Saturday, April 16, 2005

Do you ever feel like you are starting to regress? To fall back into a nature in which you once were? I feel like that is happening to me. The old anger is coming back. The old feelings are coming back. I look at myself in the mirror and see my old self. That scares me.

There are a few different kinds of despair and I feel like I'm going through one of them. A despair in which one is defiant to be one's self and wills one's self to sulk in his/her depravity. I know that in order to gain myself I must continually lose myself. Yet in my own ways I stand by my imperfect self and expect everyone to conform to my will. This is so wrong.

I've been thinking too much lately. It's the main reason why I have not been able to write. I've thinking about the past and obsessing over lost causes. I care so much others that.

In the past two weeks, I have been blessed to see beauty in life that I haven't seen in many months. You could even say that I haven't seen beauty in over a year. Beauty that is not of this world but indescribable beauty that comes with sacred joy. Signs of God. I started to see again, the wonder of nature, the mystery of life, and the solitude of my imperfect soul. But now that joy in starting to hide again. And this time I don't want to forget it or let go of it. I hope that it comes back tomorrow. I know that there are hard days in life yet the darkness that surrounded my life over the past year was too great. I don't want to go back.

I was thinking today of the burden that has been with me for awhile. It's the passion of my life and the desire to do. For much time now, I've been wanting to go to Africa after medical school. To live with the people there and help. While this burden is still there, I have a new that is coming out. And this one is a surprise to me. I've been wanting to go to medical school in Oregon for awhile now, and to get out of the LA area. But this has changed. I want and I need to stay in LA. I desire to help people here. I have found a love for the people here and want to be part of saving this city. Our first world city is now a third world in its spirituality. And I want to be a defiant light here. A soldier in the mist of the enemy. Maybe God has called me to this battlefield.
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2 comments:

KMOB said...

What i tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. {matthew 10:27}

Our lord is constantly taking us into the dark in order to tell us something. It may be in the darkness of home where bereavement has drawn the blinds; the darkness of a lonely and desolate life, in which some illness has cut us off from the light and the activity of life; or the darkness of some crushing sorrow and disappointment.

It is there He tells us His secrets - great and wonderful; eternal and infinite. he causes our eyes, blinded by the glare of things on earth, to behold the heavenly constellations. And our ears suddenly detect even the whisper of His voice, which has been so often drowned out by the turmoil of earth's loud cries.

Yet these revelations always come with a corresponding responsibility: "what i tell you...speak in the daylight...proclaim from the roofs." We are not to linger in the darkness or stay in the closet. Soon we will be summoned to take our positions in the turmoil and the storms of life. And when that moment comes, we are to speak and proclaim what we have learned.

This gives new meaning to suffering, the hardest part of which is often the apparent felling of uselessness it causes. We tend to think, "How useless I am! What am I doing that is making a difference for others? Why is the 'expensive perfume' (john 12:3) of my soul being wasted?" These are the desperate cries of the sufferer, but God has a purpose in all of it. He takes his children to higher levels of fellowship so they may hear Him speaking "face to face, as a man speaks with his friend" (Ex. 33:11), and then deliver the message to those at the foot of the mountain. Were the forty days Moses spent on the mountain wasted? What about the time Elijah spent at Mount Horeb or the years Paul spent in Arabia?

There is no shortcut to a life of faith, which is an absolute necessity for a holy and victorious life. We must have periods of lonely meditation and fellowship with God. Our souls must have times of fellowship with Him on the mountain and experience valleys of quiet rest in the shadow of a great rock. We must spend some nights beneath the stars, when darkness has covered things of earth, silenced the noise of human life, and expand our view, revealing the infinite and eternal. All these are as absolutely essential as food is for our bodies.

In this way alone can the sense of God's presence become the unwavering possession of our souls, enabling us to continually say, as the psalmist once wrote, "You are near, O Lord" (Ps. 119:151)

- F.B. Meyer

4/16/2005 10:52 AM
Sycz said...

I'm rereading "A Sickness Unto Death," and kierkegaard pretty much says the same thing. That why i said in my post that I feel like i'm content in my own despair, which is the worst thing. The christian life is full of dispair, ongoing, aswell it should be. Part of our santification requires this. New things will be found through this and I know and pray for that. I must constantly remind myself to use all my faculties, whether they are my compassion and love or anger and guilt, to llet myself, be myself, which is caused by losing myself.

Simple huh?

4/16/2005 11:23 AM

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