We Don’t Have To Talk… ‘still’

A journal entry written three weeks before I broke, and seven weeks before I found the words for why

Three weeks before I broke completely, I sat down one night and wrote about my yard.

The actual yard, if it matters, was late February grass, mostly dead, cut anyway, because a dead lawn cut clean still reads as care from the street. I had been mowing degrees of nothing for years by then, tending symbols instead of substance, and something about finally writing it down instead of just living it cracked a door I did not know was still shut.

I was not writing toward the break. I did not know it was coming, not by name, not by date. I only knew I was tired in a way sleep had stopped reaching, and that four years of a body turning against itself had finally worn through whatever I had been using to keep from asking why. I called what I was doing healing. I called it self-discovery. What I did not call it, because I did not have the word yet, was a contract, the same one I had been signing without reading since before I owned a car, and that February night, alone with a laptop, tired past the point of managing how I sounded, I got close enough to read the terms out loud to myself for the first time.

Here were the terms. If the yard is kept, no one can call you lazy. If no one can call you lazy, you are trustworthy. If you are trustworthy, you are permitted to exist without apology. I had given twenty-nine years to a version of ministry that ran on that same arithmetic and taught me to call it virtue, and by February of 2023 I could see the arithmetic clearly enough to describe it. What I still could not do was stop running it. Seeing a contract and being free of it are two different things, and that gap between them is most of what this work has turned out to be about.

What follows is what came out of me that night, word for word. The original still lives where I first posted it, dated and untouched, if you would rather read it standing alone before anything I have laid over it since.

As you know, I’ve been taking some time off lately to heal my body and my mind. The last four years have been a rollercoaster of emotions and all the nice trimmings that accompany them. Learning about disease often helps me get through the process of mitigating the pain, symptoms, and mental anguish, and have learned that understanding the way I think is essential to healing. My doctors have told me that my physical problems, all of them, are a result of my inability to think correctly. Years of unseen anxiety and fear masked by the unconscious script that has been my programming. Imagine (pun intended) a permanent life change in your physical body because of the way you look at the world. I don’t have to, I have lived it. I often wonder if Paul’s thorn was the ill-effects of psychological and emotional illness.

Self-discovery has been both amazing and frightening. I have never really liked myself and in every aspect of finding my purpose and joy in life I have assumed ridiculous philosophies. I assumed that I only exist for the purpose of the joy of others and while I know this is not a healthy ideology or theology, I find it difficult to escape. I find ways in everything I do, for the benefit of someone else or some cosmic purpose or a perceived picture of soundness, goodness, and focus.

For example, when I clean my yard, it fulfills the need to maintain it, the idea that if I didn’t I was lazy, and to prevent anyone from thinking likewise. Because my yards are well-maintained, you can rest assured that my service to you is trustworthy. Now extrapolate this into everything. I mean everything.

Now before you come and say, “Awww, this is nice and sweet, these are good things.” let me stop you right there. These are good intentions or actions but their root is not. This thinking is a result of a damaged understanding of the world. My worldview is broken. For over fifteen years I have been withholding my true feelings about aspects of my life and my understanding of how Christian people should act in the world. I have long been calling the general “evangelical church” the “evangelical cult” for a reason. I can also pick apart political and social stances and show clearly how the grand majority of what many perceive as good according to the Bible is literally hateful and sinful according to the Bible. This includes socio-economic and political paradigms. But to talk about those things would just be another way that I feel I must invest in you. It’s not about me learning and being a human believer in the gospel of grace as God permits, it’s about me grasping, processing, and teaching so that someone else can be free, often keeping me imprisoned.

It’s funny how just hearing these words in my head is causing me to fight the guilt of the idea, not even action, of “considering others more important than yourself” or “putting others’ needs” atop my own. What most of the cults have taught us is to omit the portion that says, “looking not only to his own interests” (Phil 2:4). So for what its worth, I have failed to eat, save, understand, enjoy, rest, heal, love, breathe, or maintain myself because it has felt evil to do so. Long ago I learned this error, yet, I still live it out unconsciously…

every.

single.

day.

I’ve been emphasizing the path to joy, freedom, hope, and life over the last eighteen months and will continue. But I’m realizing too that putting myself into the plan of producing teaching or writing articles (I have outlined another book that will never see the light of day) is always an attempt to do something for others without ever seeing if what I am now understanding is applying to myself in regard to freedom and joy. I have discovered that a long time ago I built a series of structures and elaborate scaffolding keeping everything up and safe out of fear of anyone, even one person in my life, getting hurt or falling down. Well, when we build the house, the scaffold goes away. If something is unable to stand on its own, it should come down. It is not my job, nor is it in my ability to keep people safe, secure, sound, or sane. It’s not even my responsibility to keep anyone happy. I cannot and I should not try.

What am I trying to say? Well, in time, you and I will figure that out. But for now, I’m saying that I wrote this article for myself. I’m talking to me. And if you’re listening, great, I’m glad, but first, I need to grasp the reality that I don’t need to write to you, but I want to write to you, and when I do, it is not my job to make sure you read and get it, agree with it, understand it, or even care to apply it. We don’t have to talk as long as I am listening. Then, as life brings us together in a natural and organic way, we will share it with each other. So, no brand building here… no grand scheme… no future plans… just me talking about life.

I write about living life well.

That’s what I want to do.

There are some changes in the future. Those close to me will notice. Those connected with my voice will hear. Enjoy the ride… I surely am and have great hope for tomorrow – my gospel is true freedom.

Slow and easy.

The house did not need the scaffold. I did.

Three weeks after I wrote that, I broke the rest of the way. March the fourth, and I want you to have the date, because I have learned that provenance is not sentiment, it is evidence. Seven weeks after the entry, on April the eighth, something that had been welded shut since before I could name a year for it came open. By May there was a poem I still cannot read out loud without my throat closing. Everything built since traces back through that spring: every framework, every diagnostic, every hour spent sitting across from someone else while they find the seam in a contract of their own. This entry is the last thing I wrote before the floor gave out from under me, and I did not know it was the last thing when I wrote it.

Read it again with that in mind and something in it moves. The man writing about his yard was not being poetic about maintenance. He had located the actual mechanism, the precise trade his nervous system had been running since before he could name it a trade, and he still called the maintaining good. That is what a contract does while it is still binding on you. It does not announce itself as a contract. It shows up wearing the face of character. It shows up as the kind of man you had decided, a long time ago and without anyone asking, that you were going to be.

I go looking for entries like this one now on purpose. Not for the sentiment, though there is plenty of that too, but because a framework built only from theory earns nothing from anyone carrying real weight. What I teach did not arrive from a stage or a study. It arrived from a yard, a body that had quit cooperating, and a man too tired that night to keep performing even his own convictions. When I sit with someone now and help them find the invisible contract running underneath their exhaustion, I am not describing a technique I read about somewhere. I am describing the exact shape of the hole I found in myself that February, before I had a word for either the hole or its shape.

Since then I have started naming that particular mask out loud, the one built from belief before it was ever built from choice, and if you want to see where that naming has led, it begins here.

I do not know what your yard is. I know you have one. Some maintained, defensible, well kept thing standing in for a self you have not yet been given permission to have. I know telling you to let it go will not work, because it did not work for me either. It came down because I finally stopped defending it long enough to look at what it was holding up, and found that it was holding up nothing.

You may not be three weeks from anything. You may be exactly where I was, mowing a dead lawn and calling it diligence, with no collapse in sight and no date worth marking yet. That is fine. The date was never really the point. The seeing was.

The house did not need the scaffold. I did. A house that has to be propped up forever was never actually finished being built. Put the tools down. See what was standing without them.