End of 2012

I'm sitting in the living room. Next door, Dave plays a lively card game with his family. Their laughter is light and warm. I am sitting in the dim light of a lamp, waiting for my headache to ease. It is quiet, and I am enjoying being on my own.

2012 is almost over. We have had Christmas with two of the other interns, and most of the hype has subsided. The next couple of days will no doubt be full of this sense of numbness and post-Christmas exhaustion.

It is the end of another year. A little while ago the Mayans prophesied the world would end. Our lives could end at any moment. But life still seems long. The years pass simultaneously quickly and slowly. I am 24. I am young but old.  Every year feels more and more like the last. Circumstances change but new phases of life bring the same stresses and breakdowns in me. I remain the same.

I am afraid I am losing hope that things can change, that I can change. I think I am losing faith that I will ever be able to break free of these things in me.

It's approaching the end of the year and I am numbed by a familiar sense of melancholy. I wonder whether it really is true that everyone can break the cycles that bind them. I think I may be caught in them forever, and the best I can hope for is ploughing on, managing, hanging on by the skin of my teeth. Trying to believe that all of this is worth it, that me being alive is a good thing.

These may seem morbid thoughts but the truth is, nothing has changed. I have felt this way since I was 11, and I am beginning to really and truly doubt I will ever be free.

I wonder whether it is time to admit defeat. Whether this is as good as it gets for someone like me. Whether nothing about me that is broken can ever be fixed in this life, and the best I can do is try to hobble on without jumping headlong off a cliff in resignation.

I am tired of feeling tired and overwhelmed by everyday life. Sometimes I see that the things which drown me are no longer anchored to circumstances or the movements of my life. They are deep inside of me. And I can't run away from me.

As I sit here, I realise how alone I feel. I feel like an extra piece of a jigsaw puzzle that never fits. Sometimes I wish there was someone left that I could pour out to, who I could tell these things without fear and pretence. Instead I am blogging this into cyberspace, into a silent void. Comfortingly familiar as I plough on, the realities of life unchanged.

Life is difficult universally but sometimes I wonder at the ways that I get stuck. My friend once said to me that my life seemed idyllic from the Facebook photos of my little family, my house, my husband and my dog. I now have a job, and have found a good church. The hole inside of me continues to suck me in. I feel drowned and small and alone and out of control. I wonder if I will ever be happy or at peace.

I take my meds and I do all I can do to keep a lid on things. I know that I am not in a depressive episode. I am tired that I am never really okay. It is so boring and tiring. It is so profoundly disillusioning.

This is an honest blog post and all I have left is my honesty. Sometimes I wonder why it is that this darkness and emptiness never seem to fade. Severed from everything that brought it into existence, it still seems to thrive. I live in the memories and scars of things I can never change. I can never run away from it.

People make new year's resolutions in the hope that things can change. And I am afraid, because with every day that passes, every person I meet and every experience I have, I believe less and less that they can. I am losing hope in myself, in my life, and in humanity. And I don't think I can get the hope back.

Conscience calls

When I became a Christian I promised Jesus that I would follow him. I probably didn't realize till later that this meant following him wherever he would lead me. I think of the disciple fishermen who dropped their nets and lives to follow the divine mystery. As I sit here, lost after a church service themed Uganda/Kabubbu, I feel a weight on my heart and a desperation in my gut. I am confronted repeatedly by the choice I have made, everything in my being screaming the question: when is it time to leave everything behind for the gospel?

If I were called before the judgement seat of God now and asked about it, I would say that I feel as though I should throw in the towel and leave this church behind to follow Jesus. That sometimes I feel as though it is black and white, and that as a married couple we make it more complicated than it really is with our thoughts and compromises and analyses. That this place is a dead end, that this is not where the gospel will be served through us, that it is a waste of time for us. I would pour my heart and soul out to him with all the anger, pain, and disillusionment that I have carried inside me for so long; I would tell him that the more I look at it, the more I see role modelled in this church an obsession about superficialities, church services and performances, all worldly values veiled in the jargon of English Christendom, all the worse for the fact that they are marketed under the banner of church. I would tell him that my conscience is telling me to follow him where he leads me, far away from here, deep into the bowels of need and injustice, into honest community and humble service to each other and to him.

