Anyone that’s lived in this world (I’m guessing that’s most of us) has practised this before—the formal word for it is “compartmentalisation”. While there are many ways this word can be expressed, in terms of a Christ-follower, it pretty much is the act of having different versions of ourselves in different social settings. As expressed in my artilcle “White Man’s World”, we are obsessed with being liked—to be liked is to be accepted, which essentially to us, means belonging.
While navigating the misty and isolated roads out of this mindset, I have found that theoretically knowing and understanding this new identity in Christ is entirely different to embodying it. I love the way Erwin Mcmanus talks about being co-heirs with Christ—that we truly belong to a creative order and that we were made to create! It is in this new way of thinking and living that we can discover and build our true identities in Christ. While I would have preferred for change to happen overnight, it didn’t. I still cringed when people asked me why I was a believer, or why I go to church. I still thought twice before speaking in church, so that I wouldn’t say the wrong thing. I still slipped into that character when the music played and the drinks went down, when the talk got loud—I was in the midst, easing into the banter, bitching (still struggle with this one), sexualising—it was my strongest type of dialogue, how could I resist?
The one thing about the compartmentalised mind is the inability to innovate—or at the very least to innovate at the level and potential you were created to. Living like this is living in preservation, survival and fear. Anyone can become a badass by just desensitising themselves, but in my opinion, this is one of the biggest forms of cowardice.
This is my conviction—when you grasp the full meaning of being a child of God, the conviction to live fully alive, one and whole will come to you. Picture a car with a lithium-ion battery (Tesla grade) but it is disconnected and runs purely on gas—that is what it’s like, this limiting idea of self. When you are truly whole, you’re connected spiritually, emotionally and mindfully! You may not understand what this means, or how this may feel, you may even say you’ve tried it before, but Jeremiah 29:13 says that if you seek Me (God) with all your heart, you will find Me. This is a guarantee that God waits for you.
Some of us learn the hard way and I had to myself. But after that awful accident with the prospect of jail time (this event is described in my piece “speed”), it forced me to completely seek the Lord. When Jesus conquers your heart, the experience is intense. People would tell you not to live for the highs—and i mean, yeah, life is mostly lows and finding satisfaction in them, but I say always seek the highs in Chirst. This comes with one condition, never cease to seek Christ. The pursuit of truth (which is holistically spiritual, emotional and intellectual connected) will always lead back to Christ—just as long as you love truth, as to love it more than yourself, you will not be blinded.
2 Thessalonians 2:10 “And with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore, God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”