Loyal readers, I am inspired.
I am worked up, hyped up, and revved up (and ready to go, no less).
The latest project of the inward journey has become a process of deconstruction, and before I start losing folks, let me throw out details on terminology:
1.) The Inward Journey: The process of inner healing, of working through past (and present) pains, hurts, and issues, learning to keep short emotional accounts (which means to not let past stuff affect present stuff), and allowing the Holy Spirit to strip away all the labels, titles, and other worthless crap we clothe ourselves with until we are left with (and consequently are forced to own our name.
2.) The process of deconstruction: The process of deconstruction is basically my way of reversing the unhealthy pattern of developing false identity patterns. That unhealthy pattern goes as follows:
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1.) We are exposed to a lie about ourselves. Exposure to this lie isn’t restricted to hearing, but includes percieved lies, seen lies, felt lies, ect. For instance, my father (whom I love dearly and have worked through some of this stuff with) used to love to say: “Boy, you can’t do nothing right.” Whether I acted like I believed it or not, this lie attached itself to my perception and as we all know, perception is reality.
2.) We believe the lie. As we all know from our journey of faith, our beliefs are not so much determined by what we say, but by who we are and (by extension) what we do. Like I said before, I didn’t necesarilly believe that I couldn’t get anything right but the truth that my dad believed that about me (and maybe other people did to) settled firmly into my consciousness.
3.) That believed untruth results in reactive living. Because I believed that my father (and others) believed I couldn’t do anything right, I took a three-fold approach to debunking that particular untruth. One, I became very performance-oriented, attempting to exceed any expectations of me by leaps and bounds. Two, anything I percieved that I might fail at, I never took a chance on or gave a second thought. Three, I became critical of others intent on proving that even if I was incapable of doing anything right, that there were others who couldn’t either, which made it not so bad.
4.) Our actions are integrated into a negative self-perception or identity. That’s a fancy way of saying that because we act a certain way, we believe we are a certain way. Let’s take for instance, the criticism I talked about in number 3. I am not naturally a critical person, I am usually relatively patient gracious, which is part of my personality type, but because I am reactively critical (because of the believed untruth), then I must be a critical person, musn’t I? Wrong.
So, all of that to say that I am inspired to deconstruct myself, to open up the rusted-shut maintenance door to my psyche and take out each cog and sprocket, one by one, and let the Holy Spirit reveal what each piece of me really means and what each piece’s real purpose is. Hopefully, this process will result in a much more cleaned-up, refined, and intentional Ben.
What do you think?
and I’m sitting (somewhat inonspicuously) in my car in the Burger King parking lot, taking advantage of their wifi hotspot.