The past few days I’ve been staring at a whole mess of pictures from my recent trip to Portugal with the FOCUS team from our church. It’s been a somewhat mind-numbing experience of moving, deleting and renaming a few thousand pictures, yet at the same time fun to remember the experiences God gave us in Portugal. But also on my mind were people with whom I’ve come in contact with over the years that have for one reason or another developed a bitter attitude toward people and/or God due to one reason or another (how’s that for being specific), and being human I’ve had similar experiences.
Catching up on my blog reading a bit I read my Dad’s most recent Meditation Moment I actually let out an audible “wow!” as he detailed what a gift disillusionment can be. Here’s the article:
The Gift of Disillusionment
Meditation Moment #236Probably one of the most significant mental hurdles which will confront a person is what we call disillusionment. At one time or another we have all experienced its chill. There was the day we discovered that our parents were not all powerful or all knowing. There was the crisis when a friend did not come through for us. It is an ongoing thing. We grow disillusioned with our job, our marriage, our church and even our favorite baseball team. When we tell someone that we are “disappointed” in them we sometimes mean that they have disillusioned us.
Of all of the disillusionments which grip our spirit one of the most devastating is being disillusioned with our selves. Somewhere along the line we realize that we are not what we wanted to think we were. With Buzz Lightyear, our shoulders slump and we sing to ourselves, “All the things I thought I’d be, all the brave things I’d done, vanished like a snowflake with the rising of the sun, never more to sail my ship, where no man has gone before. And, I will go sailing no more.” (”Toy Story”)
It is difficult in the midst of a dark episode of disillusionment to realize that we are experiencing a gift. At the very core of the word “disillusionment” is the word, “illusion.” To be disillusioned is to be set free from a mirage – to be set free from something which was not true and which, therefore, was leading us astray.
To set aside illusions can free a person to look for what is real such as the real value in the friends he has. It can free him to admit the less-than-perfect features of where he is at the moment. When this happens he is able to develop a growth strategy rather than mope with a failure sense. To realize that he isn’t going to be nominated for President this year liberates him to help his neighbor without having to wait by the phone for the call that never comes.
The most significant benefit of disillusionment has to do with our relationship with God. Agnosticism feeds on disillusionment. What the agnostic does not realize is that the illusion is not God but rather his catalog of assumptions about God. Assuming those assumptions to be the real deal, the agnostic asserts that God must be the illusion. Once a person become disillusioned with his assumptions the door can open for a fresh look at his Creator.
Here I need to mention that “illusion” is not the same as “invisiblity.” The conductor in “Polar Express” says to the children at one point, “Sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.” The Apostle Paul put it this way, “The things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). Illusion is not about visibility but reality. When dealing with something or someone which really exists regardless of visibility, illusion has to do with what we expect from that thing or person.
Illusions concerning God, therefore, do not primarily have to do with his existence. One has to do a lot of mental gymnastics to conclude that there’s no one “out there.” The illusions concerning God have to do with the opinions which we develop in our minds concerning how things should be since he is out there. The forcefulness of the Bible is that God has clearly revealed that he knows that things are what they are and he knows how they got to be that way. Knowing that, he tells us what we may expect and how we should prepare to respond.
To believe that God should always keep us from being sick is an illusion. To believe that people who trust in Jesus Christ should be immune to catastrophe is an illusion. No one with even an elementary awareness of the narrative of Scripture should have such illusions. Nevertheless, we insist on holding to those illusions as realities and then determining that it is God who is the figment of our imagination. Then we become bitter because God doesn’t line up with our illusions.
Faith has to do with trusting God, whom we cannot see (Hebrews 11:1) and being true to the things which he has revealed (1 Corinthians 2:9-10; Deuteronomy 29:29). When we have that faith we realize that one of the most dangerous illusions is the notion that anything in this life will give us what our hearts really crave (Matthew 16:26). One illusion-busting bumper sticker put it this way – “The guy who dies with the most toys… is still dead.”
