Burn Those Ships

When the pain and cognitive dissonance in your mind and heart are more than you can take.

A recent ship floundering on Tamarindo Beach.

One of the Christian songs that has meant the most to me over the past few years is one by For King & Country “Burn the Ships” It’s a song that does not mention God, or Jesus, or even reference Christianity at all much less a certain flavor of faith. It’s about surviving bad things, by picking your rear end up and walking away from troubles. Light a match, leave the post, burn the ship, as the lyrics read.

Here’s a link to the song. I encourage you to take a listen -

I’ve been through so much in my life, I’m still going through so much involving my family of origin in Louisiana that is fearful and uncertain. But whenever I hear this song I know I don’t have to fear the unknown. I can literally get up out of the dust and walk myself to anywhere I want.

A big part of that walking away is realizing some years ago that the opinions of others of me are not any of my business. Not at all. I’ve mostly tried to keep to that. One of the things I did with social media after stopping writing for “No Longer Quivering” on Patheos was privatize my Facebook account. I kept my old social media accounts referencing my Patheos column because of my upcoming book “With Strange Fire”. It’s a tale of how a scoffing unbeliever ended up joining a sweet country church, but by the end the church was in a far land sending up that strange fire referenced in the Bible as unrighteous.

It’s part of why that particular song deeply appeals to me, as sort of a cast away on a strange shore far from where I started. I didn’t know that the bad thing I had to survive was going to be my church. But it was. For two full years after I left I cried every single day. Every day in my small Southern town I ran into someone who primarily knew me through my former church. I was castigated by the masses for walking away, and called an apostate. It was an intensely painful time that sent me back into the arms of therapy.

Now I can look back and see why everyone in my faith sphere suddenly treated me as if I’d been tossed into the outer darkness. It was because I was so heavily involved in the church, years on worship team, I was on the altar ministry, the healing team, taught Sunday School, women’s group, Bible study. We hosted the area Wednesday night Bible study group. If someone like I, involved in everything at church, could suddenly walk away then anyone could.

When I started burning my particular ship it frightened them so greatly. Later others did start to leave, and what I’d inadvertently started went from a trickle to a flood, leaving only a few still at my original church.

Change is such a scary thing. Being the first to do something takes not courage, it merely takes being so disgusted by something that to stay is more than the cognitive dissonance in your mind can tolerate.