Riding High & Free

Here I am riding high at 34,000 feet as I break over the coast of Florida’s Panhandle into the expanse of the Gulf of Mexico just south of Tallahassee. I am on my way to San Jose to spend three days investing in the lives of leaders and coaching them through the unchanging reality of change in our life, leadership and spiritual cultivation of others.

You might ask, “What do you know about change?” “Ha!,” I would answer you, “My middle name is change.”

The last two years, really all of my adult life, I have been pursuing change. I have always been looking for ways to change. Why? I was mostly miserable with where I was and I thought the next great thing was going to make the difference. I was not myself and was scared to be me. I could not be me and be accepted.

I got married as a different person. I parented as a different person. I was a friend as a different person. And, as a different person, I was always trying to be something different. I was trying to be comfortable, accepted, natural, successful, fun, interesting and effective. I was trying to change from what I seemed to be.

Nineteen months ago I was in a restaurant in Haines City, Florida when it happened. I changed. This was different. It was not the quest for change, but a coming to reality and honesty that I had never had the courage to come to before. Let me tell you something. When this happens as it did to me, people cannot and do not understand. The person my honesty hurt most was my wife at the time. We had been married for almost 27 years and here I was telling her what a fake I had been. At this time I was emotional and not totally understanding of what was going on inside of me. My communication was less incriminating to me and more intimidating to her than what I would have intended. Still, it was honest. That was a huge change. It is one thing to lie. It is another thing altogether to live a lie.

Back to Haines City…I was sitting in a booth waiting for pancakes and writing, as I am today, in a journal of thoughts and prayer when I began to cry. First, a few tears, then a stream, then a torrent of emotion. I was trying to hide myself, but dared not get up for fear of calling way too much attention to myself. I told God I was finished. I could not live this way another day. That day, I took off my watch and my wedding ring and put them away.

To me the watch was a reminder of how I was always trying to make things fit, minute to minute and hour to hour to accommodate my schizophrenia. (Okay, that is an over statement of my emotional condition, but I was out of a state of normal living.) The ring was the greatest lie to me. It represented what I was faking the most – an intimate connection of care, concern and partnership for the greater good of another human being. I was selfish, self-serving and self-preserving. Why? I was in a constant state of surviving. I felt like I was in a whirlpool of drowning from which I could not escape. Death was my only way out and I feared death. That is what you call caught in the vortex.

Over the next few months, in a limited capacity and without the full understanding that I have today, I attempted to craft a new life. I offered to God a new way. He laughed. I offered to my wife and family a new route and I was shouted down. I offered to myself a new purpose and I failed.

Through it all, I have just lived and trusted. I do not make perfect choices, but something has happened. God has methodically taken away my masks and my crutches. Everybody now knows my weaknesses, sins, misgivings, detours and humiliations. I have lost my church façade, my pastor façade, my spouse façade and even my perfect parent façade. I am now known. It is a wonderful place to be.

Things have changed and fear is gone. I am loved. I am accepted. I am embraced. God does this for me.

Do I want people to do the same? Heck, yes! And they will. Some already do.

Why am I so happy today? I am losing so many of my outward trappings, yet there is a freedom.

If you are a regular reader of this collection of thoughts and words, you will know my lack of freedom. You will know how happy and excited I am in an airplane at 34,000 or 37,000 feet. Well, today, I am happy at sea level. I am free.

It took me 49 years and a few weeks, maybe even the trauma of my father’s death, but I am finally becoming me. Maybe salvation is a wonderful process of God’s love active in our lives in the midst of hell’s hatred. Maybe I am like Nicodemus and having the beautiful gift of new birth explained to me by a loving Lord and friend, Jesus. I do not know where the wind comes from or where it goes. I cannot know time and space apart from where I am. What I do know is that I am free to love because I am loved. I have a new life. I am riding high.

~ by phil underwood on 7 October, 2008.