Reason Breeds Insanity

I made a conscious decision to stop going to church. I love my pastor, but church just irritates me. I won’t go into that tirade again, I will spare you all the angst, but I have decided to spend my Sunday reading. I am consciously trying to read my bible and comment about what I have read every day. On Sundays, my goal is to read what I usually read but to also read a book. Today I read Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts, and I was pleasantly surprised by how deeply his writing touched me. I found myself hungering to drop all of my worldly belongings, hop into a VW Microbus, and travel the wild west in search of God. Now I am not so naive as to think that I can’t find God here in Muncie in the loud and siren plagued streets, because I find God here every day. Or [They] find me. When I was half-way through the book, I realized that I needed to go for a walk. Bec and I took our old bread and headed out to feed the ducks. We ended up walking for almost an hour and a half winding our way through Muncie, visiting some new businesses that we had read about in the paper and enjoying each other’s company as well as relishing the time outside in the somewhat urban beauty. We also took the time to reminisce about simpler lives and simpler times. Tonight’s venture was a far cry from last night’s Drag Show Fiasco (who ever heard of a drag show with two contestants?). The pleasure of being out instead of in, of walking instead of sitting, of thinking and talking instead of straining to see what may or may not be going on on the stage of a crowded and smokey bar, reminds me why I seek nature even in the constraints of the city. There is peace to be found walking down the sidewalks of a midwestern town. As we turned onto McCullough to finish the last leg of our journey this evening, after we gave up looking for Joe, I thought I saw a blue tent along the bank of the river. As we got closer to the place where I thought I saw the tent, I was shocked to see that there really was a family camping along the river. At first I thought they may have been a homeless family, but as I got closer I realized that this was a family on vacation. I wondered: who camps along the White River in Muncie? But then I took and minute and listened to the river flowing over the rocks, the crickets chirping, and the ducks preening and quacking, and I didn’t blame them . The calming sound almost drowned out the noise of the passing cars, and the smell of the campfire moved me almost to tears. God was here, even here on the banks of the White River, a block from Muncie Central and a world away from the wilderness. As I type this I am thinking about that family and how they are faring with the trains moving slowly and noisily over the tracks above them. The wheels squeak and grind on the rails, and the brakes grind to slow the hulking beast for its entrance into the city, but I can still smell the smoke from their campfire, and I wonder if they are sleepless like I am.

Rebecca got a job! She starts Tuesday for orientation, and then full time on Thursday! She will be working at Advantage Home Health Care. We are pretty excited! Whoo..hooo…Yippeee!!!! Two incomes!

I am slowly recovering the pieces of me that were lost to corporate insanity, and I am finding that much of me, the me that I was, is still there as the me that I am. I have survived another period in my life in which I was abused by power-hungry imbeciles. I wonder sometimes how my dad survives. He lives that life every day and has for so many years. How does he keep it from eating away at him? How does he cope?

I am recovering, though, from a sort of dark night of the soul that was spent in the throws of busy-ness. I was too busy to contemplate the Scriptures. I was too busy to contemplate ethics. I was too busy to spend time with people, to get to know them, and to get to love them. I was too busy. Business kept me from the things I love. Business, not idleness, is the devis’s workshop. I have HEARD it said that “idle hands are the devils workshop,” but I KNOW that “if the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.” The busier you get, the more you neglect and the more you lose.

I am still busy, but it is in a much healthier way. Actually, I am not busy at all. I am in a blissful state of being nurtured through lack of activity but presence of contemplation. Instead of getting up at 4 and driving to work still asleep, I sleep until 9 and make it to class by 10. I actually get a full night’s rest. Nine hours, every night. I have time at night, when I would have been frantically trying to finish homework, to eat dinner with Bec, talk to my friends on the phone, read for pleasure, and even to be silent and listen. I even have time to go to student activities. I actually have time nearly every morning to read the Bible, and to think about it as both a text and as Holy Writ, but I also have time to read everything for class, too.

I made a commitment to take Sunday as a Sabbath, to celebrate Creation and God, and meditate on the amazing and awesome connection between myself and the cosmos. How minuscule am I! How incredibly small! I am but one small particle in the largess of the universe, but I am a child of God. [They] are aware of me?! I have time to meditate. I think about lots of things. My heart breaks for some, and it rejoices for others. My mind follows along.

I think that is the piece of my recovery that makes me happy: my heart leads.

Click here for a story about a friend of a friend who got caught under a lawn mower.
Click here to see a story about a friend of Becky’s.

1) The article about Mother Teresa. Click here to check it out.
2) My recovery from Ale Fest 2007 Dayton. I am upright and speaking clearly.
3) Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Read it.

While I have long been enamored with Mother Teresa, I now know why. We are of the same cloth—the human cloth. Though I am by no means a saint, I mean we both have this difficulty hearing God. We share the problem of knowing God is there, and in her case knowing that she is doing the right thing, but being unable to sense the presence of God—unable to feel God’s touch. I cannot imagine being the woman she was with fifty years of darkness, fifty years of being estranged of her groom, fifty years of disengagement from the source of her salvation, fifty years of isolation from the source of grace. Her faith was amazing.

Doubt is a substantial portion of faith, but to wander in the desert for fifty years, well, ask Moses how it feels to wander for forty. Ask anyone around you who has wandered and wondered in her/his faith, how it feels to be estranged but seeking God with no sign that [They] are listening. What amazes me about Mother Teresa is her ability to function everyday as a beautiful example of God’s love while she struggled to hear God’s voice. Everyday we see people claiming to do whatever it is that God is “telling” them to do, and the fruit of their labor isn’t love, forgiveness, mercy, or compassion, but hate. If you open the page of any Christian publication, I can almost guarantee that you will find an article about a person hearing from God and acting in a way that is antithetical to the living presence of Jesus. I applaud Mother Teresa for living her life until her death as a human, living in grace, helping others to experience that same grace.

While I am sure that my mother will not appreciate my appreciation for beer, I am still going to say that we are all thankful that I am standing today. I am never eating olives again. And I really love IPA’s and Porters. Mmmm. Everything in moderation.

Finally, I have always liked Charles Dickens and now I remember why. He had this amazing ability to weave the cloth of a tale so tightly that I miss the threads laid bare at the ends. There are all of these strangely loose threads, but there are so many, so tightly wrapped, that I lose interest in the ones that aren’t sewn up. I am infatuated with David Copperfield, and I can honestly say that I want to know what happens next. I am interested in the theological ideas and concepts that are being worked out and also the gender issues and stereotypes that are being utilized. I just keep reading. It’s amazing.