Taking the red pill

I was reminded one evening recently, through something someone said, of the premise of the movie called, "The Matrix."  Okay that was a REALLY freaky movie, but it has almost a mythic truth to it.  There are so many applications ... but they all have one thing in common: stepping from a life you thought was genuine, into a whole new world that represents reality the way it is, even though that might be something totally opposite to what you thought was the way things were.

For those who haven't seen the movie, our hero, Neo, is a computer hacker, and one day he is kidnapped by some really strange people who take him to see an even stranger individual.  This person tells him that the world he knows is not the real world.  He has suspected something was amiss, but he's given a chance to find out for himself.  His contact from the real world gives him a choice: take the blue pill and wake up in your bed and never remember any of this bizarre experience, or take the red pill and find out the true nature of existence.

Neo takes the red pill - and is instantly and literally plunged into reality - a very disturbing reality which is far beyond anything he could have envisioned.  

He learns that human beings are actually "farmed" by a master alien race who provide a virtual reality dream-state for them to experience (the Matrix) while all the while, the life is slowly sucked out of them; when they die, their bodies are converted to fuel to feed the other humans who in turn feed the aliens.  The whole concept is very disgusting; it goes against everything we hold dear.  

The moment that Neo wakes up in the real world and sees how incredibly helpless he and his fellow human beings are in those little pods of slime, he is totally confused and doesn't know who to trust.  Fortunately his link to the "collective" is severed ... and he is again rescued by the one who opened his eyes.  He is nurtured and re-educated, allowed to rebuild his atrophied muscles, and given the chance to join a resistance movement to free his fellow human beings, one at a time, from this unwitting bondage.  He has to learn a whole new way of living, a whole new mindset, to be able to re-enter the Matrix (knowing that it is only an illusion), and to overcome the aliens and their allies through a computer interface.  

That period of transition, which starts with a willingness to be shown the true nature of living (taking the red pill), is always confusing and usually painful ... at first.  The new way of living feels unnatural, uncomfortable.  It takes a while to get used to and we are constantly in the process of un-learning and re-learning things we thought we knew.  Things we thought were true, aren't. Things we thought were our imagination turn out to be real.  We need to learn new boundaries, venture out toward new frontiers. 

It's not easy.  There are bumps in the road, and there are those who have been on the path we are on, who may have been there so long that they have become bored with or tired of the struggle - and they sell out to the evil entities  who would blind us to their existence and lull us back into that dream-state.  These changing allegiances is also part of the experience, though it is a painful one; only a friend can betray a friend - a stranger has nothing to gain (as one songwriter said).  Learning to deal with and then let go of those things is part of the new reality.  

Finally, when we "take the red pill" - we learn three important truths which remain, no matter how our world changes around us in the new reality.  (1) We are born into a world at war. (2) Things are not what they seem.  And (3) we have a vital part to play in waging that war.  

It's scary.  But we are loved, we are treasured, and our Rescuer believes in us and will never abandon us.

Keep the door open

I heard a sermon once by a dynamic speaker - who liked to use props whenever he spoke; he found it helped his audience remember what he had said. This particular day, he walked onto the platform with a bright blue mop handle, unscrewed from one of those wonder-mop varieties of mops they sold in the stores about 15 years ago or so.

He hadn't been speaking very long before the color of the mop handle, or even that it was a mop handle at all, didn't matter any more to me. I was transfixed.

He spoke of the life and ministry of Moses. In particular, he spoke about the experience at the burning bush. And then he started talking about the miracle of the rod - how God told him to throw the rod on the ground; when he did, it became a serpent. (I can still see him throwing the mop handle on the floor and jumping away from it as if it had started to move and he might get bitten. Then gingerly, carefully reaching for the end of it - and raising it up for all to see it was a mop handle - er - shepherd's rod again.)

Then this pastor held the rod up in his hand and said something like this: "I want you to understand something. In Egypt, Moses was the next thing to being a god. He had it all: money, power, anything he wanted. But when he identified with his own people and tried to help them on his own, he was so disgraced by his failure to help them that he left all that behind and lived in self-imposed exile. He took on the life of a simple shepherd. And a shepherd's rod is his most important tool for doing his work; it protects the sheep from predators, keeps them in line when they stray, and helps the shepherd reach craggy places and tight spots into which sheep have gotten themselves. But over the course of 40 years, this rod came to symbolize for Moses ... everything he lost, all the failure, all the guilt and shame, all the things he could never be, and all the things he believed he always would be. Nothing but a shepherd.

"That rod was a metaphor for everything he had lost in his life. Lost dreams, lost reputation, lost future. Then God came into the picture and told him to throw it down. The Almighty told him to throw down the symbol of the life that he'd been living the last 40 years - a life of disgrace, of shame, of lost opportunities. Deep in his heart he wanted so desperately to be rid of all of that. So yes, he threw it down. Then it transformed into the very personification of those feelings : a venomous snake!! Moses ran from it. Who wouldn't!! But God told him to do something that scared him even more. 'Pick it up.' Not only was this a venomous snake, which would bear watching, it was also the symbol of all of his failures. Why? why would God say to pick up the very thing he loathed? the very thing that caused him so much pain?

"But Moses DID pick up that serpent - and it transformed back into a rod again. And here's what I want you to get. Ever afterward, when Moses talked about that rod, he didn't call it 'the rod of Moses' when he wrote about it. God called it 'your rod' but Moses never did. He called it 'the rod of God.' "

Then he said something else I will never forget. "God can take the very thing that is causing you the most pain, the thing in your life that you feel you can never be free of - and transform it eventually into an instrument that He can use to help others. All you need to do is throw it down at His feet, see it for what it really is, and then allow God to transmute that into what will eventually become your own unique ministry - whether you are a pastor or a lay person who rubs shoulders with hurting people every day. God can use the very thing you think is so ugly and turn it into a beautiful thing for Him. When He tells you to throw it down...throw it down.

"And when and ONLY when He says it's time to pick it back up, do it, for only then will you be ready to enter into the realm of using that very thing to help others who are suffering with the exact same issues you once had. And you will be the only one who can reach them because quite frankly, they won't listen to anyone else who's never been through what they have. That will be your unwitting gift to them, just as it was Moses' gift to his people, given totally unawares. And God will be glorified in and through it. You will be amazed."

How could I improve on that kind of message!? All I can say is that in my own experience, this has proven to be true. No matter how far down the scale I have gone, I have eventually been able to see how my experience not only of recovery and healing but of what I have been healed FROM, can benefit others, and God gets all of my gratitude for it, for without Him (and I tried for years to do it on my own and failed miserably every time) I can do absolutely nothing.