Exploitation for Sale

I am judging my desire for unconditional love as good.

Acknowledging and embracing my desire for unconditional love brings me closer to living life fully, one day at a time. Conversely, denying it brings me closer to living life in a bubble of delusion, one day at a time.

When I get confronted with a conscious decision regarding my desire for unconditional love, I am aware that the enemy of my soul has a primary strategy in his mission which is to kill, steal and destroy whatever moves me closer to living a life of love.  Satan's strategy involves his proposal being presented in decorated goods or theories, that will cater to what I am created to desire, because he relies on bait.  Without it, his strategy to exploit my desires towards accomplishing his mission, which is to keep me from living a life of love, are exposed.

The proposal will always be one which appeals to my desires, that is the bait.  But, it demands a high down payment.  The down payment is not in the form of money or material goods, although similar to money and material goods, it is in a form that holds universal value nonetheless: spiritual faith.  Which perception of God will I bet on being the real God when it comes to investing my faith?

There are 3 options, no more and no less:

1. the God who is for meeting my desires.
2. the God who is indifferent to meeting my desires.
3. the God who is against meeting my desires.

In each decision I become consciously aware of making, I can choose which of the above options of God I will invest it.

Investing in the God who painstakingly incarnated Himself in the person of Jesus and laid down His life on the cross to cancel our debt of sin, is a spiritually risky business.  No wonder why Jesus said few will enter in.  It requires investing all my faith in the God who is explicitly for meeting my desires, or else I'm done with because I've invested everything (all my faith) in him.

But the other alternative God-options come with covert and hidden assumptions about the Investor (person with free-will regarding their faith) that needs to be explicitly acknowledged at the same time:

• the Investor believes one can live fully without God.
• the Investor does not have desires.
• the Investor is not worth living a full life.

In my bias opinion of spirituality, I believe that believing in those assumptions above about myself as the Investor, creates pain that I would need to swallow if I swallowed the bait.  The bait entices because it appeals to meeting my desires, because it needs to disguise the lies I need to believe about myself in order to invest.

The hidden assumptions about my own self that I consent to agreeing with if I am to invest my faith in a God who is not for me or is indifferent with me are that I am defective or I have no desires, in which then the bait would not be bait in the first place and I wouldn't be drawn to it.  And there the the double-bind comes out of hiding.  The self-destructive contradiction which the sale is dependent on is exposed, this is a scam that I'm being tempted to invest in, based on a double-bind, a sly lie.


Decision-making tool:
Is this bait, or is it presenting the full picture of God and what it means to be human, revealed in Jesus?

"Exploitation for sale, 1 life a pail..."

Buyer beware, seller holds you liable for everything. no exclusions.

Spiritual Growth Centers Around a Mirror

Knowing and seeing God as he really is, (not who i want him to be, but who he really is apart from who i want him to be) is essential to knowing me.  often i discover that who i want God to be, is not far off from who he really is.  actually, in many ways, he is a better version of who i want him to be.

just as in my own childhood and young adulthood i denied certain parts of me and what i experienced regarding reality and disassociated from the truth and created my own truths or beliefs so that i could keep my parents in the parental role without fearing them or seeing how far off they were from what i really needed them to be for me.  i idealized them, out of survival.  because if i couldn't trust these people and saw them as less then perfect or strong, who would provide for me?  I couldn't do this on my own.  when they proved to be less than perfect or strong, i raged because i internalized it as me being the defective one.

as an adult in recovery, i am starting to uncover the truth, and seeing my parents as they really are, not in the lenses i needed to see them through in order to keep them in my idealized parental role.  the lens of seeing my parents or other adult authority figures as more ideal than real, is indicative of me being dependent on them for my survival.  i needed them to care for me and provide for me, so i had to see them as able and capable, and when there was any discrepancy between what I needed them to be and how they were for me, i took the blame for it.  that was the safest route i could take as a dependent child.  i can now see they are broken and wounded people who are just as prone to sin and hurting themselves and those closest to them,, just as i am.  they are much more like me than i could tolerate before, because of the power differential and dependency needs I legitimately had with them as a child.  I needed them to be so much stronger and wiser and able to guide and provide for me and my needs...simply because of the fact that i was unable to do that for myself.  i depended on trusting my parents in order to survive, and when they did things that betrayed my trust by not meeting my needs, i filled in the gaps by blaming myself.  I would reason that it was somehow my own fault, that i had done something wrong or that there was something wrong with me, and that is why I was feeling pain.

But now, as an adult.  I can see the whole picture.  I can see my parents for how they were and really are AND I can also start seeing myself as I really am, beginning with how I was as a child.  My needs were legitimate and not defective, but my parents were the only people who could provide for those needs.  They held that position, but they themselves are imperfect humans, trying to meet the perfect needs of a child, while they themselves as children, went with their own perfect needs unmet by their imperfect parents, who as children themselves had their own perfect needs unmet, because their parents were imperfect...on and on, all the way down to Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve had perfect needs.  They were not defective because of their needs.  They were created in likeness of God.  They had emotional, spiritual and physical desires that they depended on God to meet.  he alone is the perfect parent who can meet the perfect needs of his children perfectly....until sin entered in.  Sin entered in through exploiting our perfect desires and distorting ourselves as defective and in need, and that God was not the solution to our problem...the problem that didn't exist...us not like God.  It all began with Eve being told two lies, and then given a false solution to a false problem by seeing a false picture of God: a lie about herself; that she was not like God, a lie about God not wanting her to be like God, and the false solution to the false problem: eat the fruit that God said not to eat.

The way I see God is all important.  It is not just a peripheral issue.  It is central to who i see myself, which gives way to how I see others.

Just like a baby.  A baby will look to her mother to absorb her own self.  The thousands of times a infant sees her mother's face and how she feels in response to her mother's face, is forming her own identity and how she sees her own self.  Her mother is her first mirror.  She doesn't even exist yet, outside of her relationship and dance with her mother.  The primary way she will learn how to dance with her own self is profoundly wired by the way her mother dances with her in the first few years of life.  

God is like the birth mother.  The primary caretaker of an infant.  The way I see God and how he dances or interacts with me is profoundly impacting the way I see and dance with myself.  And the way I perceive, dance and relate with my own self will be replicated in various degrees with those who are closest to me.

My picture of God is all important, for I came from him.  His being breathed life into me and I am made in his image, just as a baby is made in the image and likeness of her mother and father.  god is the mother and father.

relationships are critical to emotional and spiritual health.  the relationship i have with others is directly linked to the kind of relationship i have with the different parts of my own self, and the relationship I have with the different parts of my own self are directly linked to the relationship I have with God and how I see the way He sees me.  Jesus is the face of God.  no other comes close.  any other face would be a reflection more of humans, not of God...the parent.  God doesn't want me to settle for less than when I relate with my own self, others, and that's why my picture of God is all important....

What picture of God does your mirror hold?  It has one, regardless if you admit it or not, you imitate that all the time.  Spiritual grown for me is aligning my mirror to reflect the true God back to me, and that is by staring at Jesus.