The Dark Side of Me

You may be asking yourself who this scary-looking guy is. There's a number of possible answers to that question. I could say he's a professional wrestler known as "The Undertaker." However, for the purpose of this blog, a more appropriate answer would be that he's one of my childhood heroes.

A conversation that I had with Amanda J and Jacob D'Avy recently got me thinking about this. I was explaining to them that I used to be sorta obsessed with him. Most people who know me know I'm a huge pro wrestling fan, and The Undertaker has always been my favorite wrestler. I had posters in my room, videos that I would watch all the time, etc. As I was thinking about this conversation, I started to reflect a little bit, and I asked myself why this was so. What is it about me that drew me to such a mysterious, ghoulish figure?

Despite how it might appear in this picture, The Undertaker was actually one of the "good guys" of wrestling for the majority of his career, especially during the time that I started to become a fan. He was often referred to as "the conscience of the WWF." I think that was one of the main things that drew my admiration. But I think it was more than that. There were plenty of other "good guys" in wrestling, so why him?

Well, not only was he a moral figure, but he had his own way of going about it. He did morality with his own style, and for his own reasons. He had a personal vendetta with evil, and he battled it by himself. He answered to no one. Essentially, he was his own master. His own God.

So in answering why I was drawn to the Undertaker, I think it reveals two desires in me: one for morality, and another for autonomy. While the former is perfectly good and noble, the latter is essentially evil. Now that I'm a Christian, I've had to learn that morality is not "mine." It belongs to God. It was his idea from the beginning. For me to have a morality like the Undertaker's, which I did, only glorified myself. A Christian morality is supposed to glorify God.

It's such a huge change! All of my righteous acts that I was so proud of as a young man, I now consider rubbish. God doesn't look at the acts, he looks at my heart. And the truth is, my Undertaker-righteousness was really not righteousness at all because it was usually done in my own self-interests. As a Christian, I now have to deal with the fact that true morality begins with a fear of God and submission to his will.

Wow. Writing this has really helped me understand a lot about myself. Thanks for reading.

Thoughts on Being a Jerk

A speaker I heard recently helped me realize that I'm a jerk. I found out a few years ago that I'm a sinner, but some how a full knowledge of my jerkhood didn't come with the package.

One might want to say that jerk and sinner are synonymous, but how can they be if one helped me understand something that the other didn't? And it's not that jerk can replace sinner; it just relieves it of some of the weight that it carries, so that it doesn't have to do all the work on its own. Sinner has religion attached to it. Jerk strips that off and helps you realize that you are, plainly and simply, a selfish human being.

For the unbeliever, sinner sounds so foreign. For the believer, it's almost too familiar, and it's impact is softened from hearing years of sermons on mercy and forgiveness. Jerk helps out in both of these areas.

And for the unbeliever, that's the first step to Jesus. If you grow up without religion, realizing you're a sinner can't be the first step because you don't know what sin is yet. (Actually, I think everyone knows what sin is, essentially. It's just the word that throws people off). But if you realize you're a jerk, Jesus can work with that until you understand the full depth and consequences of your jerkiness, which is what sin means.

Sin means that your jerkitude has some serious consequences, among them that it's gotten you into major debt with your creator. That's why Jesus died. Not to make us better people, but to literally save us from those consequences. He paid the debt with his own life.