A Darkened Mind

2005-08-23

In our darkened minds, we find things other than God to give us what we long for: relationship and value. Because of sin, we are seriously marred creatures. We actually believe we can find something other than God that can fulfill our longings, and that we have control to find it within ourselves. Consider part of my story, that from childhood I sought to control and satisfy my longings.

I apparently for the first few years of my life, was a somewhat outgoing child (though my first two years I didn’t speak, until my first word, which was ‘clock’). This is according to how I understand it as it is told to me, for I don’t remember too much. I lived the first four and a half years in the city, and then moved to the suburbs. That fall I started pre-Kindergarten at the public school. Early on, probably around the time of the first grade, I realized quickly that all boys liked or were supposed to like sports. Yet I hated them. They were all the same to me: get the ball or whatever into the goal and whoever does that the most times wins. Yet all the boys’ lives were infiltrated with sports: gym was the favorite class, and recess was nothing short of an organized game. Conversations were nothing but exchanges of statistics, favorite players and replays of yesterday’s game. Left in the dust, I closed my doors. Don’t kids play with toys? Don’t they use their imaginations? Apparently not, or at least not where I came from.

In those days, I would go outside and “play.” Outsiders must have thought I was nuts because I would simply walk around and talk to myself. But I was telling stories of things that interested me, of heroes and villains, of cars and buses and other things that I thought were neat. There were no neighborhood kids, just the kids I saw at school, and I was an only child. One particularly obnoxious kid asked me in the fifth grade because of my lack in interest in sports, “What do you like to do, then?” and followed up by answering his own question with an extraordinarily vulgar comment, especially for an eleven-year-old. The inevitable conclusion was that something was wrong with me because I hated sports.

Yet as a fourth grader, I found I had a certain talent for a sport: swimming. It was a sport that was not among the ones the other children played at school for obvious reasons, but perhaps it was an avenue into acceptance by the others. But life didn’t change at school, though I won respect of people who saw my performances at various swim clubs.

After five years of success and showing promise to be a good athlete, I transferred to a private school with an exceptional swimming program in the ninth grade. In months leading up to my first day of school I had high expectations of being successful in my endeavors as a student and an athlete, but also in social circles. But since I chose swimming as a path to life, value, and acceptance, it was doomed to failure. The emptiness I experienced eventually led me to Jesus, though finding my validity in things other than God had a continuing legacy that I will return to at a later time. For now I will summarize false beliefs that came from this experience:

Myth: All boys like sports, and there was something wrong with me since I didn’t.
Response 1: I retreated into a world of make-believe.
Response 2: To return to life, I had to find something about me or within me to make myself acceptable or likable.

Here is the general principle: I can either resign to the idea that I have no value because I don’t have what the world wants and retreat (response 1), or I can seek a quality about myself to give myself meaning (response 2). Whenever things didn’t work out in life, I always had chose response 1. Both results evade the reality that only the Lord Jesus can give me the love and value I long for, by His immeasurable grace. Therefore the creed is true: “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves.” It is not in ourselves to have or choose life, but only by trusting in Christ can we have joy in life.