Zombie

You want to know why I have named myself Zombie? I don't care if you said no, this is my blog remember. I have spent most of my life not feeling anything. I was young once and I had all these dreams and stars in my eyes. I was raised by my mother who suffered from Depression and extreme Anxiety Disorder, and she was also Bi-Polar, so she was kind of a wreck, though she did an amazing job given the circumstances. I had no idea that I needed a father or was supposed to have one until I was about 12 and started going through awkward changes and weird stuff started happening to me. I saw my friend hang himself and die at 12 years old, and I had no one to help me deal with that so death became and obsession for me for the next, well even now. I would lie in bed pondering things that should never be thought about in a child. The sadness grew and in came depression, a lot of it, then nightmares, then tears and more tears and anger and shame. Fast forward to age 19, I am laying on a set of train tracks, feeling nothing but relief. Finally it was going to be over, I just didn't care anymore. I saw the train, it was coming. It was coming fast, so I closed my eyes and braced myself. Then I got hit and thrown off the tracks to the side. It hurt, so I assumed I was dead. I opened my eyes expecting to see white lights or hell. I saw red, it was blood and the glare of the street lights that shined over the top of the trains. What happened? I looked down and my friend was lying on top of me holding his hand that was broken from pulling me off the tracks. I was stunned, so I passed out. I woke and we walked silently to my house which was a couple miles from where I had laid down. He told me he was driving around and felt like he should go to my house, he did and found my suicide letter laying on the bed. It was written by a hand so drunk it wrote right over the top of the last entry. It said nothing of a train, yet he walked 2 miles down the tracks to pull me off before I was killed. For days I battled the notion that this was a coincidence. It bugged me because as arrogant as I was, I had always hated myself. I got tired of thinking and wondering and trying to spin what happened around so that I could write it off, but I couldn't and I still felt like garbage, so I tried to cut my wrists on purpose. I sat in the bathtub and and said the first real prayer I had ever said and meant. I told God that if He were trying to tell me something, please say it, because I don't understand. I expected silence, then blood, but what I got was something different. My heart melted, it was the first real feeling I had had in years. For 3 days I sat in that apartment and cried, and I could not and would not stop because God had broken my heart. He had let me know that He was there the whole time, and that He cared. I call myself Zombie as a reminder as to what life is like without the realization that God loves you no matter what has happened. I gave my life to Jesus that night in the tub with my jeans on and a clean razor blade that was never used for anything again. I can tell you that I looked high and low in life for a solution to the equation of pain and sadness and loneliness. Guess what? I still haven't found it, but what I have found is a Savior that continues to repair what is broken inside me. Pain is here because sin is here, but God repairs. My real name is Adam

Tomorrow Is Better, But Today Is Ok

A title of a song I am listening to right now and it makes we want to weep violently while screaming, "I did my best," those that like Dane Cook will understand that. During the aforementioned funk I had been in I was dealing with this notion, actually I had adopted this notion that Christianity was all about keeping to oneself, and being a loving and kind person, and caring for other people in a totally silent and non-judgmental way. I had it in my head that I would just go about my business only selling what people were asking for, and I use commercial terms because the world does when sharing your faith and love with others is concerned. If students came to Liquid, I would show them Jesus, some might say sell them Jesus, but they would be wrong. Church was a good avenue to peddle my faith, but not anywhere it wasn't expected. I know it is dumb, I see that now, but then to me it looked like people were not going to respond to obnoxious Christians telling them what the meaning of life is, you could say selling them happiness, but you would be wrong. Truth be told, I was lazy and wasn't very happy, so it is hard to throw on the Jesus A-game when I am not really feeling it myself, maybe I really didn't fully believe it then, some would say I definitely didn't believe it then, and they would be right. I hadn't figured out how to live in the freedom I have been given by God. And because I couldn't figure out it's meaning, I chose to live in the bondage of sin and in misery. My wife will say that this post is sad, like she did my last one, but she would be wrong. It isn't sad at all because it took me seeing what freedom in Christ wasn't to realize what it was, it is freedom. I don't have to be sad, I don't have to live like I was, I don't have to pretend and play the clown. I can be Adam living for Jesus and doing so in a not so casual manner. Because just over the course of a couple of months, God has taught me or reminded me that knowing Him is not at all casual, and that people go about casually killing each other every day. What the world needs now is radical love, not in the way of screaming and yelling at people, but in the way of going out of my way for people, doing things for people unexpectedly, just because I love them, because I really do love them, not because I feel it to be a ritual or duty, but because God has given me joy, and eyes, and ears to hear people weeping. There is a lot of hurt in the world and not a lot of love, that is where God's people come in, in a not so casual style, we are aliens, but not the kind that want to destroy the planet, but the kind that were in the Abyss, or the Undead, the kind of aliens that mean to help the world, and in my case, help people by pointing them to God.