Amazing-Diagnostic-Development

You know that cliche about the gay guy who "doesn't know" he's gay, but everyone around him does, so much so that it's humorous? At least, it's humorous when the setting is a sitcom. I'd say it's pretty downright sad and tragic, wouldn't you? That a person would believe a lie that he's perpetuating in order to be accepted by others, except the lie is so flimsy and weak that no one who matters to him even remotely believes it?

Well, my only fear in making the confession I'm about to make is that it's possible I am like that guy. I suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. There. I said it. Ok? All of you in the wings who have been waiting for me to stop denying this, go ahead and get your reactions out of your system.

Sigh. Yes, it is part of the "disorder", "syndrome", "difference"--whatever you want to call this thing that I have, that I am--that I blow things out of proportion, that I exaggerate to make a point. (I fully understand that there may not be many people at all who have been shaking their heads with rueful smiles, waiting patiently for this ADD guy to "come out of the closet".) In the last week or so I have learned so many things about why I am the way I am, but one of the most comforting things I have found out is that my tendency to exaggerate, to overdramatize, when I share things with other people, is not a character flaw, but a genuine and well-meaning attempt to show others how intensely I experience things.

I am 35 years old. I have been trying to keep from seeming, looking, acting, *being* "crazy" for pretty much as long as I can remember, but certainly at least since I was 10 or so. I have had these "pivot points", or "inflection points", in my life-- I keep them treasured, stories of myself, traditions handed down by myself to myself, and occasionally to others. I don't think there are many people, if there are any at all, who know the complete set of these stories.

These stories are of when I was transformed from one thing into another. When I came into the moment (the "moment" usually lasting a few weeks) I thought of myself as, I *was*, one thing, and I came out thinking of myself as something different in a fundamental way. Only after my first round of serious psychological counseling, at age 25 or so, was I comfortable enough with myself (and with my bipolar dad) to occasionally share with someone that these "moments" in my life had some interesting things in common with "manic episodes" (God I wish I could remember how old I was when I first heard that phrase).

It's actually quite simple. My brain is different from the brains of the majority of people in society. Very different. The differences are so profound, that they have led to all manner of mistakes, accidents, social missteps, beginning pretty early in childhood. As all people do when they have a serious weakness or disability that threatens their ability to thrive in society, I developed "defense mechanisms" and "coping strategies", which I had to spend extra energy maintaining. It was sort of like the system we have installed in our house, to remove radon gas.

You cannot tell, except by use of a specialized testing pack that reacts to slowly emitted radiation, that radon gas is being released in someone's basement. But it is harmful to the health of the residents nonetheless. So you get a system installed, that gets the gas out of the house. I have to confess that I've never even bothered to find out how it works. But the point is that this system took effort and expense to install, and it will drain some energy from our house's power system from now until the house is destroyed.

I have a "system" inside me--hidden from view, designed to be undetectable, and generally undetected, since part of the strategy, the point, of my system is to avoid detection by those who are experts in such systems. In my case, I have avoided ever sitting in a room alone with a psychiatrist, someone who might order me to take a drug, or who might stamp me with one of the crude stamps that the psychiatric profession has at its disposal.

I may explain this system more fully in other writings--I may not--but what I wanted to note here is that I now understand that I have only fully experienced life as a human being when my life was under sufficient stress to temporarily disable my defense system. When this happened, part of me would stare in awe at the new world, the world that I normally was asleep to, and the other part of me would moan in anguish at the inevitable parade of gaffes, serious career missteps, and theatrics that seemed fun at the moment but just seemed like lame vaudeville a few hours later, in the light of day.

The ashamed guy would then remove the punch bowl, shut off the stereo, kick out the guests, shoot the fun guy up with chemical lobotomizers, and set to work repairing the defense system and restoring its power supply. The fun guy, the Rip Van Winkle, would then sleep for another year, two years, whatever, and then the cycle would start again.

There may be a book in here somewhere. There may not be. But something is going to be different from now on. The fun guy may be around more frequently, and he may be able to get along better with the outside world.

Anyway, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be writing here in this blogspot blog; I've just signed up for a new web site, called trois-souris.net (Three Mice). As soon as I can get the blog software installed there, I'll be writing there.

Thanks for reading this.

Darkness, and silence

A caravan of weary travelers, an army moving together with its families and possessions, finally approaches a city visible in the distance, to the west. Rumors, some contradictory, rustle through the exhausted community. Some are filled with hope; others, with dread and terror.

Night begins to fall, and the group stops to rest. There is no moon this night, and the sky is overcast. Just as the last remnants of light from the sun escape over the western horizon, those at the front of the caravan hear a rapidly approaching whistling sound, followed by a tremendous explosion behind them, in the middle of their camp.

