In the Closet: Bridling the Unbridled

The Average Pearl
The Average Pearl
In the Closet: Bridling the Unbridled
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In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a not-so-secret world

Essay 11: Bridling the Unbridled Tongue

Do you see a person wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for them.
Proverbs 26:12

Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. 

Cruelty is shameful–unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellow, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke.
C.S. Lewis , Screwtape Letters

 

Around my fifth grade year, the school counselor came up with the concept of peer mediation. Perhaps this was backed up by empirical evidence or maybe she was just tired of dealing with all the minor tiffs that showed up in her office on an hourly basis. Fifth graders on the cusp of puberty can be cruel to one another. To solve the problem on a basic level, she gathered a group of the more emotionally mature–the kids that didn’t have a massive friend group (gee, thanks?), or maybe we who seemed indifferent when it came to arguing (now that I think about it, I cannot decipher why she picked who she picked), and she trained us to mediate between conflicted fifth graders.

This is how it went: I would follow the two parties into an empty room and set up two chairs to face one another. Then I, the obviously mature, lacking-in-friendships, neutral fifth grader, would set a third chair nearby so that I might sit and watch them rage at one another, knees practically touching.

But first, I would lay down the rules. “Everything said in this room is confidential. That means,” here I’d pause and take a deep breath, trying to remember the exact words I was trained to say, “everything said in this room behind closed doors stays in this room behind closed doors.” The conflicted parties would smirk and I would jot notes on my clipboard, pretending to play King Solomon to their immature problems. My job was to referee, keep it civil while they talked out their issues. I was trained to find their commonalities, swiftly point them out, record the session on paper, and return to class. To be sure, we took our sweet time. We had one very important thing in common: we were all three just happy to be missing the lesson going on down the hallway.

I am certain the minor arguments were never fully solved, but peer mediation probably served its menial purpose, since fifth graders were no longer pouring into the counselor’s office.

I always felt superior just for the big word I’d tucked in my pocket along with its memorized definition. Confidential. Anything said, done, heard in this room stays in this room.

If it seemed ambitiously virtuous for a fifth grader, it certainly was. Keeping secrets is nearly impossible for anyone with a lust for attention–which is to say, all of us. 

Who doesn’t want a juicy tidbit to share at recess or the satisfaction of being the first person to break news to a bloodthirsty audience? And that was just fifth grade. 

Imagine now, as an adult, the potential to harm, exploit, promote, and market. Confidentiality is nearly extinct in this present time, where the thoughts of man bubble up from the surface with little provocation.
Quick remarks slip out the front door of a person’s heart and are made public as soon as we hit the pavement of the internet. It is as second nature as putting on our pants in the morning–we proclaim our opinions, desires, waking moments, precious pictures to an audience. We declare our outrage, disappointment, judgment, hurt feelings. We wrap deep convictions with thick satire, conjure up a hundred videos and memes to express our funny-not-funny opinions. We’ve shoved our vulnerability so deep in the cracks it wouldn’t dare peek out its shameful head.

There is little wrestling with one’s conscience, little editing. We’re too cool to think before we speak. 

Once on the way to volunteer in my kid’s classroom, I passed a bulletin board in the hallway of our elementary school. On it was pasted the phrase, “Take Captive Every Thought”. This, lifted from 2 Corinthians 10:5, was displayed in public school for children. It was surrounded by little smiling emojis with thought bubbles that said things like, I don’t have to act the way I feel, and I can be worried and still choose to be in control.  The bulletin board was simply advocating mindfulness of the public school stock variety. An institution which walks on eggshells to the point of not wishing a Merry Christmas lest they appear prejudiced would not, I repeat not, slap up a Bible verse for the willy nilly fun of it.
Take captive every thought–quite revolutionary, isn’t it? And with a closer look, surrounded by a forceful whip of righteousness.
Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

It is a picture of trapping our sin instinct, our soul struggles, and dragging them to Jesus, the King, the judge. We make them bow before the master. Mindfulness, shmindfulness–we force our own thoughts to fall on their faces before Him.

Sentimental jargon? Weeds. Snide, sideways criticism? Thorns. Pride? Pour on the gasoline; they burn up in a holy spirit blaze.

The practice of capturing our thoughts and making them submit to a higher power has several purposes. 

First, it makes us aware of our natural tendencies, our abject poverty apart from a holy God. Paul said, “what a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of sin?” Without a doubt, it is the thoughts that stream in our minds which find us forever guilty, forever the responsible party.

