Patsy Way: Jim Carrey and Me

Ok so he’s a man and I’m a woman;  he’s a movie star and I’m not; he lives in America and I live in New Zealand but really Jim Carrey and I, we’re the same. He plays characters and I do too. Bruce Almighty and I, we both often think we can do one heck of a better job at being God than God can do. We both play Truman Burbank, ( I think my Truman is slightly more feminine!) certain that there is a God way up there controlling and conniving, limiting us and enjoying raining suffering upon us purely for His entertainment. Are you shocked that I, a good Christian girl, can think like that?  Me too! In fact I spent most of my life warily watching the sky for that inevitable lightning to head straight for me and strike me down for having such heathen thoughts. But I’m still standing, I’m still questioning and I’m still searching, still grappling for answers to the question who am I, why am I here and who am I to God?

Jim Carrey and I, our characters are both on a quest to find who God is and hoping to find ourselves along the way. As I go through life trying to find my identity I try on different hats, I do a bit of this and a bit of that, yet I come up empty, unfulfilled. I want to be me, I cry out in frustration to God to give me an easy answer to who I am, a guide book, “Patsy for Dummies” that I can order from Book Depository – free shipping included. And as I’m crying out to God, frustrated and impatient, I hear His whisper, “how can you be you when you don’t like who you are, when you don’t know you like I know you?” And that right there is the crux of it all isn’t it? I don’t like me, I’m unsatisfied with who I am and I constantly compare myself to others, always coming out stone last in the very competition I myself created. Most importantly I don’t know the me God knows.

So how do I go about this terrifying journey of discovering who I am, and then liking, I dare say even loving, what I discover along the way? Could it be that the little cartoon boy on the poster in my Second Grade class room all those years ago, had it right when he proudly proclaimed, “God don’t make no junk!” (I’ll ignore the double negative if you will)? What if I were to start treating myself like I treat those around me, what if I build myself up instead of tearing myself down, what if I could encounter myself with unconditional positive regard, what if I loved myself, flaws and all? What if I could finally take the advice given to me time and again to be kinder to myself? I guess the very wise King Solomon got it right when he said in Proverbs that ‘Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel’. Could it be that finding my identity, loving myself comes down to listening to the words Jesus speaks over me rather than the cruel, harsh words I use? Can I lay aside my fiercely independent self, can this wounded healer find the courage to surrender to the Great Physician and allow Him to bring healing to my image of myself? Will I allow Jesus to show me the me He sees, will I believe that me is the real me?

Dr Suess is a pretty smart guy – he is a doctor after all – and he says, “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you”. Here, once again, I am confronted with a Jesus who says He created me to be me, who says he loves this me, this me, not the me I strive to be, not the me I see, but the me I am in His eyes, His beloved, worth dying for. As I go out on this journey of self-in-Jesus-discovery I know that E.E Cummings is right in saying that, “to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle and never stop fighting.” I am determined to take off the character masks I wear, I am committing to saying farewell to the cynical Bruce Almighty and the helpless Truman Burbank I have played for too long. I will learn, I will listen, I will make mistakes; and I will change as I grow, as I learn, and as I experience and this is a good thing. I am on a journey to do as Brennan Manning challenges, to reclaim my core identity as Abba’s Child. So whilst I was  Truman, stuck in a false world image of me, created for me and by me, I have come to the end of this world ; I am banging my fist against this ‘self and other’ created boundary and I am breaking out of this limited world. Lisa Bevere reminds me that, the limitless God didn’t create me to be limited. So today I’m going to try be me, to listen to my Jesus when He whispers truth and love to me; and tomorrow I’m going to have to start all over again, then when the next day comes, still I will fight to hear Jesus voiceover my own and I will never stop fighting because, - as L’Oreal and Jesus say “I’m Worth It”.

A. W. Tozer - The Pursuit of God - Preface

In this hour of all but universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: Within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct “interpretations” of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.

This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size of a man’s hand for which few saints here and there have been looking. It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day.

But this hunger must be recognised by our religious leaders. Current evangelism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves the “piercing sweetness” of the love of Christ about whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles and the doctrines of Christ, but too many of them seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.

I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold “right opinions” probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program”. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of the term. But exposition may be carried on in such a way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatsever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in his presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and centre of their hearts.

This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

-          A.W. Tozer, Chicago, Illinois, June 16, 1948