..coincidence//closure

I was walking on campus today and overheard a student describe her process of switching into a different art class.  She stated quite a few rational reasons to transfer to the other class and I congratulated her in my mind for figuring out the obscure matrix of SPU-land so successfully. But then she ruined it for me. She said that the fact that the wait-list opened up with an extra spot and she was able to register was evidence that God wanted her to be in the class and that God was blessing the major that she had chosen. Immediately my theological-self started shaking its head back and forth with disapproval. As it is in my life always, I disagreed with this logic on instinct and then went back and figured out just why I had such a strong reaction.

This is what I came up with:

• I have a hard time discerning what is 'from God'.  I feel ill-prepared and inadequate to wade through my life with labels that have the words 'God's Will' printed on them, adhering them to events or experiences where I feel God was present. God is confusing.
• Somehow this rational seems to be disproportionally positive. Meaning most of the great things in my life happen because God is good and therefore God wants to make me happy. True: God is good and God desires happiness for his children, I am just a little reluctant to say that these things are in a cause/effect relationship with each other. People also attribute pain or grief to God. I think that this is to find purpose, which seems to be essential to the human experience, but I just don't know sometimes...
  
• I just don't know if this is how I want to view God's involvement in my life. I think that God is subtle and intimately concerned with stupid things, like class wait-lists and the whistling biker behind me today. I am reluctant to reduce the God of the Universe to a label that I place on my happiness and convenience and positive coincidence. I want to gasp a little when I experience the mystery of God meddling in my ordinary, not simply thank them for being an accommodating bell-hop. 

I am person who craves closure. Not the forced good-bye parties of years spent together on staffs or exit interviews. The kind of closure I want is bows on the boxes of different experiences in my life. I want things to feel complete and properly discovered. It bothers me when they aren't. But right now I have a lot of boxes of experiences overflowing with content, with no bows in sight. Wrapping things up for me means talking and writing and thinking and telling the story of the boxes' content. I don't know if this is a very mature thing to be doing though. Somewhere inside of myself I am starting to feel uneasy about putting the rubber stamp of done on my experiences and then moving on. It might be nice for my mental organization but it just isn't true to real life. So I am thinking about what it means to be involved in experiences while grieving their changed circumstances without sadness. If you don't understand, it's okay, neither do I. I just want to be able to process through things in a way that is true to my current relationship to them and not as a falsified reality of complete in an effort to be done.

To be honest, my life scares me a little bit right now. Don't tell though, it's important that people think I am strong.  <  This is obviously bullshit but it's a surprisingly present little green beast in the back of my mind.

There is freedom in honesty and strength in fragility. I just need God to prove it to me because  sometimes I don't believe it.

Pedro the Lion will serenade me tonight. They just understand quite a lot and they are the only friends from high school I still hang out with.