Attack of the Zombies - Part One

As some of you know, +Sandy Boyd and I were zombies in a zombie 5K a couple weekends ago, as I was thinking about what I was going to post today, it hit me: I have allowed a lot of zombies to roam around in my life.  I'm thinking of things that are dead and gone, there's no life in them for me, but I still allow them to hang around. All they do is wander around trying to eat my brains, smash things and generally stink up the place. The verse that keeps coming to mind lately for me is Isaiah 43:18-19:

“Do not remember the past events, pay no attention to things of old.

Look, I am about to do something new;even now it is coming. Do you not see it?
Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness,rivers[a] in the desert.

What I didn't realize is that the zombies I had allowed to hang around in my life were stopping new things from coming in. Just as in a zombie apocalypse, you have to clear out the zombies to make it safe for the living to come in.

My Boss Zombie...

In many video games (especially the MMOs and RPGs I used to play) you'd have to clear dungeons of what were called "trash mobs" before you'd get to the "Boss" where the really good loot is. The boss zombie in my life is pictured at the top of this post...no not +Sandy Boyd herself, but the relationship we had before (we dated pretty seriously for about a year).  I'd been clinging to it like well a zombie clings to brains and it was destroying me.  The relationship was such a great one for both of us that when Sandy broke up with me based on God leading her to get herself together (we dated way too soon after both our divorces), I couldn't imagine that we wouldn't be back together before too long. Surely God wouldn't leave two people so well suited for each other apart! Poof! An undead relationship...we still wanted to be (and are) great friends so we were still talking, but here I was looking for any little sign that it was "time" and we'd be getting back together. The truth was that deep in my heart I knew it was over and that there wasn't anything to "fix", but I refused to admit it.

The thing about a zombie is that you can't control it and this one was particularly violent.  It smashed all of the peace and joy I had, and left me writhing in anxiety. One minute I'd be OK with us being apart, the next I'd be certain she was lying to me and was dating someone else. An hour later I was sure that we were on the road to getting back together, five minutes later I felt like there was no way we'd even be talking in a few weeks. EVERYTHING about my mood and self-esteem were based on how our interaction was...if it felt like we were getting closer, everything was awesome! If not, well it was pretty ugly. This went on for months and there's a pretty easy scriptural reason for why I was so messed up too in Matthew 6:33-34 (funny thing is that in the Holman Bible it is listed under a heading of "Cure for Anxiety".)

But seek first the kingdom of God[q] and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Every time I changed my focus to Sandy and our relationship, the anxiety would hit. The real kicker for me, and I noticed this but refused to consider it, is that the times that I completely let go and let myself believe it was really over were the most peaceful ones I had.  If I'd have had sense enough to listen to what I was hearing deep down in my heart, I would've saved myself a LOT of anguish.

Everything finally came to a head the weekend I was in Texas.  I felt a couple of weeks earlier that I should ask Sandy out on a date.  Much to my surprise, she said yes! In my head, this was either the start of something new or the end of the old relationship.  I didn't know which it was going to be but I was going to give it my best shot.  I got a haircut, professional shave, new clothes, I put on the cologne I knew she liked and basically did everything I could to "impress" her and convince her to go out with me again. While I needed the clothes anyway, the rest of my attempt to impress was worthless. I could have morphed into Adam Levine and it wouldn't have happened. There just was no life in that old relationship anymore.

We did the zombie run and had an incredible time...this was both the most fun and most exhausting thing I've ever done. Had a great time during dinner and the movie (which we ended up leaving early because it wasn't that good and we were really tired), and on the drive back from Dallas I thought I'd bring up the subject of dating.  That didn't exactly go as I had planned, I kept trying to get her to agree to another date...even trying to phrase it in as innocuous a way as I possibly could...no dice.  Only one tiny crack of the door was open, we were going to church the next morning...surely God was going to tell her we belonged together there!  After all I'd prayed in faith about restoring our relationship, how could He not fix this?

Well...cue the Price is Right "you lose" game show music here. Not only did God not "fix it", He put on Sandy's heart the thought: "what if you're only ever going to be friends from here on out". Of course I seized on the "what if" part as "He didn't say for sure", even though I knew better inside.  Finally after a long talk and tears from both of us, I accepted the fait accompli that we only had friendship in our foreseeable future and that I needed to make a decision if that was going to be enough. It sounds easy enough to say yes to, I mean of course I'd rather have our friendship than nothing, but I knew that meant I'd probably have to watch her date someone else, possibly fall in love and marry someone else, without any surety that it would happen to me in the future.

Even knowing that, it didn't take me more than a minute to say yes to being friends. Sandy is one of the most wonderful, kindest, funnest to be around people I know.  There was no doubt in my mind...we were friends for life if I had any say in it.  So what about the prayer I had prayed? I really felt like it was something I was supposed to pray, felt like it was going to be answered, and had faith rise up in me as I prayed.  I knew it was going to work.  In truth it did work, I was praying for a restoration of our relationship...and got it.  Our friendship was completely restored and all of the awkwardness, nervousness, anxiety that I'd let get between us was gone. It took a few days before it finally all "took", but it did take hold...and just in the nick of time.

