Who Am I Really Writing For?

     My wife asked me a while back who I am really addressing in my writing; that is, who am I actually writing for? She pointed out that a lot of what I write is argumentation and is polemical in nature. So who am I arguing with? Part of the answer is ghosts, that is, memories of people from years, even decades ago, who are likely no longer the same people in reality. But the ghost of who that person was still haunts and hangs out in my mind. But the chief person I am arguing against is, quite frankly, myself as I used to be.
     In many ways, throughout the stages of my life, I have been many different people, all with the same name, and roughly the same appearance, but with very different ways of thinking, and different belief systems. The Allen Martin Bair that I am now, is not the eighteen year old young man who entered Bible School in 1994, nor is he the twenty year old young man who graduated two years later. He is also not the man who was ordained as an Old Catholic Priest in 2005. In a way, the ghosts of who I used to be still swirl around in my head, along with the ghosts of the people I used to know, and constantly argue with the man I am now.
     These previous incarnations of myself already know the reasons why I am who I am today and in this moment. They already know the reasoning, the evidences, and the experiences with which they cannot actually argue. But the feelings and emotions are still there. The echoes of attachments to things which no longer exist still want to pull, even though there's nothing to pull towards. And there is an irrational desire to return to something to which cannot be returned because it no longer exists, and neither do those people as they were. This is the nature of change, and of time. Nothing is static or stationary except God Himself through whom time itself moves and to whom time itself is subject.
      And so while I write and reason and reflect on the things I've learned, the insights I've received, the things I've experienced, and I share them with whoever else might benefit, in many ways I am not really directing the polemic or argument against anyone else except these ghosts in my head, of whom my own past incarnations are the most immediate recipients.
     When I ask, "What did Jesus teach?" I am really asking myself. When I argue against Calvinism or American Evangelicalism, I am really arguing against the young man I was who bought into it heart and soul. When I question and bring evidence against the root of Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the Imperial Church now, I am arguing against the man who sold everything to be a part of it. And in many ways, by doing so, I am reminding myself of the man I have become, and that these other, younger men, no longer exist except as memories.
      The person who I am now is who I am supposed to be right now. This is the person that, after thirty years of trying to understand what being a disciple actually means, has finally gotten it, and is the closest in his relationship to God through Jesus Christ that he has ever been. But the ghosts of who I used to be are frequently triggered and appalled by who he is and who he has become. And so the internal battle between the "old man" and the "new man" is real, relentless, and ongoing as I push forward step by step, slogging as if through a muddy, sometimes bloody battlefield through the muck, fighting an enemy I know very well and who knows me likewise.