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On Incarnation
by Morten Andersen

On Incarnation:  a Vancouver War College debrief

 

Having grown up on the country side, never being surrounded by tall buildings or sirens, and never being exposed to open drug use, it was quite the change of environment.

 

However, I have experienced not knowing where my next meal would come from; have experienced being in despair and taken a look at the bottles in the cabinet, fighting the battle of the temptation to drown my despair and sorrow in strong liqueur or beer; I have grown up around bio-polar and ADHD, seen the effects of alcohol close up, experienced being completely depleted of love, and looked through the empty facade or mask, which desperately tries to hold everything together by denying the real issues – and the more I looked through that mask the more I failed to recognize my own issues. Instead I kept magnifying how everyone else where superficial and live lives depleted of love, hidden underneath another mask of self-denial, hurts, pains, habits and hang-ups. And yet I was powerless to do anything about it.

 

I have grown up with social out-casts who went in and out of jail, for drinking and for violence. But I also knew that the real issue was never the drinking, nor the violence. My friend was just another person with a butt-load of hurts, habits, hang-ups and perhaps most of all fear for being known. I just didn't know how to express that feeling, or what to do about it. Yet I was filled with tears on their behalf – sharing that pain, frustration, anger, despair and powerlessness.

 

Even though I never used drugs myself, I was by no means sparred from addictive behaviour. I relate to the struggle of fighting the impulse – the sense of want, and wanting it NOW! And most of all the sense of disgust, followed closely by shame and guilt and the feeling of being completely alone in that situation, with nowhere to turn for help and no-one to talk to. And the more I looked for that help and for those persons “out there” I only just kept seeing more people having the same problems. The only difference being they had travelled so much further down that road and convinced themselves that their behaviour was completely acceptable, perhaps even something to brag about. And then, what only brought forth more guilt, shame and disgust, was all of a sudden socially acceptable – and before long the struggle was buried too far down to hope to reach by myself. Soon it was even necessary to keep doing. But still the emptiness never disappeared.

 

I don't know what my expectations were for coming to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. I guess I expected to learn what it meant to live my new life – the new “Christian” life, whatever that meant. I was next to rootless, because I knew all my opinions, all my viewpoints, all my convictions, all my values, all my thinking, all my behaviours, even all my excuses – all of it – was up for revision. All I really expected was hardship and pain in the process of change, blended with a weird mixture of laughter and fun, travels and delays, rising up only to fall forward again, of daily living and daily death. I expected it to be a year of submission and obeying. To follow God's direction – I mean, what else could I do? No reason to fool myself anymore – everybody thought I was crazy anyways... might as well get the full nine yards out of it.

 

What I didn't expect was how I found myself in those whom I on the outside had no similarities to. I didn't expect my inner being, being exposed on the canvas of another human soul, body, mind and heart. I didn't expect to find this place being one of the Western World's most clearest mirrors. Whatever presuppositions, whatever was hidden out of sight in me, whatever I was afraid of – all of it – was walking around me in perfect daylight and clear sight.

 

It reminds me of whenever I walked into my neighbour's barn where I grew up. It was a colder temperature inside, on the warm and sunny, summer days, and the floor was hard and dirty. Everything was darker inside, so it took a moment to adjust the eyes. But after a few moments I saw the light from the warm sun shining through all the crack, and all the saw dust specks was hanging in the air, dancing around.

 

In the same way, I have now travelled to a colder and harder place where the sun doesn't shine as much. But somehow the sun shines through all the cracks, and lights upon all the saw dust specks, which dance around in mid-air all around me. And in seeing the saw dust, I slowly learned to quite myself for a moment and see yet another plank sticking out of my own eye.

 

So in answering how I incarnated my conclusion is this: I came here exactly as everybody else – with baggage and tainted glasses. I came here exactly as everybody else – with dreams for a brighter future, but too disorientated to take them down from the sky and turn them into reality. I came here exactly as everybody else – with a longing to help those around me, but strangely reluctant to help myself first.

 

I came here exactly as everybody else – deluded, and caught up in redundant stuff leading to destination “no where” without realising it spells “now here.”

 

Praise be to God that I also came here with an unquenchable thirst and hunger for Him, for honesty, for knowing love, for wanting to live life to its fullest, with a drive to keep going on, and for having been placed with the best possible support around me. I rejoice to say that my eyes were, and continue to be, opened to my own planks. And I want to testify how humbling it has been to find how much I actually was like the people who live in a place “such as this” - how humbling it was to realise the labels pushed down on these people are but reflections of our own minds, souls, bodies, and hearts.

 

I was just as broken, just as love depleted, just as deluded, as anyone else here. And that made it my home. And just as anyone else living in this home, I often experienced the barriers I experienced in my addictive behaviour. The struggle to share. The struggle to stop.

 

The struggle to accept. The struggle of emptiness. The struggle of being new. And thus the struggle to love. Thus the struggle to relate.

Thus the struggle to find the motivation to keep doing what must be done and oftentimes I failed to live out the requirements, but instead I were merely doing them.

 

Sometimes I even felt a struggle to care.

  

 

 

 

   

 

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