Still… thanks for telling me. Tell me more. As long as it’s the real you, Eva, I want to hear you. Listen to you. Let’s have it.
Let’s have it all. I’m not phased by your anger or doubt or your blatant non-belief. I’m not phased by your faith either, so no need to get all hun up on how much you think you have. Even a little bit of shaky faith is okay. It’s actually okay. You can’t change my thoughts and feelings toward you, Lass.
I like you messed up, Eva.
Even ”falling apart.” Cause Eva girl? … Shit happens. That’s just life. I wasn’t any farther than I’ve always been. You felt further, but that’s just how you felt. Didn’t change anything. There was no spiritual crisis, I was there. I knew what was happening. There will be more times like that, but it’s okay. You can make it. You are on a journey that has made you and will continue to make you stronger, wiser, more loving, and more WHOLE with every step.
Just do whatever you feel is right along the way. It’s a big gray area, right and wrong, I know. So just do the best you can. Don’t you think it’s more interesting like that anyway? All this black and white stuff… eh… takes all the LIFE out of living. Go with your gut, girlie.
Keep loving people.
Keep fighting the good fight.
Using your brain. Using your energy. Taking care of yourself. Being assertive, especially on the behalf of those who need it. Always seeing the best in people. Not letting other people tell you who you should be.
Keep being yourself. Unequivocally. That’s exactly right.
And find yourself a good man with whom to spend your life.
I’ll be here through it all.
Finally, a word about me… I have a deep desire to be known too. Just like you. Don’t forget about that.
Now back to the studying with you or I’m gonna get one of the rare, heart-felt pleas next week when your papers are coming due. And yes… I know how much you have done on those… or should I say DON’T have done.
Well, I may be the only one listening, but I’m going to talk anyway. If you decide to show up or whatever, well… whatever.
I was listening to The Fray on the radio the other day, their new song “You Found Me.” There’s a line in there that says, “Where were you when everything was falling apart?” When I heard that line, I wondered, “Yeah, where WERE you?”
I wanted you so badly. I was giving up my life for you. Giving up my dreams, my family, my home. I was ready to go wherever you wanted.
God, I PINED for you. Loved you with desperation and hope. Unwaveringly.
I needed you. You had my bleeding heart at your feet. All I wanted was you. And more of you. All you. Only you. More you. I loved you.
Didn’t you understand?
Then it all started falling apart. And where were you when everything was falling apart? Where WERE you!
It just fell and fell and fell, and I couldn’t pick up the pieces. They just all fell apart. It was my first death. The death of all I held dear. I think that’s about when I stopped crying. Sometimes everything just dries up. When you’re reason for LIVING is obliterated, eventually there’s no reason to cry either. No reason to feel anything. You just walk on mindlessly. Hopelessly.
I’m pretty calm now, God. The falling apart has ceased. I still don’t feel anything as deeply as I did, but it’s okay. I feel other things now. I feel happiness. I feel angry at injustice. At pain. I feel gratitude. Love illudes me though. At least “love” as I felt it for you. In fact, I catch myself sometimes thinking, “I don’t believe in love.” And on one level, I don’t. That’s because part of me still connotates “love” with feeling. You’re supposed to feel love. But I don’t think I do. I say “love.” I do “love.” I think “love.” But do I feel it? I don’t know.
It’s seems to me a bit like a room in my head. A room that I’ve closed off and though every other door is wide open with the sun shining in, that room is locked. I walk by it every once in awhile and feeling a little empty inside, but I just ignore it and move on.
I’m still calm though. I’ve long since given up the freaking out. I see now that there was nothing to freak out about in the first place. You never left. I THOUGHT you did. But you didn’t. In fact, it was all in my head. In the beginning, I THOUGHT I was so close to you. Then I THOUGHT I was so far from you. Then I THOUGHT you weren’t there at all. Now I don’t know about you, God.
I just don’t know. Maybe you’re there.
Maybe not.
I’ll never really know. And I think that’s okay. It may not be okay to some people, but it’s okay with me. See… I’ve settled on two things. First, it makes as much sense to me why people don’t believe in you, as why people do. Neither group of people deserves to be hated for whatever they’ve chosen to believe, it makes sense to them and helps them in whatever way they want to be helped. No one really knows anyway.
Second, either way, whether you’re “true” or not, I do like the IDEA of you. If I’m being completely honest, just the idea of you is enough to make me reacquaint myself with tears.
The idea is unique to me, as everyone’s idea of you is unique to them. To me, it’s the idea that I am known as intimately as I am loved. Watched over. Being guided. Being given wisdom and strength. Being given love for people. And being empowered and emboldened to LIVE OUT that love.
