josh Allan

“there’s a darkness in my skin
my cover’s wearing thin, i believe
i’d love to start again, go back to innocent
and never leave”

–david crowder, “rescue is coming”

this whole thing about ted haggard has disturbed me. and i don’t mean in a “that is so disgusting i’m so disturbed” kind of way. i mean that it has disturbed ME, in my own ife, in my own situations. no, i’m not confessing some deep dark secret, but i am saying that the whole incident has, more than anything else, forced me to take a good look at myself.

dave crowder says, “there’s darkness in my skin” and i know there is. there’s deep, filthy darkness inside me, and i don’t know how the hell it got there. (i mean, i DO, but, you know.)

as you probably know if you read my blogs, i currently work for a church in southern california, and as an employee/leader/clergy (i guess) of the church, this ted situation takes on an almost corporeal aire around my friends, because we are all in similar positions. no, we don’t lead as MANY people, but we do lead many people. no, our pedastal isn’t as big, but i’m sure people still put us on one. (we try our best to insist that we are no different from them, but in many ways we are, because we have chosen to lead and they have chosen to follow… another dog, another day perhaps.)

all that to say, we have had some fairly intense discussions about these types of things surrrounding what’s happened at New Life, because our closest friends here are the lead pastor and his wife, and we love them and all their kids dearly. and we can see, almost tangibly, physically, what kind of devastation this kind of incident would bring upon a family in that position. it feels a bit reverse projection; like instead of projecting feelings somewhere else, they all get projected on us, and we can separate ourselves from our lives, if only for a moment, and feel, at least in a small part, what they might feel. i don’t mean that in a diminishing way, i just think that as a church employee it’s affected me with more voracity than it would if i wasn’t.

the thing that really bothers me, though, is that i hear a lot of talk about mr. haggard and his family in such a detached tone. we talk about this situation like it’s filthy and wrong, and, moreover, that we are in no way capable of this kind of behavior. but i don’t buy it. i don’t.

i can feel that there’s something dark inside me, as occasional thoughts skirt across my mind, or emotions flare up. there’s something broken deep within me. the truth is that there’s just as much darkness in my skin as his, and in your skin as his, and i really think that if we don’t recognize that, we are willfully deceiving ourselves, and we are on a dangerous path to cloathing ourselves in thoughts that are far from the way of jesus.

maybe that’s what grace is: being able to choose to not allow our darkness to rule us.

i am no better a man than mr. haggard. he is a fellow jesus-follower, and deserves our God-ly thoughts and prayers, not our gossip, speculation, and indirect, quiet condemnation.