It is Christmas night.
I am looking back at recent months with a frustration and sadness that I feel ashamed to even admit to myself. I try so much to avoid these feelings, or perhaps heal them, through my pursuit of competency and industry.
(Note: Perhaps I “should” feel happy and grateful tonight – and don’t get me wrong, I do. Though I am not so concerned with “should” in regard to feelings anymore. We feel what we feel, and what we do next is what matters. No need to feel shame and guilt about feelings that are already burdens enough without being compounded by real or perceived expectations.
Yes, I feel happy and grateful, and also pensive and sorrowful. But the discussion here is to be had in regard to the latter.)
Sorrow.
My deepest sorrow this evening is something that at the moment I can only share in a story.
Every so often, my dad forwards me an email containing a devotional story he read that morning that he found moving. I don’t often feel I have the time and attention these devotionals, and a proper response to my dad, deserve from me. Tonight, though, I was seeking to chip at my email inbox and found I had sufficient moments to read one.
It contained an excerpt from The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers by Amy Hollingsworth. In it, Hollingsworth explains through facts of Rogers’ routine and writings that prayer and discipline were absolutely central to his rhythms of life. He wakes up at 5am for devotional time, and by 7:30am he is preparing for his morning workout by singing a song his friend Henri Nouwen taught him from the Taize community in France.
The conclusion, of course, was that a quiet life of prayer and communion with God is of such value that it is at the heart of the life of one of our most admired men. If we truly admire his legacy, how could we not stir our hearts, minds, and spirits toward such disciplines?
This devotional made me feel two facts quite deeply.
The first: I am frustrated with my daily routine and disciplines.
I have ambitions of making something meaningful of my morning and evening times to myself, but they almost always dissolve into a combination of weariness from the day and anxiety about how I might optimize my time without, well, losing myself in a clockwork routine. I’m beginning to think that this all stems from a fear of letting myself down. It’s something that drives me trudging toward efficacy during the day, but that overwhelms me into idleness at night.
The second: The people in my life are too precious.
I don’t say this as hyperbole or condescension. When I think of my dad and his emails – these digital touchpoints of his continued, present relationship with me – I think of his enduring, patient, loyal pursuit of knowing God. I think of his deep love for his two children. I think of his own weariness from the ways this world tends to slowly sap at one’s life. I think of what it has meant to me that I have had a father who is an honest man who has openly dialogued with me about his wrestlings with God and taught me my whole life that I, too, could wrestle openly with such things, before family, and before God. I think of all of my family and friends and the faithfulness with which they live as themselves and vascillate, like myself, between various sets of longings, wanting to be someone and do something and yet constantly facing obstacles within and without oneself in succeeding at these things (Romans 7:15-20).
These two facts combine into this truth:
I feel that my neighbors (that is, those loved ones currently known and yet to be met) deserve more from me, and that I have failed to love them as they deserve.
This truth is symbolized in the daunting list of people’s names to or with whom I am hoping to write letters, spend time, call on the phone, and generally be present.
I despise that rather than feeling compassionate and excited, I feel daunted. I’ve felt that I failed this year at spending the time my loved ones deserved from me to lovingly consider, research, select, and choose gifts for them. In my mind, and in some way, in reality, my loved ones are “out there,” being precious and beloved, and I have failed to respond to this adequately. They have received (or not even received) some gift that does not convey the truth of who they are to me.
In these failures, I find comfort only in my conviction that God is the only, and also the sufficient, perfect lover of souls.
This alone makes me think that love of neighbor is not solely an ever-growing debt, but an opportunity.
My prayer life has been rather dormant this year. I scarcely let God have a whisper toward me, and I fail to find words to have any kind of worthy conversation with God. But in these whispers I have discovered some works God has for me, of the type described in Ephesians 2:10. Those works are to build community by:
- Serving as an administrator for an online group of LGBT+ Christians
- Stepping down from leadership of my current small group to help start a group for those exploring Christianity
- Making preparations to buy a house to live in and rent to others who are seeking Christ through community and discipleship
There are other works cut out for me, those veiled by whispers to which I have not yet listened — like voicemails from a beloved friend piling up as day after day I turn over in bed (Proverbs 26:14).
Occasionally, I will gather some kind of energy to listen to one, and to do it, of course. It will take time. More time than I think ought to be necessary for someone with the health I have.
This can all spiral down into a voicemail list, a task list, a list of names.
But here is what prevents that.
Providence.
The way these goals were revealed to me was providential. As a mentor has been saying, when God gives big goals, God tends to provide the means to accomplish them – even if not in the way we think.
I have too long been daunted by the task before me by looking at my own abilities.
I will fail. Yet God’s plans will succeed. How will such a paradox come to pass? I don’t know. It’s beyond my ability to understand.
