put it. How they cope I don’t know, I’m on top of everything one moment and a moping sniffing wreck the next. It’s rather incongruous behaviour, at best.

I feel like a huge mess, but, that is what I’ve figured out so far.

I had a moment where I was at the front of church about a month or two ago, at an altar call, I’d been feeling depressed for months again, I was sick of it. I just wanted it gone and it went…

Be careful what you wish/pray for folks, you just might get it. I sure didn't feel ready to handle it what came next, let me tell you that!

I’d been numb for a few months, run down, drained and unhappy with brief moments of ecstatic  joy puncturing my sad existence, it usually involved coffee or animals, sometimes both.

Anyway, when I awoke the next morning I felt everything at once, and it was too much… Ever been swimming and got water stuck in your ear so bad you go deaf and then when it finally drains it sounds like the whole world is screaming and you have to adjust to how loud everything is? It’s like that. Just with, you know, feelings.

Needless to say I emotionally face planted many time, like a deer learning to walk. Truthfully, I still do.

I’m still quite unsteady, quite afraid, I wore armour so tightly for so long that I forgot I was made of  flesh and bone and am allowed to feel… No, still not used to that yet.

What if I feel the wrong thing though? I’d had friends abandon me before, simply because I felt the ‘wrong thing’... Where’s the guide for this sorta stuff? Surely someone has a specification for how you work these feelings? Is there not some settings I can adjust?

I was depressed, but I was balanced, subdued but consistent. I was unhappy, but I knew how to cope with that.

Now every day is an adventure in a new combination of feelings and experiences, it’s confusing, it’s hard and I almost wish, almost, that I still had all the armour around me, it created a barrier, but it kept me contained, but don’t think for a moment that the armour was there to protect me, it’s much too late for that, my armour was keeping my together. Now it’s gone I feel like I’ve burst out in all directions and it’s scary. Especially since I’ve lost a few good friends this year. It’s just freaking terrifying.

In the midst of my fear however, I’ve experienced kindness, acceptance, and it scares me to think I might lose that. So, in that way I’m learning to trust, sometimes small little things, sometimes huge confessions of massive insecurities, other times it’s waking up and speaking of the nightmarish place my brain had gone to while I’d been sleeping.

Amanda Palmer once described trust this way “I trust you this much… Should I? Show me!”

I like this, but trust isn’t a one time thing, trust is a totally counter intuitive series of moment to moment choices to believe a person when they say something. When someone tells you something, it isn’t invalidated by their absence or silence or anything, I’m learning that you can’t trust someone and ask for constant reassurance. Trust requires something of me, trust is absolutely two way, I can’t say I trust you and then never give you opportunities to demonstrate that trust.

Cards on the table, I want to be better at it, I’ve made progress, I can see it in myself, but I want to be better still.

So, another lesson is learn who is trustworthy, I’ve made that mistake a few times before, hopefully I’ve gotten better at it. I hope to not find myself feeling the same sense of loss and trying, once more, to piece the broken bits back together again.

I mean, I’ve only just now figured out how it is that things are supposed to be in the first place.

I’m reminded of the movie the Shawshank Redemption, the tagline is ‘Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free’, eight years… Eight years, and I’m making plans, maybe not big ones, but there’s events I look forward to now, I find that I feel I can lift my head (sometimes with tears streaming down my face) and have hope in things. Hope that there’s a good things coming.

I hope that the future is as bright as it seems today, I really hope it is.

Because a little hope is a dangerous thing, now that I have a hope for my future, I don’t want to return to feeling numb and hiding myself away, even though that’s the most comfortable thing to do right now.

Today I choose to trust, and tomorrow and the next day… Can I do that? Show me.

Thank you :)

May 7th: X

Cryptic title, perhaps, but it'll all become obvious when you read the words 'general election'. To anyone not from the UK reading this, on May 7th 2015 the UK will be holding a general election to decide who will be running our government for the next five years.

At the time of writing there's very mixed reports and it doesn't look like there's going to be a clear majority. This is pretty much what happened last time too, suggesting that the UK is trending away from having any great faith in the major players. That is what it is and we need to talk about what I think we, as Christians, need to consider when voting in our elections.

First lets look at the word Christian, historically it was actually used as an insult to the early church who were identified as being 'Christ-like'/Christian, I guess the name stuck because that's what we use to this day.

Now, when we consider that we are known for being Christ like, it is obvious then that we must study Christ, learn his heart and attitudes. What he said and what he did, and how he lived his life.

