An Invitation to Self-Reflection

Dark Corner
Orig­i­nal­ly post­ed to Face­book Octo­ber 17, 2014.
Late­ly I’ve been pon­der­ing some ques­tions I would ask myself and invite oth­ers to ask them of themselves.
If I would answer ‘yes’ to the fol­low­ing ques­tion, “Am I in a rela­tion­ship with oth­er believ­ers that involves some form of account­abil­i­ty?”, then these fol­low-up ques­tions to myself would fol­low:
  1. In all the aspects of my life in which I am osten­si­bly trans­par­ent, is there any activ­i­ty or aspect which I have com­part­men­tal­ized away and either con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly in order to make cer­tain that it nev­er gets exposed, dis­cussed or explored, by not bring­ing it up or by steer­ing the con­ver­sa­tion in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion when some­one else brings it up? Might I even go so far as to con­fess oth­er areas of weak­ness both to show a sin­cere desire for account­abil­i­ty and to direct atten­tion away from my secret activ­i­ty? Do I have a dark hid­den corner? 
  2. If the answer to #1 was yes, why do I do it? Am I: 
    1. Ashamed or embarrassed? 
    2. Fair­ly cer­tain that I know what their response would be and that they might ques­tion whether it was wise, or God­ly, or some­how at odds with the kind of rela­tion­ship with God that I want and pro­fess to want to have? 
    3. Com­plete­ly cer­tain that I know what their response would be because it’s come up before and per­haps I even agreed at the time (Do I not now?) that it was unwise or unGod­ly or some­how at odds with who I claim to (want to) be in God? 
  3. Final­ly, if the answer to #2 matched any of the pos­si­ble rea­sons, or even rea­sons that weren’t sug­gest­ed, how impor­tant real­ly, is that activ­i­ty or aspect, and do I real­ly want to keep pos­ses­sion of that activ­i­ty or aspect? 
I say final­ly, but it leads me to pon­der some­thing Col. Jim­mie Coy asked us about at the Val­ley View Com­mu­ni­ty Church 2014 Men’s Retreat; Does that ‘thing’ qual­i­fy as an ABOB, A Bowl of Beans, a bowl of lentil stew which I desire so very strong­ly that I am will­ing to trade away my entire birthright, as did Esau, in exchange for gain­ing or keep­ing. Fur­ther, when I’ve reached the bot­tom dregs of that bowl, will I still agree with the log­ic and rea­son­ing that led to my deci­sion? Will I find last­ing sat­is­fac­tion that replaces the val­ue of my birthright, or will I find last­ing remorse over that which I forsook? 
From Jim­mie Coy: “ABOB, A Bowl Of Beans…is any­thing that will sep­a­rate you from your Spir­i­tu­al eter­nal birthright. ABOB calls to each of us but ulti­mate­ly it is what sep­a­rates us from our great­est trea­sure. As Desmond Doss would say, ‘If we miss heav­en, we have missed every­thing.’ IC, jdc”

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