But it is within my ability to trust.
Desperation.
The most meaningful moment I had this Christmas season was last night on Christmas Eve. My brother and I were spontaneously talking in the living room after everyone had gone to bed. We were recalling what it was like for each of us in middle school and high school, from our own perspectives, rather than from just observing one another as siblings.
Looking back on my teenage years, and my early years as a wholehearted follower of Christ, I describe the time as something highly intellectual. These are the years in which I became “logically convinced” that Jesus was who He says He was: the Son of God, whose life, as C.S. Lewis has said, “if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance.”
Yet my brother challenged me: “It seems like your religious was rooted solely in intellect.” He could not relate.
I suddenly felt defensive, as though I had to defend myself as a solely intellectual being. And then I realized, I was wrong about myself and my recollection. I was a whole human being. Even in a season in which I tried to deny the side of myself with emotions and desires and feelings, God knew it and engaged with it and met it (me) in that place with God’s own emotions and thoughts and desires.
That season, while seemingly driven by my philosophical questions, was highly emotional. It was also driven by an existential guilt I needed to resolve. A search for meaning that was full of fear and hope. A lonely heart that found satisfaction in the only being who could truly know me completely (and, who, I was forced to conclude, actually did exist). A desire to leave an impact on the world beyond the scope of my life.
In these years, I was driven in academics by a sense of wonder in God and God’s creation, a conviction that with every math formula and chemical compound and classic literary work, God was speaking to me, personally, about a world that could make sense, that could explode with energy and light, that was full of people using art and story to discover which pursuits weren’t worthwhile and which ones were.
At the root of this was a desperation for God. It was emotional and authentic. It wasn’t rooted in my defense of my reputation, or a sense of belonging in a group, or a need to be accepted and admired by my peers. And that, I believe, is what made those years so impactful that even today, at my weakest point of desiring to run away, at my strongest doubt, at my most intense anger with the Church, at my deepest question of the heart, I find an anchor in the person of Jesus Christ. This was not anything I could claim I did for myself; the circumstances were such that I could seek and find God during that time (“though he is not far from any one of us” [Acts 17:27]).
Returning to a new place.
Even today, I despise my negative emotions and don’t know what to do with them. I most often treat them like the ringing in my ears that won’t go away, but that I can’t do anything to resolve. But I’m starting to see that I need to return to that desperation. Not the same kind, but a new kind for the place where I am today.
My walk with God is backwards from what I often hear. A kid grows up in church going through the motions, only later to discover the person of Jesus. As for me, I knew him then, and in recent years have been motivated most to follow God by a desire to live up to others’ expectations of me, to live as I socially ought, and the like. My desperation for God has devolved into a desperation to be a certain type of person living in a certain type of way among a certain type of people. That is merely conformism. Tonight, I am done with it.
Tonight, I want to start seeking God again for myself. And I will be doing this amidst many temptations to only appear to be seeking God. If I were not in ministry, and found my primary community outside the Church, it would be easier to seek God, in ways. Or at least, my pursuit would be more pure. It would be motivated intrinsically.
I long for that intrinsic motivation, for a lack of temptation. Yet I must remain here.
In meeting those curious about Christ but not yet convinced to go to death with him, I will find deep fellowship. I will find desperation anew, and I will bring it to others who, though not siblings in Christ, are siblings in Desperation for knowing what kind of God, Gods, or lack of gods may or may not be.
I am terrified. I am sorrowful. I am unworthy. I am inadequate.
But now I know something. I can move into the new year without trying to heal these emotions, or erase these feelings, even from my own memory.
I can, as they say, “do it scared.” I can do it knowing all the letters won’t be written with the truth of the timing and wording of what each friend deserves. I can serve knowing I won’t be able to give all that my group members deserve, but that I can still offer some ethereal shadow of a perfect love.
After all, desperation doesn’t come when you’re fully adequate and fully satisfied by those around you. In my inadequacy, those around me will most certainly seek God, because I most certainly won’t be able to meet their needs or answer the doubts of their hearts.
I will be desperate and inadequate, and I will do it precisely in the places where I’m called to be. I won’t run away. I will be present. In leadership. In service. In my community house. In my local congregation. On a stage.
Oh, God. Meet me there. Meet me here. Know me and sustain me. Disillusion me with the facades of social clubs, popularity, accolades, and “praise from men” (John 5:41). Re-enchant me with the glory that comes with humble, quiet, prayerful, terrified, daily life.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
This is my goal.
When I can’t convince myself to get out of bed early, when I fail, when I doubt, when I grieve. When I rejoice, when I’m apathetic, when I’m empty. When I’m too tired to read or write. Whatever and whenever I feel and, may I spend my days with You.
Wholly,
Faithfully,
Hanging on every word.