Second, we are forced to admit our powerlessness to handle the sometimes raging, inappropriate nature of the thought.

Third, it acknowledges our dependence on a supernatural source. On our own we do not have the power to fight this battle.

And last, it prevents seeds of bitterness from falling and taking root in our hearts. Seals and Crofts weren’t wrong: Love takes no prisoners. Love shows no mercy.

Made aware of the awfulness. Forced to admit our powerlessness. Acknowledging our dependence. Cleans us from the inside out.

Our worst thoughts, our best thoughts–though ceaseless, they do not define us. It is simply the old nature–that flesh we mortified when we chose to live by the Spirit so we might not gratify it. 

The thoughts, the creeping fountain bubbling up–it can be controlled, boundaried. We can be self-controlled, we can be love-controlled.
We can hope for that which was formerly hopeless. Isn’t that wonderful? It gave Paul hope. “Who can save me from this body of sin? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus!”

Holy spirit fire–this is the weapon that has the power to demolish the enemy. 

It must be exercised with care and calculation. If we could personify the internal struggle between good and bad, cartoon character-style, I would imagine quite a tussle. The bad guys would wriggle and squirm to get out of their handcuffs–anything to escape before being handed over to the Judge. 

It’s obvious, then, that the capturing of the thoughts themselves takes time, not to mention the process of holding them in court. Therefore, a thought that then comes forth from a heart with audible words forced through the mouth–ought it not be sifted a time or two for editing purposes? 

Here we are, each human with two ears and one mouth, dependent on the Holy Spirit to come up with anything worth saying.  

Proverbs 17:28 says,

Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent.

We used to sing hymns to remind us: angry words, oh let them never from my tongue unbridled slip.

It is a long haul to claim back such confidentiality, isn’t it? To strip away the modpodged surface and let our vulnerable, non-shiny selves rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us step by step in our words? 

The verse that has been nailed to my wall the longest is Colossians 4:6:

Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.

I’ve stared at it for years, the painted salt shaker tipped over, spilling grains onto the words. It turns out I’ve been too focused on the salt. 

It isn’t the salt shaker in my pocket that guides me and my conversation in a saltless world.
It’s actually Who holds the shaker, and He gets to decide when and how to apply it.
He doesn’t wage war as the world does–so I won’t, either.

 

Grant us the weariness

My kids, I joke, are on the sixteenth level of Homeschool: copying and memorizing Gary Larson comics.

It is okay, I tell myself, interspersed with major doubts generally directed at my husband. We made dog biscuits and wrapped them in festive packages–Mr. Mutt’s Christmas Treats. The boys were invested when it came to pureeing the turkey and sweet potato, less interested when hand printing the labels. My energy waned around the second batch. The math kid had already wandered off by the time we were figuring out fixing a price point. And really, I couldn’t blame him. Entrepreneurship is for the narrow-minded. I have a million ideas to pursue.

Nothing holds my attention very long. The six year old doesn’t care about Charlemagne, and I don’t either, not anymore.

Loud noises make me irritable. The second drone (useful in the Canvas drone videography class) has burned up its little propeller motor. All our Amazon boxes have been transformed into a massive castle, drawbridge included.

We have not exhausted our resources; just our mom.

The kids are still doing great. I am convinced all a kid needs is a mom and dad who love them.
I listened to a podcast interview with a novelist. The sweet English lady, having had a mother as a writer, swore she knew nothing more than a mum who picked her up from school, distracted and puffing cigarettes, one after the other. They’d return home, eat a cookie, and her mother would disappear into the bedroom, close the door, and type for another two hours before returning to heat a can of beans for supper.

It sounded romantic to my ears. I know it was not.

Neither is staying home with kids.

I married a man who is extremely successful. It came as a surprise to both of us, I think. He comes home from work bone tired. I am, too.

He makes money–I don’t.

Yes, I say, but you have a real job. You don’t put away clothes and dishes for the millionth time. You don’t yell at kids to stop running through the house.

Pearl, he says, our jobs are the same. People buy product, I order more. We restock the shelves. Then the product goes away and I do it all over again. And, he adds, an underdressed boy streaking through our living room, there is always at least one person who isn’t doing their job right, and I have to get on them about it.