I like that idea.
And maybe that’s all you are… an idea.
I was trying to figure out the other day why I like the movie Gladiator so much. It’s my all-time favorite movie. Number one on any list I make. When I tell some people that they say, “That’s a guy movie.” I think that’s a bunch of bull-hunky, cause I like it and I’m not a guy. There’s something in it that I REALLY like.
I finally figured out what it is…
It’s the concept that believing in something good, even if it turns out to not be “true” (like the might of the Roman Empire from that movie) but if for no other reason than that it inspires you…
is worth it.
Maybe you’ll die in the end. And maybe the Empire you believed in will collapse. And maybe it never really existed in the first place like you thought it did.
But the fact that you believed and you let it inspire you, made it worth the while. Made it MORE than worth the while. It changed the color of your world, because whatever you believe IS your world.
So, God…
God??? [echoing]
Humpf.
That’s what I thought… no answer.
I guess what I’m saying is that if I believe in you, then you exist. In my world. And that makes sense because as close as I thought you were in the beginning… you were. And as far as I thought you were later on… you were. Because it’s what I believed.
That must mean that I am as close to you as I believe myself to be. And God… God?… I believe you are very close. I believe you are very far away. And I believe you are everywhere in between. I believe you know what’s going on. I believe you know what’s going to happen. I believe you love all people. And I believe you want me to love all people. I believe you made me strong and intelligent. I believe the Jesus is a character worth immitating. I find him intriguing, like I haven’t found him for a very long time. I believe you see me. Really SEE me.
And God… I believe I like the idea of you. Perhaps that’s all you are. I don’t know.
But either way…
I believe it’s an idea worth believing in. Or it can be. I’m sorry about all those Christians who have and spout an unhealthy and hurtful idea of you. I’m sorry they’ve forgotten about the rest of the world except in terms of evangelism. I’m sorry that I don’t like them sometimes. I’m working on it. Sometimes.
Meanwhile, I’m still here. And I BELIEVE you’re still here, as close as you’ve always been… so you are.
I think I just have one thing left to say. It’s kind of hard to say. I told you about that door, right? Yeah, I like leaving it closed. But maybe today I’ll crack it, because love is worth believing in to.
Let me say first, that my blood pressure is rising, so I think I’ve touched a nerve with myself. Don’t be surprised if this turns into a rant. Please remember as you read though that I’m not a Hater. I have the capacity to love almost any individual I come in contact with and find something I value in them. There are certain aggregates however, whose views and/or practices I do not appreciate. What makes it even more volatile is when I have personally experienced pain and grief due to those beliefs/practices. That is why my blood pressure is rising. My experience with Christianity thus far in my life has not been all positive and I feel some of my wounds are still a little raw. On the whole, I have seen myself make great progress toward healing. I love where I’m going “spiritually,” and I know I’ll get there someday…
I don’t know where to start except at the beginning, so here I go… Raised in a Christian home and all that blah, blah, blah. You’ve heard the dealio… we were at church whenever the doors were open. That was normal for us and every one we knew. It was okay. I accepted it as part of life without questioning. In fact, I never questioned it at all. By the time I graduated high school I was very well versed in the Bible and all things related. I talked the talk and I walked the walk. No one had anything on me. Squeaky clean.
I should also say that I believed pretty much everything I was told. It wasn’t that I was just going through the motions, I bought into the whole package. I prayed “without ceasing” (not really, but probably as close as anyone has ever gotten), memorized verses, faithfully attended church, and all the related activities. Essentially did the whole dance and I loved the “music.”
After high school I decided after much deliberation to take a year off from school to do missions with Youth With A Mission. It was a really hard decision because what it came down to was deciding which was more important to me, God, or all the things I loved about my life (sports, piano, school, etc.). I oscillated for many months, but things eventually came to a head and when push came to shove, I chose God.
So, off I went to Lakeside, Montana (and then Thailand) to find God. To “know” God.
God, or what I thought God should be if I found such, was what I got. Now, I’m going to lapse into my seriously Christian-y talk. It’s weird sounding to me now, but I can only describe it in such terms because that was how I described it at the time and to convey the depth of what I felt I need to use the same lingo I used then… anyway…
I fell in love with Jesus. I cried when I felt close to God and I felt close to God a lot. I raised my hands during worship. I could not read enough of the Bible to satisfy me. Couldn’t talk about God enough to feel I’d said enough. Couldn’t be silent enough to feel I’d heard enough from God. Couldn’t listen to enough music to adequately sing my love to God. I just couldn’t love God enough. My whole heart was in it. My everything. I wanted God more than anything.
