Bleah.
I'm kind of tired as I write this, so...this may not make a whole lot of sense.
I'm getting kind of annoyed with myself lately, on account of the fact that I feel like I'm pretty weak as far as Christianity goes. That is, when the topic of God, Jesus, etc., comes up in conversations in real life or on the internet, or anywhere, or I have an opportunity to bring up the subject of God, I've kind of been dodging lately. And I'm not sure why.
My spiritual life lately has been rocky at best. I find myself drifting away from God for no particular reason, slipping into bad habits and drifting away from my good ones. I barely read the Bible anymore. My prayers are short and shallow, and mostly have the attitude of, "I don't really deserve to ask you for anything, but, um, if you could kind of overlook my general suckiness and maybe do something along these lines..." which maybe isn't an entirely bad attitude to have, but still, I'd like to be more comfortable with my prayer life, better equipped to actually communicate with God, let him work with me and change me. Instead I'm sort of shrinking away from the light, cowering in the darkness.
In some ways, I feel worse about myself than I have during the times when I haven't been a Christian. I feel dishonest, like I'm always hiding something. I'm either hiding my failures as a person from other Christians, the few that I meet, and acting like I'm way stronger than I am, or I'm hiding my Christianity from non-Christians, or giving mealy-mouthed answers when they press me on it.
I wonder sometimes why anyone can really put up with me. I need to develop a stronger backbone.
I've drifted around quite a bit since I came out to Washington. Part of my motivation for moving was to see what kind of person I'd be if removed from peer pressure in general. I've been sort of surprised to see how dark I can get inside. For the most part I've tried to appear positive, upbeat, and friendly to those around me. I've developed a nasty habit of trying to tell people exactly what I think they want to hear. I'd probably do well to take to heart some of the advice of Schopenhauer regarding honesty and not caring what people think of me.
So here's a little bit of honesty.
I spent a month in November and December basically determined to be a non-Christian. I threw away every belief I had and decided to start from scratch. I quickly decided not to be an atheist, because atheism is essentially pointless and doesn't strike me as being particularly plausible. I toyed with deism, because this one girl I know online seems relatively bright, and she's a deist. But I found it rather dull. It was at about this time I began investigating some of the more interesting Middle Eastern and Asian religions. I skipped most of the more common ones, figuring, there's really no point investigating any of them too much, since I've already wrestled with them for apologetic reasons, and found them wanting. Hinduism and Shintoism were a bit more alluring than most, because I'm cliche and Asian like that, but I eventually pushed them aside in favor of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, stuff like that. I examined Christian arguments and found them horribly lacking. I couldn't really accept the historicity of Christianity. I was essentially dissatisfied with almost every religion and philosophical system I encountered.
I held on to this non-agnostic uncertainty (I believed in God, just didn't really know what form he took and was determined to rationally evaluate all claims to see which proved the most legitimate) up until I read a Shusaku Endo book called "The Samurai". It presented, in vivid terms, a picture of Jesus, poor and hated and despised by the world, who rejected power and made friends with the weak and friendless. It was something I knew about, something I'd maybe heard all my life, but didn't really know, somehow, or maybe had forgotten (I sometimes read stuff I wrote 10 years ago and find something that makes me go, wow, this kid had it kind of together compared to me. He knew stuff I don't and said stuff way wiser than most of what I say now. What happened?). But anyway, this picture of Jesus rather shook me. I almost began crying as I read it, riding home on the Greyhound bus, but fortunately I managed to avoid it, because public spectacles are unseemly.
Anyway, so now I found myself in the odd position of actually loving Jesus, a phenomenon that has occured, to be totally honest, only rarely in a life spent mostly worshipping Protestant God. I don't know what exactly that means, except maybe that I have a tendency to overlook Jesus in my efforts to serve him. Moving onward, I then read a Hindu Bengali writer named Rabindranath Tagore, who, in spite of his adherence to a different religion, had a strangely Christian view of God, and professed a deep fascination with Christianity and considered it the source of the power and goodness of the West, at least until he went to the West on a spiritual pilgrimage, coming back, apparently, disappointed.
So at this point the last bits of my resistance to Christianity fell apart and I reaccepted Jesus for the 40th time or whatever, because I'm horribly unsteady like that. I tried to find God via logic and argument, and found he'd made a backdoor by way of self-sacrificial love. Funny how that works. :\
I'm gonna leave off on this for now, because it's really freaking long. Hopefully I'll have time to continue this depressing and probably needlessly self-indulgent saga of repeated failure and assorted shortcomings.
Or not. Now that I think about it, excessive public confession is among the worst and most obnoxious forms of narcissism, I think. So maybe I'll turn this into something a bit brighter, more optimistic, etc., and have it be a brief chronicle of something or another...redemption and whatnot, you know? And Jesus. All that stuff.
Incidentally, if anyone from Young Adult group or Turning Point reads this, I miss you guys. You were strangely helpful to my spritual growth and, for the most part, my overall level of happiness, probably moreso than I really knew at the time.