If we consider what Jesus stated was the greatest command in the law was we have this:

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'" - Luke 10:27 (NIV)

Now, this does refer to the 'old law' which the Jewish nation at the time was following but, do you know how hard it is to love your neighbour sometimes? I mean, you might not even LIKE your neighbour, they might play their music too loud, they might take drugs, be from another country, practice a lifestyle choice that makes you feel uncomfortable, you don't get a choice in who your neighbour is, you gotta love them anyway.

This one is important, we're going to come back to this.

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:34-35).

There's that l word again. It's worth noting that Christ doesn't command us to do things that he hasn't already done himself, Jesus wasn't a 'do what I say, not what I do' kinda guy, he first lived and asked us to follow his example. Love one another! Ever been in a group and found there's only a couple of people you get on with? Yeah, even in Church, ya gotta love people and serve them.

"For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don't use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love." - Galatians 5:13

We see it again here, we are not called to be selfish and please ourselves but we are called to serve each other and demonstrate love.

Serve and love folks, serve and love.

Ok, so what does this have to do with the elections? 

I'm frankly sick of the system the way it is, and I will not mention any names of political parties, but I used to vote for one party consistently and in our 2010 election I changed, I voted for another party. I was hoping for a 'hung parliament' where there was no clear majority and all parties had to put aside their differences and work together... So yeah... That didn't happen.

This time around I find myself with a choice between two minor parties, neither of which are likely to get many (if any) seats, but, these two parties have strong manifestos that align with what I believe we should be doing as followers of Christ.

I mean I could turn up and spoil my ballot paper, but I understand that unless a statistically significant number of people do this then nothing changes... So I feel compelled to vote for someone.

So lets look at some things that I think we need to bear in mind when we put that cross in the box.

Mark 12:13-17 details some religious leaders trying to trick Jesus with a question of taxes and he ultimately asks them whose face is on a coin and the leaders reply 'Caeser' to which Jesus replies 'Give to Caeser what belongs to Caeser and give to God what belongs to God'.

So yeah... Tax, that tricky thing everyone wishes wasn't as much as it is.

I pay tax, gladly I might add. As a child I grew up and my family got working tax credits (or something like that, I don't know the exact term), I went to school, I saw doctors, I even had dental work provided free due to services that are paid for by tax. I am happy to pay my tax, I was born in a hospital, I entered this world on the backs of others who had paid their taxes. Our entire national community depends on us all paying our fair share of tax.

My taxes pay for others to have the same luxuries I have been lucky to have, I made no effort to hide the fact that my company provides private medical care, but I absolutely will never criticise the fact that I'm paying for National Health Services (NHS) I never have to use. Most of my friends use the NHS, the homeless girl on the streets suffering from hypothermia uses the NHS, the junkie shooting up to numb the pain uses the NHS. The NHS is something so many people depend on, something I've used, how can I begrudge it as a service, how can I in any moral standing condemn people to a private system that many could not afford and any pre-existing medical conditions would not be covered. I for one am grateful that there is a place everyone can go, regardless of their status, and be healed. 

Kinda sounds like someone else doesn't it? Come as you are and receive what you need.

Taxes pay for our sewers, for social care projects, maintenance of the places we live, investment into the places we live. Taxes are hugely important, the sooner we ensure everyone pays the fair share (this includes corporations tax, entities that aren't even real people) the better.

What else?

Immigration, yeah, I'm going there, remember I said we were coming back to Luke 10:27?

Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?"
He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself."
He said to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live."
But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbour?"

Jesus then proceeds to tell the story of the good Samaritan, which I won't rehash here, but I'm sure most people will be familiar with, the most significant part of the story however is in its name, 'Samaritan'! Jews hated Samaritans, there was a lot of racial tension between Jews and Samaritans. Yet Jesus pointed out that in this context the Samaritan was the neighbour that the lawyer is commanded to love as he loves himself.

This would have been deeply uncomfortable then and I know that it is deeply uncomfortable now to some people. We don't get to choose our neighbours and we don't get to exclude certain people or groups of people which crap platitudes like 'But they're different' or 'But they've done X and Y' or even bringing up stereotypes. We have to love our neighbours regardless of who they are or where they're from. 

Finally I'm going to pick one other topic and look what Jesus had to say on the matter and wrap this up...

The poor.

