Romans 8:13 Commentary

“For if you are living according to the flesh you will die, but if (you are living) by the Spirit (and) you (are putting) to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”                                             

Romans 8:13

To my family, the truest gifts from God and the central figures of my mortality – Mary, Mallory, Niklas, Cassidy, Matt, Delaney, Lazer, Samson, Marybird and to any and all others who might join us in the future . . . .

I have spent the majority of my existence above ground trying to understand what human life is all about.  I started out as a kid greatly confused by my surroundings, by culture, by adults, and I sort of spent the first fifteen years of existence living from moment to moment; responding instead of acting, pretending instead of being.   I was artistically driven, not very interested in school (except for the social aspects it offered) and didn’t really fit into what other people suggested was vital to finding happiness and peace.  Essentially, I felt lost and like many people my age was befuddled by almost every hour of existence – so befuddled that life, looking back, was one constant existential crisis – manifesting in a strange morass of eerie faces, odd expressions and discomfiting activities.

When I heard people say things like, “I’m going to the store,” or, “have you done your homework?” or when they expressed a weird opinion, I found myself transfixed with thought, wondering, for instance, about the meaning of “store” and why we assume there is any purpose or meaning in going there.  The way people dressed freaked me out, too.  Or activities in things that seem so bloody unimportant.  What was meaningful to most people made me almost nauseous but I also lacked an ability to  relate to the beauty in nature, a cigarette butt smoldering in the curb of the street or being emotionally bound to a group.    

Like many people, and almost as a natural reaction to being so confused, I quickly learned to use the physical and emotional elements of existence to provide me comfort and protection.  Eating copious amounts of immediately satisfying food gave me comfort, sexual gratification (which entered my life way too early by any standard) and violence (verbal and even physical) became a way for me to manage the disconnect I experience between feeling lost and my desire for belonging.  In other words, I created an identity out of these external expressions that served to help me manage the demands of everyday disconnected living and in and from them I discovered a fleshly identity that I was able to use to manage my fears, alienation, and deep desires to be loved.  For some reason, whether based in reality or full-on paranoia, I did not feel genuinely loved by anyone, and learned to use overeating, sexual deviance, violence, threats and rebellion as defense mechanisms for my inward pain.

Because my parents converted to Mormonism as a means to guide their large (six kids) family in ways that they did not feel personally equipped to raise, I also found my person and my struggles with feeling unconditionally loved constantly confronted by the faithful members of the Mormon church who used subtle and even outright rejection, guilt and shame in response to my odd way of surviving this world. Because I was ironically adaptable to my surroundings when necessary (and unless I was truly confronted) I was able to thrive through charm, making people laugh, and challenging the status quo just enough to remain cautiously accepted by the group at large.  Having a mother who played the LDS social scene like a fiddle aided in my being received as well because many people were forced, in my opinion, to deal cautiously in their treatment of me or they might be on the receiving end of her ire – something I was paradoxically subject to since as far back as I can remember.  It was almost like she was telling the world, “nobody can reject my son and not show him love . . . but me.”  Not real healthy.

In our immediate family culture however, music, like food, was greatly appreciated and I was exposed to all sorts of musical styles and forms through my older and younger siblings alike.  It, along with good cinema which I have long been drawn to added an ethereal element to my bizarre inability to connect with the world around me with each interaction of sound and film becoming direct conduits to a life I could understand – life through art.  In other words, while on my own and through my own skin I could not emotionally navigate nor intellectually understand even the most common things around me, music and film gave me a connection that literally soothed my soul and told me every so gently that I wasn’t alone.  

Around fifteen years of age I was introduced to punk as it somehow managed to find its way from across the pond and New York to a little west coast neighborhood in Huntington Beach, CA.  In summary it was as if its raw, fast garage sounds reflected the turmoil in my soul.  When I came to understand the so-called ethos behind true punk, which demanded personal authenticity (in the earliest years) an anarchistic rejection of all unauthorized authority, and a unapologetic do it yourself attitude that was so contrary to the growing corporatized world around me, I was hooked.  And I still am, to a certain extent, even in my sixties.  

