Competition

I used to wear a pendent in high school that said, "F-The World." Except it didn't abbreviate the expletive. I almost got that tattooed on my chest over my heart. Instead, I got the face of Christ just after I realized the existence and love of God. I remember walking around with this me against the world attitude with this huge chip on my shoulder. The truth was that I didn't think much of myself and needed to channel my competitive nature to keep going. If I could make life a competition between me and everyone else, I could survive, because I am and always have been a fighter. I will fight you until I cannot move, ask my wife. If it was me against you, I would die before I would give up. My friends and I used to play twister. There was this one friend, one of my best friends, we will call him The Body, who had a similar mind-set when it came to competition. We would be the last two left at the end of every game. We would fight and fight until we had to agree to call it a tie.
There is this scene in the movie Gattica, where the guy who was looked at as the weaker of two brothers challenges the older, stronger, and more athletic brother to a distance swimming dual. The weaker brother won because the more athletic one had fears that he would not save enough energy for the way back to shore. When they returned, he asked how the younger had planned to get back. The weaker one replied that he didn't save anything for the way back. It was about the battle, he needed to tear his own heart out to survive. This is how I functioned, and to some aspects still do function. I sometimes need to tear my own heart out to survive. If you know me, you know I am competitive. This rubs some the wrong way and causes me to have to apologies a lot, but it is how I function. I frequently find myself needing to fight everything that makes me want to give up trying. In response to my post yesterday, I wrote that with some harsh words and I think I offended some. Sorry. I really am, I didn't mean it to offend anyone, I meant it to remind me to fight for the church. Because often I want to give up on it out of frustration, not just with the people in it, but with myself in it. I sound too preachy sometimes and I really do not want to come off like that. This isn't a blog that I want to become sermons or anything like that. I use it to raise my fist at myself. I find myself yelling when I am frustrated, mostly I will vent to my wife and it comes off like I am venting at my wife, so she tells me to relax, stop yelling at her. I think I do that a lot when I am frustrated with myself. I shout and many get the reasonable impression that I am shouting at them, but I am shouting at myself. I am my own worst critic, but I see a lot of great things in others that I wish I could have in myself. And when I can't manufacture those things in myself, I get angry with myself.