Sunday, September 25, 2005

Of falling pianos and impending doom

I discovered last night while driving to Chattanooga that I despise this time of year. It was only 6:45, yet the sky had that 8:30 look about it, and then the realization hit me that it's "that" time of year again. The sky turns a bland gray, there's a warm wind blowing, and I feel like a disaster is just waiting for its chance to strike. I hate the in betweens, when the sky looks ominous but won't get its act together enough to pour down buckets or like the times when I was little and got in trouble and was then forced to sit in my room for what seems like hours waiting for my dad to come "make war on my backside." Pick your favorite analogy, it's a strange time.

Perhaps it's simply the fact that I love at least 14 hours of daylight? Some may try to tell me that I would hate it if I lived with that much sun year round, but mark my words, they're all very wrong.

Or maybe it's because of past unfortunate experiences that occurred during this time of year.

I remember when I was 12 or 13 in 1990-91 and it was football season. Everyone at church was talking about Iraq and Kuwait and Armageddon and the Four Horseman and the moon turning to blood and frogs, locusts and marks of the beast and all that jazz, and my only reprieve was the fact that my aunt had season tickets to the Atlanta Falcons and that got me out of sitting through the Sunday service. It didn't totally block out my discomfort with the situation, and the Falcons were awful, but the only slaying, destruction and judgment going on in the world for three or four hours was the other team beating the snot out of the home team on the field. They changed their uniforms to black the next season, presumably to be more intimidating, but putting a bad team in black only means you have a bad black-uniformed team.

I remember the summer ending and entering my senior year of high school. Though some of my friends had graduated and had moved away, I still had a lot of friends, but for whatever reason I found myself in the "funk." I vividly recall several Tuesday nights after church volleyball driving home in a 1984 Ford LTD station wagon with a sagging headliner, racing through the odd paradox that is cold humidity. Stickiness + a night chill + air conditioning that long ago stopped working = nastiness/misery. I listened to a lot of the Newboys' Going Public album then, specifically the final track that dealt with the suicide of a friend, and some old Geoff Moore and the Distance cd. I'm not sure why...I'm not even sure what my problem was, but I eventually snapped out of it around Thanksgiving.

Then there are the memories of failed relationships that went belly-up around the end of the Indian Summer period. That sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that doesn't make me throw up but makes me want to because I think I'd feel better. That's about the best description I can put to this feeling, but I can't give it a name or anything.

I do think there is something to the whole seasonal affective disorder thing, but I'm not so sure it's a chemical thing as much as it is a spiritual issue. I'm starting to think that Satan uses things like this to throw wrenches into our present in hopes of derailing our future. And it occurs to me that it's a terrible thing that seasons changing and internal feelings, things that God created and that must be good, can be manipulated and perverted for evil purposes. Thankfully, God gave me just a wee bit of defiance in my personality, so I'm going to try to pray, read the Word and shake this off, if for nothing else to be the contrarian.

Our feeling of doom, of punishment, or of looming disaster must be tied to grace and mercy, or better said, our failure to believe that we've been granted forgiveness and salvation. How incredible and life-changing would it be if those things were always present on my mind? The sin nature teaches that there is still something yet to be brought to sacrifice, something else to receive punishment for, something more to make atonement for, but the fact remains that it's finished. The bill I've been trying so hard to remember to pay was taken care of long ago. "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

There. I feel a little better now.