Anointed by Mud

So it's been a loooong time since I've stopped here and written. The beginning of a new semester is certainly no coincidence in that. But man, there's a personal side to it too. January and February have been a good time for me to begin processing things, and with an August-thru-November like we had, I might be there a while. The weird thing is that in the midst of where I am personally, things in ministry at UNC have been, well, as good as one can imagine. Students are praying like never before, inviting like never before, and the Spirit is seemingly at work like never before. We've seen two students come to know the Lord for the first time, some who are new to faith beginning to take it seriously, and some who have just been gone for a while come back to Jesus. And we've seen students who a year ago had serious issues with that word which seems to have become a dirty one - evangelism - embracing it as a lifestyle. In InterVarsity, we like to talk about transformation, and it abounds right now in the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter.

But the trickiness of it all is that ministry is what I do, but it is not who I am. While things are going really well on-campus, I can't deny that I still feel a bit like the man born blind in the 9th chapter of John's gospel on the personal front. Well, except for my under-developed left eye, my eyesight is just dandy. But I feel like a man emotionally born blind. I've always been one to opine before I emote. That's just kind of the way I've been wired. Not unlike many men I suppose. But man, last fall called for a different John Farmer. If all I can do is opine about last fall, I would certainly be able to do nothing but spin myself into a cycle of clinical depression, I'm pretty sure. Losing two of the closest people in your life - I think you can guess my opinion on that. But I needed to learn, and learn fast, how to emote. Not how to deal with emotion - that's quite a different thing. I've always dealt with emotion - hey John, stop it! That's what my inner monologue has always sounded like. I haven't needed to deal with emotion; I've just needed to do the messy business of simply emoting.

The process went through the end of 2009 without so much as one discovery about myself or about how I'm taking things. But January and February have been a bit different. And I'm realizing that it is very deeply a spiritual process. Because emotionally, I was born blind. Fortunately, I was born into the church, and my blind self has been laid in the shadows of the temple just like this man, where Jesus would find me. And he definitely found me found me back in middle school, when the gospel became clear and real to me. But he's constantly finding me again. See, we're not fortunate like the miracle-recipients of the gospels, who seemingly had one or two needs - blindness, paralysis, a hemorrhaging problem. (Kidding.) But seriously, we're all incredibly needy. And we're in a cycle of Jesus finding us in the pit of despair in a lot of different ways throughout our lives. Well, this spiritual process of getting emotional eyes has been largely non-epic. We have this image of Jesus' miracles being these epic displays of power, like scenes from a movie except not. But no, dude took dirt, added spit, making mud, and anointed the blind man with it. That's not the way Spielberg would have written it, I'm pretty sure.

Imagine what it was like. You're blind. Can't see. You've functioned primarily out of your sense of hearing your entire life. So this man comes up to you, and seems intent on healing you. So you're listening really well to hear how exactly he's gonna do it. You hear him spit. Confused yet? You hear him bend down, and you hear him taking his fingers and stirring together his spit with the dirt like it's a milkshake or something. I'm questioning his wisdom by now. And then you hear him take a dollop of the newly made mudshake onto his finger. You feel the warm sensation of the mudshake on your eyes. When this crazy lunatic who just slathered spit-mud on your eyes tells you to go wash yourself in the pool, do you do it?

Here's where the blind man has an advantage on me. He's been aware of his need for sight for all his life. People like me, who think we have it all together, we want to say to Jesus when he does weird things to heal us, "No, I'm fine, you keep your spit to yourself." But the blind man is no fool; if it has even a chance of giving him sight, he's gonna do it. So he goes and he washes, and in faith receives his sight.

So yeah, receiving emotional sight has been a spiritual process. The more I understand about the person of Christ, the more I have eyes to see what is happening in my heart after a hard fall. I'm glad to be back to blogging. It's always a good way for me to process things, to share things, and to invite others into my process, if it's actually interesting to them - to you. When asked why the man was born blind, Jesus says, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him." That's always at the root of our needs. We live in a broken world, a world broken by us no less, and we all as a result have immense needs. But a redemptive God shows the world where the true source of redemption is through powerful works of healing in those who come to him in faith - who in faith can admit their needs, who in faith confess that Jesus can heal them, who in faith believe that whatever weird way Jesus chooses to heal them is just fine. So I'm glad to be back to blogging to share this process so that maybe the works of God might be displayed in me too. There's no point to our suffering if the power of Christ over suffering is not displayed in us.