Fate (or less ominous stuff)

I have been ordered to post and, even though I'm a hyprocrite, I am nothing if not obedient. *looks around warily*

I have been missing the blog, anyway, and decided it was time to come back. And some things are too long for comments and inspire post ideas themselves and I talk too much as it is, so it's all inevitable, you see. Like Fate.

*ahem*

So...summer's over and the stores are full of Back-to-School spirit... Just kidding. I am pretty bad about living up to what I say I'll do, partially because I'm bad about decisions and settling things in my own mind. One thing I've noticed this plainer and much-more-muted fall than last year's is that the energy expended in great emotional proclamations and hopes and promises can be used in actually accomplishing some of those things. A lot of things I realized last fall were good. Wonderful, really. But there was also a very rampant tendency to glory in the emotion of a lot of good things and lose sight of actually putting a lot of the original intentions and ideas into practice.

It has been hard to realize that some of my thinking last year really didn't make a lot of sense and was pretty overblown and unfounded. I'm not talking here about my beliefs about Christianity, except in the way I was pretty dead-set on God reacting to me. I was thinking about it today and some of the struggles that have consumed me over the past several years, how it became a recurring frustration to me at some of the worst times that I felt I was not seeing an issue right and yet I was not seeing an alternative--and it occured to me perhaps I was doing something I know very well is foolish for a human to do when dealing with God. Expecting him to deal with me on my terms.

At one point I had got so entrenched in an internal debate over how to obey certain passages--and had got myself so backed into a very difficult corner with my logic--and kept backing myself in further--that I began to feel frustrated that God was leaving me pretty much to handle the situation all on my own, to figure out the answer (the alternative I believed existed but couldn't see) or stay backed in this horrible corner.

I don't know what God does behind the scenes. I don't know how he helps, or chooses not to, according to his own wisdom, when we pray for wisdom, strength, a way out--any of it.

But the thought that began to gnaw on me was I was a weak human being with an obviously imperfect brain. What if I wasn't smart enough to get myself out of this? Would God leave me, sincere, pushing myself to sacrifice as deeply as necessary, maybe even as possible--and do nothing? Just break and maim my life over an honest but wrong understanding? It was very -- infuriating. I am not sure this is the right way to say it and I don't mean this to get sympathy, but it felt -- like I was being hurt. Destroyed.

I was doing the destroying, because I could see no other way, and was trying in the way I knew to be honest and self-sacrificing, but I knew it couldn't be the right way, and God wasn't getting me out of it.

'Course, this wasn't actually the whole picture. I had started resisting an important point along the way--the point that made me struggle to be self-sacrificing to begin with. And that's that the world is God's and that even in our struggles with truth where we pick the wrong thing, if we submit in humble sincerity, we are reformed by those choices into humbler, better things.

I knew that, but the struggle was getting very hard. I still don't know for sure what I should have done. I am still uneasy in some of my choices, in how I am moving away from the thinking that lead me into that dark corner.

This was not supposed to be so long and I was not going to talk about all this. See where opening up the blog again gets me. ;) I can't seem to help myself.

Anyway, the point of that line of thought was--actually good. Yes. The realization that I have been expecting for a long time for God to react to me on my terms.

Maybe the world isn't how I think it should be. Maybe God doesn't reveal things and our brains learn things the way I want them to. But it's the world, all the same. I didn't make it, I don't run it. And maybe it's better to deal with it as is--take a few steps back and turn a few circles to get new perspectives when I find mine blanking into a stone wall. Maybe when I do, I'll find out how God really talks. And find some knowledge about how the world really is, for a change, 'stead of how I want it to be.

It was a good thing to realize today--a point of change, I think and hope. Of progress, even if not the enveloping, emotional, dramatic kind. A rather small-looking correction in dusty, gray logic. I'm beginning to notice those are the kinds that tend to be the actual bigger, broader-reaching changes in my life. How annoying.