The Sylvr Pen

Tomorrow, October 25th, is Purple Thursday.

Do you know what that is?

Do you know how important and helpful to millions of people it might be for you simply to wear the color purple tomorrow?

It’s about domestic violence awareness and prevention. It’s a public statement that says “No more!” 

My awareness about this terrible blight on our homes and entire culture has grown hugely in recent years, and this month it grew a bit more via this found wisdom in a county library display:

Shall we take a stand? Shall we, just quietly and individually, accept this invitation from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence:

“Make a fashion statement that really says something: wear something purple on Thursday, October 25th to honor victims and support survivors of domestic violence! This year marks the 7th annual observance of Purple Thursday, the awareness day launched by the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence that’s now gone national with Purple Thursday observances in Massachusetts, New York and Oklahoma…”

I’m wearing purple tomorrow, how about you?

For more about Domestic Violence Awareness Month and Purple Thursday click here.

For more about “No More…!” click here.

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In the last post I said there’s a better means of navigating life’s challenges than by trying to know and follow all the relevant instructions in the Bible correctly. And there is!

I found this wisdom (at my first silent retreat) in a book by Henry Blackaby (et al) called Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. In it he related a sort of personal-experience parable that helps show how Jesus Himself can be our direction-giver, our “road map,” and be far more reliable than our trying to follow mapped out guidance or multi-step directions by our own wits.

He told of how a local farmer had given him instructions to find his house. There were landmarks to note and turns to make in a long series. He finally did make it to the farmer’s house (to his near astonishment), but the next time he went to the farmer’s house, the farmer himself got into his car and told him where to turn at each moment he needed to do it. He didn’t give him more than one step at a time. He didn’t have to, because he was right there with Blackaby to guide him through each part of the journey. (And giving him further directions beyond that immediate step at the time would likely only have “muddied the waters,” and confused him.)

What Blackaby was talking about was surrendering your own mapped out plans and instead tuning in attentively to Christ throughout your journey—not asking for more than one step at a time, not needing to see the whole way to the end, but trusting him with the present turns to make or bypass.

This can be really hard for us who want to be in charge of every aspect of our own lives, who want to have it all lined up so neatly in our own heads before we proceed, who want, in fact, to see the end from the beginning. But it’s Christ whom we need to yield to as the One in Charge. It’s Christ who does already see from the beginning where we’re meant to arrive at journey’s end. The difference lies in trusting Him instead of putting our trust in our own wisdom, judgment, and “traveling abilities.”

Does this mean we should throw out the Bible? Certainly not. But without leaning on his guidance even to make our way through the scriptures, do we really think we can get it all right and make no mistakes?

I believe this moment-by-moment leading of Christ is what happened to me this past weekend. I had become unsure of my way, unsure I was doing the right thing, on the right path. The evident opinions of a couple different people who did not know the particulars of my situation or the exact path that I was on were leaving me feeling “wrong,” almost shamed, and I took this problem before the Lord. “Am I doing wrong?” I asked, earnestly. “Am I headed in the wrong direction? Please let me know.”  

A random look in my Bible didn’t give me any concrete answer. Nor did turning on the radio and hearing the message someone was giving on a Christian station. But as I just continued through my day with Christ, a whole series of amazing things began to happen–which in sum total thoroughly affirmed that I was “traveling” rightly. When I sat back afterward and reviewed it all, I was just plain awed at what God had lined up for me that would not have happened on a different trajectory. 

Yes, Jesus is the road map, He is the way. He is not only the most reliable GPS, but also the most awe-evoking! If you haven’t experienced this sort of thing, try it: try putting your reliance on Him, and keeping close to Him, and see where He leads you, what He causes to transpire. It might change your whole approach to life.

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That last post may have left you staggering. The amount of deception and wrong steering that we may face in any day–from purposeful deceivers, from misled people, from our own self-deceptions, or from just faulty information–can seem so daunting that you might want just to sit on the sideline and not. do. anything. for fear of misstepping. 

Such paralysis (which I can be quite prone to myself) is not the answer. With or without perfect discernment, failing to get up and move positively through the life God gave us deserves the warning I got from another one of those fortune cookie messages. This one made me laugh out loud after I smoothed it out and read,

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll still get run over if you just sit there!”

I laughed because I know myself. I laughed because it was so convicting.

But how can one make one’s way through this deceptive world, this difficult thing called life, and not proceed into outright disaster?

Well, there are road maps. And navigating without one can be very daunting. As I found out just this month on my journey to my latest retreat, at a new and unfamiliar location. I even exclaimed amid my tense superhighway driving, “Dear God, I need a road map! Oh, how I wish I had a road map!”

The Google directions I’d gotten had looked so easy. Just drive up the nearest highway for fifteen minutes, get on the superhighway, and follow it for 168 miles. A few short back roads after that and I’d be there.

Yes, it seemed so easy, till I started up the on ramp and saw all the mobs of tractor-trailers, car-carriers, tandem-haulers, with a few SUVs and fewer still smaller vehicles (like mine) sprinkled here and there—and saw the speed limit sign: 70 miles per hour! Which meant this was the minimum speed almost everyone would be driving…

Now maybe you’re young and used to this. But I’m neither! And to realize that I’d have to continue this kind of travel for 168 miles (on sleep deficit) was, well, almost shocking! But I felt like I’d gotten onto a gerbil wheel and just had to keep going. And going. And going.

