Birthing Monstrosity

Many times, the things we purpose ourselves to in life are simply the things our combination of personality, gifting, wounding, and heartfelt desires seem to steer us toward.

Someone may be a construction worker who is able-bodied, who grew up like a slouch and found an appreciation for material contribution to the needs of society, or a sense of wonder of what is capable with planning, materials, and sweat.

Maybe you are former prom queen who grew up in wealthy circles realizing through visiting impoverished children in Africa the reality of your undeserved life of privilege and now wishes to mitigate the realities of disease and dysentery in the poor with charity.

With believers, it is often found after they are met with the joyous discovery that God still speaks and moves among them. That sometimes even miracles and divinely guided circumstances lead to the truth that God is truly good, and generous. And now, they hope to be ministers, and obedient co-workers with God.

Once we realize a purpose, fantasies begin – maybe of being a foreman or architect of incredible efficiency and capability.  Maybe it materializes as being a non-profit CEO feeding the starving. Or maybe, most audaciously, a charismatic believer, who believes in the otherworldly task of facilitating the continuation of Gods works in the world  – fantasies of healings, of miracles, of preaching to soon-to-be believers, of standing for God and truth.

At this moment, unavoidably, we become impregnated with monstrosity – nurturing and cherishing it in our psychological wombs.

As the dream grows, so does the fetus within us. It enthralls us with possibility, and purpose. We devour things in our environment to aid in its maturation. We swallow the podcast of the person who has reached tremendous heights in their field. We find an insatiable hunger for a motivational speaker that helps us find that emotional edge we needed to overcome a difficulty. It’s the appetite for the guidance of a mentor that helps us navigate complex situations to eventual proficiency.

So it grows, and we become larger as a product of our growing bellies. People can see it and rejoice – since it looks precisely like burgeoning potential. You have a glow and magnetize people to you. People talk about you, and the impression you now make. Soon, they say, you will be recognized or succeed in the ways you have always dreamed. You believe it, too. You’ve paid your dues. You’ve persevered in fantasy. The ambition thrives, and the one growing in you kicks, and tests boundaries.

Then the promotion, the endorsement, the investment, the viral video comes that changes it all. Your water breaks, and you find yourself laboring in a different way: now there are pains of adjustment as the head of success crests, and pulls through.

And with inhuman screams, you’re destiny is now seeing the light of day, as you hold it gingerly for dear life, just as it holds you powerfully for survival.

And you are now proud of the hell you have given birth to. The monster in your arms is the proof of all you have ever wanted to be – you are now the architect being recognized, the Charity organizer staving off 3^rd world famine, or a revivalist, sweeping crowds with a spiritual power.

And everyone praises you for it. Good job, they say, you’ve gone through the ringer, and have prevailed. But now your life has changed forever. Now you must tend to your success child. Your time for other things is gone. People that knew you apart from your pregnancy are alienated. Nothing and no one matters beyond those who are enraptured by your growing infant.

And the whole world changes around you, as your unholy child grows into puberty, and then into adulthood. Everything revolves around what your growing influence can accomplish. You reach horizons beyond yours or anyone’s expectations.

Then, once it has matured, it opens its maw and begins to rip and chew through your outer extremities. It does not matter that you birthed it. It never cared about that. It wants only to maximize itself. Gradually at first, and then with increasing velocity, it begins to cannibalize you until nothing is left of you. Much of you that is human is bitten through, and now your entire life’s singular purpose is shoring up your own sense of magnitude through success. The monster you’ve birthed has now replaced you, and now your remnants exist inside of the stomach of the one that grew in yours.

And how would anyone know what has transpired? All people see is what you do. In the case of the believer (which to me seems to be the most deceiving), you astound other believers with your wisdom, and bring about badly needed miracles powerfully through prayer. Cancers vanish, bones are mended, unwell minds cured. You care for the poor and set up the demoralized for success. Almost everyone has the same thing to say of you: “My my, how godly this person has become! How tremendous!”

They couldn’t be more wrong. It is a monster that stands before them doing good works. Sometimes it’ll show itself to the public – like when its platform is threatened, or frustrating its will, since it is so accustomed to everyone acquiescing it in every instance due to misplaced honor. One might even wonder whether they simply love the monster. Maybe they do not want to understand that something stands before them aflame in unbridled ambition, gorging itself on self-centered glory, and primarily sees helping the needy as the best way to fulfill itself.

And as people praise the monster as holy, God keeps it there as a public good, despite being a private disappointment – a truth the devoured most likely only meets once they depart from this world to meet their Maker.

And yet how can anyone become successful without the monster –  without powerful fantasies of success? How can we be propelled onward in what we know is that which we are called to do?

The impregnated may require disappointments to reverse it: setbacks that seem perfectly capable of threatening our deepest future hopes. Tragedies that diminish and brutalize it – not so that you lose all hope in a future in which a calling is fulfilled but only to kill the monster-child we incorrectly cherish.

But since we do not realize our misplaced affection, we do not understand that God has allowed the Devil to take up arms against us, or that God was strangely silent and absent in a time of deep trial when hope itself seemed on the verge of dying – with the intention of prying us open, gauging places that fantasize of success out of insecurity.

We need the wounds. In fact, in some respects, we must abound in them. They keep us closer to the reality of our own mortality, and closer in ability to sympathize with the disadvantaged. They are designed to kill the monster, but also to create room for correct  reasons for longing – to kill addiction to public spectacle in favor of inner charity and royalty.

How would God not praise them in open streets when possible? Even Jesus appeared to his disciples a mauled, stabbed, impaled, and beaten resurrectionist. The fantasy didn’t lead him to success, but adoration for God, and for those in need that did – and it could only be done by becoming destructible in human form.