Sometimes I wish I could cry it out, that it were easier to explain how much this hurts. I find myself wondering why we put ourselves through this torture - the torture of being part of a system where the gospel is not the vision of a blind institution that perpetuates all sorts of rubbish in the name of Christ - when we could be taking upon ourselves the divine torture of living out the gospel, with all the hardship and suffering that comes part and parcel of joyfully seeking God's will. I wonder why we are choosing this futile, ungodly torture over the torture of the Christian journey, when we have been put on this earth for a finite time by our Maker to live out the gospel for him, when our world slowly crumbles and people die by the second and creation cries out for us to be God's hands and feet in the broken world that he loves so much.

I feel like more and more I have to tranquilize my heart, mind, and conscience in order to exist in this institution, and sometimes I wonder to God whether it is killing me. Suddenly I am painfully aware that all this is a waste of time and a ludicrous farce pointlessly sustaining itself in the name of church, while billions of our brothers and sisters, made of the same flesh and blood as us, with hopes and dreams and desires just like we do, live in desperation and need. If this is the way it is supposed to be, if this is the gospel and the church that Jesus wanted, then I don't want any part of it. But this is not the way he wants it to be, and I always knew it.

We read Isaiah 58 tonight and it was torture. I sat operating the laptop, surrounded by sound systems, PAs, technology, and stressed out musicians performing and acting in the quest for perfection rather than the love of God and neighbour - all this culture the centre of our leader's obsession and mind space. And my conscience punched my heart and my heart shouted at my head and everything in me knew that I had no idea what I was doing there.

I made my choice long ago to follow Jesus. I just don't know when it is time to give up on this church to do it.

Interview

I have an interview for an internship with Toybox next Thursday and I am starting to feel a little unsettled. In truth I don't feel as though I have really let the whole thing settle in fully. I wonder whether this feeling is quite typical amongst people who have been out of work for a significant period of time. It is hard to maintain the focus and motivation, it has been hard for me to leap out of the mindset of being a slob with few engagements and responsibilities beyond the movements of mundane everyday life. And now it is real; I have an actual interview, where they will assess my suitability and capability, and judge me accordingly. I may have my hopes dashed or my disappointments reinforced. I have to admit I am starting to feel a little bit scared.

I think I know the peace of God in a way that I didn't the last time I interviewed for a job. I know now that things can hit rock bottom in a very real sense of the word, so whatever happens, I will get through it and everything really will be alright. I trust God. It is strange how we can have this trust and still feel this kind of fear, where our successes and failures can throw us in our core. It is strange how even though I know it is not about me, these things do affect me.

My stakes in this are not high, but whenever I get myself invested in something, I become afraid. I fear that the joy and anticipation of hope will become the bitter hurt of disillusionment, that I will have set myself up for a bit of a fall. I feel ill-equipped and inadequate sometimes when I look at the job description. I am unsure what to expect. I know things will work out if they are meant to - how else have I ended up here but for the grace and provision of God? - but I know the truth is that I could end up being rejected, and then all the statements and provisional plans we will have made about me going back into employment will be shown to be empty.

I suppose this is the difficulty of putting yourself out there, hoping you will get something in return.

I have to remind myself that if I didn't get this internship, it would just mean nothing had changed, that life would just go on as it already did. Which wouldn't be that bad, right? (There's always Skyrim!) From that perspective, I don't really have anything to lose.

It just sometimes feels like there is, that's all.

He wears our shoes

So much has happened in the past few months, inside me and around me. I feel like I am not who I was 6 months ago. I wish I could capture it all in words and put it in this blog, so I could look back on everything and see the journey and the process I recorded.

There is a great comfort in the knowledge that God knows us all. God knows how many hairs are on our head. Before we think a thought, He knows it completely. To quote Sufjan Stevens, he wears our shoes. I have learned that God knows my heart, better than I ever will. Sometimes I have to throw my hands in the air and rest in the knowledge that He understands me when I am knocking my head against the wall in frustration at how little I understand my own ways. He knows me. He is my closest friend.

