A lot has happened since I wrote last, more than I can tell…more than I can begin to remember. It’s that way with life I’ve found; there are cycles, patterns, stages, like rungs on a ladder or rings on a chain. It’s important to remember what you’ve learned, what time and experience have taught you; drowsiness and the new thing will always try and make you forget.
I haven’t written much in the last three months for several reasons. One, lack of time, two, lack of focus, and three, those three months are the ones I changed in, like a caterpillar in it’s cocoon or a dog when it gets rabies. A time of silence has come and gone, a cycle, a stage has passed over me. I have integrated to one thing and denaturalized from another. The culture, the life here, I understand it, and strive to see it for what it is; the culture and the life back there, where you are now, I understand it, in its absence, and strive, also, to see it for what it is. It’s a deep movement, fringing on the borders of a chaos theory. I see myself between to worlds, not able to find my footing in either one. I can understand one by itself, or the other by itself, but together…there is no justification for either of the two worlds. Thus, it is difficult to find my place in an existence my mind cannot justify.
There is a great shadow over our world…of ignorance, of power, but there is also a great light too, bright and shining and real, a reality you can see without your eyes and feel without your hands. But in both of these worlds, I have come to know, few, I find, follow that light; this world of pet-Gods and beliefs without meaning, passed down like a holy relic from generation to generation, losing meaning with every exchange of contract.
There is life, and there is truth, and there is a way, a path, but I don’t see many on it. Am I on it? Yet with the question on my lips, I cannot answer, for there are things moving within me that I don’t even know if I believe in. I feel this destiny about me, like there is something very specific that I am to do, but nothing about my life right now tells me that is so; it’s a feeling, a sense, a projected reality that has no basis in what I can see or what I can feel.
I am utterly worthless, even unto myself, my sins, the torture of my own mind. By all rights, I am a cancer to my own spirit. In any practical reality, there is no reason for my existence, in fact, in a sense, I am worth more to this world dead than alive. But that is not who I am, it’s not who I am, literally and frankly.
How can that be? How can you be more than you see?
Life and experience, and things far deeper than that, have taught me. Who you are is something deeper than what other people think, deeper than what you think, deeper than what you do.
Who you are is what God says you are.
I am not talking about the god your aunt believes in, or your dad, or your church. I am talking about the real God. The God that is bigger than all of their ideas and thoughts; The God that is bigger than Santa Clause-god, with his big list, checked twice, bigger than Judge-god, who spends all his time waiting to strike you with lighting, bigger than Hippy-god, who only cares about whether you feel good. The real God, that wrote the Bible through imperfect hands, and saved its meaning for so many centuries. The God that’s bigger than any religion or power, and yet came to us as a man, as himself, together.
And the real God says, you are perfect in me!
All he asks is that you believe that, in him, it is true, and love people, all people, as though you could see the perfection in them that He sees in you.
I believe it is the purpose of our lives to see people as they really are, as God sees them; acknowledging their faults, but showing them that God is in the business of salvation, and only Him. The best thing you can do is get out of the way and let Him make the changes as part of His plan to make your spiritual reality a physical reality.
These last three months have been full of pain, but also of joy, a joy that somehow, overrules the suffering in the world and the suffering in me. It comes from something other, something deep, something miraculous, and if there were anything I could do, it would be to give you such an experience. The pain softens a heart so desensitized by our world and the joy gives you humility of a God that is real.
When I think about the past it gets fuzzy; people, places, things, they all loose something; the thing that made them real at the time. I've never been good at remembering; anything from my childhood dreams to what I ate for breakfast. But looking back, seeing all of it in a big pot of mixed, melancholy memories I wonder...what did it all mean? Why was it? I guess I'm someone whose prone to regretting things (maybe that's why I can't remember them so well, a sort of mental override or something). But when I look back at all that has passed in my life, I feel like I should be able to feel some sort of pattern to it, some mode or theme or gesture of reality, but I don't. I see a boy, seemingly timeless, living, breathing, making choices that he often doesn't understand. A boy with a love for learning and a love for the whys of the world. I've always been a thinker. Thoughts about science, thoughts about people, thoughts about God, about anything that interested me, I wanted to know why, why is it that I ask? What was once, I think, a hobby, is now a raging passion in me. Why can preachers wear suits when Jesus wore rags? Why can people spend their money and lives in pursuit of what a beggar has? Why can I listen and hear all the screams around me and remain so unaffected? The pain of this world is heavy. I feel as though I have taken on some of that weight. I breathe and it is as though I breathe with a million other souls. The rhythm of a world beating as I respirate; with clogging, sickening sounds of a heart diseased. But yet my spirit is light and my mouth always with a song; expressing pain, joy, confusion, and peace. Why do I crest these hills of human suffering, in a mind, only to see a valley of ignorance and pain. Sometimes I wish I could show people what I see, but then, I wonder if such is right. Give us this day our daily bread, a sustenance for a soul weighed heavy with sorrow, let it's power soak up what we have left in our path, greasy pangs of hunger for what we cannot express. Why does soul long for what mind tells cannot be had? When you look into their faces, you see the face of a nameless race that toils for survival and not principle. The face of one is the face of millions, bleeding from a heart diseased and strained. It breaks your heart to see theirs and morbidity tries to take hold. When you're eating lunch in an airport somewhere; you see her...you see him. Without dignity, without shame, without food, and without peace. You want to give them something, but only justify, to refill, to give them the dignity you think what you have... has given you. But what do they really see? A person filled with encrypted philosophies, so deep and willful, you think they can't be seen. I will give you rest, from a racked brain, in-justifiable ideas about a world that doesn't exist, time that you thought was your own, place...where you thought you belonged. God, you say, must I be poor to see? No, He says, you must be rich with promise, grace, compassion, love...while your pockets will be empty, your heart will be full, a peace that security cannot bring, a relationship with every suffering man and woman through a relationship with He who gives all and embraces a broken world.