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. - Mark 10:21-22

Jesus doesn't say give it to the temple indeed he rebukes the Pharisees for manipulating the rules so that they can avoid giving to their own needy parents and be seen to be giving to the temple.

But Jesus put it right back on them. “Why do you use your rules to play fast and loose with God’s commands? God clearly says, ‘Respect your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone denouncing father or mother should be killed.’ But you weasel around that by saying, ‘Whoever wants to, can say to father and mother, What I owed to you I’ve given to God.’ That can hardly be called respecting a parent. - Matthew 15:3-9 (MSG)

I heard it preached once that the 'what I owed you' element in the above passage referred to parents who needed some (likely financial) assistance from their children and they instead of helping their parents, gave the money elsewhere. Essentially the law of charity was being re-interpreted such that those in need were not being helped and given a rather pathetic excuse that they are being helped, just not in any practical way.

It angers me, when I see political parties abandoning essential community services for the poor and for those in need while declaring that we need to return to good Christian values. I feel physically sick sometimes, to know that we are commanded to look after those in need and those with the power to make large scale change and create a better environment for those we are to love and serve are disengaging and claiming that those are the ones at fault.

Yes, some people don't help themselves, some people are scamming the system, but how many good, honest, trying people does it take? Because like it or not, we're talking about people, some need benefits and food banks. When we decide they cost too much, we are ultimately saying the lives of the people most in need cost our society too much, and that's just wrong.

When we look at what our political parties are all doing in our nation we shouldn't just be voting for what benefits us most as an individual, we should be aligning ourself with what we know to be righteous and moral. We are not called to be selfish, we are called to be the heart of communities, to be good Samaritans, what example do we set when we vote only to benefit ourselves and not for our communities? 

I don't think it's a coincidence that in Jesus' time the word charity and the word justice meant the same thing. Being charitable is being just and righteous. 

The Prison In My Mind: Part 3, The Voice

 So, uhm, it's been a while, things at work have been busy and I moved at the end of last year and there's been a few teething issues, I think for the time being I might reduce my posting schedule to once a month to keep everything in balance.

In the last part of this series we looked at shackles and how they limit movement, in this part we're going to look at the voice. You know, that one, the one that always tells you that you can't escape. The one that knocks you down a few pegs... Or more.

I used to think I was crazy to have a part of me that always second guesses me, always drags me down and I thought it was abnormal. I have however since learned that a lot of us, if not all of us, seem to have this part of us that always seems to whisper "What if you're wrong?", or "Are you really sure you can do this?".

It really drives me crazy and it happens a lot, in some pointless things as well as serious things.

For instance at work, I've been working on a huge project and I've taken a particular approach which was considered a bit unorthodox, but after all my initial testing the whole thing ran painfully slow. I then tested my code relentlessly until I could find no reason for the slowdown, I then on a whim deleted some other... Not strictly required code, wouldn't you know it, it ran blisteringly fast?

Yet, my first reaction was that it was my fault the whole thing had slowed down. Even when confronted with previous experiments that showed my code was fast, I assumed it was my fault.

I like to think of it as the cell mate or guy in the cell next to you, the faceless insubstantial voice that talks at you and tells you that you're crazy when you talk of your hopes and dreams and what you will achieve when you get out.

I can imagine it now "Haha! You think you're ever going to get out of here? That's hilarious! Face it, you're locked in here with the rest of us."

Now, perception is a funny thing, everything in that sentence is a lie and frankly, this is my mind and I'll do what I want inside it and if I want change, the voice has to realise something...

With that in mind, my voice, which for the purposes of this blog I'm going to call "Harvey", why? I'm glad you (didn't ask). I watch a lot of cult tv, and I thought I'd discussed of one of my heroes in 'Who do you want to be?' but apparently not.

Context: Farscape is a sci-fi show created by Rockne S. O'Bannon and in partnership with the Jim Henson company, basically, after a rather long and complicated series of events the protagonist ends up with another consciousness in his brain. It often manipulates him and keeps him down, he refers to this entity as Harvey. Once he wrests control of his mind back from Harvey he frequently keeps the unwanted 'guest' in a trash can in his mind...

Look, just watch it and it'll make sense, OK?

It’s a nice comparison, because Harvey is an invasive series of thoughts and words. Isn’t it also true that many of our issues didn’t come from within ourselves, they’re usually the result of someone saying or doing something that hurts us and we keep with us?

