overload.

A series of somewhat organized but meandering current thoughts after tonight, when I couldn't say anything in the spur of the moment. I don't normally talk about this to most people unless someone asks and I feel mentally able to at that point (of course most people don't really broach the subject unless you're direct and honest like someone who I really appreciate even though I never really responded back the same way). Which is why I tend towards being quiet and someone asks why I'm so quiet at the opportune time. It's just taken me a long time to get from a point of not knowing much of anything to this half-formed state presently. and I need time to process my thoughts into something cohesive and not just an idea that continuously stabs me when I least expect it to because I'm half-listening to a podcast show from NPR or music in the car while worrying about little day-to-day issues like how am I going to talk to these people today.

My first immediate reaction to this is that I should relax a bit more in general (I think I felt my pulse rise and I feel like I'm having heartburn right now), and yes but no, this matters enough to not leave around hanging to dry. Apologies for the post overload.

(For some reason I randomly jumped from second-person to first-person thoughts in the middle. Oh well.)

---

Hey there. You, yes you.

Okay, it doesn't feel quite as authentic typing it into here this way. (I was having a full out conversation-war with myself earlier.) The process of writing-typing means that inevitably, some thoughts will come out filtered rather than the way they usually do when you're sitting there staring at yourself in the mirror. Which you rarely do because you're too afraid of looking at yourself in the mirror. Too afraid to acknowledge yourself for who you are. All your faults and failings and shortcomings.

You're not the kind of role model you'd hoped you'd be, although even the idea of being a role model doesn't exactly appeal to you. Who would look up to you? Who should look up to you? You feel like people are better off with someone better, more upright and stronger in their values and beliefs. That's why you never even bothered trying to work with younger folks, kids, mentoring roles. and good lord, don't even think about discipling someone, because your beliefs probably are too far marginalized from the norm and wouldn't necessarily conform well enough.

Okay. Maybe that wasn't the right term to use, but you know it's true. You're too afraid of sticking out like a sore thumb, being the one voice that dares to question what the leader says even when it springs up doubts in you. But instead it leads you to start thinking more judgmentally about your fellow Christians around you, because obviously you know better (but remember, be humble so not really) and wow you can't believe he didn't know that? No, the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn alcohol itself except when it's in excess as in drunkenness, and with Leviticus it's pertains to specifically when entering the tent of meeting and not in general (but you just read Leviticus so of course you know that now). but particulars aside, it's not about the knowledge so much as it is about what you do with it, right?

[how can you not know your own religion?]

You're too afraid of becoming sucked into an insular community - one that isn't in touch with the lives of those outside it in completely different areas. When people mention that they don't have many people they can pray for who aren't experiencing God and you feel completely the opposite way, and your pray for five is more like pray for everyone and help me I need prayer too. Because you choose to remain in those areas yourself? Because you yourself don't feel like you're experiencing God the same way? It's been a long time since you last heard anything coherent except you don't really know whether you heard anything to begin with or if that was just wishful thinking or you just aren't really trying to listen right now. If it weren't for the past...

[the only thing is that you can ask your god for help. I cannot.]

All you have left is this voice in your head that you think is just you yourself except you aren't consciously fully aware of how much of what it's saying is coming from you. The little things it says that leave you second-guessing and makes you wonder if you're really just crazy and talking to yourself. And when you're going about your day to day, you don't want to listen to it or confront it because it'll just remind you of all the issues you ought to be confronting right now but you aren't because you just want to play your game again or do whatever it is you feel like at this moment. When instead you should figure out what you really believe, and WHY you believe it. and don't just go along with the flow because you want it to be true. Could you look at yourself in the mirror and admit, "this is who I am" ? Why are you here right now?

[he just wants to know that this is the truth.]

You haven't been fair or honest to him, to be honest. And he or it or somebody's been giving you all of these chances that you've been throwing out to just continue doing your own thing. You said to your friend that it's all on the table now, [woe is the life of a skeptic], but is it really? You still can't comfortably talk to someone and tell them that this is what you really believe, and you aren't really acting on what you say you ought to believe, but you're still around here somewhere. You're still here. Waiting for the right person to come up to you and really ask how you're doing, without the pressure of a dozen eyes all watching at once to see or hear your testimony of where you're at right now, at a point where the more you learn, the more you read, the more you grow unsure of the experiences you thought you had and start chalking it mostly up to your own will. I'm here because I decided to be here years ago. And I believe what I did was right.

and that's why... I respect those who came to their own conclusions, because for whatever the reason, I seem to be unable to fully settle. but I stand here on one side of the fence because I still believe that there's still something to be gained by being here that I wouldn't be receiving from were I not. The reliable consistency of a weekly community, the opportunity to talk about personal issues where you wouldn't feel comfortable elsewhere even if you haven't fully broached those topics that bother you. the backwards part of my conscience that affirms that I'm here because I should be here, because where would I be otherwise? Not caring at all, and an indifferent life is by no means a better one.

