..scared

I am sitting on the yellow (jell-o) couch that I hate, but I have spent what feels like the last three weeks on this couch that I hate. My relationship to this couch feels a lot like my life. I have kind of hated the place that I have been recently but seem to stay here.

I suppose I could blame it on Camden, but its not Camden. I could blame it on 'unsustainable' Christianity but I don't think that is it either. I could think about changes in social structure or the shift into a new quarter, and search for other things to blame this feeling on. I think that all of these elements play into my current state, but the sum of them is less than the totality of my experience.

I don't know what to do. I feel like I am loosing my faith and so apathetic and heart broken about it at the same time. I am too tired of Christianity to go back to the same rut, the same cyclical guilt, the same standards that I will never reach. I don't want to live a life of Christian cliches or tightly structured Christian activities. I want my faith to mean more than a label I can put in the religion box of surveys or an easy conversation to fall back onto at a Christian conference. I tired of pretending I am perfect, have perfect revolutionary ideas, or how some strangely deep understanding of life. At the end of the day, I know little and tend to love less that I could.

So I have become blunt, and tell people how I actually am. I have noticed that I have more grace for people's humanity and that the fact that life is messy and terrible at times does not paralyze me.

Right now though, I am really really scared to talk about the place that I am in. I don't know, with certainty, things that I hold really true and only realize that they are vital to my existence when the thought of loosing them overwhelms me. I am terrified to talk to most of the people in my life about it because I don't want to be mad if they say something trite and soothing, seeing my current state as an emotional outburst. Antidoting pats on the head and 'I'll be praying for you's' seem to be the worst possible solution to this situation and are the reason that I have shrunk away from so much in my life.

I want God, that is a truth that is undeniable in my life. I am just at a complete loss in how to find him and its starting to kill me.

..answers

Looking back on the last few days and the last month, I have begun to realize that I have not really allowed myself to be effected by the different events that have come into my life. I like to think that learning and growth doesn't come from experiences but from reflection on experiences, but that is so much easier said than done. Life happens and you experience things but the rest of your life doesn't stop, it's just paused and waiting for you to come back to it. So I have been doing that, getting swept up in life without reflection and dreaming of an arbitrary time in the future that will be a haven of debriefing and understanding. This idea is very illusive for me and I guess I am learning what unpacking along side of living life will look like.

I think the place that Camden has brought me to is one of difficult questioning. It's forced me to ask hard questions of myself, ones that reveal decaying parts of my heart, and the underdeveloped limbs of my soul. That is something that I don't really want to spend much time looking at. My lack of maturity can be pitiful and the depth of my arrogance is embarrassing. I think that for me to look for answers to the questions that I am asking right now would be missing the purpose of their existence. I think that they are in my life as a means of motivation, or a way to engage difficult topics and situations. I can't go to places like Camden and not question. All Camden is to me is an eternal pile of questions with very few answers and I think that was a reality that I wasn't expecting.

I am a person who wants answers. I expect them from people in relationships and in my beliefs and understandings of the world. I like to think that every problem has an answer and that its just a matter of finding it. But I don't know if that true. What if questions are the medium of life that we are suppose to remain in, find motivational comfort in, and let us remember our frailty in a world of confusion? I think that this concept of questioning allows God to remain sacred and mysterious and it is through this medium that I can continually pursue him. This attitude keeps me a perpetually naive student and never an expert. It forces me to trust blindly, the people that I love and the people that I fear, because they are often one in the same. And it makes me live in love, because I feel like it is the only medium that is guaranteed by God. Love and answers are different. They are different solutions to different pursuits and answers will leave me arrogant and frustrated, burned out and in despair. Love never fails, it just doesn't because it's not based upon solving problems. That's probably why it's hard.