in this season

I sat among those I love most here in this town tonight and felt the distance grow, the unrelenting and growing knowledge that I have never fit here, that I will never fit - that one day I must depart.  I even added my voice to the certainties, to the answers.  When I should have remained silent, I spoke, when I should have spoken I remained silent.  But mostly I talked needlessly.  The room was full of people with the answers, and as I added my voice to that number, I was struck by how little I really wanted to be talking.  How little I want the answers.

Sometimes I am struck with the intense need to walk away from it all for a season, to abandon others' expectations and the constant reminders that I'm the skeptic, the doubter.  There are increasingly common moments when the conversation slides so entirely out of the realm of my control, and increasingly common moments when the desire to wrest it back fades almost entirely.  This season of my life, this lonely time, this solitary time - this is a time for introspection, a time for single-minded pursuit of God, and a time for the abandonment of all the things that would slow me down from that.

I have little left these days.  With my husband's departure came the removal of the last bit of security I had.  I was thrown out into the wilderness, and -oddly enough- I find myself thriving there.  I find myself wanting less and less to waste the time in this wilderness.  I want to enjoy every moment of the questions, of the searching.  I want to throw myself wholeheartedly into this pursuit of God.

He will be found.

I wonder, though, where I'll find Him.

Curse the answers.  Curse the textbooks and the systematic theologies.  Curse the Sunday School questions and their corresponding answers.  Curse our cornering of God and our small-minded conceptions of who He is.  Curse it all.

I'm reading.  I'm asking all of the wrong questions and finding all of the wrong answers.

And God is working.

Of that I am sure.

For the first time ever, I'm no longer confident that my presence here is fruitful in the least.

I might disappear into the wilderness.