He is right–of course he is right. His work life isn’t glamorous. There is no totem pole, no ladder to climb. We’re all in muck and mud–his just happens to gleam a bit.
My griping lands in knowing ears, kindly, but unsympathetic.
Our responsibilities are split down the middle.
Once a person told me the breadwinner of the family only has a part time job. When they come home from work it is time to clock in for their full-time job.

It sounds lovely. There is a piece of me that wants to argue this, to put it into practice. But the practical me, the tired me, she knows a secret: my kids have parents who love each other, and this is good enough.
Love really does cover up a bevy of faults. Grant us both the weariness to not find them, Lord.

We break out the oil pastels. I forget and let the kids use them on the carpet. My husband, who will never notice pink streaks in the carpet, not even when he lays on it every evening to stretch out his back, doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind because I don’t tell him. I don’t tell him because he doesn’t want to know.
He loves to see me paint, loves it when I cook, loves to come home to the newest endeavor. Loves to hear our kids make music, cookies, pictures, projects. Enchanted by our homemade candle making, chemistry experiments, gingerbread decorating, outside adventures.
He is tired, I am tired, we are equal; equally tired.
It is satisfying, to be loved dearly by another tired person.

After kids are put to bed, he comes back to the living room and watches the news or Youtube. He dives in the rabbit hole–videos on growing strawberries in Alaska, choreographed Christmas lights, rednecks feeding raccoons, traveling in Turkey, how jellybeans are made. After a half hour or so, he turns it off and sighs, done for the day.
“Well, that was an interesting smorgasbord,” I tease.

“Yeah, I guess I’ve got a lot of interests,” he says.

“Or none at all,” I joke. 

And these weary parents go to bed, happy.

Advertising 101

Thanksgiving break finds me flipping on the TV more than I’d like. Maybe it’s the green bean casserole that always makes me sick and couch-confined, or maybe it’s the futile hope to catch a decent, classic Christmas movie to watch with my kids. And football is always a good second option.
I’ve waited years for my boys to grow up enough to sit still for more than a minute, so I take primetime football as a sign we have finally arrived at our destination. Televised football, I reason, is my reward for the hours and years I’ve spent on the floor racing hotwheels and reading board books.

But along with football comes some awful commercials. The TV we are so careful to monitor becomes a minefield. 

This is where my feelings get worked over, where I doubt my standing, if I’m really a nice person, and most of all–where I stand on Culture.
I remember learning in sixth grade about advertising. We took notes on how companies try to sell product, services, and ideas by putting an emotional or compelling spin on their brand. Drinking Pepsi makes you fun and possibly capable of rollerskating backwards. A diamond necklace wrapped up under the Christmas tree means your daddy loves your momma, and she will cry ecstatic tears of joy when she opens it. Good food and family time can be bought, and endless breadsticks will never let you down–Olive Garden.

Maybe the rest of it went over my head; maybe commercials haven’t changed that much. But I get a sense there is more culture molding, more propaganda than ever before. Brands aren’t just trying to get me to buy what they are selling. They’re actually trying to invade my brain with their version of the world. They want to destroy my conscience by numbing it. Repetitive, outrageous behavior becoming normalized.
I’m not talking about healthy, slender people sinking their teeth into a Big Mac, Coke, and fries (though I’ve never seen an obese, self-loathing character in a McDonald’s commercial).

I’m talking about same-sex everything, the glory of “coming out”, grown men pretending to be little girls, drag queens, nebulous he/she/they situations, women falling in love with women. I’m not saying JLo undressing on a pole during halftime is any better, but this influx of regularly, reliable “strange flesh” (Jude 7) on television is disconcerting. 

If you don’t think these situations are a problem, if you think it is mere “conspiracy”–there is a good chance you have become desensitized to evil. You are ignorant to the impact these advertisements have on your conscience, your morality.

It isn’t just on television where my kids are exposed to this cultural revolution. In my six year old’s online Spanish curriculum, he was introduced to the idea of two women on a honeymoon (nevermind he is still only mastering greetings and simple phrases. Donde esta tu esposo? No tengo esposo, tengo esposa! Um, que?!)
Several days ago, our school district sent out an email to the parents of 85,000 children, announcing the celebration of Trans Week.

