Blah

Well, trying to be all profound isn't working. Oh well. I was thinking today when I was taking notes on the sermon during church, "I wonder if I recorded everything I've been taught that I have written down, which would include mainly some recent sermons, SLT and a recent conference, plus the stuff i have on CD, I would first see how many times I had to be told the same thing and how important that must be, and maybe even learn it this time, and second maybe there is an overall pattern that reflects events in my life." Eh, I really wanted to type up everything I had taken notes on in SLT. That would have been helpful, since my writing grows more cryptic over time and since my memory is really bad.

Oh, but something somewhat meaningful did come up today. My pastor said that even if it's not your fault...hanging on to dysfunction becomes a sin. He was talking about confessions, which is the series we are in right now. The passage for today was Luke 18:9-15 about the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector.
The sermon convicted me of about two things.
First, the minor reminder that Christians are often at a huge risk of turning self-righteous and trying to go on our own strength. I don't really struggle with that especially but it's good to be aware of the risk. The other thing was the problem of dysfunction. It has come to my attention recently that I am more than a little bit extremely dyfunctional beyond belief. Like, I have some serious issues in addressing everyday life.
I'm not surprised at all to realize that, but it is definately true. I just never was able to take in just how incredibly dysfunctional I am. Like, I can't even remember what I'm doing half the time, and I have a lot of trouble with memory in general.
Well, it was really easy going along and not wanting to function normally and be held to all the same standards as the real people because I had a lot of issues in the way that it seemed made it impossible for me to be normal. I really didn't think it was possible for me to act at all like the normal people. I thought my memory just won't work and I won't be competent and I can't ever understand what anyone wants from me. And I won't ever be understood because too many things went wrong and I got wrecked from the beginning, like some kind of little tree that grew into a fence and got twisted all around the fenct so it can't ever be straightened out like the good trees. That's how I feel a lot of the times. I had a feeling not only that it wasn't my fault but that there was nothing I could do about it except try really hard to not be a nuisance to the people that know how to behave.

But then today I realized that the dysfunction itself is like a sin I hang onto, and maybe that in itself is part of my comfort zone.
And that presents me with a whole new dilemma. Because I established back at SLT the need for self-respect. That's hard enough. It's hard learning to act in self-respect. I'm barely getting there. And then there's the need to stop putting myself in positions where I will be abused. That's hard, too, because I have to step even further out of my comfort zone. And then I have to stop being dysfunctional?! It's like I have to let go of everything. It's like I have to burn my house down with all my clothes and records and stuff and basically go on to something completely new with absolutely nothing. It shouldn't be hard, since I've done something like that twice. That is I left everything behind, including my family and moved on to somewhere completely new and cut off. That I've done twice, cutting off from two families. I even preached a sermon about it last month.
But that's just physical. I can handle losing all of my stuff and I can stand the social severance of having to leave home multiple times.
But to cast off abuse, self-hate and dysfunction? That's hard. That's like wrapped around my whole self like a strangler fig. That's sunk into everything I know and do. It would be like cutting off all my skin and expecting a new one to grow. It's like sawing off all the diseased branches of a tree and only having a stump and expecting it to live. It's crazy. I don't want to do it. I'm afraid of what really is left of the original me that got buried in all the crap. I wonder if I could make it.
I think I must also be afraid of the potential there. Imagine, being free enough to get out of that. Imagine being like some kind of machine that was so dirty and messed up and broken that it didn't work but it still went along caked with dirt and struggled no matter what. And then it go clean and fixed so it worked, and it was so used to struggling just to crawl that when it started going it, like, took off and ran stuff over.
That's how I feel like I would be. I think I'm afraid of being that. I think I have trouble believing I could ever work properly. I think that's my problem