Sometimes I feel like I'm searching for God in a sandstorm, and even though I've never been in a sandstorm I can imagine what it would be like to be lost in one. Blind, stinging, dry, directionless. Just lots of yellow stuff swirling around.
For the first time in a long time, immeasurably long (immeasurable because I can never keep track of time), right now I breathe. I have only half a paper to write, and then it will officially be fall break for me. This half of paper represents all that I throw my hatred and exhaustion and uncertainty into. It represents all the scratching and professor-pleasing that I do to get A's that I don't need. It represents all the resume-building that I used to think was so important. It is a paper for my Honors class, and it is one of the most pretentious-sounding things I've ever written. (I love being able to use words like "thing" and "stuff." It's so liberating.)
Check this sentence out:
Here, my integration of perceptions failed to integrate in another's mind. Or perhaps the ideas presenting themselves to me seem incompatible, and my mind is unable to perform the integrations between them, in which case I fail to conclude at all.
Who would actually want to read something that dry and boring? Nobody. Especially not people who just need a break. (Like me.) Unfortunately, someone's gotta finish this paper. And that someone is me.
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I am now on top of Lookout Mountain, looking over the city of Chattanooga. It is dusk, following a red sunset. The moon is a steady sliver hung midway in the sky. I am sitting in Hannah's bedroom five floors up with the windows flung open and no screens barricading me from the mountain air. Sufjan Stevens is singing "Heirloom" to me. I have been reading A Severe Mercy for the past hour and now I am sitting, taking in what is happening to me in these days of rest and peace.
And what can I say now of life and God? Only that he is enough. I read one of the most well-known passages in all the Bible two days ago -- Philippians 4:4-7 -- and for the first time it shocked my heart like a bell struck. I felt so thankful for fear and distress and a certain feeling of being lost, because suddenly the speakings of my Lord became alive in that context.
It's funny how lostness works that way, and distress, and fear. I guess the sandstorm is the place to find God after all. He's like an oasis that fills the entire desert once you find it. I started looking because I couldn't handle the thirst or the dryness anymore. How quickly he found me then! It's not that my confusion is gone, but that while I wait for it to "shake out," as Hannah would say, I'm finding all kinds of joy and goodies in God's presence -- or, to be more poetical, "peace that passes all understanding."
Sometimes I'd like to find a house in a field in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, with a garden erupting with lilacs and roses and winecups, with a bench in the middle of the garden where I can sit and spend out the rest of my days contemplating Christ. It would be lonely and pretty against how God set things up to be -- in community and everything -- but I think I would be at peace. But then, that shows how afraid of people I am. And of pain.
I guess on that note, because I'm rambling, I'll close with this quote from A Severe Mercy, which I picked up today. In spite of the fear, and because of the beauty, and because I hope that out of all this contemplation and all this distress and all this joy will flow one thing -- a great Love -- here are these words:
“He had been wont to despise emotions: girls were emotional, girls were weak, emotions—tears—were weakness. But this morning he was thinking that being a great brain in a tower, nothing but a brain, wouldn’t be much fun. No excitement, no dog to love, no joy in the blue sky—no feelings at all. But feelings—feelings are emotions! He was suddenly overwhelmed by the revelation that what makes life worth living is, precisely, the emotions. But, then—this was awful!—maybe the girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering! … What is beauty but something that is responded to with emotion? Courage, at least partly, is emotional. All the splendour of life. But if the best of life is, in fact, emotional, then one wanted the highest, purest emotions: and that meant joy. Joy was the highest. How did one find joy? In books it seemed to be found in love—a great love—though maybe for the saints there was joy in the love of God. … But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain—if, indeed, they went together. If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.”