When I was growing up and all the turmoil in me was taking its reign, I didn't understand what people meant when they told me that God was using all this to make me stronger, that I would learn from everything that happened and it would make me better, because in God's strength I would get through it. When I look back now, I see that it was because I never really got through any of it. All the wounds from the past were still there, in a different form maybe, less gaping and less raw, but still there. It only took circumstance and events to topple me over again to go through the same pain over and over again. It wasn't a wonder that I couldn't understand the point of going through the motions only to repeat the same cycles. Perseverance doesn't come easy when you don't have much hope in what you're striving for.

Funny how God's timing works. I honestly don't understand how I got through it. In the past 6 months I feel that I have had every layer of my life and identity stripped away. Then somewhere along the way, quite remarkably and randomly, peace and contentment came. It was like a veil lifted and I felt more myself, more content, than I had ever felt in my 23 years of living. I honestly don't know what it was that made the change.

And there it is. God came through for me. Every promise that He made came through, seemingly randomly but in His timing, when my experiences had brought me to the point that He deemed most appropriate. And now I think I can understand why. I am young, and there is much to learn in life that only comes with time. And trusting in God is a hard concept to really grasp until everything that you take for granted (and don't realize that you have) is taken away.

I realize now that I do love God, and above all other things, I want to be more like Jesus. I feel like I couldn't have said this at other points in my life. I don't think I realized that I was following Him for the wrong reasons.

It is a great comfort to know that He understands it all.

In the end, what are we really except tiny, finite human beings, conditioned and pulled to and fro by all sorts of influences, some that we see, some what we have no idea of? We don't know what we do; we do the things we hate. We think we make choices, we cling to the certainty of our opinions. But what do we know about ourselves really? We are so small. We are dust.

I feel humble in the presence of God, small and yet precious. We are wretched and we are beautiful, says Shane Claiborne. I feel like God has allowed me to grasp this, and to see this more in other people too; He has opened my eyes to experience His love so that I can try harder to love others like He does. Perhaps there is nothing that drives one more to compassion and forgiveness than the knowledge that you are no different from your enemy, and yet you are freed by love. The knowledge that we are all beggars.

I still have questions and doubts. I always will. I wait at at the heels of a God who is a revolutionary mystery, the eternal question mark, the great unknown. I am angry and broken, just like the next person. God says, I will be who I will be.

I am very grateful to God for the journey, and for His patience while I am on it.

Submission and authority

"And now, being an old man, I will add a word I might not have known then. Abishai, no man knows his own heart. I certainly do not know mine. Only God does. Shall I defend my little realm in the name of God? Shall I throw spears, and plot and divide... and kill men's spirits if not their bodies... to protect my empire? I did not lift a finger to be made king. Nor shall I do so to preserve a kingdom. Even the kingdom of God! God put me here. It is not my responsibility to take, or keep, authority. Do you not realize, it may be his will for these things to take place? If he chooses, God can protect and keep his kingdom even now. After all, it is his kingdom.

As I said, no man knows his own heart. I do not know mine. Who knows what is really in my heart? Perhaps in God's eyes I am no longer worthy to rule. Perhaps he is through with me. Perhaps it is his will for Absalom to rule. I honestly don't know. And if this is his will, I want it. May God be finished with me!"

- Taken from 'A Tale of Three Kings' by Gene Edwards, spoken by David.

Miracles Liturgy

Lord God,

You spoke into darkness and chaos and then there was light;

You imagined this earth in its complexity and beauty and called it into being;

You created humanity in your own image and gave us a home to live in;

We believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

Lord God,

You walked with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego through the fiery furnace;

You shut the mouths of hungry lions and kept Daniel safe until morning;

You gave Hannah a family when she despaired of ever having a child;

We believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

Lord God,

You changed water into wine so the wedding party could continue;

You calmed a storm, and your disciples, with words of quiet authority;

You transformed a boy's picnic into a meal for a multitude, with plenty left over;

We believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

Lord God,

You healed a woman from 12 years of bleeding and rejection;

You asked Bartimaeus what he wanted and then restored his sight;

You watched a paralysed man being lowered through the roof and helped him to his feet;

We believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

Lord God,

You called Lazarus from the tomb and restored him to life;

You walked past the mourners at Jairus' house and gave his daughter back to him;

You suffered a horrendous crucifixion and defeated sin and death;

We believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

Lord God,

You told your disciples that they would do greater things than you had done;

We hear and read stories of miracles in our world - of you healing the sick, setting prisoners free, releasing drug addicts from their addiction;

Providing the right amount of money at just the right time;

We believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

And yet, Lord, we don't see many miracles happening around us:

We have friends with cancer, and we pray, and they are not healed;

We have friends who long for children, and we pray, and they do not conceive.

