Not the Same Anymore

I was a big fan. Bryan Duncan nailed it once during a phone interview. He told the radio DJ that he hoped he wasn’t the same man he was two weeks ago because he felt he had a long way to go in his ministry calling. A primary symptom of spiritual growth is a sense of penitent humility, even as we feel an unlimited confidence in God’s power and mercy in our lives.

By the way, I still love Bryan’s singing voice, but a lot of his music no longer speaks to me.

So very much of what brought me here is no longer pertinent. Some of it has become quite annoying. In the past week or so searching my old music favorites, I realized that how sweet it sounds means nothing against whether it draws me up out of myself. It’s not that I have suddenly decided the musicians are no longer good enough with their song-writing, but that what they needed to say is not always what I need to hear. A few rare albums speak to me all the way through, but most of it is now just a song or two here and there.

In a similar fashion, I read almost no fiction these days. There was a time I always had a book with me, and read when I should have been paying more attention to other things. I would get lost in the stories. Now my previous favorite authors annoy me. I can’t bear to read the next book in a series I once anticipated as I devoured each line. Some of the few authors I could read again are long dead. Whenever I sample something new, I’m struck by the same annoyances. I’m sure there are some decent new writers, but I don’t have time to pursue it like I once did with such obsessive devotion.

Why? My regular readers probably know that I just don’t have much tolerance for Western thinking any more. Most fiction I encounter is so lavishly pro-Western it’s sickening, and all the more annoying when the author seems wholly unaware of it. And if I went back over some of my own fiction I’d have to rewrite a bunch of it, probably in ways that simply wouldn’t work for storytelling. I have no idea if I’ll ever write any more. Given the way I write fiction, inspiration could come crashing down on me in the next hour. However, my conscious mind finds it unlikely.

Where do we go from here, Brothers and Sisters?

I’m forging into new territory on ancient roads. I keep saying to myself and others that we are building a new reality, in the sense that we are having to form entirely new structures for thinking about what God intended for humans. The heart-mind is totally new in our civilization. It seems most of the folks who write about it from the scientific background are still mired in Western expectations and what they produce is so mixed up and useless to me. I can’t find anybody ahead me on the same path. The terrain has shifted on a tectonic level since the ancients explored this land, so we aren’t going to find exactly what they mapped out.

It’s no longer a question of taking it one day at a time; I’m exploring entirely new turf and having to grapple with a new universe by the minute. I’m not complaining, but I’ll be the first to tell you sometimes I don’t have a clue what to do next.

(Check out his channel.)