I’m in a place called Vertigo; It’s everything I wish I didn’t know; Except you give me something I can feel.
~U2Vertigo2004.
Vertigo, of an emotional or spiritual variety, produces confusion even numbness, as a self-protection mechanism for when our world is too much.
When things are chaotic, we run with the bulls in Pamplona or run to the privacy of the refuge. Both leave us scared of our true feelings. One embraces the activity as a cover for denial. The other embraces loneliness, even from oneself.
This can be due to a moment of acute grievance, overload, or even the bleeding heart’s desire to reconnect with Jesus after a long period of dryness.
However, feeling when there is no feeling left is a malleable response to this amazing vertigo.
APPROACHING CHANGE IN A NEW WAY
Enabling such a collapsible response requires a change in the modus operandi.
We can imagine that the Lord has blessed us with these feelings of giddiness, because we know that when there is no feeling left that God felt the presence is also gone; not the presence of the Lord, but our perception We are not sorry about that.
This is an important clue; a beautiful and striking reminder that we have strayed from the reservation set in God’s will, and we all do. It is mostly involuntary. Change is almost always beyond us; we don’t normally anticipate change that well. Who really has the vision of a sage?
Approaching change in a new way focuses on being able to trust the randomness in what has caused our feelings to go awry.
TRUSTING RANDOM
The seeming madness and confusion of life is simply a test or a temptation: will we prefer Jesus and the simplicity of truth and peace, or will we run the challenge?
Preferring Jesus is a movement toward feeling when there is no feeling left.
God hands us trials on silver platters all the time. Satan, however, throws temptations at us; overlapped and under the table. Trials are designed to make us grow. Temptations are designed to deceive, weaken, and destroy us.
Running that gauntlet mentioned above wants to deny the vertigo, that life is somehow solvable. How many people burn out or completely lose their purpose because they are deceived, weakened, and ultimately destroyed?
Of course, life without Jesus it’s not soluble.
Life with Jesus trusts in a mystery: it helps us to form beliefs, feelings and thoughts around the acceptance of things that we cannot change.
Chance, which is both a test and a temptation, is designed to help us if we stick with the truth, but it will hinder us if we go our own way.
As the song Vertigo says – and we imagine Jesus saying this – “Give me what I want [your obedience] and no one gets hurt.” When we trust God’s insight, and not our own, always acknowledging it, the Lord will make our paths straight (Proverbs 3:5-6).
© 2011 SJ Wickham.