looking back

So tonight I decided to take a journey back into my past, and was reading an old blog that allowed me to set privacy settings for each individual post.  This allowed me a rare amount of honesty in posting, because I was often posting so that only I could see it.

I haven't posted in that blog for over two years, and haven't read it in forever, either, so it was a rather emotional experience to relive it all.

I was struck by just how different I was as recently as 2009.  My spirituality was simultaneously more apparently strong and obviously weak.  I was terrified of academia and the changes it had wrought in me, and yet I still looked for God's presence in the summer camp counselor sort of way.  I wrote a ton of prayers in that blog, and many of them begged God to make an appearance, to speak to me, to tell me what to do.  As I struggled through the darkest time of my life to date, my faith carried me, and yet the manner of my faith was part of what brought me into the darkness in the first place.

Just what was the problem?

I counted my emotions as evidence of God.  It's as simple as that, really.  When I was feeling positive emotions, it was usually because I felt as if God was there.  When things weren't so good, I railed at God for his absence.  It created a huge problem when life got complicated and when the nature of my academic training left me less susceptible to emotional experiences.  "Worship" got more and more difficult to engage in - with each passing month I found it harder to abandon my intellect.

And as the pressures of life pressed in, my faith came back.  But only as a response to crisis.  As my relationships fell to pieces around me and I was experiencing more pain than I had ever experienced before, I found God to be "present."  It was only with distance from the pain that I was able to really appreciate the aftermath of my liberal arts education.

It's not that I don't think God is present.  I do think He is.  I think He is a very real presence.  But I don't believe that my emotional state can be equated to God's voice.  And this has a very real impact on my spiritual life.  Worship through music changes as emotional fervor is no longer the goal.  I strive to serve God, but I guess I'm just more reasoned about it all, and less emotional.  In some ways it's a hard shift to make, and I don't know that it's the only right trajectory of faith.  But it has been my path.

On a side note, intense emotional pain definitely brought out the poet in me.  I wrote this in 2009:

I stand alone
broken in a world
where all are whole
unable to reach out 
for shame of my failure
to measure up 
to their standard
I am unable to
see their failure
through my rose colored
glasses that humble me
to the point of pride.
If only I would look up
and see Him in His
beauty and realize
that all is broken in the light
of His glory
and reach out.


and this:

Sunglasses will never be thick enough
To hide my eyes
I could spend the rest of my life
building a fortress
attempting some sort of anonymity
and still you'd be there
knowing me exactly
words superfluous..
I couldn't hide if I wanted to
Cuz you see right through me.