I'm getting kind of annoyed with myself lately, on account of the fact that I feel like I'm pretty weak as far as Christianity goes. That is, when the topic of God, Jesus, etc., comes up in conversations in real life or on the internet, or anywhere, or I have an opportunity to bring up the subject of God, I've kind of been dodging lately. And I'm not sure why.
My spiritual life lately has been rocky at best. I find myself drifting away from God for no particular reason, slipping into bad habits and drifting away from my good ones. I barely read the Bible anymore. My prayers are short and shallow, and mostly have the attitude of, "I don't really deserve to ask you for anything, but, um, if you could kind of overlook my general suckiness and maybe do something along these lines..." which maybe isn't an entirely bad attitude to have, but still, I'd like to be more comfortable with my prayer life, better equipped to actually communicate with God, let him work with me and change me. Instead I'm sort of shrinking away from the light, cowering in the darkness.
In some ways, I feel worse about myself than I have during the times when I haven't been a Christian. I feel dishonest, like I'm always hiding something. I'm either hiding my failures as a person from other Christians, the few that I meet, and acting like I'm way stronger than I am, or I'm hiding my Christianity from non-Christians, or giving mealy-mouthed answers when they press me on it.
I wonder sometimes why anyone can really put up with me. I need to develop a stronger backbone.
I've drifted around quite a bit since I came out to Washington. Part of my motivation for moving was to see what kind of person I'd be if removed from peer pressure in general. I've been sort of surprised to see how dark I can get inside. For the most part I've tried to appear positive, upbeat, and friendly to those around me. I've developed a nasty habit of trying to tell people exactly what I think they want to hear. I'd probably do well to take to heart some of the advice of Schopenhauer regarding honesty and not caring what people think of me.
So here's a little bit of honesty.
I spent a month in November and December basically determined to be a non-Christian. I threw away every belief I had and decided to start from scratch. I quickly decided not to be an atheist, because atheism is essentially pointless and doesn't strike me as being particularly plausible. I toyed with deism, because this one girl I know online seems relatively bright, and she's a deist. But I found it rather dull. It was at about this time I began investigating some of the more interesting Middle Eastern and Asian religions. I skipped most of the more common ones, figuring, there's really no point investigating any of them too much, since I've already wrestled with them for apologetic reasons, and found them wanting. Hinduism and Shintoism were a bit more alluring than most, because I'm cliche and Asian like that, but I eventually pushed them aside in favor of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, stuff like that. I examined Christian arguments and found them horribly lacking. I couldn't really accept the historicity of Christianity. I was essentially dissatisfied with almost every religion and philosophical system I encountered.
I held on to this non-agnostic uncertainty (I believed in God, just didn't really know what form he took and was determined to rationally evaluate all claims to see which proved the most legitimate) up until I read a Shusaku Endo book called "The Samurai". It presented, in vivid terms, a picture of Jesus, poor and hated and despised by the world, who rejected power and made friends with the weak and friendless. It was something I knew about, something I'd maybe heard all my life, but didn't really know, somehow, or maybe had forgotten (I sometimes read stuff I wrote 10 years ago and find something that makes me go, wow, this kid had it kind of together compared to me. He knew stuff I don't and said stuff way wiser than most of what I say now. What happened?). But anyway, this picture of Jesus rather shook me. I almost began crying as I read it, riding home on the Greyhound bus, but fortunately I managed to avoid it, because public spectacles are unseemly.
Anyway, so now I found myself in the odd position of actually loving Jesus, a phenomenon that has occured, to be totally honest, only rarely in a life spent mostly worshipping Protestant God. I don't know what exactly that means, except maybe that I have a tendency to overlook Jesus in my efforts to serve him. Moving onward, I then read a Hindu Bengali writer named Rabindranath Tagore, who, in spite of his adherence to a different religion, had a strangely Christian view of God, and professed a deep fascination with Christianity and considered it the source of the power and goodness of the West, at least until he went to the West on a spiritual pilgrimage, coming back, apparently, disappointed.
So at this point the last bits of my resistance to Christianity fell apart and I reaccepted Jesus for the 40th time or whatever, because I'm horribly unsteady like that. I tried to find God via logic and argument, and found he'd made a backdoor by way of self-sacrificial love. Funny how that works. :\
I'm gonna leave off on this for now, because it's really freaking long. Hopefully I'll have time to continue this depressing and probably needlessly self-indulgent saga of repeated failure and assorted shortcomings.
Or not. Now that I think about it, excessive public confession is among the worst and most obnoxious forms of narcissism, I think. So maybe I'll turn this into something a bit brighter, more optimistic, etc., and have it be a brief chronicle of something or another...redemption and whatnot, you know? And Jesus. All that stuff.
Incidentally, if anyone from Young Adult group or Turning Point reads this, I miss you guys. You were strangely helpful to my spritual growth and, for the most part, my overall level of happiness, probably moreso than I really knew at the time.