Sparks

“And if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

The ancient text haunts my very existence. I have found myself crushed beneath its colossal truth and left prostate, not in humility, but in submission to its gravity. I run down so many, so many avenues in my life and never find a destination. I have told myself many things of love. I have convinced myself of many things of love. I said that I would never love a beloved unless I knew that beloved, and then I convinced myself that knowing is loving and loving is knowing and the lines become so blurred that all cognitive understanding is demeaned and therefore recognized as lost. I have become convinced that love is closer to hate then we might first realize. They are like close sisters who kiss on the cheek whenever they meet and yet live completely separate lives. They respect each other. I find that when I love, I tend to hate many thing about myself. I hate the way I love, I hate what love does to me, and I hate what this love does to those around me. In this sense, love is very close to hate. So why are we nothing without love. Why is love so critical and how does love remain the antithesis of hate. This ancient text doesn’t end there. It goes on to describe a love that is totally absent of any quality one might remotely associate with hatred.

“Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous, love does not brag and is not arrogant. Does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”

I think that God must be a bit of a helpless romantic himself. The whole story of redemption is a very cliché love story. The sort of things you’ve seen done in a hundred movies. The only difference is that its not real. That sort of love story doesn’t happen. We look up to it, we look forward to it. It never happens, not like that at least. We begin with a character. He is lost in his life, broken in his passions, and without, empty. And then we have the girl enter the seen. At this point I will intentionally start sounding cliché. The girl enters the scene, she is the exact thing that the Man has been wishing he was. Every shortcoming found within him, is completed by her. This dark emptiness becomes filled with her light and he is suddenly a different creature, a new man. The two are wed, and the union lasts forever. Its simple, its glorious, it’s also impossible. If it were possible, it would not be divine. God constantly proved himself by being the impossible. And a love that is all of these things is impossible, and by that, it is not simply that God gives us or has for us this kind of love, its that God is this kind of love. God is love is not the same statement as God has love, or God loves. We are not love, we are so much more hatred than love. We are the lover of the one sister, and therefore a distant relative of the other. We, by our very intrinsic depravity, are closer to hatred than to love, and yet we are constantly compelled to attain something we never can on our own. We are not Gods, we are not even children of the Gods, we are not sparks of light in this universe. We are the void, we are the emptiness longing to be filled. We are impatient, we are unkind, we are jealous, and we are arrogant and very unbecoming. C.S. Lewis wrote a book to explain such a disaster. He argued that unless the Gods give us identity, they will never look down upon us. We are not like the God’s and in their greatness and majesty. It’s is a greater insult to for we to make an appeal to them than for a beggar ask for a kings crown. And here is where the love story resumes. Where the incomplete lover finds his completion, his identity, is within his beloved. His beloved doesn’t simply assimilate his identity, but the lovers identity, that is his areas of deficiency, are conformed to the adequacy of his beloved and now the lover may commune with the divine, because he is like the divine in that he has not simply aroused feelings of love, not simply demonstrated acts of love, but has become love in as much as God is love. As I said before, this is impossible. And therefore, it is God’s doing, it is his love story, and it never occurs outside of him.

Leaves of Grass

Today was a hard day for me. I rolled out of bed with a heavy heart. There was no reason why at that point that I should be wrought with such melancholy, I hadn’t even seen the sun, and the sun didn’t shine today. Instead, I welcomed the melancholy with a quizzical humor. I did not embrace it, I attempted to ignore it. I spent the better part of my afternoon with tears streaming down my two cheeks. I cant remember the last time the I ever cried about something so worthy of my tears. As they soaked into my sleeve, my heart continued to be consumed with melancholy it became imprisoned by it, and each time I thought the sun might shine through these prison bars, there was only rain. Little Courtney "bean" Davis was remembered this afternoon. The life of a little girl with more strength of faith than I have ever had, was remembered. They stood up there and recounted the days of her short life, and I felt alone. I was never apart of her life. I never enjoyed her laughter, her smile, her spunk, or her angel eyes. Her family stood up there and shared a stories of a life too hard to imagine, and yet a life lived with more love for God than I have ever seen. And it wasn’t the fake facade sort of show that I was used to seeing where these people talk about how they stuck with God though all the hard times and you sit they wonder, either these people are super Christians who don’t feel sorrow like I do, or they are lying. This family stood up on that stage and touched me with their tears. They had faith, they had faith beyond the absurd, they had faith enough to weep for a beloved and stay curled up in that corner dark with sorrow, faith enough to take the pain of cancer upon themselves so that their daughter could find comfort in the hands of a living God. Comfort that we all are in desperate need of, comfort that she needed more then any of us. Cindy said that she is glad to carry the burden of loss if it’s what it takes for Court to not feel pain again, she said that we all are carrying the pain of her cancer now. It’s a pain that I will bare only take part of in the smallest measure compared to those who were close to her, and my tears too will join with the rain. This day was fitting for me. I have been too happy for too long. And I don’t want to suggest that my sorrow compares to that of those who loved her. But I loved her, I loved her memory, I loved her smile and her eyes, I loved her spirit, I loved her and I never knew her. She is everything that I am not.