Our doubt is mixed with faith;

Our trust is accompanied by questions.

We acknowledge the mystery of faith and prayer, and the ways in which they are connected;

We acknowledge that you often do things differently from the way we would do them;

We long to know you better, to understand more of your ways.

And we believe you can do miracles.

But even if you don't, you are still God.

Lord, we believe.

Help our unbelief.

- Taken from 'Heart, Soul, Mind, Strength' by Jenny Baker

The Belfry

I went to church tonight for the first time in a while. Sitting there during the rituals and proceedings, I thought of R.S. Thomas' poem 'The Belfry':

I have seen it standing up grey,

Gaunt, as though no sunlight

Could ever thaw out the music

Of its great bell; terrible

In its own way, for religion

Is like that. There are times

When a black frost is upon

One's whole being, and the heart

In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.

But who is to know? Always,

Even in winter in the cold

Of a stone church, on his knees

Someone is praying, whose prayers fall

Steadily through the hard spell

Of weather that is between God

And himself. Perhaps they are warm rain
That brings the sun and afterwards flowers

On the raw graves and throbbing of bells.

R.S. Thomas, the poet of the absent God. His phrases and poems have come to me frequently lately. He writes words that convey how words fall short.

I have questions. I have lots of questions about God. For God. It seems, it has seemed for a long time, that all there is is silence. I feel like I am 18 again, a young, distressed, naive teenager back at Wycliffe, sitting alone in the chapel in the dark quiet, praying and asking and sobbing, the chapel door closed, silence and cold all around me, waiting for God's voice. Waiting, unsure of what it would sound like, unsure of where or what God is. I feel like that little girl again, waiting and hoping desperately, confronted and confounded by the silence.

I sit in church and in conversations amongst other Christians these days feeling the words wash over me. I wonder whether this is something that many people go through, or whether I have passed the point of no return, where all meaning has been lost and I will no longer understand the language and experience of faith and trust and the journey with God. The vicar introduced the service tonight and opened with a declaration containing phrases like 'God's grace and salvation is available if we repent of our sin and turn away from our ways'. I felt a strange sense of disconnection then; the words washed over me, they didn't make any sense. I didn't understand what they meant. All the subsequent bits of service felt similar. I feel like I have lost all connection and understanding of faith; these words of faith, these rituals and liturgies, have lost their meaning for me. I sit, feeling lost and disengaged, bored and uncomfortable.

My husband is a youth worker, a committed Christian servant. He has his doubts and battles, but sometimes I look at him and the rest of the people that I know who are Christians and I feel like I am an alien impostor - that they think I am one of them when I am not. They know what they believe and they trust in it. They know what it means. They have difficulties as the journey is difficult, but they are on the journey and they know what that entails. I feel like I have faith-Aspergers. None of it makes any sense and I feel like I go through the motions because I am in a position where I am expected to, and it doesn't make any difference to me.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a real independent choice over whether to go to church, whether or not to self-identify as a committed Christian. Whether or not to confess that I have so many questions, so many doubts; that it all means so little to me that I don't know whether I even believe or whether it even matters to me anymore. That it has no impact on the everyday motions of my life and the inner stirrings and yearnings of my heart. That I don't even remember the last time I thought about the connection between my faith and my actions. I wonder what it would be like to be in the position to admit all this, to leave the church behind.

I am a Christian youth worker and minister-to-be's wife and sometimes when I am honest with myself I think that if I wasn't, if I did not love my husband so much, I would have abandoned this faith long ago.

I suppose some would say that this was all God's provision for me so that I wouldn't fall away.

I continue to wait, anyway.