Traveling Thoughts

            Perhaps you can identify with the need to share.  Perhaps it is the musician in me coming out that is that little extroverted, dramatic guy that needs to express events and new wisdom to anyone who will listen.  Maybe I just want to explore a new medium besides music that may be accessible in a different way.  Whatever the reason, I have been feeling the urge to write and to put on paper the things that I have been learning.  Perhaps hearing my thoughts doesn’t make you feel like experimenting with gymnastic exercises.  If you don’t like it, I guess you can get the hell off this page, and go read something really intellectually stimulating like somebody’s blog about how many times their baby has vomited in the last week and how it’s sleeping so much better. 

             It is so interesting to think about pain.  We are so afraid of being hurt, and when we are hurt we are so anxious about being out of pain that we completely miss what God may be trying to teach us.  I have had an interesting last couple of weeks.  I have been torn about what to do with myself and my time.  What career do I choose?  Where do I need to live?  Very practical things that many recent post-graduates find themselves occupied with.  This decision had become, despite my greatest efforts, the center of my spiritual thoughts, and a constant nagging issue in a relationship that I was in.  Suddenly, I have found myself in a place where I am not tied down by anything as I don’t currently have a job and the friend with whom I was involved has thought otherwise about being involved with me.  So, with these things in mind, I felt it would be better for me to be out of town for a while, and for me to explore some options for myself while alleviating any temptation for me to attack my friend with emotional pleas in one of those post-breakup moments of insanity.  All of that said, it has been a rather emotionally devastating and confusing time.  But it has also been incredibly affirming.

            A few years back, I had a very similar time when I was in a relationship mess, and I was in the dark about what God was calling me to do.  I was a freshman at Clemson University having been accepted as a student to the engineering program.  However, I never even took any classes toward this degree because I felt strongly that I just wasn’t being called to that profession.  However, I decided to stay at Clemson as one of those undeclared-novision-tooscaredtochasetheirrealdreams-Godmaycompromiseandfindsomethingformetodohere type people. So this relationship that I was in was in the shit, I didn’t know what to do with school, and I became addicted to pornography. To those who tend to dabble in these little anatomical explorations, (purely from an artistic perspective, of course) I will say that nothing ever, ever will shred your emotions and spirituality like pornography.  If you want to be that guy who can’t help but to whine to their friends constantly, listen to Dashboard Confessional while keening away in their room alone, and watch their time with God turn into a desperate search for some answer to get them out of the rut, fruitless in every way, go ahead and take a look.  Why not go ahead and make yourself miserable? Maybe you’ll even be one of those who are really lucky and it will tear your family apart one day. 

            If you’re not really catching the sarcasm I was in some serious pain.  But you know what the saddest part of it was?  Not the fact that I had pushed my family and friends away.  It wasn’t that I was so selfishly consumed with myself that I couldn’t enjoy life.  The worst part of it was that I failed to see God in the weeds.  I couldn’t see the joy in brokenness.  I became so scared to feel anything, and so desperate to be healed that I missed out.  I love to read in Psalms and listen to David cry out to God.  Not from some sadistic pleasure, but because David has simple faith that God hears his cries and  he finds comfort in it.  He is a man in pure anguish, but he is drinking deeply of God, his love, and his promises.  It is this idea of drinking deeply that has me so captivated.  That it is in our worst and most troublesome moments that we see Christ abandon his white robe with his arms crossed and his hands tucked into opposite sleeves.  The face of pious pity fades, and he weeps with us.  In our loss of words and a plan of action and annihilation, he is able to fill all the cracks and make us whole.  It is in these times of brokenness that He draws us tightly to him and that we are able to drink deeply of who he is.  It is like the moments right after a car crash when adrenaline is still pumping and up still isn’t quite up.  But stepping out of the wreckage is one of the most alive feelings one can feel.  In the calm after the storm, the birds sing louder, the air is more refreshing, colors more brilliant.  It is for this reason why we must be broken; why we must let ourselves hurt and feel pain.  I have to bare my chest to the dagger, and know that God fills holes to overflowing.