Finding Oil

Why God? Why do we begin there, and why do we always come back to this point. Why, if he exists, does he tolerate our, and by our I mean my, wavering faith...my daily wavering faith. I used to have this small, weak sort of faith, but I always passed it off as something great, something solid, because I wanted to be seen as solid. Who wants to be seen as weak, wavering and scared. But then I realized that there was no point in trying to pass off my faith as something great, because what's the point anyways. It seemed to me that trying to convince myself that my faith was something grand did nothing to actually give me a grand sort of faith. So instead, I embraced the weakness of my faith, and left God to become something very small in my life, sort of like my faith. At least I was honest. But still, it's not the best. Because, now, I don't force myself to see God as he really is, or how he makes himself out to be, greater than my perceptions. This world sucks, this body sucks, this life sucks, this stupid struggle sucks. I really miss seeing God as bigger than I would honestly admit to actually believing. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I started out going down a lonely dirt road and I found myself chasing roads that I only led me in circles. Now listen, I am not saying that mainstream Christianity has the answers, no, not at all, no freaking way. What I am saying though is that I am so reactionary and I want to get so far away from that way of thinking, that I loose some of the greatest qualities I once possessed. I used to think God was so big, so involved, so there, and I was deep with people, I lived for a greater purpose than myself and this life, and I felt secure, not in Christian culture, but in knowing that what I did wasn't for myself but for God. I have thrown the baby out with the bath water it would seem, those priceless qualities became lumped together with my abandonment of conservative Christian practice...religiosity if you will. Now I want it back. I want it back so bad that I am almost willing to take it all back just to experience that sort of comfort with God again. I still have a small sort of faith, I still don't see God as grand as I ought, but if I can just LIVE in the knowledge that HE IS GREATER than the faith I have in him, I might be able to find that comfort again. Maybe I can start letting loose again.

Escape from the end of our day

I sometimes ask myself, "Nathan, who are you, are you really the person you want to be? Should be?" and I look at myself and say, "You know self, not really, not even really close to who I want to be, and yeah thanks for reminding me again that the rocks toward the bottom really are that sharp, now I am going to get a beer." It’s kind of like when you get up and go to work and a completely random person comes up to you and says, "Hey, are you feeling ok?" in a compassionate tone. Where are you might have been feeling fine one minute, simply by their statement, you feel sick the next.
I am feeling a little bit sick right now. The confusion and uncertainty of past decisions has left me feeling overwhelmed. I recently packed up my car and drove 2000 miles east to a town where I know almost no one, all the time attempting to convince myself that God was with me on this, but not very sure at all.
I am not happy with this life I have found myself. It is true that this might be a temporal state of dissatisfaction, but I am not convinced. I spend much to much time thinking about how things used to be, or what I would be doing right now if I were else where. I have the third most boring job in the world, only beaten out by envelope stuffing, and being a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I am a lift operator at the smallest, most pathetic, ski resort I have ever seen. I sit in a little box for eight house and make up stories in my head, draw fake maps for no reason except it passes the time, and day dream about being any where else, which I tend to do a lot of anyways outside of work. What happened to me? It wasn’t suppose to end up like this.
I have been living in a state of dissatisfaction since I left Moody Bible Institute, not that Moody gave me satisfaction, no far far from it. It’s just that I was on a good road, it lead to a concrete destination, and the traffic was one way. Now I never know when this road is going to dead-end and leave me hurling off a cliff, or worse, stuck anywhere. You see, that’s what my greatest fear in all this is. That I will be stuck, anywhere. If I didn’t have a lease on this place here, I would sell my car, fly back home, start working crazy hours while living at home for three months and pay off the rest of my school lone. Sign up with some crazy missions organization that only requires you go with them to the ends of the world and back again 6 times over and then I might be satisfied again, well maybe for a couple of days. The rest of the time I would probably complain about why my food looks and tastes like it was found on the bottom of my shoes, and why my bed is hard, and better yet, why I got myself into this in the first place.
Why did I move to Dubuque? Part of me was running from a few things, getting stuck in Yakima was one of them. But now that I have considered it, I would rather be stuck there than here any day. I have people who love me there, not just say, oh Nathan we love you, but the sort that when you see them they come up to you with open arms and hold you, they hold you and let that feeling of warmth and euphoric comfort fill up in you till it spills out with a deep sigh. I haven’t had that in ages and you know what, that really @%*&$# sucks.
So you might be thinking, Nathan, why do you sound almost angry in this little missive, and my reply would be yea, I am a little angry. I am angry that I have left all of you to be only sidenotes in this story of my life. I am angry that I have left so much to gain so little. I thought that I would find something, and I think I have, I have found myself out. You may have done it long ago, but if not, here we go. I am Nathan the ever dissatisfied, emulator of Thelyphron, except I have given my nose and ears so I could be more like the humiliated, because I thought it would make me significant.
Give me back everything I let go. Ohh... it doesn’t work like that. Will I ever find something that makes me lighthearted, or will the ruminations of the past weigh me down forever? Will I feel like I belong again? Will our story ever continue like it used to or is it too late for that. Even in asking the question I know the answer.