News flash: this is not normal behavior.
Romance languages worldwide are not reordering their feminine and masculine nouns to accommodate a generation of gender-confused, sexually-disoriented people.
Most other countries are not suddenly identifying a mass bending of gender.
It still takes one man and one woman to procreate.
The stable family unit–one mom, one dad–is still the strongest predictor of life success (kids actually need both).
In less affluent societies, children desire an education and hope to rise from poverty–they don’t take turns in class declaring their preferred pronoun.
And more telling than anything: these rapid, evolving perversions are rolling in by the dozen. Grooming children? Pedophilia? Tell me, o wise Netflix, what shall I give into next?

Lest you be confused, at this moment in history suicide, anxiety, hopelessness, mental illness, sexual disease transmission (!) is at an all time high. There exists only one explanation, one correlating schema.

Sin destroys people.

Our culture is very, very weak. Take a gander: we have undermined our own efforts at eliminating mental illness in schools by actually celebrating deviant behavior. By normalizing fatherless and motherless homes, we are effectively telling our children there is no one path, no example, no model of right living, because anything goes.
We are confusing our little girls by letting perverse men pretend to assume their innocence and naivety. We are devaluing womanhood and manhood by suggesting there is nothing special about one’s sex, nothing creative and wonderful and God-given. We are unraveling the fabric of our society by claiming birth-assigned gender is mere suggestion, open to interpretation. We are destroying our children with confusing misnomers instead of firmly, lovingly giving them some sturdy truth.

Our glory is our shame.

When, in the past, tolerance of evil becomes the sacred cow, when we’d rather not say anything out of fear of retaliation, when cultures have disparaged the family, when they’ve resorted to total anarchy and rejection of stability–namely values, virtues, and moral uprightness–when they have rejected what is True and Right without blinking, shameless and corrupt, haters of God–this is when they were decimated. It didn’t take a feather to knock them over; they rotted from the inside out.

This makes me want to turn off my TV. It makes me glad schooling is remote this year and that we have our kids under our wing.
But I can’t keep them there forever. We cannot avoid living in this world, cannot hang up blackout curtains and pretend Rome isn’t burning. I want my kids to be able to contend for our faith someday. I want them, more than anything, to stand firm (1 Thess.3:8).

We need practice.

So this is what we’ve been doing–pointing out the inconsistencies.

Just like sixth grade, the lesson is advertising. How are we being manipulated, kids? What are the tools the enemy is using to sear our consciences?
Do you recognize it? Is it worth buying?

And just like that very erroneous, cheap bedazzling kit with which to ruin a perfectly good jean jacket–it might suffice for one glamour shot session in the early 1990s, but it won’t hold up in the washing machine.

Don’t be taken in. Don’t for one second think it is loving, compassionate, or reasonable to fall for it. 

Love allows a person to think and choose.
Love does not pressure us to give in to the madness.
Love begets wholeness, not emptiness.
Love is long haul.
It doesn’t act unbecomingly, does not seek its own, doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness (1 Cor. 13:5,6).


Advertising 101: do it for the kids sitting on the couch next to you. Explain those rainbow flags, point out flagrant, destructive behavior. Change the channel, but bring it up. 

Explain God’s truth, how Jesus died to wash us clean.

Stand firm, friends.

 

…they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.
And just as they did not see it fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper…
Romans 1:25,28

For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.
Romans 8:6

Stick out your elbows: contending for the faith

In the fall, we play football.

But between feeling a little put off every time I turn on the NFL (seeing as grown men who make millions still pound each other into the ground every weekend but millions of kids in America cannot go to school and learn in person)…and the small issue of my son being a tall, thin reed of a boy…complicated by the fact I have seen and worked with many brain injuries–well, I decided this fall to make it a point to practice our basketball skills. Maybe it is time to branch out and love other sports, the kind that don’t require helmets and full body armor.

We walked past the park to the court. I am woefully behind in the teaching-my-kids-sports arena. Their parents are mediocre, mostly-fans, and we’ve been putting off organized teams (except for a random t-ball and flag football season) since they were born. Saturdays were always easier that way.
Near the hoop, I give him a few pointers. I direct him to post up, lay up, and all those other coachable things you say to a young boy who is bound to be 6 and a half feet someday.

We are several years behind, let’s be honest. He tosses around a football. We play for fun. We’ve moved too much to invest whole seasons in team sports, and defense isn’t a thing when you’ve got parents who prefer amiable games where everyone gets to play. He has no real feel for opponents, grabbing a basketball, pivoting, squaring up, and banking the money shot. On this windy, cold, sunshine day, I lob the ball in his direction and he runs long, ball tucked under his elbow, tapping his feet just in bounds like he’s caught a touchdown pass.

