dog face

Dogs of war and men of hate
With no cause, we don't discriminate
Discovery is to be disowned
Our currency is flesh and bone
Hell opened up and put on sale
Gather 'round and haggle
For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don't know the webs we weave

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

Invisible transfers, long distance calls,
Hollow laughter in marble halls
Steps have been taken, a silent uproar
Has unleashed the dogs of war
You can't stop what has begun
Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion
We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

The dogs of war don't negotiate
The dogs of war won't capitulate,
They will take and you will give,
And you must die so that they may live
You can knock at any door,
But wherever you go, you know they've been there before
Well winners can lose and things can get strained
But whatever you change, you know the dogs remain.

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world
(david glimour of pink floyd, circa 1985)


i have recently come to the conclusion that i am a dog of war...
and have always been.

if you were to name any context from life, it would only take me a second to name my other self, my known adversary, my goldstein, my snowball, the ying for my yang. in every phase of my life and in every relational context i can identify one- always just one- on whom i blame my pain, for whom i have only disdain, in whom i am perpetually disappointed and against whom i wage an ongoing and unwinnable war.

having one extreme opposition- a bizarro around which all other relationships fall into place as positive- has allowed me, in seeing the worst in the one to see the best in all others. it appears as though, for me, balance and stability have always existed in the stalemate.

the structure holds together well until one of the dogs lets go of his end of the bone. suddenly there is a hole and, in granting forgiveness, i find myself bereft of both convenient villain and comfortable balance.

the challenge is to be on guard, lest i create from my existing relationships a brand new adversary in order to bring my world back into balance and release me from the change that is imminent.

this is why i commit war crimes in perpetuity. it's circle maintenance.

to break the cycle? i must be of greater things, that my actions and relationships would be of positive eternal consequence. if i cannot break my adversarial nature, then i must choose for myself an adversary who is ultimately as stubborn as i am. my chosen villain must be the personification of all negativity. with him and him alone must i contend.

not to presume to be able to wage war against him on any power i might call my own, but to, by God's power, wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, powers, against forces of darkness in this world, against self-serving wickedness in the spiritual realm that is enacted here, using regular people as instruments of torture upon their own countrymen.

after all, every action has an equal and opposite reaction
(sir isaac newton)

*note: the photo above was taken by an american soldier last year in the war against iraq- however, it is important to note that this is NOT an american tactic. in this kind of war, it is typical to wire a dead animal up with explosives that are set off by remote control- the person with the remote just has to push a button. when you have a bomb in your belly, anyone is a potential victim- it just depends on when your buttons get pushed and who is nearby when it happens .

stock

i found myself thinking that it would sure be convenient if i didn't have to deal with person X anymore. i was on a morning run when i thought this.

kinda cool that God gets up early and runs with you because he knows that there is a greater chance of getting through to you then.

so God is running alongside me, and doesn't seem particularly out of breath. he opens his mouth and the same voice that is described by scientists as 'the big bang' whispers an idea to my heart. here's where i paraphrase a personal word from God into manspeak...

removing one person from your life won't make the inconvenience of all humankind go away. there will always be someone else who steps in to take the place of the actor you've just fired. this life-drama is full of countless characters and many of them are stock. removing one face and one name from the playbill does not remove the stock character from the show, it only redirects the script for awhile in order for the new character to show his or her most obvious colours before things continue on again much as before. like some unending daytime drama that cycles again and again through mild variations within the individual episodes from one season to the next, the bigger story drives forward seemingly unaffected by changes in cast and crew and the occasional rewrite. it is more important to the larger story for the principal to develop and grow in response to the stuff thrown his or her way, than it is for the principal to be emotionally sedentary and relationally static.

in other words, you're going to have to love your way through this one in order for any longterm change to take place. the fact that you can even think in terms of 'person X' suggests that the faces and names are not important... what is important is how you grow through this or that in order to prevent a recycling of the same old dialogue and the same old plot. the old definition of insanity fits here: doing the same things in the same way but expecting different results is folly.

now the big question: what kind of stock character are you in the life-dramas of others?