When I have that overwhelming sinking feeling of being totally inadequate due to all the stuff I’ve accumulated in my mind over the years, that’s Harvey. A big ball of stuff can’t be addressed, it’s just... There. It is what it is and how do you deal with it?

Given a name, give it form (at least in the show) but more practically, give it limitations, and I can hear myself be self deprecating and I know I am not living and feeling a free life, like I’m supposed to. Yet I can think to myself ‘Shut up Harvey’ and know fine well that I’m not what was spoken over me, or I’m not what I came to believe about myself. It is just the echoes of the past bleeding into the present.

Harvey represents the wrong attitude, part history, part doubt. Harvey is all that crap that accumulates over the years that was never supposed to lived with, the stuff that was supposed to have been let go years ago and just couldn’t be. Harvey and what he says represents that horrible twisted comfortable pained place where one could retreat and just feel like crap, because it was my crap and I knew how to deal with it.

Harvey is all the stuff I need to as a person, deal with and let go of. He is just a metaphor, a way to visualize all that stuff that I know I need to deal with and classify and label as ‘stuff that hurts and holds me back’. I found it difficult to tackle each issue individually and some of my stuff is interlinked such that one thing triggers another thing and my mind has some crazy cascading melt down and one word from a person can set off a chain reaction of hurt that shouldn’t have happened.

Life shouldn’t be like that.

It just wasn’t working for me to have an unnameable, formless void of stuff that seemed so insurmountable that there was no point trying. I mean, why is it that it was easier to believe that my God was finite, but my stuff is infinite. I clearly had it the wrong way around.

Today I’m choosing to, in my own crazy way, place limitations on my stuff and let God have the infinite place in my life.

I don't believe there's an actual person in my head, but I do believe that certainly an ongoing battle for the ownership of my mind and the sooner I admit that there's action I need to take to ensure I don't lose the battle the better. When second Corinthians 10 talks of holding every thought captive I like to think that this is what it means, a full on occupation with armed guards at every synapse. Cos, I’m not trapped in here with my thoughts…

Til next time.

How a movie helped get me out of a sneaky depression spiral

So, I meant to post last Friday and I didn't and I meant to post the next part of the 'prison' topic that I am working on, and I'm not.

You see I'm shaking off what seems to have been a sudden onset of I-don't-care-but-staying-in-bed-seems-like-a-perfectly-valid-use-of-ALL-my-spare-time, I don't like calling it that, it's too long, I like things to be pithy, and I would give it an expressive and descriptive name, but that would take effort I don't feel like expending.

I don't know why I feel this way recently, and I don't know why in the last day or two I feel like I'm shaking it off. It's no doubt a few (well, probably more than a few) little things that have chain reacted into me feeling the way I do, but I just can't figure what caused it to start or what caused it to stop, so I'm going to talk about a movie I saw in the midst of it all that helped.

Now, I normally wouldn't have dragged myself to see a movie in the week I was feeling crap, but, I had been wanting to see it for ages and I'd asked someone to come with me, it was quite a nerdy movie and had I not made plans to see it with someone, I'd probably not have gone to see it and that would have been a great shame, because it was awesome and I'd have missed out on something that has consumed my thoughts since I watched it.

We're going to talk about Chappie, if you've not seen this, go, like, now, it's got robots, it asks the audience questions and there was one scene that I had to get the Kleenex out for because it was very emotional to have to process. If you have seen the movie it's the bit where the protagonist is wandering the streets of Johannesburg all alone and what happens on his way home.

I struggle to connect with certain topics and situations, in fact, most of the movies that have come out in recent years I've just not bothered watching, I mean, I've still not see the first avengers movie yet, I'm sure I'll like that movie, but Olympus Has Fallen just seemed like "Die Hard: This time it's political" and I just fail to enjoy most action movies, favouring a much richer character driven story.

And, the interesting thing is that I didn't watch the movie and enjoy it, I knew I was going to enjoy the movie going into it, and it was two very subtle things that when discovered through the context of the movies plot were wonderfully executed.

What were these two things that are mentioned once and are seen in every scene with the character with no further attention?

Labels.

You see, the character has two labels on his body, wonderfully accurate labels that I certainly wore myself and didn't notice the significance of the placement of the labels until a week later. Without wanting to spoil the story, before Chappie was 'born', he was labelled. He had things declared about him that he had no way to defend against or no say in. His fate had already been summed up in two words.

