Layer Cake

As mentioned previously, I've been working on a forgiveness project. At first it was a pretty obvious deal. There was a list of people who'd hurt me in various ways and I was working on forgiving. The more I worked on forgiving others the more my conscience, and in one case the good rebuke of a friend, began to motivate me to seek forgiveness. The experience is like ancient boiler plate falling off. There's a new flexibility. It feels good to say "I forgive you, Papa Smurf" and mean it. It feels even better to say, "I'm sorry I screwed up" and mean it.
As that winds down, I'm discovering whole new layers of stressed out I was too busy with the other stuff to notice before. The first time I played a game based on The Hiding Place I was three. There was a large gathering of moms and we kids were turned loose to play. The girls went into one of the bedrooms and pulled all their tea table chairs into a circle. For an hour or so we sat as quietly as we could hoping the Nazis, aka the boys, wouldn't hear us and we'd live. Any noise we made the boys began banging on the door, yelling mean stuff and throwing pillow bombs through the transom over the door. Being three, it was frequently my fault that we were discovered. It was a lot of responsibility. At five the devil came to my little Wednesday night class to take everyone to Hell who wouldn't deny Christ. The theology on that was pretty bad, but it still had me waking up screaming for a week or two. Just when I thought it was safe to return to class they decided to do a lesson on how Chinese communists were torturing and killing Christians. The next week they were going to cover another region, but I decided not to go back. At six I was avidly reading Buried Alive for Christ. When I was eight we made time lines of how the world would end while those whose parents had let them watch Thief in the Night told the rest of us about the head rolling down the stairs. At ten I went to a camp where twice a day a preacher terrified us about the end of the world and how soon it would be. I was a very grounded and spiritually confident kid, but I went forward every night. Our favorite games were about surviving the end times, the nazis, the communists, rebel groups in Africa, we were always surviving what was always coming. Four square had its attractions, as did cowboys and indians, but that was just playing--concentration camp was practice. As I grew older there were movies about how the credit card was actually a tool to soften us up for 666 on our hands or foreheads. The UN was a very bad idea. Every nation added to the EU was mourned.
I'd never noticed before how deeply that fear had settled into my mind. I'm trying to figure out what to do about a mind that automatically picks up survival tips. I'm trying not to be terrified by not being terrified. I'm trying to get to know God as more than the guy who makes your vitamin oil last until you are released from your concentration camp. I dropped most of the ideology pretty quickly, but the theology is still a bit of a muddle. I no longer think our infallible leaders are infallible. A mother was asking of the Jr. version of Left Behind was a good gift for her nephew and I very quickly and emphatically said no. My kids know that Christ will return. I think that's enough, especially if my favorite theory that says it all happened in AD70 is correct. Whatever the truth is, I'm still trying to get past the anxiety all of that causes me. It's the next layer of my journey.