The Evolution of Adam

Don't get me wrong. I am not just at peace with everything. I am flexible but I am not that easy going.
When I was a child I used to pray that God would put me through the fire of learning while I was young so that I could be a man who got to live Christianity out in my adulthood. I wanted to get the bad stuff over early. I observed young men squandering their youth and I wanted to avoid that. I saw middle aged men in the ministry going through mid-life crisis; there always seemed to be scandal. The older crowd seemed incapable of getting it, or being able to relate to anything that was culturally significant. Watching men be Christians always seemed to end in disappointment. I remember asking my Uncle why he backslid. He dropped to his knees, looked me in the eye, and said, "Because God did not do enough for me." My dad's ministry was in the inner-city and I knew that my uncle was right somehow, or that I couldn't refute what he was saying with the knowledge that I had. I walked away from that experience feeling like I had been robbed or violated in some kind of way- my God bubble was bursting. I had my suspicions that Christianity had to consist of more than what God could/would do for us. The day that my uncle declared God's selfishness was a turning point for me. So I began to pray that God would teach me all the hard stuff while I was still young.

So here I am at thirty-eight still going through stuff. I won't belabor the sorrow filled details of my life, I won't prattle on about the disappointments, rejections, difficulties, and pains that I have gone through. That would be too self-indulgent and gratuitous. Besides, my friends, who have always kind of been there did more than their fair share by watching me go through those things the first time- they don't need to be subjected to it again. I have changed over time. I used to bleed from my heart so that the persecution was made known to all. "Why me?!" I would cry out melodramatically. I would detail my pain to anyone who would listen. I would convince people that I had the right to be depressed and that they could never understand the depths of my emotion. I wrote poetry. I began to realize that my emotional heavies were not the responsibility of others and that I was being a kind of person with whom I would not like to be friends. And many echoed my realization by making themselves unavailable. I got the hint.

Eventually I began to learn the art of keeping my thoughts to myself. (I know, I know- remember though, that just because I have learned the art doesn't mean that I am always producing art... I admit to still speaking my mind more than the average person.) I can't say that I ever became embittered toward God, but I was always frustrated and felt the victim. I pouted in silence and in private. I felt that my motion was always lateral and never forward. I felt like God had me in some kind of perpetual wilderness. "Why does God always have me in the wilderness? Doesn't He know that I can't save the world in His name out here in the wilderness," I grumbled. The wilderness is vast and it takes a long time to get out of it. That length of time is history in the making though.

With enough time behind me, I began to realize that God really was developing something in me. He had been turning me into something (and still is) that He desires. He really had been guiding my steps. He really had been steering me away from things that would have destroyed me- even success. I never went hungry, I never went without a roof over my head, I never was left with no friends. I had been living a blessed life all along.

There has been a constant developmental shift in my thinking. I no longer bemoan my circumstance in the way I used to. I still get scared, hurt, disappointed, confused, ashamed, and so on, but now I always have my mind occupied with what it is I am supposed to learn. In each phase I experience, I can't imagine experiencing it without the equipping I received, in the culmination of all the past, as it works, in concert, to optimize the present. The circumstances are arguably more difficult in quantity and quality but they somehow get easier. They somehow don't seem to oppose me as much as they challenge me. I am thankful for what I have been through. So it isn't that I go unfazed with my current situation, or that I have some steel-like emotional grit, its that I trust that I am being developed into something/someone who won't be disappointing to watch. I trust that God is answering my prayers and making me into the kind of Christian man after whom I always desired to model my life.