Man, so much happening lately, and my head seems so crowded.
I’ve been feeling kinda purposeless, or useless lately…which I’ve written about. It started to feel a little better when I started being busy w/ my new job, but I really don’t want to be defined by how much money I can help a company make. That has been a little unsettling, but at the same time, if I’m feeling better, why look a bad thing in the mouth.
I’ve also been frustrated over the feeling of not being good enough to experience God like I see the people around me experiencing God. It is like I’m missing out on something. I mentioned it being like looking through tinted glass in a blog I wrote a while back. Jeff gave me some advice about hearing God, and I’m going to try to do this. He said I should go be alone for a long time, until the constant chatter in my head runs out of things to say. He said something like 3 hours, but I’m thinking at least the first time I do this I’m going to need more time than that. In general I think it is probably time to spend a good long chunk of time away from home and other people to just be quiet for a while.
Also, Jeff said if I wanted to get better at sorting the noise in my head out, I should just try an experiment where I actually do anything I hear that I think is from God for a week. Hopefully I’ll write some updates on how that goes…if I don’t pansy out. I usually pansy out on things like that.
I’ve also been thinking about optimism, faith and hope, and my personal luck. I’m pretty lucky. If your around me for a while, and you pay attention to the way my life goes I’m really lucky. I’m not sure if it is because I’m blessed, or because I’m just lucky, or what. My Dad and brothers both like to say that I can “fall in a toilet and come out smelling like a rose,” and when your family says that…you must be pretty lucky.
But I got to questioning my ideas of hope, faith, and character-building hardships. Where do I derive my faith and hope from if I don’t feel like I’ve seen hard times, and seen God be persistantly present through those times? What reason do I have to have faith in the inerrancy of the Bible when it seems so contradictory at times, and where laws are set up to improve the people for a time, but then changed later? Isn’t that what the original purpose of apostolic sucession was? So things that needed to change could be changed w/o crazy schisms? Why then do we not realize that some things seem to be pretty concrete in the bible, but pretty damned wrong today (like woman in ministry….no I haven’t read Jeff’s paper on it yet).
Definitely need some time to sit down, without the pressure of life telling me to “GO! GO! GO!” for a bit. Maybe I’ll do some of that Sunday afternoon.
Really, if you think that is depressing or something, you should just realize I’m mostly clearing my head…and I want to get this down for postarity, cuz I like to go back and read my journals sometimes and see where I was oh the way back when.