You see, Chappie was 'born' with a label on his chest (arguably where his 'heart' is) that read 'Crush' and another on his forehead that stated simply 'Reject'.

This little hero walks around for the duration of the movie with labels on him telling others exactly what people who had no way to know who he was, or what he could become thought of him.

He is a reject and doesn't deserve a chance. He is damaged, crush him down, he's not worth anything.

Does anyone ever feel like that sometimes? Does anyone feel rejected or crushed?

I do, I feel it a lot, my personality is, as I have been told, on several occasions, an acquired taste. I have purposely been rejected by many people due to what goes on up in my head, the way I think, the things I think. The fundamental essence of who I am has, and no doubt will be in the future, be rejected. Likewise, I feel like my heart has been crushed, a lot, it's hard not to be crushed when people actively choose to walk away from friendships and relationships because of who you are rather than anything you've done. It is quite crushing.

Yet, our protagonist seems totally oblivious to these labels.

He just wants to paint, to be read to (he is nothing much but a child, mentally), to be held by his mother and be loved by his father, he wants to be approved of and live his life as he so chooses.

Don't we all want that?

It's easy to live with labels, ugly, dumb, useless, fat, reject, worthless, etc. Somewhere along the way some of us appear to have interpreted them as facts, rather than just a word someone, somewhere, at some point spoke over us. We were never obligated to agree with these labels or live as if they were true.

When I stop to think about it, maybe I do know why I've been feeling kinda low and unwilling to venture anywhere it's socially awkward to wear a dressing gown, maybe it's labels that are bothering me, maybe once in a while one, or a few come back to mind and they get me down and they shouldn't.

I like Jeremiah 29:11, I hate over using it though and for the power of the verse to become familiar or to loose its meaning, but in the message it's translated like this:

"I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out - plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you a future you hope for."

I don't hope for any of the labels that were applied to me, in fact I outright hope they're not true, and if that's what I hope for and that's what God wants to do, give me hope. Then what power do labels hold?

Like Chappie I should understand that I can see them, but at no point was I told that I had to believe them.

Til next time.

Bombshell

WARNING: This post contains rather disturbing subject matter and if you have some psychological or emotional triggers this might be the kind of post that you just want to skip. You have been warned... and... I'm sorry, in advance.

I received some news that I'm having some real issues understanding, it starts on an unremarkable Monday on some cold November afternoon. An individual I've worked with for three years didn't show up for work, we have flexitime and he's not usually in until later in the afternoon anyway, but it was still considerably late in the afternoon, even for him. He doesn't show up.

No big deal, maybe he's sick, it happens, it's customary for one to send an email to the office to explain the absence, but whatever, it's above my pay grade.

He's a no show the next day, and the next.

The company I work for has had two suicides prior to me beginning there, we were understandably concerned for our work mate.

He's not there the next week, or the next. The month ends and he's not been seen or heard from. He had previously threatened to quit and we were beginning to wonder if he'd gone through with it, but his desk had not been cleared and looked like he had every intention of coming back. Half finished bottles of soda, reading glasses and personal effects still left on the desk as they had been the Friday night he was last here.

The next month comes and goes, he's off the grid, his Twitter account went silent, he's not responding to texts or emails. It was sad, kinda, this guy inspired me to learn new technologies and to think in new ways. I felt like I owed him a debt of thanks for helping me and for helping me develop the skill set that I enjoy using even today.

Someone at work managed to contact his brother and we were politely but firmly told that his is "alive", it was... Rather blunt.

It just seemed like he'd walked out and abandoned everyone and everything, it... I took it hard, I really looked up to him and he just vanished.

If only I knew.

Four days ago, on another random Monday afternoon, I'm quietly told to Google his name followed by the name of a newspaper local to his city. I wasn't prepared for what it was I read. It was indicated that it was a bit not good, but I really wasn't ready for it.

There's no real way delicate way to put this, and I've not really in any real way put it down, so I'm just gonna write this down and... It's really not nice, so here goes.

He had turned himself in to the police and admitted to five counts of sexual assault and one count of serious sexual assault upon a child under the age of thirteen years old.

So, yeah, that's really messed up.

I really did look up to him, I sought his help frequently, I would not be the programmer I am doing were it not for his help and advice.

I feel weird. I wander around and pause and try to figure it out, maybe understand why.

I can't.