Before anyone can quite make sense of what has just happened, there is another whistling, this time from the side, and another artillery shell explodes, again in the middle of the camp. One of the warriors near the front edge of the group stares in amazement: as the second shell explodes, he sees, in the strobe flash against the darkness, bodies flying. Equipment, baggage, everything-- as if an invisible angry giant has smashed down a fist, shaking the earth and making it jump like a table top struck by an unreasoning child.

Gunfire soon begins to rattle out, seemingly from everywhere, and in all directions. It's very difficult to distinguish the firing of the travelers outward from that of the ambush force all around. There is screaming, shouting of orders-- hundreds of voices mixing into a rising bedlam. The darkness deepens; the contrast against occasional shell explosions and incessant muzzle flashes is stark.

The bombardment stops, the gunfire stops. There is the sound of a few isolated whimpers, widely scattered. Otherwise, there is almost no sound. Again, the rustling of whispers, more tentative and intermittent than the rustling before sunset: Has the prophet leader of the caravan been killed?

The darkness is complete. The silence is now utterly unbroken.

Crossroads of the Blogs

I have now decided that this blog, which was originally created to try to make money with Blogitive (see second post), will be rededicated to the sole purpose of documenting the unfolding of my "missio dei" (mission from God). It is a 180-degree turn toward writing about my own spiritual journey, from my birth, and from before my birth, for myself (i.e., for unblocking my crammed brain), and a turn away from writing explicitly for an audience.

I need discipline, so I'm going to (try to!) write once a week, and only once a week, to this blog. I'll see how it goes, writing for about an hour. Oh, and by the way, I'm already planning to move away from Blogger and onto a server that I manage more hands-on. (Josh Kidd is going to help me with this, but he doesn't know it yet.) But in the meantime, the writing must continue-- no excuses. I know I contain multitudes of books; the question is merely, how many will come out in the world?

In the spirit of not caring about my audience, I will now note for myself alone that I am also going create another blog, accessible only by me, which will contain a daily journal of the events of my life. "Dispatches from the front" is how I like to think of it.

And now, back to what I was talking about before-- required reading for Servant Partners field workers. The three books have arrived-- woo hoo!! I have never been so excited about a book purchase. The books are:

Title	Author	Publisher	Date
Dispossessed: Life in Our World's Urban Slums	Mark Kramer	Orbis Books	2006
Cry of the Urban Poor: Reaching the Slums of Today's Mega-Cities	Viv Grigg	Authentic Media/World Vision	2004, revised in 2005
Building a People of Power: Equipping Churches to Transform Their Communities	Robert C. Linthicum	Authentic Media/World Vision	2005

These are AWEsome books. I am a little ways into each one of them. I am going to need to develop a discipline of some sort in order to push through them-- together they are about 850 pages. I want to be in a position to transform the material contained in them into classes and presentations appropriate for the members of my church.

Last weekend I went with Lynn Wetherbee and Nancy Geryk to a panel discussion on the future of urbanism, put on for Alumni Weekend by Penn's Urban Studies department. It was an AWEsome panel discussion. I'm pretty sure I want to get my master's in urban planning (or urban design or whatever they call it) at Penn.

This afternoon Angela and I are putting on the first orientation session for Financial Peace University. I can't say how exciting this is, for both of us. I am so proud of Angela--she is a brave pioneer.

So, I guess that's it for today-- see you (non-audience) next week!

A little more vision

It's been a while since I last wrote; I've been working on removing wood from my eyes. I think I've succeeded in getting rid of some. Of course, the kicker is that when you remove things stuck in your eye, you soon see other things that need to be removed.

But anyway, my efforts have partly been rewarded with some renewed vision for my future. When I returned to public participation in Christianity, in early 2000, it was because I got a glimpse of a faith that could transform and liberate the poor and oppressed. Six years later, this vision still remains and has been elaborated considerably.

I'm still in the initial stages of this, but I am very excited about the efforts of a group called Servant Partners. I am friends with Jean-Luc and Shabrae Krieg, who are living amongst the poor in the Chimalhuacan section of Mexico City. Servant Partners has as its mission, the manifestation of God's liberating power in the massive slums in the megacities of the world.

I don't currently feel that God is calling me to live long term in any of these fields, but rather to be an enabler, a supporter, a cheerleader and promoter of these efforts. I want to pour gasoline on the fires these courageous, talented, passionate people are starting and tending. I want to give those rich in material things the opportunity to become rich spiritually, by partnering with these advocates of the poor in the U.S. and elsewhere (especially elsewhere, as real poverty, relatively speaking, is pretty rare here).

Stay tuned! I'm awaiting 3 of the 7 books that Servant Partners asks its trainees to read before they attend a 5-6 week "retreat" in a slum in Manila. I will be writing about these books, and about the development of my plans to form a ministry team at Woodland around these efforts.