Performance Anxiety

It’s happening again.

Another one is drifting away.

This gig is not rocket science but i am still surprised by seeing the same old scenarios keep replaying over & over the older i get. You’d think it would take something complex and imaginative to sideline Jesus followers but actually it is just the same, simple and effective strategies.

The most effective? Religion.

The way it works is this: someone who genuinely loves god & wants to follow Him starts the journey. But life is hard & they take their body blows and from time to slip into self comfort thru one or more of the readily available idols our culture offers up. There are plenty of buzzes out there. And when we hit that “just plain wore out” place we often turn to them. Is it stupid & destructive? Yup. But do we still do it? Yup.

Is it porn courtesy of the world wide web? A little electricity for the hum-drum existence at your fingertips? Or is it retail therapy? The ever present hope of fulfilment via acquisition. Perhaps it is members of the opposite sex? Or career advancement delivering the promise of “significance ?” What is yours?

In any case, my friend stepped into his respective lie & struggled. And the problems don’t end there do they? The destruction is wrought really in the fault lines that shoot off from those decisions and create other crises and issues that we then need to deal with. So, as he looked around, there was now a mounting wall of frustrating failure to “measure up” and a pretty tough road back.

Now this is the moment. This is the critical crossroads. This is the point when the decision gets made that decides whether this triggers a trajectory of recovery or a trajectory out of the frying pan and into the proverbial fire.

This is the moment when he could’ve owned his failures. Pulled his idols out from behind his back. Stopped putting on the happy shiny face. And simply said, “I’m stuck. Help!”

But actually it was the moment when he could not face his heart and his life AS IT WAS and decided to just be....

....busy.

To distract himself.

To have excuses.

To drift.

Because the truth didn’t fit what he knew was supposed to be his story. (A friend used to say “it is wise to never ‘should’ on yourself!”)

So it’s happening again.

The idols are gripping tighter & the slavery is deepening as he throws in his lot with their false promises. I can see the look in his eyes. He is not there anymore. He is avoiding, always avoiding.

His values are changing. The idols are shaping him and the distance is growing. This of course means the shame is deepening too and thus the need to avoid grows stronger & more compulsive. It’s a self perpetuating cycle that runs on its own batteries.

And I don’t know how far this is gonna run before he hits the wall & realizes his story IS his story. Will he ever? What will that wall be? How deep is the hole he is gonna dig?

This story has been played out so many times in my short life in the church. Close & loved friends who I know no longer. But even if I knew them I wouldn’t because they are not the same person who chased Jesus with me.

This is why I am writing this. To try to scream into my own personal bullhorn a warning to other s so that the list of who walks this path is at least a little shorter. I’ve never wanted to write until I had something to say. And I measure “having something to say” with a kind of “I have to say this or I will die” scale. I finally feel I have something to say.

You see, I blame religion.

I love saying that. Our church in Canterbury, England has as its tag line, “Religion Sucks.” When we share that with people they always give us that look that dogs give you when you act insane in front them... they tilt their head to one side & squint. “But, you ARE religious! Huh?”

Fifteen years ago a friend loaned me a Tim Keller cassette tape where he defined the lines for me in a way I’ve never forgotten, “Religion means, I obey therefore God accepts me. But grace means, I am accepted because of what Jesus has done for me at The Cross, therefore I obey.”

That moved the goalposts for me forever.

But living it is really hard.

You see, we are incurably religious. We’re “performers” dancing for our significance. Think the Garden of Eden episode. It was religion thru & thru. I want control. I want to have the means of attaining that which I desire in MY hands. And this is religion. It’s like the guy who let us wrap up his gift for him at Christmas for free but then threw a £5 note at us & ran away because he could not handle us doing it for him for free!

“I’ve earned my way. I don’t need.” Because need = not enough to be acceptable.

Therefore I have me to thank.

Of course it is just pride but that pride is a better transformer than Maximus Prime & he sneaks into many different guises to lead us astray. And it is all religion.

I love the scene at the end of the film The Devil’s Advocate when Al Pacino, playing the devil, appears to Keanu Reeves after he has just sacrificed his promising legal career by rejecting another, earlier, overture of Pacino’s for him to compromise his morality for career advancement. The second time Pacino morphs into the form of a reporter who is now completely impressed with Keanu Reeves’ noble gesture and woos him with promises of a front page interview and that he will be “famous” for his choice... etc... etc... and when Reeves finally smiles sheepishly & agrees to meet him at the office tomorrow the camera pans in on the reporter’s face as it morphs back into Al Pacino’s face and he grins at us and says, “vanity, my favourite sin.”

And that is it. Pride (aka vanity) is the root of religion because religion dares to believe we have “enough” to “perform” at such a level as to make us “acceptable.” It is the belief that we can attain acceptability or significance or fulfilment thru our action and pursuit and wits.

Therefore...

The greatest enemy of religion is failure.

It’s because it points to our inability to STAY in control. Like the priest says to Rudy in the film of the same name, “there is one incontrovertible fact, there is a God and I am not Him.” This keeps gumming up the religious gears in our lives.

However religion doesn’t let go easily.

When we do fail it has its own homemade response to this. Try harder. Try more strategically. Try wiser. But the problem isn’t our “how-to’s” it is our “able-to’s!!” I may be sitting in the driver’s seat and holding the steering wheel but the stark reality is that...

...i can’t drive!

I mean “every single inappropriate cultural or gender stereotype about driving rolled into one” can’t drive.

I am hopeless.

And yet I persist. And the failure begins to layer thicker & thicker.

Because I am a “performer” and I continue to dance to the music so that I will be accepted.

But what if there was another option? What if failure was actually the best moment of your life?

For religious nuts like us it’d be pretty impossible to come around to that way of thinking but let’s just pretend.

If I can’t drive then maybe being faced with the glaring truth of my lack of ability in this area is the best chance I have of finding someone who can to take over those duties in my life. Perhaps this would inspire a quest guided by the fundamental and defining reality of my “NEED.”

For that to happen it would take the dismantling of everything about the way I look at life. That would take years of hammering & shaping to undo paradigms & beliefs that have kept me in my religious dancing shoes for my entire life. But if we got there how different the world might look.

And maybe, just maybe, it won’t happen this time.