i hate it when God talks to me that way. i would probably run more, but the truth is a heavy burden to carry with you great distances.
***

if i was blessed with words of sublime articulation
but was full of intellect instead of love
what a din with my words would begin
and how lengthy the silence above

if i could fathom even the deepest truths of the heavens
but remained withdrawn and shallow face to face
how pointless the talk that accompanied the walk
and how fruitless these branches of grace

hemispheres

*note: this is all i could salvage from a blog response that crashed during publishing... hope it makes a little bit of sense

in 'taken hostage' we were talking about being social thongs…
well, we weren't actually talking about that, but our conversation took my imagination there...being stuck between two virtually identical, yet perfectly symmetrical and therefore completely opposite hemispheres. the thong does not divide nor bind together, it simply fits best in the middle because of its design.

well, there are parables and then there are just really bad analogies.

anyway, i left off with “if synergy is spiritual and God is receiving less worship from human beings who know him and each other personally, then it is as though hell holds our relationships hostage. all this with the a powerfully imminent and evident change in the holy weather on the horizon… sounds exactly like what i would do if i wanted to be God and had to settle for eternal damnation instead- nowattamean?”

and Sushi said
I've been thinking about this for a while now, thanks for putting it into words. Now how do we avoid it happening in our fellowship with others and in our relationship with God?

it’s not that, for awhile now, sushi has been thinking of buying some racy underwear (or avoiding buying it, for that matter- who’s to say?) it is that she has found herself, once or twice, in between two halves of the same bum. we’ve all experienced this and it drives many of us crazy.

relational triads exist as yet another example of the wisdom contained in solomon's reflection found in ecclesiastes: ‘nothing new to see here… move along.’ however, we can’t just indiscriminately apply solomon’s sword solution to any dispute in question, giving each plaintiff half of the conflict situation as their settlement any more than solomon could.
(I kings 3.16-28)

i guess what i mean here is that we can’t avoid this stuff- it is part of our free will complex- and so God equips us with what we need to acknowledge it and then address it accordingly. for me it all breaks down when i start attending to the wrong voices.

i’m sitting with two people who don’t want to be there. i’m thongboy- the ‘mutual friend.’ as much as i want to be a neutral party that facilitates a healthy resolution to the conflict, i have brought something of my own to the table that can blow the whole process to bits: i’m not actually neutral.

i try to be. i love both of my friends as equally as i can, and recognize that both own parts of this conflict that they need to sign off on. that’s fine. the problem is that i value the relationships i have with both friends respectively and so i am in danger of compromising in favour of my own self interest. fear and insecurity start to sneak in and i start wondering which person is going to leave mad at me or who is going to leave the church or whatever.

solomon’s sword starts looking really appealing.

but i’m attending to the wrong dialogue- allowing the inner one that no one but i can hear to shape the outer one to which i’ve been called as a friend and fellow. the relationships that have been entrusted to me which involve these other two friends are now being held hostage by my own interpersonal issues. the circle grows bigger... pretty soon we’ll have our own twisted anti-support group where we all bring our stuff and start working it out on each other.

a lot of churches unwittingly operate in this manner, i imagine.

so what are we to do? invite someone else in now to mediate this relational tree?

yep.

God is eager to step into that role. sure it's a problem that he chooses to use regular people as his instruments, but there is hope in the fact that the intrapersonal (self-concept, insecurity, fear) issues of regular people are internal and between us and he who created us. the Holy Spirit mediates here, clearing our heads enough, silencing our own internal dialogue enough that we can hear others speak and can focus on what he wants to do with all of the interpersonal relationships in the room.

is it insightful or prophetic to be able to step outside of oneself long enough to see things as they are, rather than as they appear to an emotionally volatile creature?

i don't know. i mean, somedays, worship leaps from us, other days it seeps from us. the song of a soul set free is the song of God, but there are many different types of freedom and life is, among a million other things, a process of self-discovery. the way we see things is based on who what where when and how we are today.

i think a really good way to avoid relational hijackings is to recognize how vulnerable we are to them. oswald chambers speaks of unguarded strengths, and how the great heroes of faith often fell in the area of their prowess. a person in ministry is already about people, which means that people are probably going to be the greatest manipulatives used by hell to thwart anything God wants to do through them.

it's amazing that hell does the same things the same ways and we still fail to recognize them when we are stuck in the middle.
***
"if i were a good man i'd understand the spaces between friends"
(roger waters, from the 1970 pink floyd album 'atom heart mother')