(1iii): get over yourself (2004)
An Excerpt from "Flashbang: How I Got Over Myself" (2004)
I see you’ve placed the word “flashbang” back into the alternate title of the chapter.
It’s called a wraparound. They do it in the movies.
I was beginning to worry. You haven’t really mentioned it much.
Certainly I have.
You have?
Haven’t you been paying attention? Th e flashbang is there in all of the stories so far. It’s the gallstones. It’s the concussion.
Oh. I get it. It’s the cage.
Well—no.
What?
The flashbang is not the cage. The cage is good.
The cage is good?
You haven’t been paying attention.
How can the cage be good? Don’t you read self-help books? “Get out of your cage!” “Free yourself from the confines that hold you back!” “No limits.” “Go for broke and reach for the skies!” You’re a writer. You should be absorbing these clichés.
I’m certain those catch phrases look great on a poster of a waterfall. But in this story, the cage is good.
And, how can you be so certain?
Because I am the hamster.
Oh.
Yeah. Trust me. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of a cage either. There’s something about being American or maybe being male or maybe being human that makes me think I deserve unlimited freedom. But unlimited freedom is a big problem.
Call me paranoid, but you’ve got to be losing some readers right about now.
It’s actually quite logical.
Do tell.
Let’s lose the term cage for a minute and instead call it parameters. I know that I have a distinct purpose in life. I believe God created me for a reason.
And that makes you a flashbang?
NO! The impatience makes me a flashbang!
The what?
The impatience! Trying to achieve my ultimate purpose without the accurate process. Wanting out of the cage or the parameters on day one. That is what makes me a flashbang. The truth is: each and every one of us is born a wild beast. We live in a nation and a time that celebrates freedom. That’s a great thing, but we’ve celebrated ourselves out of any sort of parameters that keep us from being true. We’ve given ourselves so many rights and freedoms, we’ve just about killed ourselves.
This is not going to be a popular philosophy.
Let’s follow the path: God creates man. God gives man freedoms. Freedom to choose. Freedom to grow. Freedom to take God’s plan and run with it. But those freedoms aren’t enough for man. Man wants more than God wants him to have. Man wants to do whatever he wants to do whenever he feels like doing it. So man chooses freedoms that were not intended for him. And man does whatever he wants to do. But all of those things man does outside God’s plan have repercussions. Consequences. Man doesn’t like how that feels, so what does man do? Man attempts to create more freedoms that allow him to ignore the consequences created by his old freedoms. Freedoms that allow man to feel better about his excess freedoms. But those new requests for freedom are not accepted by God. So, instead, man decides part of what freedom means is that he has the freedom to redefine God and create a revisionist history of what God said. Time passes. Man embraces his own selected freedoms. Those freedoms evolve from being the abnormal choice into becoming society’s widely accepted choice. Those freedoms eventually seep into the church itself and subsequently into the daily lives of followers of Christ—because the world says how can you believe in a God who loves if you aren’t willing to accept all of our freedoms-of-the-month?
We have become flashbangs because we have accepted these freedoms?
We have become flashbangs because we don’t even realize we are living freedoms that God did not give us.
Ouch.
The lie of “unlimited freedom” is a publicity stunt of the enemy. God gives “real freedom”—but it is not unlimited. God knows we are born wild. He creates us that way on purpose. He isn’t looking for us to be domesticated. He wants us to be free—out in the wild rather than protected from it, but He wants us to be prepared for that first moment of freedom. Disciplined and trained for our eventual release.
But eventual could take awhile.
Exactly why so many of us bypass God’s process. I was able to see God’s plan for my life, so that made me want to go after it in my own methods rather than be disciplined in His methods. It’s like the hamster who never went to the water. He just looked for ways out. So he gets out to where there’s no more water only to discover he didn’t drink enough to get a foot outside the cage. I embraced the wilderness prematurely and resisted the cage—the challenge of character development—that God was trying to train me to climb out of. It is the very thing that almost killed the hamster.
But the birds lived.
Oh yes! The birds. The parakeets, the finches. They all lived far, far beyond their normal life spans because they spread their wings into the wild, all the while returning to the cage to rest and refuel.
So the birds lived longer because they did not resist the cage.
They lived in both worlds. They spread their wings in one while finding their source in the other. Had I only been so smart. Instead, I spent my time devising ways of escape—not realizing that everyone has a cage. Some never leave it. Some never go back to it. But both of those kinds of people are flashbangs. The only way to reach those in the outside world is to go there. And the only way to make that reach accurate and strong is to return home on a regular basis.
So real freedom has nothing to do with getting away from the cage.
We think our society is so elite because we choose our own freedoms, but really, we are just in a constant denial of what it means to be a true human being. We fight against the cage for the sake of freedom, but we are nothing close to free. We trick ourselves into believing we are fulfilled, and on the few days we face reality and discover that we are not, we burrow into more self-proclaimed freedoms to make us forget that we are frauds. We resist. We have no substance.
God made us. God gave us His freedoms, His rules, His plan. And from the moment we realized that, we have fought Him on it tooth and nail.
Following Jesus is irony. Always has been. Be last to be first. Give to receive. Be weak to be strong.
Get in the cage to get out of it. Get fed to get free.
Get under His freedom to get over yourself. As a follower of Jesus, I will never truly affect the world with His love until I get over my own desires and needs, my desperation and petty bickering—anything I cling to in order to feel better—to feel freer. I must swallow my pride. Forget what I believe I deserve. And get over myself. Resist the world’s freedoms. Embrace God’s parameters. Allow myself to be accountable and restricted. Choose to go without every little thing I want. Strengthen my character. Determine where I am incorrect. Humble myself. Stop manipulating God’s way to look like my preferences and choose His plan—His way—for every detail. If I can just deal with life and allow God to use those dealings to transform me into the right person—the explosive person, the person with gun powder in my veins— then the noise I make will be worth hearing. The fire that is seen in my life will scorch the room. The substance of my life will pierce the hearts of those around me. And where I stand, I will always leave a mark.
Because you choose to get over yourself.
It’s time to cut myself open and remove the remains of the flashbang once and for all.
NEXT: Enter the second portion of Mark Steele’s debut best-seller “Flashbang: How I Got Over Myself.” Begin to leave teethMARKS with (2iv): things break.