My Contradiction

I am a walking contradiction.  I love to write. I love create.  In middle school I often tried to make cartoon characters and tell their stories.  My life’s ambition was to be a cartoonist. 

But, I had a problem.  I struggled with “learning disabilities” (I think the official term was Perceptually Impaired).  Specifically, my impairment existed in the domain of language (though numbers were affected as well).  Trying to understand language was trying to stop my feet from sinking into the sands of spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax as the tides of education swept over me. I struggled through middle school, high school, and college, gradually finding less and less joy in writing and creating.

In my final year of college, I had one professor, Dr. Tyson, who wrote in the margin of my midterm paper (when I quoted him in said paper), “I know what I think, I want to know what you think.”  A small mark on a lousy paper changed my life.  I avoided writing because it was humiliating, exhausting, and painful, both physically and emotionally.  However, like a glimmering star on a cloudy night, this professor’s words offered hope by giving value to what I had to say. 

So I wrote.  Even though getting my thoughts on paper felt like pressing cold pea soup through a fine mesh strainer, I wrote.  The next paper I handed in he said to me in the margin, “this is masters level work.”  I just went to college because "that’s what you’re s’posed to do".  However, I left with the seeds of a new passion germinating.

My mental contradiction, the impairment did not go away.  Writing did not become easy.  But what I was writing was now affecting more than myself, and was being noticed.  After college I served three years as an Army Officer.  As I left active duty, to become an Army Reserve Chaplain, my commander let me know that she respected and valued the things I had written for her. 

In preparation for the chaplaincy, I spent the next three and a half years pursuing my Masters of Divinity (M.Div.).  I poured myself into learning how to write.  Often times working 12 hour days without even realizing it.  I fell in love with my painful contradiction. 

After seminary I worked six years as a pastor (four as an Army Reserve chaplain), writing sermons weekly.  I created around 2,000 pages of manuscripts during that time.  The sermons spoke truth and love into the souls of the people dear to me. 

Writing still hurt.  Writing was still straining pea soup.  Writing was still my personal contradiction. Except, after gaining mastery of the language, I could swim in the ocean that threatened to drown me before.  I found I loved it. 

In 2015 something happened.  God called my family and me into international missions.  We will head to French speaking Africa. We are now learning a new language in France. 

What I did not expect was to find myself struggling like a child again.  Once again the letters and words move restlessly around.  I am living in the frustrations of my child hood, where the voice of contradiction whispers the thoughts I once deeply internalized, “stupid,” “you cannot speak,” “You cannot write,” “what made you think you could communicate something as important as the gospel?”

Every day, every moment, I must remind myself of this truth: the good news of Jesus is not that He takes the smartest, the best looking, the most powerful into His service.  He takes the broken contradictions and becomes, Himself, the greatest contradiction on the cross.  Perfect God taking sin upon Himself.

When the brokenness of my contradicted soul condemns me I can say, “Yes, but it is the God who is not afraid of brokenness and contradiction who calls me. I do not labor for my own sake. And maybe, just maybe, my struggle with language, my becoming a child again, can bring God glory by bringing hope to the broken in Africa. Hope from a man who feels like a boy every time he opens his mouth.”    

Like English I will fight inch by inch to master French and the local language after that. The learning impaired kid who longs to write and tell the most important story in many languages.  I will increase the nature of my contradiction by embracing the contradiction.