I wish the answers were simpler. I have no right to condemn anyone, and I feel ambivalent about whether or not God really would also right now, considering the picture that we see of Jesus seems so different from the Father of the Old Testament even though his beliefs may not stray far at all. Of course reading through the OT hasn't been so reassuring. The entire world of that time period just feels messed up like most of human history. And you wonder, was it really all that necessary for this? To teach a lesson to us now? What about the people who went through it then? What choice did they have? And why doesn't history corroborate it so much? It's not flattering, it's not pretty, and it doesn't seem right so much to us now, the picture of him that we get from it.

It was both on them and God, but moreso God. Not so much a Calvinist interpretation, but a sovereign synergist one. But that lends itself towards an non-permanent hell which might not jive with anyone theologically, for where is the consensual basis for it.  But how can you really be debating theology like this when you haven't even settled the most basic question: do you really believe right now? Do you really, deep down inside, want to see and trust him now? Trust in someone you can't really perceive?

I cannot conceive of the ways. The how. The why. I think it's unfair to pin the blame all on God for this state of affairs. Sometimes it feels more like people prefer to stick with being atheist as a reaction because if God really existed then they'd have to unleash a lot of anger and ugly thoughts on him, they'd have someone to blame it all on, and it'd make the situation that much worse to confront. How could you set up this sick, twisted situation, this illusion that compels us to do the wrong thing because it's easy. Because it's appealing. Because we're just messed up and built that way. Job was no better an answer than a bitch-slap to the face. And there's something relieving and comforting about realizing that you don't really have a reason for being mad at someone who doesn't even exist.

But all this talking about God and not really doing anything about it. What do you have to say to me now.

I'm sorry. For being stubborn. and choosing to fall back on behaviors that I know I shouldn't do regardless of where I am right now.

I sat there during worship, my head abuzz like there was a war going on between me, myself, and God. It's like what Sang mentioned about the introvert mind. It just feels like a storm or hurricane that never really stops, when all the external crap is over, it's always still there. I wanted to cover my face right there because I was falling somewhere between asleep and half-dreaming and going mad at the words I was hearing from that voice or saying to myself at the same time, second-guessing the basis of everything in my life and challenging me to do something about it when I didn't have a journal and pen handy to process all of this input because I didn't plan ahead properly for a worship and prayer night after a long drought of all times. Imperfectly played worship music has that kind of an odd effect on me like that... but it's also why I don't like listening to recorded album-quality contemporary worship music either, because it ironically doesn't feel authentic enough to my personal experience even though the music we play is trying to reproduce it.

Have you had enough of your life now? Are you satisfied with leaving it all up to the whims of a seemingly capricious maker who would actually know more than he's letting on because we just suck at interpreting things we can't understand (but why didn't you make it any more reasonable for us then?) and puts us into situations that he already knows the resolution to? It would be so much easier and probably logical to say that it's much simpler than that, and we're just making much ado out of nothing like we tend to do with those conspiracy theories and such. Sagan had a point after all. I have half a mind to guess whether or not a number of the experiences I've heard were as real as others have made them out to be, and I'm afraid of what I hear coming from the words of the more vocally devout of the bunch, those prayer warriors. Passion and ecstasy without total knowledge or the full truth is a terrifying sight to behold... for how it could go wrong. But I still somehow respect it for being passion. and full of life, all be it a somewhat foreign one to me.

Sometimes I worry that we're all just misguided about the truth in some way. I'm almost anti-people-who-are-completely-sure-of-themselves, but that can get annoying fast, because most of the time we need people who are sure of themselves even when certainty isn't there, or else we'd never move aywhere. And that thought in itself is my own certain belief so I'm just contradicting myself.

Thoughts aside, I'm hardly all that loving or even trying that hard on a regular basis, so long as it's convenient to, and I look up to those who demonstrate so much greater capacity to love others as themselves and can give up so much, regardless of who or what they are. And that's what matters foremost to me... And I should act on it more and not just settle for achieving some kind of resolution in my beliefs. Faith without works is dead.