You Can’t Handle the Truth!

When I was a sophomore at Berkeley I was rather disillusioned. Life was not going the way that I thought it would. I wasn’t at the top of all of my classes. I didn’t reinvent myself so that I had a cool new college personality. I might have left my family and all that drama and moved hundreds of miles away… but that whole “wherever you go, there you are” thing really is true. I was in a new city with new people, but I was still me. Only thing was… once I got to college I couldn’t stop wearing the mask that my family made for me.  Y’know, the mask where “everything is alright.” Only thing is that, everything wasn’t alright with me and hadn’t been for a long time. Away from the restrictive confines of my family, I was able to be free. But I didn’t use my freedom as one might think. I was free to finally start feeling and I couldn’t handle it.

Gone was the pressure to suppress and repress what I was feeling.  The Pandora’s Box that was my mental health was getting all shaken up. I started to implode. All the thoughts that I used to carefully categorize and confine when I lived in my mother’s house… now came out to play in my house and it was like one of those parties that teens throw when their parents are gone. All hell broke loose.

My thoughts took over the house and it wasn’t safe for me to live there anymore.

I didn’t know it was Bipolar Disorder. I just knew that my world…my mind was out of my control… and control was so very important to me. It was at Berkeley that I realized that the feeble thing I called “faith” was just a cultural thing that I put on, much the way people put on decorative jewelry. I had gone to church as a kid because my mother made me. I didn’t know Jesus, so it was easy to walk away from him when my shallow beliefs were challenged. The biggest challenge to my beliefs came when my nephew was murdered by a drug pusher. At least that’s the story I was told. I don’t really know the details. All I know is that I started to question the goodness of a God who would allow such an atrocity. I became an atheist. Not a card carrying one who likes to shoot Christians down on sheer principle. I was a pseudo-intellectual who shrouded my ignorance in pretty rhetoric.

I am not sure when I decided to do this, but one year I decided that I need to find truth. Blame it on the fact that I was a Rhetoric major and for them there is no single standard of truth. Everything is relative. That didn’t fit well with me, SO I went looking for truth. I’ve got a nifty post called “‘X’ Doesn’t Mark the Spot,” if you want to read more about that revelation… suffice it to say, when you sincerely go looking for “truth” it will eventually lead you to Jesus because he is Truth. There is nothing relative about Jesus even if his people do get hung up on “disputable matters.”

Almost from the moment I started walking with Jesus I have been begging him to get to the root of my dysfunctional life. A mental illness, obsessive suicidal thoughts, a sexual addiction & an addiction to porn, incest issues, social phobias and anger/rage issues???  I wanted him to get to the roots and yank them out hard. Only thing is, whenever I got too close to roots my world would start to implode. I’d panic and then run away to go lick my wounds in the comfort of the confines of the Bipolar Bubble.

I’ve done enough counseling to be able to write a book (But wait! I have). If going to counseling heals, I should either be fully healed by now or due for a refund. The idea of doing counseling again did not sit well with me. As I’ve been blogging recently, the application that I had to fill out for this new Christian counseling and the books that I have to read to prepare for it have been pushing my buttons. I have been tempted to retreat into the Bubble and put out a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign. I’ve been “disturbed” long enough. I want to avoid things that are going to make me mentally disturbed. Saturday, Jesus showed me that I’ve been going about it the wrong way. Avoiding the pain isn’t going to make it go away. Burying the pain hasn’t worked so well either. Putting on a mask because it makes other people feel good about themselves might preserve a semblance of peace… but it’s not true peace. If there are two people in a relationship and one of them is really happy, but the other is broken and hurting there’s a problem.

I know I have problems. Maybe they’re minor when compared with what’s happening on the world stage, but they are my problems and they are very real to me. For whatever reason God is directing me to this counseling. It galls me that I do not buy into their major premises, but God has reminded me that I don’t have to trust their process. I just have to trust him. Then, out of nowhere, God reminds me of my sophomoric search for truth. Would you believe that I thought the best way to find truth was to interview people? And somewhere, somehow I decided that the best way to really get at truth was to conduct a Sociological Sex Survey of college co-eds because people are “real” when it comes to sex. Yeah. That sounds really ridiculous to me now. But I really believed that and started interviewing people and keeping a file on the results of my search for truth.

And,  like I said, the search led me to Jesus and I’ve been struggling to understand truth ever since. This counseling journey has been a challenge.

What is the truth, Lord??

I think I was driving when I asked him that question.

You can’t handle the truth.

Was Jesus now quoting bad Jack Nicholson lines??

What did he mean that I couldn’t handle the truth?? It made me think of that ridiculous book that I’d read. What if (and I’m not saying I buy into it), but what if this author is right? My pastor always uses that scripture about “disputable matters” when encouraging us not to get all bent over people who believe different things within the faith. Like how people who don’t speak in tongues shouldn’t get all up in arms when people who speak in tongues start going at it. Or how people who are quiet in prayer shouldn’t get all heated when other people start praying real loud. Personally, the whole “disputable matters” thing gets to me because it sounds like everything is relative — this might not be good for you, but I believe it so it’s good for me. It makes the standard of truth seem a lot less standard if people can decide what is right, and scriptural for them based on their interpretation. If there is one standard of truth, if people hold opposing views — everybody cannot be right.

I am clinging to my complete and utter disbelief in the theories that propel this book forward. What if I’m wrong? I’m not saying that I am… but what if? What if this author is writing truth and I’m too proud, blind, stupid, or neurotic to see it?? I told Jesus the other day that I wanted to know truth no matter where it took me. That’s how I met him after all. I can’t put my faith in a process that I don’t trust, but I can put my future in the hands of the God that I do. He wants to use this process and I want to obey him. Since telling him that I wanted to know truth, my buttons have gotten mashed BIG TIME. Maybe I can’t handle the truth… but I firmly believe that God will never send anything my way that I can’t handle in his strength. I ask for truth. I believe he’s going to reveal it to me.