This mindset carried me through my teen years but luckily it did not become my whole identity as I, due to my extreme desire to never be boxed in by anything remained oddly active in my church, swam competitively and worked as an ocean lifeguard on southern California beaches.  But I remained disconnected to the world emotionally even though my body and mind were entirely driven by heightened emotional experiences.  The more something made me feel, the more I clung tight because I was incapable of feeling most of the things the world around me loved.  So with this mindset in hand, I sojourned forth, attempting to manage life through my own independent will, wisdom and abilities.  In time, I tried to offset my natural inclinations toward anger and violence, sexual expression and substance abuse by embracing the religion of my youth, serving a full-time mission for that church and then getting married to a truly wonderful woman, but all of these external attempts to live a responsible life never penetrated my soul and therefore all of it bounced off my person and landed at my feet below.  Why?  I could see, over time, that they were all superficial appeals to training me how to be rather than effective tools at changing what I was.  I felt like a trained animal, performing on command but capable, and ready, to rip the head of anyone and anything that challenged my person, views or ideals.  Certainly, I could white-knuckle my way through most public or social events, playing the role of a reasoned balanced individual but I felt myself growing more alienated from the world with each and every performance.  In time, even after all my religious attempts at reform, I was internally torn to shreds and headed toward self-extinction.  I’d done the religious route, I’d seen psychologists, psychiatrists, took medications and rigorously exercised as some means to feel relief.  Some of these things helped.  None of them lasted.  All proved incapable of providing me with a remedy that I saw as authentic and genuine.  Where so many people around me appeared normal and adjusted I knew I was not.  And I was able to validate this fact every time I attempted to honestly express who I was and how I saw the world because in the face of such I was never understood.  Ever. When I realized that being married to a really adjusted girl wasn’t meaning anything to me, I began to seek and search for anything that would fill this gap in my mind – anything that lent to healing, maturity or truth.  I tested as many things as possible that promised real internal change or enlightenment – eastern metaphysics, Marxism, Islam and the Quran, drugs, wine, women and song, subjugation of the flesh, self-harm, nihilism, violence, crime – you name it.  I embraced it, tested it, and assessed the results, hoping to find something that would give my life meaning, purpose, and allow me to see the human experience through eyes wide and unobstructed.  I wanted whatever it was that would freely accept me for what I was, that would use the way I was created for a lasting purpose, and that would frankly challenge all disingenuous appeals. 

What I did not realize at the time (which I could and should have understood by virtue of my own natural inclinations) was that institutions of any kind were not going to welcome me as my authentic self.  There is a reason for this – institutions, as a means to survive, are established on the laws of complicity and conformity and individualism is rarely embraced.  It’s too threatening.  Too out of step with the established plan.  Instead of understanding this, I initially and continually sought to be accepted (even loved) by groups, institutions and organizations all the while being steadfastly rejected by them when the real Shawn McCraney reared his ugly head.

After seventeen years of openly searching for truth, I found myself literally at the end of the proverbial rope.  What I mean by this is self-destruction, nihilism and abject indifference to anyone and everyone around me took the helm.  The reality was I was internally broken inside from years  of running after anything under the sun that would offer me an escape from the reality of what I had ultimately become.  What I did not understand (at that point in time) was that due to how I entered this world (in terms of world-view and makeup) and who I created myself to be, with my limited skills and perspectives, the world would never receive or sustain me, would never bring me peace, and that from this approach I would never find unconditional love.  The reason for this was because, pulling from all things punk, I honestly wanted and was driven to live authentically and refused to accept anything that did not comport with such.   And the fact of the matter is true authenticity, in direct connection to who I honestly was, is almost impossible if it is founded on temporary expressions – which speaks to anything and everything material.  Why?  Material things, in my mind at least, pass, fade and cease to exist, no matter how much we love or appreciate them and whenever anyone embraces them they will ultimately be disappointed.  

From the microcosm to the macrocosm, matter, or the material presence or existence of all things, will fail us – and when I came to understand this fully, I saw that striving to find hope or to be accepted in anything material was a waste of time and could not possibly sustain anyone in the long term.  Food, sleep, sex, and substance were obviously deficient and failing and it doesn’t take much work to see how fleetingly deceptive they are, but at a deeper level, so is fame, fortune, devotion to physicality and endless material acquisitions.  All of them fail, all of it fades and none of it can sustain what I was seeking – truth, which would allow me to be authentic, that would allow me to be loved, and that would lend to something far more meaningful and lasting than a nine to five job, a night at the bar or the intimacy of a mosh-pit.  

Know that I am not in anyway suggesting that material attentions are meaningless or empty in the human experience.  All of them, in one way or another, can be used to actually enhance mortal life and when some fortunate souls are able to discover their purpose in life the world at large can be abundantly blessed.  For this reason I see great value in anyone who discovers their purpose in life, who can passionately pursuit what they were made to do and be – all fine, all good.  But for me personally, nothing material, temporal or cultural had the capacity to supply me with what I needed to fit, belong, change and be loved.  In every pursuit for truth, the ultimate questions for me became:

1. Will this last and why?
2. Can this be my priority to govern my life? And,
3. What will allow for inner strength, peace, and lasting authentic change?

For the first thirty-seven years of my life, the only thing that came close to offering me a solution was art writ large, and not just art in and of itself but the principles in creating, expressing and representing the individual mind behind them.    Of course, there was music (the more unique, and the more authentic, the rawer, the better); film (the more honest and unfiltered the better), literature (the more philosophically based the better) and paintings (particularly the ones that captured an artist honestly splattering their very heart across the canvas).    But even art, in the end, fails as most of its appeals begin to wane with time and demand a change in attention in order to remain viable.  

One afternoon, in August of 1997, my wife asked me to go pick up our two oldest daughters from a gymnastics practice in a neighboring city.  As I proceeded to drive to the gym I could have easily taken the ultimate route of selfishness and ended my own life.  I was truly at a low in life as nothing – not communism, existentialism, Mormonism, psychiatry or psychology could afford me what I was looking for.  Absently, I turned on the radio and scanned around and suddenly a radio preacher’s sermon came through loud and clear.  Why I stopped to listen is understandable as I was actually at that point clinging to a cliff and ready to fall.  The preacher, whose name I later learned went by the name of Charles Stanley, was in the midst of a sermon and he asked the following succinct question almost as soon as I pulled my hand away from the dial:

“Now,” he asked in his southern drawl, “if you can get yourself right before God, why haven’t you done it?”

