As much as I sit here and write about nobly digging my heels and sitting right here and waiting to hear from God.. there is a flipside.
I mean it all. But I fear what makes sense to my heart.
There are the days like today, when something brings to mind the ideas of two opposite poles, and the way extremes offer their own versions of certainty which could be either so easy, or so excruciating, to swallow, in pursuit of peace: God is punishing you for stepping out of his will, or God is a fart in the breeze and everything is arbitrary.
It would be almost a relief to stop fighting the hardwiring that tells me God has thrashed me within an inch of my life; I listen, sometimes, to what's whispering in my head, the breath-intimate, hushed litany of sins preserved in a vacuum against my brain: bad choices. bad choices. shouldn't have chosen culinary school. shouldn't have chosen these people, these actions, this path; should have listened harder, waited longer, done it differently, should have known how to choose better. this is what happens.
And, on the flipside... the blissful comfort of maybe being able to believe that God isn't there. Oh, the bliss. That there isn't someone at the helm, controlling things, and choosing which things he won't control, toward ends that nobody else can know until it doesn't matter anymore. I can't tell you how much my heart aches to be able to believe that God does not watch children starving, or people tortured; that he did not watch my death, because he is not there. Because there are bad people, and there are strong people, and strong people survive what the bad people do to them because they are strong and invested in good.
Taking God out of the equation simplifies everything to my heart.
But I will never be able to believe it. Not late at night, when I open my eyes and scan my darkened bedroom for the tenth time before trying to drift off, when my breathing quickens against the rising dread in my middle, when I wonder why I'm still here.
And so, there are no answers in the gray.
There is no resolution. No balm in the gray for the contradictory need of the weary, who push so hard against the easy black-and-white answers as we crave the certainty and peace, real or false, that they offer.
And I know, as surely as I know this couch upon which I sit, that I will scream why at the heavens (occupied or empty) for as long as I live. Not because I have decided to, but because I am thoroughly shattered on the ground of why. It is all I have.
Speaking of poles. The why thing. I hate the "why" thing. I hate the reality of what it means for me now, the involuntary tightening in the back of my throat at the way it's viewed as either, or simultaneously, huge and trite, depending on who you talk to, or where you are, or what you're whying about. Why did this happen to me: it's like a phase for Christians to push through. A speed bump, a barrier to something: a prelude to anything real or worthwhile; a weakness. The Last Roadblock To Peace. It's not ours to know why. The foundations of my life tremble with violent, uncontrollable fury at that statement, and God knows it.
If only I could decide that I don't really need to know the whys of my life experiences, I could have peace.
As if that is ever something I could decide. Ever.
I fear the momentum that the death of this faith has set for me.
And so, for now, I sit in these ruins, and wait, because it's the last place I knew of God.
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