I feel a whole bunch of things, most seem entirely irrational if I'm honest. I feel confused, kinda betrayed, weird, definitely feel weird about the whole thing. I take a small comfort in the fact that others in my work place seem to feel the same way. We stop, look at the desk he used to work and take down some art work, or disconnect more of the equipment. Slowly beginning to move on. At least it's nice to know that I'm not the only one just trying to make sense of it.

You know how people say they just wouldn't have suspected, that he just seemed so normal and you think that it must have been impossible? That someone MUST have suspected something? Yeah... He just seemed so normal...

I don't really have much else I can say at this point, it's a situation I'm still kinda in disbelief about and it's kinda shaken me up a little bit.

Don't know what else I can say really, not sure I've fully processed the fact that someone I worked with for three years was capable of such things.

So... Yeah... Til next time, I suppose.

The Prison In My Mind: Part 2, Shackles

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but sometimes I just feel really weighed down by stuff. It's like this big ball of oppressive junk that makes me feel slow and heavy, I've found myself recently getting bogged down with something and just like sometimes, on my own, as I was walking, I'd just stop and pause. I felt like I was dragging things around with me that were limiting me.

As we continue this series it occurred to me that were was a device that's used to limit a prisoners movement. This device has many names and forms, ankle shackles, leg cuffs, ball and chain, the point is the same, a device that limits movement and holds a person down. I call them “shackles”.

Shackles don’t just weigh you down, they can also be used to chain you to one particular place, prisoners can be chained into a sort of kneeling position with their wrists shackled to their ankles. Holding you in a fixed position, unable to move from it.

As I mentioned in part one, everything in this ‘mind prison’ is either self inflicted or self created and what is it that leads me to find myself bogged down and unable to move sometimes. So what is it that’s caused me to feel this way?

Unforgiveness.

More specifically, I find it hard to forgive myself.

Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be easy, I screw up, I ask God to forgive me and I try not to do it again, but, what if it’s one thing that you did once and only once and you find it hard to move past the fact that you did it? What if it’s something you did in good conscious and later found out it was bad?

That sensation of being wracked with guilt over something you did and you continue to punish yourself for it. Yeah, when it comes to un-forgiveness of self it really is essentially shackling yourself to the past and you’re either dragging it around with you or it’s holding you in place.

Yeah… Shackles suck.

I’m behind in the daily devotions that get sent through and fortunately so, because I had a bit of a binge this morning. I’m too sick to get to church and I thought catching up on bible study and having some quiet time to myself would be a good idea and what do you know? I happen upon a message about forgiveness. It was split into two parts, upon reflection though I discovered something. It raised the points that we find it hard to forgive others because what they did was so bad, it hurt so much and no-one could understand the pain.

I realise this is how I feel when faced with the fact that I need to forgive myself. 

In relation to harbouring unforgiveness against others it read “Unforgiveness [against others] is like drinking poison and hoping someone else gets sick” and I realise in my own little world I was drinking the poison, sure, but I wasn’t expecting anyone else to get sick. 

I was hoping I would.

When you refuse (or, in my mind, find it hard) to forgive myself, it’s like drinking poison, knowing full well it’s poison and not caring.

That’s either really dumb or just means you wish to punish yourself.

Fortunately this devotional briefly talked about self punishment. If God has forgiven us and we don’t forgive ourselves and continue to try to make up for what we’ve done by refusing to forgive ourselves, or trying to atone for it, or perhaps other things, then we’re saying with our attitudes that the cross wasn't enough.

I mean, that’s bold for all the wrong reasons. 

How can we… How can I, as an informed, forgiven individual believe that the cross wasn’t enough? Where do I get off telling God what did or didn't work. 

I can hear myself thinking (in a rather perplexing inner monologue) it now: 

“But you don’t get it I’m horrible! I don’t deserve to be forgiven.” 

“God can wrap space and time around his little finger, I’m pretty sure he knows how nasty or not I am, were or could ever be.”

“Yeah… but, but but….”

There’s not really an answer to it, but I still try to justify it, for some really weird reason, does anyone else?

It begs the question of why I hold onto the issues of not being able to forgive myself. So, this morning, I recognised that I had been living with my rule of punishing myself in the way I deserved and I felt I had to live as God wanted me to life, not as shackled down to what I had done, but free to move freely into what's coming next.

I tried to find a passage to include here, but I couldn’t find something really deep and meaningful, maybe that’s because being forgive in just so simple and we overly complicate it with our issues and disbelief. I guess when we are forgiven we are forgiven in our entirety and we are free indeed.

Til next time.