Monday, June 22, 2015

On honesty

Somewhere along the road a mile or two back I lost my way.  They all have their scape goats, their explanations, their reassurances, or sometimes even their apathetic ignorance.  

I know the truth, or at least the bits and pieces that come to me through the fog of loneliness and unbelonging and self pity.  

I lost my ability to trust God.  

The most shameful part is maybe that it happened with no real reason, just evolved out of the aftermath of a couple moves across the country.  

As I moved and attempted to fit into new cultures, I slipped off of the sure foundation of faith and family and heritage and belonging.  I floated adrift, free to be who I wish to be with nobody to see or care.  My faith shifted, and I asked more questions than I had ever asked before.  Everything was up for grabs.  

And then the last year happened, a year of the highest highs and the lowest lows of my life.  I got married to my wonderful husband who has spent more time away than here in the first year of our marriage.  I struggled to belong in a church that had always been more his than mine.  I struggled to find my way through the pain of broken familial relationships and the strains that put on our marriage.  I struggled to hold onto piety and even faith in a God who was so silent when I desperately cried out to him again and again during one of the darkest weeks of my life.  

One thing led to another and I was making the painful decision to begin again, even with only six months left here.  I couldn't bear to be simply "Justin's wife," and hear empty offers of help should I "ever need it."  

I needed help long ago and help simply wasn't there.

I prayed and prayed and begged and begged and God was (and is) largely silent.  They all said "God would have me do this" and "God would have me do that" and I didn't believe them.  Not a bit.  Especially when it had to do with dating and breaking up.  Especially then.  

It is hard to trust the God of a people from whom I could not feel more estranged.  

~~~

I have been praying more recently.  This past Sunday I drove an hour to get to church... This farm girl needs an urban setting, I guess.  I consider myself fairly desperate for God at this juncture.  Desperate for hope, more accurately.  What, after all, does "desperate for God" even mean?  I am desperate for reconciliation, desperate for justice, desperate for answers, desperate for peace, desperate for faith.  I have to believe God is the source of those things.  I have to.  But as I drove, my prayer was more simple.  I prayed that God would show up at church. 

I need him.  I am so aware of it, and so unaware of how to find him.  Because the darkness is still here.    It keeps coming back.  It won't let up for more than a day.  

If God can be said to be present in this world, he had to have been present in that movie theatre church on Sunday morning.  He had to be present in the raw honesty of the pastor, in the vulnerability displayed when we shared around our tables with perfect strangers why we were in need of God this past week.  I will cling to that.  For that hour and a half I wasn't alone.  I was among family and they cared though they were perfect strangers.  For a few hours that evening God was there when I fellowshipped with some of my closest friends in my town, when they accepted me among them even after I left their church.  

He is here among us as we serve and love one another.  And he hasn't left us alone, He sent a Helper. I will cling to that when the body of Christ is absent.  He is here.  I will trust that even when I have no faith, even when the darkness keeps coming back, even when I feel alone.  I will believe.  

Monday, June 15, 2015

On being in hiding

I think maybe it hit me last night, as I socialized with people in real life for the first time in a long time.  I smiled and joked and sometimes even said a few brutally honest words about my desperation to leave this region. But for the most part, I hid behind a polite smile and pretended that my world continues revolving around its old axis: piety and church involvement.  But that all obscures the reality: my world has fallen apart. 

I am tired and sad and so very lonely.  I am trapped and free all at the same time.  I can't bear the people with whom I once surrounded myself and I miss them desperately all at the same time.

They say you can't walk the Christian journey alone. They are so right. 

Maybe it happened when she who is supposed to represent love told my husband and I to "have a nice life." Maybe it happened when I sat through yet another communion service alone.  

But maybe it was the more continual reminders week after week that you can "know" people and not truly be known or know at all.  Familiar faces often produce the most aching of all loneliness.  But suddenly those people who have constituted my world here in the South were all gone.  Moving away, drifting away, running away.  No more Saturday night church, no more game night get togethers, no more casual evenings eating out.  Fragmentation and the continual comings and goings of life in a military town took their terrible toll. Meanwhile those with roots here treated me as an outsider, because that is what I am here.

That's all I have wanted to be.

And this is where the story gets complicated. How can I expect them to love me when I hold myself at a distance? How can I do anything but when my very foundation is built on a different material?  I struggle to hide what makes me me, and it tears me apart from the inside out until one day my husband is deployed, my friends are all gone or in the process of checking out, and I am utterly isolated.  

It isn't a pity party, and yet that is exactly what it is.  Exactly.  

It is hard these days to summon the energy to try again.  I want so desperately to sign up for a small group at my new church, but I am terrified.  Terrified that who I am with all my craziness isn't enough, that I will destroy more than I build.  

And so I hide.  I hide away where no one can find me, where I can't hurt them, where they can't hurt me, and I desperately pray that God will show me how to find the light again.