As I said at the beginning, most of the time you have to let go of the old before you can bring in the new. It was definitely true in this case. My holding on to the old relationship would have stopped a new relationship, two actually, from starting.  The first new relationship was a restart to my friendship with Sandy. This has already been an incredible blessing to me, I didn't realize how much I had missed being able to talk with her about anything and everything until it was restored. I can guarantee that it wouldn't have been restored if I hadn't "killed" the zombie of our old relationship. The second new relationship I'm not going to go into details about right now, but at the very least it is the "beginning of a beautiful friendship" and at best...well the sky's the limit here. None of it would have been possible if I hadn't given up the old, undead, zombie relationship and if Sandy hadn't stuck to her guns when I know it was killing her to see me in that much pain. What does the future hold from here? God only knows, but I know it is a better one than the one I had waiting for me if the zombie was allowed to live.

Part 2 will talk about other zombies that I and other friends of mine have had to fight. Stay tuned! :)

Integrity

I know I haven't posted in a while, I got off track with other things and lost focus a little bit (I have several posts started, it's the finishing that I'm having trouble with!).

This post comes from a couple of conversations I've had recently with my daughter and +Rachel Harrell. My daughter triggered my thoughts here earlier this week with a conversation about returning the vacuum she bought.  A few months ago, our vacuum broke and Katelyn decided she'd replace it for me.  As a waitress she doesn't have a whole lot of money so naturally she went for the cheapest that looked like it would work.  Unfortunately when we got it home it turned out she had accidentally gotten one that required bags instead of a cyclonic.  Well long story short, we really needed the vacuum right away so she decided that we'd keep it.  Fast forward a little while and finding vacuum bags has been a pain for this (why the places that sell that model don't carry the bags that fit it is beyond me) and Katelyn was definitely regretting the purchase.  She mentioned it to a friend of hers that works for the grocery/superstore that we got it from and she told Katelyn "You know if you tell us that it doesn't work, we'll take it back even without the receipt".  Later on that day Katelyn mentioned it to me, and I said simply "well that sounds good, but you'd have to lie." She thought about it for a moment and answered "I don't want to do that, never mind."

Thinking about that conversation later, it struck me how cheaply we sell our integrity for these days. How many times, for $50, $100 or even more do we sell out the thing that is much more valuable than money can ever be. We have our rationalizations of course: "they're a huge corporation they won't miss it" "they don't pay their people enough they deserve it" "I got cheated out of money by them, time for payback" or whatever, but at the end of the day, we're valuing that money (whose value is guaranteed to decrease over time due to inflation) more than our own integrity.

Another example I can give (and this time I'm calling out myself) is I got called out for something I hadn't done at the end of last week.  There was a report I was supposed to be sending out (the data had to be manually imported every morning so I couldn't automate it), and it just completely slipped my mind.  Now even though there weren't going to be any real consequences for this, when I was asked why it hadn't been sent out, a million excuses, well lies really, came to my mind. Every single one of them was absolutely plausible, a great reason why it wasn't done, completely provable (if I needed to), and of course a complete falsehood. There is no way anyone would've known that I lied and the incident would've been dismissed as if nothing happened.  I was writing the email with my best "reason" when I came to my senses and realized that no job, no praise/criticism from the boss, nothing was worth losing my integrity over.  I changed the email to the real reason (I was busy with other stuff and completely forgot), sent it, and haven't heard about it since. Maybe that loses me points on my review or has further ramifications in the future (though I doubt it), but I don't care. I honestly am ashamed that I got as close as I did to lying about something that is, in the grand scheme of things, utterly inconsequential.

I may be a bit old-fashioned, but I think that quote says it all. What do you do when you and God are the only ones that will know? I know cheating a store out of $5 or a "white lie" to get out of trouble doesn't seem like much but the problem is little things matter.  Anyone who has been married (and especially divorced) knows that the little things add up, for good or for bad.  More important is the effect on your character.  Just about every person I've read about that was arrested for embezzling millions of dollars from a company started small with a few bucks here and there that didn't get noticed.  From there it just grows.  As it says in Luke 16:10

Luke 16:10  “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much."

 It doesn't matter how small the issue is, if you're willing to sell out for that little, seemingly inconsequential thing, the next time you'll stretch to something a little bit bigger and there will be more places you decide to cut corners. Eventually this will spread to your entire life.  While your friends, co-workers, and family may not know what exactly you're doing, that lack of integrity will show up in your relationships with them as well.

This quote pretty much sums up a couple conversations +Rachel Harrell and I had recently. We were talking about being "old-fashioned" and what exactly it meant. Rachel was talking about values like integrity, honesty, faithfulness, honor and how important they are to her and how that made her a bit old-fashioned.    After talking along these lines for a while, I suddenly had the epiphany that "these aren't old-fashioned...they're right vs wrong." Truly they aren't old-fashioned, it's just that we as a society stopped caring about them.  The people that still follow them (and sadly I haven't always, but I'm learning...my dad was a great teacher of these principles) are the ones everyone count on. The ones that people implicitly trust their word, that a handshake is as good as a contract.  I think we just need more of them, and need to start electing them (or rework the system so they can get elected...a system where you expect every politician to be a crook doesn't seem to be a healthy one to me). I don't know that returning to these values would solve all of the problems in our society, but I do know it would solve a lot of them.