Hello world.

Gee, where to start, the good or the bad? Let’s start with the good. I have been thriving spiritually the last 6 months, and the Lord has opened my eyes to my sin and more of Him, which are the exact two things He must open our eyes to for growth! I am finally at the point where I can look back on the events of last year in retrospect and say, “God used that for good in so-and-so way.” It was C. S. Lewis who said that “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” If things had to transpire the way they did only so that my deafness was shaken, then it was well worth it. I needed to be broken, it was the only way I could be woken from my hideous slumber (to steal a title of my friend and writer Bryce).

He delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity.
Job 36:15

The cure for pain is in the pain so it's there that you'll find me
Until again I forget and again he reminds me,
"Hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly."
-mewithoutYou

Now I must continue to the bad, as much as I don’t want to. This is the part where I confess my sins, the very ones I justified and disguised as virtues for months on end. If you knew me well before the courtship, you’d have known that I’m a hopeless romantic. I was eager and willing to get married and lay down my life for my wife as much as I could to the end of my days. That in itself is not a bad thing. However, a friend of mine recently rightly pointed out that I have narcissistic tendencies, and that makes me a hope-dependent romantic. I had build my hope on romance and had the expectation that it would fill me. When it failed me, I wanted to collapse, mentally and spiritually. This does not hint at but points directly to and shouts loudly of idolatry.

I don’t feel like I hear God speak directly to me often, but several months ago I really heard Him tell me something profound and penetrating: “My son, it is not the worst things that will make the best idols, but the best things.” How true. I had sinfully turned the most glorious thing in life after salvation, God’s sanctity of marriage, into an idol. When we do drugs we’re making pleasure an idol, which is a good thing. When we lust we’re making sex an idol, which is a good thing. When we covet we’re making the object of our coveting an idol, which is itself a good thing. All sins are perversions of good things. I highly, highly recommend chapter 10 of Timothy Keller’s book The Reason for God. The chapter is called "The Problem of Sin," and in it he defines sin as I’ve never seen it defined before, at least with such Biblical clarity. Keller remarks, “So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.” I already knew this in my heart, but Keller said it concisely and authoritatively. The problem with my deeds after the courtship and on this blog was not that marriage was a bad thing, but that I was deriving my true happiness from it.

For months on end through this blog I justified my actions under the banner of falling in love, defending my position that I could not move my heart and therefore what I was doing was not of my own free will and therefore I held no responsibility for it. What an outright lie. Sin is always, always, always, always, always a choice. It is the scapegoat of humanity to victimize ourselves in our sin and claim that there is something that is too powerful for us to overcome, such as a set of circumstances. That way we alleviate ourselves of our responsibility in the matter and we don’t have to change. That is what I did on this blog, down to the last crossed t and dotted i. The story I stuck to was that my heart, a distinct mind from my own and not under my control, had fallen in love, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was being forced beyond my will to be smitten with a girl. I do believe that we don’t control who we fall for, but we can and do control how much of our heart that person holds, i.e. we control if that person becomes an idol or not. The problem is not that we fall in love with other people, it’s that we need to fall even more deeply in love with God.

I picture love to be like a seed of a plant, which we neither place in the ground nor remove from it. We can water the seed regularly and make sure it has enough sunlight and give it good fertilizer so that it will thrive and grow, or we can refrain from watering it and perhaps even purposefully block its sunlight with a bucket so that its growth will be ceased and the obsessive gardener in us will forget about it. If God has made it known to us loud and clear that a certain relationship is not to be, the second option is the only right response. We don’t have to disdain the person, in fact we shouldn’t, even though that is one of the most common strategies of the world (“I’m too good for him/her”). Rather we should not feed our heart, because it will only lead to sin from that point. Love is like cigarettes (I’d imagine), in that each puff begs for another. It is meant to perpetuate itself endlessly; there is never “too much” in love. What we have to do is do everything in our power to starve the plant. Do not water it, obscure its sunlight, utterly forget about it. But that is not enough! It’s not just about the negatives, what we don’t do. We also have to replace it with something. Our hearts abhor a vacuum, and something must always be on the throne. Simone Weil put it that “One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God . . . one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.” We must turn to God with fervent reverence, otherwise we will replace one idol with another, guaranteed. We will “plant another plant.”

Sometimes when you’re reading a book, God painfully exposes a sin in your life with the use of the author’s words. This happened to me. Keller states, “As in all addiction, we are in denial about the degree to which we are controlled by our god-substitutes.” Is this not exactly what I did on this blog? I was in constant denial that my every emotion was hinged on my idolatrous, broken heart. I spoke of God only when it was convenient, so that I could reassure myself that I was still trying to please Him. I had deceived myself. Sometimes when we’re in sin, we continue to speak all the right words, in a hope that our heart will hear those words and believe that our actions must reflect our words. This is not always so. My actions did not reflect my words. From my words it sounded like I was simply a boy foolishly in love with a girl who was pining for God, but really I was narcissistically pining for love with my every cell and pasting the right godly words on top. Sound familiar? That’s what my father has done for the past 20 years, doing as he pleased as long as he uttered the right words. Oh, how I hope I do not become my father! It is a burning desire of mine that I do not hypocritically bring shame to the holy name of God with every day of my life as he does. Lord, lead me away from that path of wickedness, I plead with You.

Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.
Proverbs 28:13

I want to repent to anyone reading of the poor example of Christ I set on this blog. I did not put God first, and yet I did it all under the proud umbrella of saintliness. Please forgive me. I now see through the Holy Spirit my grievous sins of narcissism, which is only a synonym for idolatry of self. I pray that I did not mislead anyone in thinking that what I was doing was right, that one would test and scrutinize every one of my words against the holy Word of God before listening to a single one of them. Praise God that there is never a “too late” in life. We can always be renewed, we can always be redeemed. Nothing is too far gone. Lord, restore to me what the swarming locusts have eaten, as words of the prophet I’m named after say. That which I have torn down, help me to build up as a monument of Your grace. Give me the faith to walk onward from this point, this fresh start, in a way that deviates from that which is behind me, the sins of days gone by, and help my thoughts and ways to be correspondingly more like Your Son. Give me the grace I need to keep walking this road, empowered by the death of Your Son.

Joel