Then he paused and in the momentary radio silence I found myself transfixed by the query.  See, I had tried to get myself right before God and frankly before the rest of the world, in dozens of different and failing ways without success so the question caused me to really listen to what else the man had to say.  And after a brief pause, he added,

“The reason you haven’t gotten yourself right with God is because . . . you can’t!”

Now at this point in time this added remark absolutely floored me – because I had tried.  Seriously.  For at least seventeen years and to no avail.  Ostensibly, at least to me, “getting myself right with God” was synonymous with getting my life and my view and understanding of life right,” and so I continued to listen – so much so that I pulled over to the side of the road.  And the preacher continued, saying,

“And because you can’t get yourself right with God, He sent His only begotten Son to live like you can’t, and to do what you are not able, as a means to save you as you are.”

This message sent a shockwave through my mind.  See, I had, since a child, tried to find something or someone, to accept me as I was.  To love me unconditionally, to embrace me with all my weird views and ideas about the world.  Of course, most things pretend to offer this unconditional acceptance out the gate – religions, clubs, groups – but in the end they will be quick to reject anyone who refuses to conform; and other people will only accept you if you first conform to their demands (cultures, occupations, governments) but to be offered something that first loves us as we are and then steps out to help us without condition?  I wanted to know more.  And perhaps for the first time in my life, I allowed my own ears to hear, and my own heart to feel, and my own mind to think, and within minutes I followed the instructions of the radio preacher who simply said,

“If you want to accept what God offers the world, then call out to Him.  Right here and now.  Ask Him to forgive you of your will and ways and sin and then wait on Him to respond.  He will.  He will reveal Himself to you and you will hear and see and know Him in a way like you never have before.”

The program ended. I shut the radio off and sat in the car by the side of the road listening as the traffic whizzed by.  But in that car, on that day, I did what Charles Stanley told me to do.  But this time, because I had called out to God many times before, this time, I was really speaking from need, from despair, and in all seriousness.  I meant every word because for some reason I knew that God wants us to mean every word we speak to Him and I was ready and willing to receive anything that would keep me from getting to the end of the road which was suicide.   

So, I asked God to change my heart.  I asked Him to make Himself known to me.  I asked to be enlightened or illuminated by and through what is real, and good and lasting.  And when I finished my prayer, I honestly thought something would have happen.  I opened my eyes.  Nothing. Just the traffic passing me by.  For just a moment, I wondered if I had succumbed to yet another message loaded with empty promises but lacking in any real power.  But I remembered Dr. Stanley’s advice to patiently wait on God to respond , and so armed only with a meager amount of faith, I said in my heart, “I will wait on you,” and I started the car and drove to the practice.  By the end of that day, as my daughters came running out from the gym with their friends, I experienced a change from within and it allowed me, caused me, to see, with spiritual eyes, who God was, to know, in my new heart, that I was loved unconditionally as I was, that all of my weaknesses and sins were forgiven past present and future, and I was, for the first time in my life, at peace, with a peace that is not of this world, a peace that sings acceptance, and a peace that allowed me to accept how God had made me and that the life I had left ahead of me was founded upon something real, lasting and purposeful.

I’ve opened this short book up with this story because it represents the first step in genuinely knowing and experiencing “life that lasts.”  Yes, what human beings call life and living is filled with promises of meaning and eternality but through trial and tests I have discovered them all lacking.  What happened to me, and what happens to anyone and everyone who experiences it, is known as being born from above.  It is the moment when God reveals to those who sincerely seek Him, Life, and when I write, Life (with a capital L) I am talking about life that lasts or living that continues forward beyond this world of material engagements, activities and distractions, to standing on a foundation that cannot be moved.  It is an internal event, and exists in the hands of the Spirit of God.  

This book is an attempt to describe what God does and how He appears to work on a person after they have come to know Him in and through the Spirit.  I’ve written it to principally outline what the Living God has done with me since that fateful August day in 1997.  Not through more anecdotal stories but in and through biblically supported principles.  From the get-go know that God, unlike organized religion, works on the inner Man, sustaining His creations in their uniqueness while gently striving to bring them closer and closer to the Truth. 

Since my roadside experience, armed with the realization that there is a God, that we are loved (as He created us) and that there is a reality in the things of the Spirit that lend to our betterment, I have embarked, through some extreme highs and lows, on seeking to increasingly coming to know Him better over time.  Looking back over the past twenty-five years of deep diving into the Bible, allowing God to manage my weaknesses and trusting in Him and Him alone, I wanted to express what it seems He sort of universally does in the individual lives of those who will allow Him into their hearts and mind to work on our spiritual defects.  See, that is where we are unacceptable to Him in our natural state – spiritually.  Physically, He loves and accepts us as we are, but He wants access to our souls.

It is to this end that we will now proceed.