All the Way Down, Then Up

We Americans pursue control, love control, and think we always need to be in control.

Control is the chief idol of our society, of the times in which we live.

Control Obsession

We all have a toxic little controller, an insecure dictator that wrestles with inferiority and insignificance and which condemns us without mercy for failing it.

So it hungers insatiably and schemes incessantly to be famous, great, and big–needing all control.

And if we can’t be famous, above, and big, then we want to associate with or be a fan of those who are.

The celebrity, movement, or fantasy world serves as our vicarious surrogate, giving us the illusion of bigness and highness and aboveness and betterness.

We have this bloated picture of ourselves, and demand worship from everyone and everything else in the universe.

We redefine and redesign the universe to validate our ego, celebrate our ego-crafted identity, and applaud us and glorify us forever and ever.

Worse than the Stock Market

Then it all comes crashing down.

Our inflated ego world collapses.

Our grandiose plans are in ruins.

We lose all control to the things we look to for control–to our addictions.

And we are dragged all the way down on a greased slide.

The harder we grasp control, the more tightly we hang on, the more quickly we slip down and down.

Trying to live a high-altitude life, our fall is precipitous and our crash is brutally hard.

That’s why Americans are not only egotistical and narcissistic, but depressed and self-pitying and enraged at everything and everyone else.

Supreme Irony

Strangely, even counter-intuitively, the way back to sanity is all they way down at the bottom of the slide.

It is where all our illusions of greatness are in tatters.

It’s where our need for approval and our craving for recognition die.

It’s where our bargaining and scheming, our protests and our blaming, whimper and go out.

It’s where we finally see our pretensions to control for what they are–lies that disguise our powerlessness and our enslavement.

It is where we realize our body is not the problem, and suicide is not the answer.

Our soul is the real problem, the broken, corrupt inner person we take with us wherever we go.

Yet, in the irony of all ironies, where we are the least love-worthy and the most worthy of rejection by everything and everyone, is where our redemption happens.

The Voice of Redemptive Love

A voice whispers, “You don’t need to be big and in control for Me to love you!  In fact, I love the lowly and the broken and the sinful.  I have a special place in my heart for people just like you!”

It continues, “Entrust your failing self to Me.   Surrender all control, and place yourself entirely in My good hands.  Let go of everything else!”

It gently appeals, “Trust Me for what only I can do inside of you–to make you a new person.  Trust me to remove your sins on My cross and die in your place, and replace them with My perfect rightness and everlasting life!”

Then it asks, “Will you let Me deflate your ego and love you at the bottom of your life?  Will you surrender yourself to My redeeming love and everlasting care?”

“Will you withdraw your faith in your self, and place it all in Me instead?”

For people who have known only abandonment, abandoning our self in this way sounds like insanity.

If we don’t stand with and stand up for our self, who or what will?

But it is the cure.   It is where our true healing begins.

What we need most is a re-Goding of our lost lives, a re-Jesusing of our damaged souls, and a re-Fathering of our broken hearts.

There is a solution.