Mental Toughness

3/29/2000

(This transcript begins 5:20 into the track.)

There was a day, seventeen or eighteen years ago now where I basically stepped outside of the religious system. I was the only one I knew on Earth that home schooled, and I was the only one on Earth I knew of that wasn’t just some kind of crazy rebel that wanted to stay home and sleep in on Sunday morning. That’s what they really want to do. They want to party on Saturday and sleep in on Sunday, so they say they’re too spiritual to go to church on Sunday. Just a bunch of weak losers that are making excuses for their own worldly compromises. That’s the hyperspiritual bunch.

And then there are the people that go to church. And I’d never heard of anybody that actually did love God with all their heart, and actually was investing in people’s lives, and receiving input into their lives that didn’t go sit in a building on Sunday morning. I knew of no such creature anywhere, anytime. I’d never heard of it, never read about it, and never met anyone like that. And that so frustrated some, this whole direction that was so different, and so radical, and so easily rejected and insulted that they cried, “It’s all bad fruit! How can you justify it? Just look, you’re all by yourself.” And I had to decide if I was going to be mentally tough. And I remember thinking and crying and praying and fasting several days after that. I just said to myself, and to God, “Well, are they right? Am I crazy? Is this just something in me? What’s going on here? How can I find myself in this situation, which in essence is saying ten trillion people are wrong? How could that be?”

So I had to force my way through this thing and ask myself, “What were my motives? Did I have any that weren’t godly motives? What price was I willing to pay? What do the scriptures really teach about this?” Like Martin Luther, “What do scriptures say?” And I came to grips with the fact that I knew what the Bible said, and all the people that I knew that had the PhD’s in Bible, and were the Greek scholars—I knew people like that—and not a one of them could answer my questions. Nobody could answer my questions about why these scriptures say these things and nobody does it. No one could give me any answers about those things.

So I basically decided – MENTAL TOUGHNESS. I have to keep going here, even if the results seem bad, even if I’m shankin’ ball after ball after ball, to use a golf analogy, if the objective is right, I’ve got to keep going even if the results are bad. I can’t let what other people think make my decisions about this for me. I’ve got to let truth make the decision for me about it, and I’ve got to persevere through the hard times if I’m ever going to see the good times.

And you know what, even if… and this is the verse in Hebrews 11 that came ringing through to me during that period of time, where it says that those that sought the city whose Builder and Maker is God could’ve gone back to the old country—but they wouldn’t. And, therefore, God was not ashamed to be called their God, and they His people. And that verse just came through like a rocket in my heart. It was like, “Well, even if I never see it with my own eyes, I’m not going back to the old country. I’m not going to sell out. If I die having never seen the Promised Land, so be it if that’s where it all turns out. But I’ve got to base my decisions on truth, not on feelings or results or popular opinion.” And the truth is no one can show me why this whole set of scriptures….no one has been able to explain to me why no one does these things, and why they seemingly don’t matter, and why people don’t live that way. They talk about it, and they study it, but they’re not living it. How could that be?

And for the longest time, I thought it had to be just my fault, it was just my perception. But the deeper I dug into it, the more I realized that it’s just not my problem. If everybody in the world thinks I’m crazy, I’d rather go to my grave being true to convictions that are based on the scriptures, and everybody thinking I’m out of my mind, than I would compromise and sell out just to make everybody around me happy. So throw your staplers at me from eight angles, and I’ll just keep ducking. And if I die stoned of staplers – how would that read in the headlines ;) – so be it! But I’d rather die than just cross out a bunch of scriptures and live in this make-believe world that is not described by the scriptures. I won’t do it, even if I have to stand by myself, I won’t do it.

So mental toughness, says I’ve got to go on—I will not recant unless you show me in the scriptures, and however it turns out, it turns out. I’m just going to do the best I can. I’m going to be the best I can be, do the best I can do, and find whatever satisfaction I can find in the fact that I was true to the best of my knowledge to what was true. I might not have been popular. I might have not been successful, but I was true to what I thought was true, and truth was defined by what God said, not what everybody thinks or what everybody feels or what everybody does. That can’t matter to me nearly as much as what God said about it.