There were rest stops. If you want to call them that. (I’ll not get into it.) But I knew nowhere else to go than on that challenging long-haul, high-speed, high-tension route.

We used to have road maps. If only I had one now! I lamented, and resolved that if I survived this trip, I’d go right out and obtain at least one (which I haven’t done yet). With an actual hard copy map, you can see the big picture. You can see the variety of routes, good and bad. You can map out your own preferences. And if you run into difficulties, delays, or hindrances, you can reconsult your map and plan an alternative. But without a map, not a chance!

After I did actually arrive at the retreat camp, and later discovered I could get wifi, I wasted some of my “silent solitude” trying to use Google Maps to plan an alternative way home. I wanted to use that superhighway for part of the route, then get off and take less intense roadways (because the “avoid highways” option almost tripled my driving time, which my eyes just can’t do, and would get me back after dark, which night driving my eyes can’t do well either). But Google kept dumping me back onto the superhighway. Utterly frustrating! Till I had Big Brother G plan two separate segments; the first a trip on the super to a named destination, the second from that destination to “home” on lesser roadways.

But a roadmap would have been easier. And more helpful.

Well, God does give us a road map. You know what that is. The Bible. It’s not just a tome full of erudite sayings and insightful stories about people throughout time. It’s loaded with practical directions, which, if followed, will get you safely where you need to go.

Yep. Have a road map. And use it.

However, there’s an even better way.

Next time…

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To know wisdom we must be able to discern and avoid lies and distorted thinking, but this may be the hardest part of “All things good to know [being] dfficult to learn.”

Perhaps the most important thing we need to know is why and how we’re vulnerable to believing lies or suppressing truth–from within ourselves as well as from others.

Through my life I’ve had to learn a lot of this the hard way, and the wisdom I gained came from the “hard knocks” of realizing I’d been duped, or just plain wasn’t facing reality. I suppose this is unavoidable to some extent. But in recent years I have learned a lot about where I’m likely to accept falsehood, and why and how others might be aiding and abetting it, often without realizing it. This area of learning is huge, and I don’t suppose anyone could gain it all in a lifetime. But if you want to venture into some learning experiences that might arm you against accepting falsehood, here are some that have been breakthroughs for me:

For one, there is within ourselves a strong leaning toward “denial” of realities we find too painful to accept. I “found” this wisdom most strikingly long ago in Al Anon, where I came to learn that the person least likely to admit to someone’s alcoholism is the person him- or herself–and/or the person closest to them in life, like a spouse. 

“Denial” is just one of a whole list of :”defense mechanisms” we ourselves or other people in our lives may be using to avoid facing and dealing with painful truth. By searching online as I put this post together, I found these fifteen you might want to read and think about!

Once upon a time, I observed a whole church business meeting erupt into bizarre behavior to keep from accepting the fact of error or wrongdoing on the part of their leadership. It wasn’t until six weeks later that I thought to google “causes of mob mentality,” and learned about a phenomenon called “groupthink,” a powerful group force that suppresses truth by collective avoidance/denial. This phenomenon can occur in close groups of even highly intelligent and informed people and has evidently been at the root of some of the most “disastrous” governmental decisions in history. So it’s worth knowing something about, to perhaps keep from being part of it oneself!

Besides these largely subconscious ways that we or others keep us from truth there are those folks out there purposefully playacting, lying, and manipulating for their own personal advancement and avoidance of consequenses for their wrong behaviors. In the last decade or so I became painfully aware of the existence of people who exhibit the behaviors of covert aggression, multiple diversion tactics, purposeful and conscious “projection” (see the first article link above), and behaviors designed purposely to undermine and sabotage anyone they see as competition or otherwise a threat to their agenda, or whom they simply want to control by putting them in a “one-down” position. These people may be defined as having “narcissitic personality disorder,” or even be sociopathic or psychopathic while looking like the nicest person you ever met! And the percentage of our population that’s made of such is enough to take your breath away.

If one out of every ten or twenty people among us tends to one of these categories, as research shows us, we would really do well to learn about their tactics and how to keep from being badly victimized–or led astray–by them. Just think: how many people do you relate to on some kind of social, business, or church basis? Divide by ten or twenty, and you have the likely number of these folks you can expect to be interacting with in an average population. And don’t think that being largely church-oriented in your social sphere keeps you safer, for the percentages there prove actually to be higher!

No wonder Jesus told his disciples to be “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” and to beware of hypocrites! Innocence alone is not enough. We need to be savvy, too. I think the operative bibilical word is “discernment.”

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If you have been following this series, did you notice this bit of wisdom, hiding in the shadows, back in the collage on the acronym T-R-U-T-H?

And on the next page, this?

These were cut from a scrapbooking paper filled with “sayings.”

I  present the two of them together because I think their juxtaposition stirs the brain a bit more.

What do you think about them? Do you agree with what they claim? Which one resonates with you more?

Something to muse about on your weekend break.

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