By the time my term in Montana and Thailand were up I had reoriented my whole life. Earlier I mentioned not wanting to do YWAM because I didn’t want to give up sports, piano, and school… well, those things didn’t even enter my radar anymore. All I wanted was to stay in YWAM(forever) and feel close to God.
So that’s what I tried to do. I poured my heart and soul into an application for another term and sent it off feeling certain that God was pleased to finally have my full attention and be my number one priority. It felt so good to know what I wanted to do with my life, to have a purpose and a Person with which to do it. Jesus! My best friend! My ever-present companion! The love of my life!
But…
I didn’t get accepted.
Crushed. I was absolutely crushed. I cried so hard. I hadn’t cried that hard since I was a little kid and I haven’t cried that hard since. My whole life went up in smoke in a single instance. No more YWAM. No more friends. No more love. No more God. At least that’s what it felt like at the time. I tried to remind myself that God was not confined to a place, but I’d never felt so close to God as I did in YWAM. Now I was stuck, suffocating, back in the life I had originally not wanted to leave. I lost again (I had just left them when I came home) all the friends I’d made, because now I knew I couldn’t go back to them. I lost my life plan. I lost hope that I’d ever be able to find another life that I could be happy in, and most of all, I lost the feeling of being close to God. I’ll just say right now, I haven’t felt it since either. For all those reasons, my grief was well founded.
So, what did I do? I did what any person does when their world is turned upside-down. I just survived. My Bleeding Heart suffered through each day until it eventually became my Numb Heart, which eventually became my Bitter Heart, which eventually became my Hopeless Heart (I’ve talked about the depression before here, >>click to read<<), which eventually… after several seemingly long years… became my Content Heart.
After I learned that I couldn’t go back to YWAM then only other plan I happened to have in place was going to college. I had already been accepted and had scholarships to my hometown university, so I enrolled. The plan was to major in music, push through in three years instead of four, then go back to YWAM.
The first year of colllege was miserable. That and most of the second was when I was the most depressed. It was bad. I feel bad for my roommates now as I look back. I was a recluse. Kind. But a recluse. I tried to bury myself in my schoolwork, but as anyone who’s been depressed knows, it’s very hard to concentrate. Anyway, I was very depressed.
I tried to hold on to the faith I’d found during YWAM, but as the months dragged on, it waned and waned. Feelings of emptiness prevailed. By the time I was well into my first semester, it was weak enough that the religion classes easily shattered what was left and the remnates blew away in the breeze. I was left with nothing in the way of faith. But I faked it. I keep doing all the Christian-y things. There really wasn’t any question that I’d do that, I’d done that stuff all my life. It wasn’t going to change that fast. Old habits die hard.
Before I go on, I’ll say that things went on this way, me being depressed, until the middle of my sophomore year. At that point, I finally cried in front of my parents, asked if I could move home, which of course I could, and I changed my major. From there things, inch by inch, got better for me. Not in regard to faith or how I felt about Christianity, but how I felt about life.
I started learning how to help people (my new major was Social Work) and realized that I really, really liked that. I also realized that I loved learning. All types of things. Things that I’d never, ever use, like Physics and Chemistry. No matter the class, or even the professor, I would (and still do) become engrossed in what they’re saying. It satisfies some deep craving. I love it. That’s why I love reading and am always in the middle of so many books at one time. I find another one that is interesting and I don’t wait to start it until I’m finished with the last one/several.
Those discoveries finally gave me the allowance I needed to be able to adjust the dreams I had for my life. I found new dreams and they actually didn’t even include YWAM. They included continuing education (a Ph.D came into the picture) and clinical social work/counseling, eventually possibly including international human rights advocacy, professorship, social research, and so many more dreams. My thoughts finally got reoriented. I found my passion… people, people, people.
Additionally, studying social work was personally therapeutic and helped me understand why I’d had such a hard time transitioning out of YWAM. This new understanding I had nothing to do with spirituality or “losing God,” like I thought it had. It was completely understandable from a psychosocial perspective and I realized that I’d been misled to think that 1) feeling close to God was equivalent to being close to God, and 2) both were dependent on me.
This is where the rant begins…
There are some veins of Christianity to whom it is really important to feel close to God. They don’t say it in so many words, but in what they preach and how they live, it’s all over the place. If you don’t read your Bible every day, pray a lot, and go to church like your life depended on it, then you are “falling away” from God.
Really??
Falling away from GOD!?!?!?
