The Perils of Introspection

"Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.  For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you."         Psalm 86:4-5

This is my verse for now.  I have been thinking a lot about joy and holy cheerfulness... and of course getting discouraged that I fail in having enough of either.  One of the hardest (and maybe most helpful?) parts of the journey of the past 2 1/2 years has been the exposure of my sin, my weakness, my failure.  Not just everyday, but oftentimes moment by moment.  It is continually in my face that I do not love unconditionally, serve with a cheerful heart, give freely, keep short accounts, or sacrifice gladly.  I feel the truth in Psalm 130:3,

                                     "If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
                                              O Lord, who could stand?"

I am thankful that the Lord has shown me more fully the depths of my sin, but I think I can run into trouble when I stop there and am comfortable wallowing in it and stroking it like some sort of deranged security blanket.  What I need to do is look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of my faith, who has freed me from being a slave to sin and given me the gift of being a slave to righteousness.   

"But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."  1 Corinthians 15:57

I tend to get discouraged that I am not where I wish I was on the sanctification scale.  If he has shown me this sin struggle, why haven't I gotten mastery over it yet?  I know the truth, I have been blessed with so many amazing resources and I still go back to the same old comfort-seeking, entitled, complaining about my hard life.  I am the Israelites who are longing to go back to Egypt.  I am Paul who is kicking against the goad.  I am Javert who thinks mercy is a threat to justice.  Oh how ugly!  I want that kid to get what he deserves, which is justice, not mercy!!  When I have been given such mercy!  And I know the mercy given to me came with a great price.  Am I not willing to pay the price for another in small ways when it has been paid for me in the biggest way of all?  It grieves me that I can't seem to change how I feel even when I know the gift I've been given and what I really deserve in it's place.  So I get overwhelmed with the work of it and discouraged that I feel like I'm losing the battle with my flesh sometimes.  "Why can't you do it?"  I say to myself.  "Try harder, work harder, don't let this beat you!"  I can do this on my own is what I think and honestly what I want at times.  But the gracious Lord shows me time and time again that I have no chance of winning this battle on my own.

And then sometimes, for a moment, I can step outside of myself and my self-obsession and I can see how beautifully the Lord is working in our family.  Nick likes to remind me that there is undoubtedly brokenness here, but there is ALSO beauty, and I can't always be perseverating on the broken side of things.  We all have made sacrifices on this journey, but it has made the times of family laughter sweeter, the date nights more blessedly precious, the moments of sibling comradery more beautiful, the clinging hugs more savored, and the times of honest sharing between us all more real and more tender.  We need the truth of the gospel more desperately and we long for heaven more fully.  Those are amazing gifts from the hand of our loving Father.

I was listening to Piper's biography on C.S. Lewis on the treadmill today and he talks about how influential Lewis' way of balancing Joy and Truth has been for him.  A couple parts of it were very helpful to me in thinking about searching for more joy.

1.   "Lewis’s keen penetrating sense of his own heart’s aching for Joy, combined with his utter amazement at the sheer, objective realness of things other than himself, has over and over awakened me from the slumbers of self-absorption to see and savor the world and through the world, the Maker of the world. And this sense of wonder at what is—really is—has carried over into doctrine, and the gospel in particular.

Lewis gave me, and continues to give me, an intense sense of the astonishing “realness of things. He had the ability to see and feel what most of us see and do not see. He had what Alan Jacobs called “omnivorous attentiveness.” ⁴⁰ I love that phrase. What this has done for me is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and to be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the coldness of the wooden floor, the wetness of the water in the sink, the sheer being of things (quiddity as he called it). And not just to be aware but to wonder. To be amazed that the water is wet. It did not have to be wet. If there were no such thing as water, and one day some one showed it to you, you would simply be astonished.

He helped me become alive to life. To look at the sunrise and say with an amazed smile, “God did it again!” He helped me to see what is there in the world—things which if we didn’t have them, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He convicts me of my callous inability to enjoy God’s daily gifts. He helps me to awaken my dazed soul so that the realities of life and of God and heaven and hell are seen and felt. I could go on about the good effect of this on preaching, and the power of communication. But it has been precious mainly just for living."

2.  "Lewis’s experience in the pursuit of Joy and the mistakes he made has had a huge effect on the way I think about the assurance of salvation in relationship to introspection and self-examination. What he discovered is that the effort to know the experience of Joy by looking at Joy is self-defeating. He wrote, “I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt contemplate the enjoyed.” ⁴¹ It can’t be done, for the moment we step outside ourselves to contemplate our enjoying, we are no longer enjoying, but contemplating. The implication of this for knowing that we are believing God by trying to look at our believing is enormous.

This is our dilemma . . . as thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? ⁴²

You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning around to look at the hope itself. . . . Introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look inside ourselves and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by product for the activities themselves. ⁴³

What this has meant for me is, first, that I see now that the pursuit of Joy must always be indirect—focusing not on the experience but the object to be enjoyed. And, second, I see that faith in Jesus, in its most authentic experience is suspended when it is being analyzed to see if its real. Which means this analysis always ends in discouragement. When we are trusting Christ most authentically, we are not thinking about trusting, but about Christ. When we step out of the moment to examine it, we cease what we were doing, and therefore cannot see it. My counsel for strugglers therefore is relentlessly: Look to Jesus. Look to Jesus in his word. And pray for eyes to see."

Now I'm pretty tired of writing.  But I've been wanting to get some of these thoughts down for a while.  I'm going to work on focusing on the OBJECT of my joy and my hope, namely Christ, not on my level or feeling of joy or hope at any given moment.  And also on remembering to be thankful for small things and big things all day, every day.  There are plenty of them.