Day Nine: Okay, I'm getting kind of personal...
WARNING: This entry contains depressing-ness and skipping around in my storytelling. Turn back now if you dislike such things...
So... it's been about a week since I last posted! Yay... *sarcasm*
I promise I will not abandon this blog, not even after the 31 days are over! I plan to keep updating, because although I'm too shy and nervous to give a speaking testimony, I still want to share my Christian walk with other people, and I like writing. It gives me time to organize my thoughts coherently. Although being tired most of the time tends to negate that advantage...
I'm definitely talking to God more often now. For the last few months, I didn't even think about Him most days until dinner, unless it was Sunday. And this is the first time in I don't know how long that I've missed more than one episode of Bleach in a row. And even though there was a terrible cliffhanger in the last manga chapter I read, I don't feel very tempted to read it. I feel proud of myself for having this much willpower. Ah, but I need to remember that God is giving me strength to do this. I almost forgot...
My new resolution for this week is to pray at lunchtime. It sounds kind of random, but I used to pray at every meal, and now I'm only praying at dinner most of the time. I think it's partly because I'm at school so much, but that's not a good excuse, so I'm going to change that!
I feel like I'm also improving relationships with other people. But at the same time, I think I'm losing one of my dearest friendships. It's a guy I've been friends with since we were four. He was still going to my church last year, which was great because I was going through losing a grandparent that I actually remembered. I knew my great-grandmother when I lived in California, but she died when I was four. Her son, my dad's father, passed away about a year and a month ago from cardiac arrest, I think. He smoked for a long time, and so it was going to happen sometime.
I just wished that he was able to know that I graduated from high school. This is really painful to write about, but also really important, because my grief turned into bitterness, which affected my relationship with God a lot. For a while I was really angry because my dad's birthday was the day he found out that his dad had died.
HIS BIRTHDAY. I was furious that God had let that happen to him, and to my whole family. And so I didn't want to talk to God.
The day that my parents told me and my younger brother, my dad also said that my grandpa had accepted Jesus about 30 years ago. So I felt a little better (and it gives me the hope that I'll see him again), but I was still in a lot of emotional pain.
I started sharing personal stuff with my parents again a few months ago. Once I started going to my current school (2 years ago), I kind of closed myself off from them.
When I mentioned feeling annoyed about crying so much, my dad said that it was okay, because talking about painful stuff would eventually make me feel better because I would be healed instead of still being hurt internally. Or something like that. It was a few months ago, so I can't exactly remember what he said.
Oh, back to the friendship that I was losing. Like I said, he was still going to my church last year (his parents and younger siblings started going to a different church before then), but over the past summer, our youth pastor felt called to a church in the South somewhere. I think it was Tennessee...
Anyway, not only did we lose our youth pastor, but there was a lot of drama and clique-y stuff on a mission trip that I went on that ended in two people not talking to each other anymore, and one of those people changed churches. My friend just kind of stopped coming to my church, and then I talked to him on the phone one evening. He said he really disliked the cliques, and that he was done with our youth group.
We texted for a while after that, but we haven't actually had a conversation for a few weeks. I'm usually the one to text him, and a lot of times he doesn't reply. It hurts my feelings, but I hate telling people when they hurt me, because I'm afraid that I'm being too picky, and if they know that it hurts me, then they have the power to hurt me that way again.
So today at school, I decided that I'm not going to text him again unless he texts me first. I'm tired of feeling like I'm the only one who cares about our friendship.
It seems kind of random to talk about all of this, but I think taking steps to stop being a doormat (because I really am) is another important thing I need to do.
This blog has kind of extended past my spiritual life and more into my struggle with depression and self-esteem and a bunch of other issues, but those things are all connected and relevant to each other, so I'll probably continue to write about past events and other things that are affecting my relationship with God.
And if you're somebody who knows me in real life or other places, don't worry. I'm not going to mention names if I talk about people I know. And if you actually know about this blog, I really like you and I promise not to say anything mean or reveal anything confidential that you may have told me.
One last random thing before I study typography for five minutes and then go to bed. I couldn't fall asleep on Saturday night, so I tried praying, and it really helped me calm down. I cried a little bit because I was conflicted about the friendship that I'm losing, but afterwards I felt peace, and a random phrase popped into my head. "I don't have to take such a big step. He just wants me to try."
I found that it actually applied to my relationship with God. Because faith is all about taking steps, and like Matthew 17:20 says, "if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." (All of the Bible verses/passages I quote will probably be NIV, but I might reference The Message version sometime.)
So I got inspired by the phrase that entered my head, and I'm trying to write a song. I have most of the lyrics, but I haven't had time to figure out the music part at all.
See you tomorrow! (I promise!)
PS: Feel free to ask me questions that you have about Christianity or God! I can't guarantee that I know the answer, and I don't claim to know everything about God (or anywhere near to everything), but I will do what I can with my limited knowledge.