You mean that Being whom you describe as Omni-blah, blah, blah??? You must be outside your mind! (We are going to do up-downs until Blue is no longer tired and thirsty.) If Said Being is Omni-Anything, then Said Being would be per se… Inescapable.
No matter how much you are sinning or not… Said Being will still be there.
No matter how much you “feel” said Being (or not)… Said Being will still be there.
No matter how much you pray, or read your Bible, or go to Church, or “witness” (or not)… Said Being will still be there.
THEREFORE…
Remove head from Christian sphincter and actually do something for someone ELSE. Your continual self-grubbing really only serves the purpose of making you more self-absorbed (Christian sphincter idea again). Turn your eyes away from yourself. Stop being so highly concerned with your own goodness and think about someone else. Help someone else simply for their sake, not because you get brownie points with other Christians, like Pastor Humble, Husband Head-of-House, and Wife I-Don’t-Speak-In-Church.
Yes. I am irked.
I am irked because this hits so close to home. I used to be exactly like that. I used to always be trying to be good enough (never succeeding) and I used to interpret all of life through a lense of Christianity. EVERYTHING had to do with my “spiritual growth.” No hard time in my life could just be chalked up to that… a hard time. God was always trying to teach (<grossly emphasize that word when you read it) me something, like “humility.” That was always pounded into my head.
Having a cosmic purpose in times of trouble helps some people feel better about it. But I am not one of those people. To me, the understanding that God always had a purpose for my pain felt like nothing more than cosmic punishment, and for a person who was already internally self-abusive this was bad. Very bad.
The whole concept emphasized that I was never good enough. I worked so hard, doing and feeling everything “right” where Christianity was concerned, but it was pointless because I was always supposed to be working harder. I was always supposed to be more humble, have more faith, FEEL more, read my Bible more, pray MORE. More, more, more.
This is what so much of Christianity has become… being ever more “spiritual,” more “holy,” more “Spirit-filled.” But what did that get Christianity? In my view … Arrogancy. Irrelevancy. Self-absorption. (Christian sphincter idea again.) So many Christians have seemingly lost contact with reality. They no longer have any common sense… Go tell a conservative, fundamentalist Christian that women actually have brains [note sarcasm] and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. Women in leadership??? Huh??? Gay people should have equal rights??? Huh??? And good grief, DON’T get me started on Christian Zionists.
In regards to my own personal feelings about Christianity, I have absolutely no desire to return to that type of Christianity. The self-absorbed type that ignores the poor, disgraces the weak, ex-communicates (practically) people who are gay, subjugates women, aviods people who have criminal records, a mental illness, or children without a spouse, cheers when my Palestinian brothers and sisters have their homes demolished by the Israeli government, believes Americas are somehow “better” than the rest of the world, and demonizes people who don’t think the same way they do.
It’s been hard for me to want to go to church the past year or two. Part of the reason is that I just don’t know how to relate to God anymore. That old Christian box that I used to use, just doesn’t fit anymore and I refuse to try to make it fit.
The easiest way to put that is that I am simply burnt out, with no desire to relight the former fire. I don’t have the energy to make my Christianity look like everyone elses. It is pointless to me, because doing the Christian dance doesn’t make me any closer to God, even though Christians think it does. Maybe that’s the main quarrel I’m having with them at this point in my life, because one, it’s not true, and two, there are so many people in the world who need their energy! So many people who we ignore when we are consumed with trying to feel “close” to God. SO MANY PEOPLE.
So.
What did I realize the other day? (bet you forgot I said that)
I realized that NOT all Christians are like that. Many of my Mennonite brothers and sisters believe that Jesus actually meant what he said. They are socially and environmentally conscientious, politically active, service and social justice oriented, and live out their ideals in a PRACTICAL way. None of this “spirituality” that is no earthly good.
The fact is there are a lot of Christians out there, beyond Mennonites, who feel the same way. In an interview with Christianity Today, Barack Obama (my President!) said this…
“I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that, that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.” (italics mine)
Here is one of my deepest convictions…
WE CAN NEVER BE CLOSER TO GOD THAN WE ARE RIGHT NOW.
That means that like Obama said, I can prioritize the marginalized members of the human race over my own spiritual (self-)absorption. That means to me that I never have to be “not good enough” again. That means that even in those moments when I don’t think I even believe in God, which are intense and frequent, God is still here. As close as before. Unintimidated. Unchanging. Unwavering. I am SEEN (Gen. 16:13). I never have to worry about “falling away from God,” so I can spend my life expressing my faith through love (Gal. 5:6), walking with Jesus until he takes me away (Gen. 5:24).
Sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, speaking a true word, or making a friend. ~John Ruskin
