..mercy

I think the worst thing in the world is poverty.

God, have mercy on us for what we have done.

..fixed

For a set of reasons, my theological language has shifted a lot over the last yearish (also, my conceptualization of time, that's basically non-existent now).  I don't really talk about 'sin' very much anymore and I am much more interested in life than righteousness, health instead of holiness.  When I talk about who I am I say that I am a person who is broken, rather than totally & utterly depraved.  Sweet, change...

But I think that I want to be fixed and that is posing a problem.  'In my brokenness' I want to transcend and find wholeness, health, completion, community, authenticity, and so on and so on.  But I don't know how this all works.  I think part of my current journey is learning how to live in the paradox of brokenness.  

Like when Jesus healed people- they were once blind for their entire life, get some mud rubbed on them, and then they are healed.  They were profoundly healed, their sickness was replaced with health and their lives were profoundly changed.  But the thing that always got me was that at the end of so many of the healing parables so many of the people screwed up.  Jesus would tell them not to tell anyone who had healed them and then they would do it anyways.  Maybe that's the part of the parable that I have never taken the time to imagine; what happened in the lives of the healed post healing?  I'm pretty sure they screwed up a lot of shit.

And I think that is what I want my experience with God to be so much of the time- a healing without an ending, where I will be fixed and the story will complete itself in abstracted bliss.  (Maybe this is part of the trouble with an obsession with the New Testament, it doesn't seem to show the struggle of people perpetually ruining everything like the Old  Testament does.)

Recently, I have felt the need to be fixed more strongly.  I feel like I am walking around with a pet grey cloud over my head and unintelligent, sad comment on the tip of my tongue.  And so my sociology brain starts to turn, thinking about the plausible 5,000 causes for my state (many of them are likely true) and what that means for my life, social networks, life opportunities...  In this vein, I have received wise, sagely advice from a wise, sagely friend- cause and effect relationships in peoples' lives are complex and it's foolish to assume that they aren't.

And so I sit in the intersection between plausible causes and desired solutions, wanting something else, wanting to be understood and then fixed.  But... I don't think that's God's plan.  Maybe my whole life is not about becoming more and more fixed/healed/authenticated/communal/whole.  Maybe it's one f-ing long process of becoming okay with my brokenness and choosing to hope in God regardless of it.  For some reason, I feel dumb writing this (mostly because I am blogging instead of doing my homework) but also because I think it sounds like a whole lot of the Christianese I grew up with (self-hating Baptists and the journey to moralistic humility with a God that was always a little dissatisfied with everything).  I could care less if it's a cool new theological thought, because it's one that I am learning.

The point where it all seems to crystalize for me is when I think about what life's purpose seems to be... is it always me becoming a better/more fixed person? or is it about learning how to live while being shattered and sick?  For which of these projections is God necessary, not simply employed for efficiency?  And honestly, even though there are hundreds of things in my life that I could look back on and remember marked change in, none of the areas have been fixed so what's the point in pretending like I am somehow beyond them.

I want to learn for the rest of my life how to be okay with not being okay.