I am not sure that I can be of much use to the world if I don’t believe I’m good.
It is too exhausting for me to try and maintain my sanity and have any thing of hope left for anyone else. I have struggled with what to tell people if I even wanted to tell them of hope, when the hope is just that you suck.
It is easy to front that Jesus loves you and people who are struggling are attracted to that. It brings people in, the idea that God loves you and that God is Jesus. There is this part about hell as well, but if you're in, it feels good.
What happens as the years go by though is that theology starts to break down. You start to have real life things hit it and it just starts to crumble and it doesn’t hold up under pressure. If God loves me, why did this or that happen. If God loves me, how am I so wretched? Did God have to die just for me because I’m so awful? Are there seriously millions of people going to hell? And its my responsibility to stop that from happening?
I've found this to be a limiting set of beliefs. There is no discussion of nature and this entire world and how all that works. There isn’t much discussion of other people, of the energy of the world, of science, of anything other than this love God has for you. It sounds weird to say this theology I learned isn't enough, but it isn't because I don't believe it reflects reality, even spiritual reality.
"Jesus invited people to 'follow' him in bearing the mystery of human death and resurrection. It is not a requirement in order that we can go to heaven later, it is an invitation so that we can live an entirely full life now." - Richard Rohr
So I am feeling some peace. Work is leveling out. It seems there isn’t a mass exodus like everyone said there would be. The hysteria is dying down as some people exit. It continues to be challenging and hard, but I'm trying to release more and do my own work.
I hope to continue on with learning.
I am okay right now with these small consistent daily steps. I am trying to be disciplined and hang in there with it all.
So I am coming out of this deep depression. It has been a very long season, over many years with 2016 being the worst.
What am I doing to recover. The smallest steps. I am not staying in bed. I’m on a small schedule. I don’t do a lot of random things in the middle of the day. I’m trying to be productive. I’m working on my theology of life. I can’t recover if I’m not able to make sense of the world. Otherwise, every day feels hopeless and just a long series of minutes and hours that you’re waiting for something better to happen, when you know there just isn’t anything coming.
That has been the most scary, that I realized there isn’t much to look forward to if life doesn’t have some deeper meaning. I was looking forward to meals and movies and pretty shallow things that are supposed to give life patina but not BE life.
I felt sawdust in my mouth alot and in my soul. The searching for something that could make me happier. I saw an interview today with a Google exec who said that we are using the wrong analogy when talking about the glass half full. We can see the glass half full and be happy but what if we expected it to be completely full? We are replacing happiness with fun. We have not reconciled what we think life is supposed to be about, fully. So we replace fun with happiness and fun is really only something we’re doing to stop thinking about whether we’re happy or not, mostly not. It’s distracting. We’re not even sure of what we’re trying to do, what has meaning. “Happiness is not about what the world gives you - happiness is what you think about what the world gives you."
People are looking for meaning, I’m looking for meaning. I have been searching for meaning and I feel I’m finally finding it. It is very slow but it’s very important that I finalize these things.
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I started a poetry class on Coursera. I'm excited to start up on the education side of things again. I'm not sure I'm ready but I'm going to try. It will at the very least force me to be present.