Today we "did church". For me it was fairly miserable. Let me explain.
I grew up with tunnel vision during apartheid in South Africa, and it remains an embarrassment. As a teenager much of my life was consumed with staying out of (more) trouble at school, a passion for hang-gliding, various diversions from the opposite sex, many other self-centred interests, and making sure I didn't look too closely at the Christianity I supposedly professed. This tunnel vision was in equal parts due to a lack of awareness of what was happening in my country and a fixation on things that brought me pleasure - driven in part because my early childhood included a solid dose of misery. This lack of awareness was helped along by my sheltered life (we were shielded from the harsh realities of oppression), but that was something I could have consciously challenged. Likewise, my fixation on a few selfish foci only served to reinforce my tunnel vision, and could also have been addressed if I had only chosen to do so. The consequences of being unaware and fixated took many years to overcome - and will likely forever leave a scar. As I've aged I've learned how to see a bigger picture - my job requires it, and learning this skill has brought benefits in so many ways. Tunnel vision means you fixate on tiny detail - its all you allow yourself to see. This is satisfying because it limits your concerns, gives focus to ambition, drives success, and shields you from all sorts of distracting concerns. It can make you selfishly successful, and so we tell our children "you can be anything you want if you only focus and try hard enough" - what a web of lies we weave. Tunnels only exist because there is a mountain of context to tunnel through - and that context defines the values of what we focus on. Miss the context, and you end up missing the values. Skip forward to today. We "did church". It was not great. We're in a season of change and while we have a vision, we have jumped from that straight into the details. But translating vision requires three things:
Lets talk.
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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