Lose Yourself

Snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity,

Oh, there goes Rabbit, he choked,

He's so mad but he won't give up that easy? No.

He won't have it, he knows his whole back city's ropes

It won't matter, he's dope, he knows that but he's broke

He's so stacked that he knows, when he goes back to his mobile home,

That's when it's back to the lab again yo, this whole rhapsody

He better go capture the moment and hope it don't pass him.

-Eminem, Lose Yourself

For those who want to save their life will lose it, 

And those who lose their life for my sake will will find it.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 16: 25

I'm not a huge fan of rap music.  I have a few, mostly old school, artists that I like a bit:  Public Enemy, KRS-One, Cypress Hill, NWA (Ice Cube, Dr. Dre inclusive), and of course Snoop Dogg (for shizzle).  But honestly I never expected to actually like Eminem, even though he may seem old school now, and he is about my age, I just couldn't quite like the Slim Shady thing and the edgy, violent and frankly psychotic persona that he was putting out there, and maybe honestly, I had some sort of preconception about white rappers that goes back to the ill-conceived age of Vanilla Ice and Shaggy.

Some of you (maybe a lot of you) probably have no idea what I'm talking about.  You should feel no shame about that, thank you for persevering with me through the first paragraph.  If you've seen the movie 8 Mile, which is a (sort of) biographical story about how Eminem made it in the hip hop world, you will know that the song Lose Yourself is sort of a microcosm of what he does as an artist.  For those of you not familiar with hip hop in general, you should know that introspective, self awareness is not really the strong suit of the medium.  Anger, braggadocio and conspicuous consumption are more par for the course. Project strength, be the Tyrannosaurus Rex, posture yourself as a madman, a crazy wild man, or so chilled out that everybody knows you don't give a you know what, that's the range of emotions available.

Eminem did all of that, but then he also told people about all the bad stuff that was going on.  He rapped about his messed up trailer park momma, his failed relationships, even his own self doubt, and you notice that he does it with this command of his voice and the flow of his words that only the absolute best rappers can manage.  But what made Eminem different was his willingness to be honest without "going soft." That's bad news for a rapper, if you can write a song about your struggles parenting your daughter and not come across as a sap, you are talented.  Eminem pulls it off in my opinion.

What I really want to talk about this morning is the way that following Jesus in the world could use a little Eminem.  I started, but did not get very far into reading a blog post that was titled: Self-care During Spiritual Deconstruction or something along those lines and I kind of threw up in my mouth a little bit.  There was nothing wrong with the basic premise of the post.  The point is that when you go through times of spiritual struggle, or when your faith is being stretched or challenged, you can get worn out or "burned out."  This is true, but the tone of the blog post was something that just sort of gives me the shivers.  The phrase "self-care" is like a trigger for it, "life-giving" is another, "seeking balance," "taking 'me-time,'" dear Lord spare us from the doom of "going soft."

I think a lot about why the church fails to reach people.  I rarely think it's because we're too hardcore.  We can be judgmental, angry and even brutal, but we fail most woefully when we do not learn to resonate with people's struggles.  Sometimes we try to hard to be nice and fail to be honest.  Sometimes we are honest, but only about other people's problems.  Sometimes we can seem nice, actually be sort of honest, but fail to be kind (or merciful).  Following Jesus is hard, I mean actually following him, taking up your cross and all that, if we try to do it on our terms, we inevitably choke and melt down.  Part of authentic discipleship is confession of sin and unfitness, it is the part of the song where Eminem admits he has more problems than he knows what to do with and stops trying to pretend that he's a world-beater.  He puts down his ego, he loses himself.

What Eminem picks up is the words, the music, writing the next lyric, mastering the rhythm and the flow.  What Christians need to pick up is Jesus, his radical ability to love, his willingness to be open and vulnerable, even when he is at the end of his rope.  If we are to be prophetic to this world, we have to learn the path of descent and be willing to go into the dark places, whether it is the place where the greed and lust for power that runs the world crushes down, or whether it is the dark night of our own soul, where we wrestle with our own inadequacy and the smallness of our faith.

The best way to exercise "self-care" is to put yourself entirely in God's hands.  You burn out when you try to do it yourself.  I'm all for rest and Sabbath time, I'm all for deep introspection and self-examination, I'm just saying, "suck it up buttercup," it's hard work to actually do that stuff the way it needs to be done.  Honestly putting yourself out there might just push you to the edge and maybe even over it, it did that to Jesus.  Be prepared to lose yourself.