On Being A Barbwire Christian

Looks like after writing or editing twenty-something books, I should have known it was coming.

But I didn’t.

I expected to go bouncy bouncy from finishing Short’s 1854 Diary project right into a new writing project. I’d even made a list of five likely title to work on. But what I’d forgotten is that every time I finish a book and move the notes and final draft into my DONE file, a fit of dark black depression falls on me.

Oh, there’s that first giddy feeling of elation when I hold “my book” in my hands and gloat over having produced it. That lasts from 20 minutes to two hours—then comes the let down.

I look at the work of my hands and say, “What a piece of crap”. I see mistakes that spoil the whole work. I think that this garbage isn’t going to sell any better than the last book I wrote. I realize that I’ve wasted time on a useless project—Again!

Everything sours on me. I feel I’ve been a loser all my life. My own one-line diary entries say, “Another wasted day in a wasted life”. Depression paralyzes me. I say, “It doesn’t matter” about everything—shaving, mowing the lawn, reading—why bother?

It’s all I can do to look at pictures of naked ladies on the internet. And even that feels useless and not worth the trouble of clicking on another nipple.

But should a Christian feel so low?

Probably not.

But that’s the way I am.

And shouldn’t a Christian hide such feelings out of a sense of “testimony” because we’re supposed to be joyous people?

But the big let-down is a common human experience; we all know the backlash after psyching ourselves up for finals and the end of semester comes and we crash. And after even joyous experiences, say preparing for a wedding, or sad experiences, making funeral arrangements, there comes a letdown, a period of enervation, an overwhelming weariness—these feelings are real.

And they are our common lot.

This is a place where raw dogged faith kicks in.

I really do feel lower than whale shit, but I still believe that Jesus Christ is Lord.

My lord.

He is what He is, regardless of what I feel or experience.

He is true whether I believe that truth at the moment or not.

And, yes, I feel I should write about these things to be honest.

I want the Kid in the Attic and anyone else who might read my diary to know the reality of Christian experience as it works our in the life of one morose, grumpy, dirty old man—me. That way they’ll know that the Christian faith is real. Jesus doesn’t just save winners.

Ginny and I were talking about my depression the other night and I expressed my faith that in Heaven I will be given a cheap seat in the nosebleed section with a ticket stamped Saved-But-Useless…

She said I’m wrong, that the Lord will run to meet me with arms wide open to hug me home.

She would say that.

She likes me.

I’ll show how my thoughts about the coils of barbwire entanglements fit in just a moment.

In some research the other day, Ginny encountered a site I’d never run across before, Dr. Donald J. Mabry’s Historical Text Archive at http://historicaltextarchive.com/books.php?op=viewbook&bookid=70&cid=2 .

Dr. Mabry, Professor Emeritus of history at Mississippi State University, pioneered in introducing historians to the use of the Internet for professional purposes. His Historical Text Archive, the first Internet-based file storage and retrieval site for historians, has won over sixty Awards. The Archive had published 70 books and over 687 articles in electronic form. It has eleven million unique visitors a year.

In a well-researched, scholarly E-Book entitled World’s Finest Beach, Dr. Mabry tells the fascinating history of northeast Florida beach communities.

In investigating Dr. Marby’s footnotes Ginny found that he cites such eminent Florida history authorities as Bill Foley, T. Frederick Davis, and James R. Ward.

Among these names in the footnotes, she found three references to articles I wrote.

What a shock!

These guys are really good. They are authorities. They qualify as legitimate historians. I’m not an authority on anything; I’m just a guy with an interest in the past of my hometown. Yet, there I appear in three different footnotes.

Yes, I am a footnote.

Here comes the barbwire thought:

While I feel that my writing and my life per se is useless, somebody got a footnote out of it.

Back in the 1950s I met a soldier just returned from the Korean War. He’d been a machine gunner over there as United States troops fought their way up the peninsula, then the Communist Chinese army poured over the border in hordes to push our boys back .

The soldier told me that our guys set out massive entanglements of barbwire to channel rushing Communist fighters into firing lanes covered by machine guns. He said some of the enemy soldiers were armed with nothing but sharpened bamboo spears as they charged the machineguns.

To break through the barbwire entanglement and make a way through for the soldiers behind them, the first waves of Communist soldiers would run forward and throw themselves on the barbwire.

The combined weight of thousands of them eventually flattened the wire.

By stepping on their bodies, the Communist troops following could charge the machine guns without being entangled in the barbwire. The first wave of men’s function in the scheme of things was to keep others from getting entangled in the barbwire.

These barbwire soldiers were nonentities.

Bodies for other soldiers to step on.

Expendable.

Footnotes.

I find the example of these men comforting.

Ginny read over this just before I posted it online to Blogger and she began singing.

She sang that tune from the musical Annie.

You know the one—The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow!

I live with an interesting woman.