Privacy and Teaching

These next two Sunday's I'll be teaching the college group at church... the invitation was very surprising to me to say the least but something I jumped at the chance to do. There's only one problem...

I'm no longer the teacher in my family. Becky is. I say that half-jokingly. In college I taught a few times without hesitation. I thought the messages were really good, but after speaking you hear hardly any feedback at all. Then you have to filter out the real feedback, the "i'm your friend so I'll tell you you did good" feedback, and then the negative feedback. Once everything balances out, you're left wondering if the message that the Lord gave you was even heard. To this day I still don't know... Well now that I've heard Becky teach a few times, I honestly don't know how to even reach that level. I think she's a phenomenal Bible teacher.

So what am I going to do? I'm going to teach about being authentic in our private and public lives, something I wrestle with every day that I'm alive. This is a topic that I'm intimately comfortable with, something that I could talk about for hours if only someone would listen. The private part is the part that I'm REALLY passionate about, mainly because that's the foundation of your authenticity. I've not always been an all-star at this.

Back when I really wrote, both personally and on a blog, there were days that I found myself writing to impress someone else (truth be told, a girl. Depending on which time in college depends on what girl I wanted to read it). I wanted to show them that there was depth in me and that I had a real relationship with the Lord. Looking back on it, I don't regret it because I worked my way through a lot of issues by writing, but I also created a few more to be dealt with at a later date. The biggest of those being pride.

Well fast-forward to November 24, 2007. Our wedding day. I had now reached the day where I no longer had to impress a girl that I was interested in. I had done it. I won! Now the goal was not becoming complacent but leading my family in a very focused direction... into deeper relationship with the Lord and with each other. So subconsiously I decided to not write. It wasn't some set in stone decision and I don't have a date to really go back to when I decided not to write, but somewhere at the beginning of our marriage I decided that pride couldn't be given such a comfortable role in my life anymore. So I choked it. I shut it down.

What did this mean? It meant I wanted to wear sweats on date night when we went to Pappasito's. It meant that I didn't shave for a while or get a haircut, because appearances were feeding my pride. It meant that I didn't read a whole lot, for knowledge puffs up. It meant that I didn't do a whole lot to grow because I was afraid of what I would grow into. And it's through this fear that I found the folly of my ways...

The Lord very lovingly showed me that if I make a commitment to stop growing, then I also make the same commitment to stop leading my family. If I purposely become unattractive... guess what, you're unattractive to your wife too. If I stop writing, then I all of a sudden have a lot of issues built up that have yet to be dealt with (giving way to my very first counseling appointment this Friday :) I'm excited, because now if Becky and I have a disagreement I proudly exclaim, "Becky, I'm in counseling ok? I'm working on it"). Purging the ugly in your life does not give you permission to purge the beautiful as well.

There's one breakthrough I'm glad to possess. I no longer write to impress, I write to process. I don't care what you think to be honest. I'd like to know what you think, but I'm not doing this for you, the reader, anymore. I'm doing this for my family and for me in hopes that I will become who God created me to be. I don't think hardly anyone reads this anymore, but the moral of this story is what you do in private will be what defines you. You may not understand it until years later, but if at any point you don't like the definition of who you are then a different course of action must be taken. A purposeful course. And it's along this path where true treasure is discovered.