last night i found myself reflecting on some of the darker aspects of my personality and things i’ve done that i regret. it’s not something i take pleasure in examining, but we all have these skeletons in our closet that we carry with us, times when we have delved towards the lower limit of our humanity by choice or error. we bury them and keep them hidden from others – knowing intimately the struggle we face in loving the dark places others have accidentally or intentionally revealed. meanwhile, the great bulk of society puts on a face of confidence, all together buying into the corporate lie for our own perceived benefit and safety.

were we to all drop those masks, all-at-once in a you show me yours, i’ll show you mine scenario, would there be any love left in the world of man? or would we be so repulsed by the reflection of our own shame in one another that we would be driven into solitude? if there is to be any hope left it would be in the love of Christ, but the masks of christians are even the more delicate and intricate, covering a myriad of sins with deceit rather than love. meanwhile, in the shadows behind the mask the darkness remains, and grows.

the world looks strange, as if the environment around me itself has fallen into the uncanny valley. as if i’m in the matrix version 1.0 and the simulation is just inaccurate enough that around the periphery of my vision i can tell that things are just not right, and the programmers haven’t fixed the little glitches yet.

of course my perception isn’t perfect but there is a sense – sometimes manifested as an intuition just under the surface and other times a present as the crack of a hammer on your thumb or a bite into a jalapeno – that the world isn’t right. and eventually we start to realize that the reason the world seems to be off-kilter from what it should be is because it is. the whole world is living in an episode of the twilight zone and in this version of the story we only have the faintest knowledge somewhere in the back of our primitive mammalian brains that there is the possibility of a better option.

and the tragedy of the whole situation is in our complete inability to grasp this – we can barely come to terms with the death, broken relationships, and hurting people right around us. how much more impossible is it for us to perceive the suffering in the darkest places of the world: in the ghetto, or the middle east or sub-saharan africa? there’s a whole broken world out there and we are ourselves but just a tiny little broken shard in the midst of it.

so we do what we must to survive: we set it aside and we pile our bills on top of it like a birthday card from our distant uncle; we know we ought to respond but so many other things will come first. there’s no way we can deal with it right now, but maybe later. tomorrow perhaps?

but in the end you still can’t get away from the idea that this is not how it was meant to be.

this verse has been on my heart ever since the start of this whole zach situation. perhaps it was the concretness of seeing someone facing down prison for just actions, but i just want to know how i can reflect this reality in my life every day.

I, the LORD, have called you for the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand; I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness. I am the LORD, this is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. See, the earlier things have come to pass, new ones I now foretell; before they spring into being, I announce them to you. Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the end of the earth: let the sea and what fills it resound, the coastlands, and those who dwell in them.