Denial ain’t a river in Egypt!

I have spent time talking about the differences between the Recovery group and the Faith group. But what is the same? What is common between the groups? Right now let’s talk about denial. Both camps would deny they are in denial. You hear ‘yes but’ a lot. I have lived in both worlds and in the dangerous ground between.

The hardest place to find in this denial place. So let’s look at places of denial. In the faith world, we have trouble embracing the consequence of our sin thing. We hide the broken parts of ourselves. We are posers. It is like people on the spectrum posing as neurotypical. It is exhausting. Everyone knows good Christians are neurotypical or really good at posing as neurotypical. Even neurotypical folk are not perfect. But at church, we are on our best behavior. We know we are not what we want people to think we are. So all of us pose. What are we hiding? We are hiding our human frailty. Churches are full of posers. This isn’t bad. It is who we are. And we are judgers. We have to keep the facade. Judgment is the drug to kill the dull pain of posing. We pretend we are there already. We pretend we are victors and not pilgrims.

Recovery people mostly don’t have the luxury of posing. We are in various states of disrepair. We are not able to pose because of our issues. We in recovery are given a great gift. We can out of necessity say our goal is progress and not perfection. This jump is much more difficult for Faith folks.

Finally, both groups have trouble with the harder biblical truths.

Recovery people won’t come to the Lord because they simply are not willing to be obedient. Sin, righteousness, and judgment are a bridge way too far. If you don’t drink or use you should have the right to do everything else? So denial of bible truth is a bastion of denial.

Faith people deny the struggle. The paradox is the beauty of life is in the struggle. Humanness is beautiful. God shines thru the broken places. Our arrogance is opaque to his glory.

Poser me is not beautiful. But the real human me is really complex and beautiful.