Tuesday, November 19, 2024

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READ: Ecclesiastes 11-12

Rejoice, young person, while you are young,
and let your heart be glad in the days of your youth. 
And walk in the ways of your heart 
and in the desire of your eyes;
but know that for all of these things God will bring you to judgment.
Ecclesiastes 11:9 (CSB)

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Each Monday morning I receive an email from Roy H. Williams – the Wizard of Ads. I love his stuff, not least because he often nods towards his faith in his marketing emails in the most lovely, wise, and non-confrontational way. Yesterday, he started his email like this, 

The future is unknowable. The past is unrecoverable.
If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
Don’t live your life in an imaginary tomorrow. Find joy while it is still today.
If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
Escaping the past is easy. The hard part is choosing to start over.

The great contemporary thinker, Os Guinness has a book called God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt but the original title was In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt & How to Resolve It. I like both titles equally, but there is something about being in “two minds” that I find compelling. 

I can certainly relate to this idea; as can anyone who has experienced the debilitation of depression or anxiety. It is a double-mindedness. It is a terrible fantasy or a terrible trauma, but either way, the mind struggles. When Guinness talks about two minds, he is using it to define the experience of doubt, but I think that doubt, anxiety, and depression are not-so-distant cousins. 

The mind is so powerful, and I believe this double-mindedness can happen when it receives mixed messages. Everyone deals with anxiety, doubt, and depression but the more often we receive mixed messages from important people in our lives, the more our mind runs in two directions. 

“I love you,” says the mother. But she is drunk and terrifying. 

“I will protect you,” says the father. But he gambles away all the family’s money.

An employer gaslights her struggling employee, and a teacher puts inspiration posters on the way but belittles the dreams of his students. 

And then there are the Christians. 

One week, a youth pastor tells his students how precious they are to God and the next week tells them that every sexual thought they have makes God furious with them. A pastor talks about free will and then uses the fear of hell to keep people on the straight and narrow. 

Solomon writes that youth should love life while they can aaaand that they will be judged for loving their life in the ways that youth often do.

Here’s the interesting… maybe scary thing… the teacher smiled when he ordered those motivational posters and believes they make the classroom a better place and doesn’t see that his words completely undo everything the posters empower. The employer convinces themselves that their employee really is the issue, not their leadership. The youth pastor genuinely believes that his students are precious to God and that He is furious with them when they act in a way that is completely consistent with the way He created them biologically. The pastor believes he is right to all but remove free will with fear because the Bible speaks about both and instead of wrestling with the tension he simply shifts topics from one message series to the next. 

And Solomon believed that youth should enjoy life and that they would be judged for it. (Or at least that’s the way we see the text from our modern perspective.) Solomon was in two minds. And who would expect anything different? How he must have worked to justify the path his life took… actually, the path he chose. 

The path we choose either brings peace or pain and the degree to which we live consistently and honestly with ourselves and God, the more peace we will have. Even an addict who acknowledges their identity as an addict finds greater peace in that admission than in the duplicity of denial about their inner demons. 

If you find yourself in two minds, the place to start clawing your way back is with brutal honesty, with yourself, with God, and with those in close relationship with you. Then you will return from the past into the present and the fantasy of the future will terrify you less, and the doubts that plague will turn to wonder. 

And all those mixed messages from scripture? When viewed through the scope of wonder, they too, come into greater focus and become far less problematic to our harried modern minds.