First Posted 16-Jan-2015
Leelah, you poor thing. Bless your heart. You died for no reason. The world will not be fixed, sorry.
There were three words in Leelah’s suicide note that just stopped me dead, “Fix the World”. The world can’t be fixed. It doesn’t come correct. Trying to make it bend to our idea of good just brings us fustration. Choosing martyrdom is a bit of a risk. The worst that can happen is that you will be in the two week news cycle and then the press will move on. Then its back to the same old hot mess world we know and love. Baby girl, you got pushed aside by a presidential election. If you were still here you could still fight the good fight. Sadly, you have become so yesterday.
I was married to someone who had a core belief that if the world could be arranged properly, she’d be ok. If folk would come correct, she’d be ok. I don’t come from a family that comes correct. We tend to be either consciously, deliberately obnoxious or through our brokenness, unconscious of the consequences of our actions and though unintentional, tend to pluck nerves. Leelah asking the world to behave in a way that she’d be ok with had me crying.
The world I live in doesn’t behave. The people I associate with don’t behave. We are the outliers, the black swans who lived with a self-image as an ugly duck for a good bit of our lives. Bad stuff happens to us even though some of us are good people. Good stuff happens also but a lot of us carry a core belief that we were specially made to have an extra portion of bad given to us. One of our bad habits is either intentionally or unintentionally attracting similarly dissonant people and events to our lives. Good stuff can feel wrong to us. We ought not. Some of us know we ought not. We do, though.
My ex-wife and my family share something in common. The world is wrong and they are right. The road to happiness comes in arranging the world so that it is pleasing to them. This is a task like Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill in perpetuity. The world is amenable to some arranging but there is always that little bit belonging to us black swans that won’t come correct. Angst ensues.
2 Corinthians 10:3-6 in the The Message, “The world is unprincipled. It’s dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn’t fight fair. But we don’t live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity.”
Thus, trying to get the world to come correct is stupid. We are to work on the logs in our eyes, on our stuff, and in emulating Christ as best we can. We are too let the world be its bad self. Which I try to do. But my heritage is of one who tries to push the Earth up a hill to a pedestal I made for it. If I could just arrange the Earth just so I could be happy. That’s what I was raised with. Both my Mom & Dad are lifelong, saved Christians. My Dad comes from a wickedly left wing, socialist mother & father. They worshiped at a shrine which elevated the idea that the solution is to fix the world to high orthodoxy. So, (therapy moment), as hard as I work at letting the world be its bad self, I backslide some. I am heartbroken that the kid committed suicide saying that she would have been happy had the world been fixed to her liking. The world is what God made it to be. It is neither evil nor good. It just simply is. Paul was right in telling us to focus our eyes on Christ and not worry about the world. My condolences to the family of that transgender kid. It’s never good for a parent to bury a child. But from a black swan, if more of us could bring our lives into proper focus maybe a few less of us would go home to heaven so early.