Functional Madness

This world is one big lie, says the Bible.
Seen any good family dramas lately? Watched some serious dysfunctional behavior artfully portrayed on the screen? Was there a heartwarming resolution or did they simply wallow in it for laughs? Lying propaganda, all of it.
The biblical standard of dysfunction is anything which hinders your mission and calling. Acting sane and reasonable by this world’s standards would have kept Christ from the Cross. Psychiatrists, life coaches and Joel Osteen (et al) all want you to have a smooth existence and good success in this world. Jesus and His Apostles said don’t worry about that. They said tell your mind to shut up and listen when God’s Spirit talks through your convictions. Tell your mind to stop trying to evaluate the imperatives by any standard it can grasp. Instead, tell your mind it has only one mission: to implement what the Spirit Realm demands. Once you have satisfied the demands of the Spirit, then consider ways to live a peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world. Don’t revel in stirring up trouble.
When your whole world militates against what God considers sane and reasonable behavior, that really doesn’t leave much room in Christian faith for what the world calls “normal.” The emphasis behind the admonition to avoid stirring up strife is mostly a matter of minding your own business, not trying to correct others like some obscene truth policeman. It means allowing folks to be wrong, to carry enough humility to recognize your ideas may not fit their world, as if there actually could be some sort of objective reality that you would happen to understand. The admonition means you neither seek nor avoid attention for doing what you really must do in obedience to your own convictions.
The one thing I found missing from every religious training experience was the emphasis on clarifying your convictions. The spiritual discipline of learning what convictions are, and then learning how to bounce stuff off of them, is almost completely absent from Western Christianity. At the best of times, they make it so utterly mystifying with talk of long prayer sessions and reasoning. You might arrive at some clarification by accident, but not because the teaching helped you very much. Reading your convictions should be reflexive most of the time. The primary reason churches get this wrong is because they fear the outcome. If people really dig into their own convictions, they might decide they have to leave that particular organization and go elsewhere. Can’t have that, now, can we?
Worst of all, your departure, along with the reason for it, might cause a stampede and leave the leadership holding an empty offering basket. They have no way to pay off the huge loan for that big fancy facility. Worse, it will decimate their political leverage.
You have no duty to resolve all your dysfunctions. That’s not a godly, biblical standard, not a goal associate with Christ. The goal is your own cross. In the Bible, “functional” is peace with God, a sense you are about as close as you can get to His moral imperatives during moment. It means a resolve to keep checking because you can’t trust reality, but you simply must trust God. You cannot possibly adjust your mental vision of reality to God’s revelation when that vision is cluttered by worldly junk. If acting crazy is the only way you can have peace with God, then start raving. I might not stand next to you very much, but don’t let that hinder you. I have my own raving to do.
Peace with this world makes you an enemy of the Cross.