No, I tell him, basketball is different. Stand strong down low, keep near the basket. I remind him his opponents on defense will only come up to his chin, so if he can catch it and keep it above his head, there isn’t even a chance they could get it from him, even if they tried.

It isn’t natural, keeping your elbows out and catching a ball eye level. I remember my dad practicing the same moves, passing me a ball, again and again. It was annoying how he aimed for my head, threw it as hard as he could, expecting me to catch it without flinching, pivot, and score.

I should’ve been better, for all we practiced.

Good thing basketball mattered very little in the long run. It was nothing more than an allegory in my life–one that has served well to remind me of what could be called a calling:

Contend for the faith.

Jude didn’t get very far in his little book, didn’t mince words. Fight as though you are going to win.

The apostle wanted our elbows out, hands out and ready to catch the ball thrown our way. We’ve been warned to hold it high–keep truth eye level–handle it with care, and get the dang ball to the basket.

It’s the broken record in me, I guess, or my dad’s persistence to keep throwing balls at a person’s head–we have got to handle the truth. We’ve got to make it to the basket, opposition be damned.

Look around, take in the scene. Out there are masters at manipulating our thoughts, our feelings, our ideology, and we are catching the ball way too low. In fact, I’m not sure we’ve got a very good handle on catching the ball at all, or even realizing we are all playing the game. Perhaps we’ve fallen so out of practice, we don’t even know why it’s important to be a part of anything at all, much less uphold truth.

I, too, take the bait often. If I’m tired or in need of distraction, I usually stumble upon news articles or feel good reports and let it sink in too deep. I let my elbows drop. I listen to the sob stories, I genuinely try to understand where a person is coming from when they use their human reasoning to justify all sorts of contrary matter. I get sucked into the uplifting, fluffy nonsense. I indulge far too often in temporary, this-world-is-my-home, humanistic, nihilistic, and perilous self-centered thinking.

I get it, because I’ve been the person with a bad marriage, secret thoughts, depression, self-issued borderline personality disorder, low self-esteem, narcissism, a quick hand at blaming, and overall complainer supreme.
It’s very easy to wallow in it, let it handle me.  It comes from a very tender soul, the commiserating on weakness, the abhorrence of stigma, the recoiling at every sense of shaming. It almost-almost–makes me feel like I belong somewhere when we are all throwing the human pity party, waxing on about our problems and struggles.

But it isn’t truth.
Truth doesn’t begin and end with self. Justice cannot be just if I’m the one always banging the gavel.
Truth is chained to authority, and God is the one in charge. 

The truth is–I am the one responsible for my sin. Guilty.

Jesus pulled me out of myself and those lowly, worthless groanings. It was the Father who put the ball in my hands and told me to hold it up a little higher. It was the Spirit who made me sturdy enough to weather the practice. They won’t be able to knock it out of your hands–when you stand up, you’re taller than everyone else on the court.

And here is the God honest truth: you aren’t much to look at, when it comes right down to it. You and I have nothing to offer, not one speck of anything special, lovely, or wonderful. But God put Jesus to death to buy you. When I was worthless and wretched, He said, I want her–and it cost Him his Son to make you His most priceless treasure. There was only one Truth who could reconcile me back to the Father and blot out those endless, worthless pity parties.
I will not go willingly back to the pig pen.

The world will not tell you this. It will swipe the ball right out of your hands. You will watch it bounce down the court and you’ll wonder why it feels like your life is slipping away. You’ll maybe think there isn’t a God big enough to rescue you from your hopeless situation. You’ll continually depend on other people to fix your problems, mend your fences, make you feel a certain way. You’ll be a blamer and a whiner. A hater and a gossip. Forever dissatisfied and addicted to self. Ungrateful. Filled with loathing. Despair.

All because truth is gone and the ball is completely out of your hands.

More than anything, I cannot stand to watch Truth being knocked around, when we’ve been charged with protecting it. I cannot tolerate souls in torment when God reached down to ransom them back by the blood of His Son. I cannot fathom a life of just dabbing ointment on the pain, waiting for death as some sort of rescue. And truly, I hate it when people wave off the Gospel as some sort of fairy tale, because it is the only thing that, at my lowest and loneliest, pried me out of the miry pit.

I am throwing the ball in your direction; I charge you to contend for the faith.
Arms up! Elbows out!

They won’t be able to knock it out of your hands.