the little boy is at the table...

In my post-Germany existence as a human, I have struggled to regain my bearings as it relates to time.  The jet lag is still lagging.  I'm tired much earlier and waking up much earlier no matter what I do.  This has been frustrating in some ways, but in one particular area I'm finding it to be quite positive.

I've been waking up, going down stairs, sitting on the couch, and praying.  But this isn't the same praying that I've been used to for most of my life.

I'm not sure of all the reasons, but I feel like a little boy spending time with God lately.  A really little boy.  I feel stripped of many of the adult covers and armors that have piled on me over the years since my childhood.  I'm not coming to God as a capable, high-capacity adult...I'm whittled down to my inner essence laying emaciated under the debris of dutiful professionalism and mature proficiency.  I am little Jay-Jay with Jesus.  Jason and Jesus sitting in my quiet living room without pretense or posing or posturing.  

I feel more sensitive and innocent.  I feel more scared and insecure.  I feel more joyful and hopeful.  I feel more overwhelmed and under-qualified.  You know, all the stuff you feel as a 6 year old as you press your face against the windowpane and watch the falling snow with woolgathering wonderment.  

I've cried a few times because I'm scared that my outsides are growing bigger and going faster than my insides.  On the exterior I may appear to be larger than life while on the inside I feel smaller than life.  On one side of my skin I'm passionate and poised and prepared, on the less known side of my skin, I'm a small town kid wondering if he's reached his threshold and entered into a zone that is out of my league.

It is probably why I feel like most people don't really know me...all of me, that is.  They know the one side of me, but very few know and are comfortable with the part of me that shivers in the shadows.  On the one hand I am confident and competent, on the other hand I am scared and skittish...very kiddish honestly.

As Jesus and I have been chilling together lately, I sense he is trying to show me how fragile and little I am apart from his enabling strength.  And I'm not just saying this when I say, I not only feel that, I know that.  Something about these early morning sessions with God have made these realities really real to me.  Not just a head-nodding-yes-man-bobble-head-thoughtless-ya-I-give-intellectual-accent-to-that-truth-kinda-crap, but a really real reality that settles into my little boy spirit...that little boy Jason inside of me that knows who I really am hanging out with a God who knows exactly who I really am behind the performance and positioning that coats and covers me over the years of pressured self-construction that happens as a reaction to breakneck, smash-mouth life.  He knows me.

Our times together have been precious to me.  He is becoming my strength.  He is taking the wheel again.  He is whispering validation into my fragility.  He is fathering corridors of my inner man that have not been oxygenated by proper rights of passage over the years.  He is being himself with me, and I'm being myself with Him.  

I, in some ways, will always be a little boy no matter how big life gets around me.  And I want to stay true to myself as the walls of expectation press in around me.  I want to stay close to little Jay-Jay and let him have a voice at the table of decision in my life.  I really do.

And I get a sense that God enjoys me more when I'm coming to him as a little-shot instead of a big-shot.  It's almost like it only works when it goes down like this.  Like we're hard-wired to be smaller than him.  Like we were never meant to take ourselves so seriously or let others take us so seriously that we start living the cold life of a snowman or the hollow life of a showman.  Where showmanship replaces sonship.  Where the poser eclipses the pastor.  

So jet lag isn't all bad.  The boy in me is getting a place at the table recently.  And though it's not fun to feel small, it's relieving alot of the stress that comes with dressing up and playing pretend...make believe.

He must increase, I must decrease.  (John describing his little boy encounters with God in John 3:30)