The Thin Line

Beau, our Springer Spaniel, woke me up early this morning (why can't I ever seem to be able to sleep in on Saturdays?) demanding breakfast. Beau doesn't understand weekends. I guess every day is Saturday to a dog, so I won't hold it against him.

Once I'm out of bed it's hard for me to get back to sleep, so I made some coffee and walked out to get the paper. On the front page was a bizarre story. It seems a woman who lives here in one of Atlanta's suburbs came home from a vacation in Greece to find her lights on and a strange car parked in her garage. You can read the full story here, so I won't go into details, but it seems that, while this poor woman was on vacation, a woman broke into the house and moved in. I mean moved in. She put in a new washer and dryer, repainted, pulled up carpet and replaced it with tile, and put in new light fixtures.

In reading through the details, I couldn't help noticing that this squatter seemed to alternate between periods when she knew she was a thief and burglar ($23,000 worth of the owner's jewelry was found in the squatter's car), and believing that she actually owned the house. In her mind a switch was flipping, like a light bulb filament beginning to burn out.

How fine that line is between reality and a realm of blissful self-deception. This woman seems to have been crossing and recrossing the line uncontrollably, but how many times every day, and in how many small ways, do we choose to close our eyes to reality and create our own surreal internal constructs that enable us to cope with the demands life brings to our doorstep?

I think I do that more frequently than I might want to admit to myself. One of the primary themes of the New Testament is the idea of beng transformed toward Christlikeness. The apostle Paul referred to this as being conformed to the image of Christ. I'm beginning to realize, far later in my life than I would have preferred, that part of that process is the process of bringing the life of the mind and the external life into consistency with each other. All those little internal rationalizations, those little insanities that I've constructed through the years as self-justifications and coping mechanisms, are not consistent even with my external life, much less with a life that is Christ-like. Brian Doerksen wrote a song not long ago called "Change Me on the Inside" that expresses this well:

I long for freedom to live in the truth
I want to be more like You
But every time I try to bring about change
I only touch the visible me
There’s only one way I’m really gonna change

Change me on the inside...

This seems simple and easy to dismiss with a "well, of course." But it means yielding to Christ in the deepest internal places -- it means giving Him control of the switch that we flip to turn off the sense of reality that the Spirit uses to lead us to respond to the world with compassion and to turn on nicer realities that enable us to focus on self instead. It's humbling to realize at 45 that the appearance of some increasing level of Christlike behavior is nothing even remotely close to what Christ really longs to see in me.