I’ve not written at length in rather a while. Whether for publishing online or simply to fill the pages of my notebook with thoughts to be read later in life, looked back on as records of where I’ve been. I simply haven’t taken the time to parse out how I’ve been feeling or what’s been in my mind. Some of this is because I’ve been more focused on living my life, being outside and sitting in the sunlight without a laptop or a journal to distract me from the moment at hand. Some of it has been because when I have sat down to articulate my thoughts, I’ve found myself lost for words when contemplating the world which lies before me. Some part of me wishes that bringing my computer outside weren’t even an option. Yet, is it more beautiful, that having a choice in the matter, I choose to live outside of the screen, the web of distraction and clamour? What manner of man am I, that I make such choices, and what has made me so?
I ought to have known that such questions would rise in my mind with the approach of my thirtieth birthday, yet somehow I was caught off guard. I am a contemplative person during the middle of the most mundane week, so days of flooding rain leading up to the end of my twenties could only be expected to create an extra thoughtful mood, even somewhat melancholy. Not a sad atmosphere, but a heavy one to be sure. So, wearing the heaviness like an invisible robe, I went about my days and did what I knew I must. I fasted, and prayed, and knelt before God in the silence, and likely appeared to any who knew me to be simply a slightly more somber version of myself. Which is understandable to most. Thirty is a big deal! You should be concerned! Oh man, this is it: the first level of Old Age! So go the sentiments.
Yet my own thoughts mirrored such musings only a very small amount. In all honesty, I rarely find myself on the same page as most of my peers — peers being in this instance all of the other bipedal mammals with the power of language implanted into their brains. Usually, I am rather dissatisfied with the things which are part of the daily course of life for the modern man or woman.
Why do we consume energy drinks?
Why do we plant and cut such precise lawns?
Why do all of our houses look the same?
Why do we carry little computers in our pockets?
Why do we seem to be getting rid of quiet places?
Why do we share so much of our lives on the internet?
Why do we buy new vehicles so often?
Why don’t we talk to our neighbours?
Why don’t we cook our own meals more often?
Why don’t we look up and around more than we look down?
Why don’t we stop and smell the roses more often?
Such questions roll through my mind with pulse-like regularity. And the only response I can think of that would seem to make sense of all such questions would be this: we have lost our connection to God, and to nearly all aspects of the divine.
This reality rankles me. And yet that I take notice of it at all is intriguing, for if I notice it and am bothered by it, others too must be aware, for I’m no extraordinary man. If eternity and the desire for it has been written on my own heart, then it is flowing also through the veins of my brothers and sisters all over this good green earth. If I can begin to wake from sleep, then so can all who wish it.
Through the weeping and wrestling of the last days of the decade, one particular thought came to me which I found great comfort in, and must continue to dwell upon if I’m to make it through this mess of a life with any sanity. And that is the fact that for all my own stupor, for all my ignorance to the deep truths of God and my stony heart, so quick to turn cold, the God who I serve is the same today as He has always been. And He is good. Whatever questions I have of my own success, whatever concerns over whether or not I’ve “made something of myself” in the last ten years, I am encouraged by the memory that God Himself chose to make something of my life. And I’ve every reason to believe He will do as much and more in the next decade, should He grant me so long a time.
At the beginning of my twenties I was afraid. Pretty much afraid of everything. I was afraid of making the wrong choices, afraid of being capable of nothing else, afraid of my own brokenness, afraid no one really wanted me. I didn’t know what to do with myself, and so at the age of 22 I was already making plans to end my life, assuming that continuing it wouldn’t be of much use to anyone. Then, being somehow and for some reason taken in by strangers who apparently saw something valuable in me, I found myself in Northwest Arkansas with a job and a new home. (Apparently as many new homes as I needed, actually.) Going from house to house and from one friend to another before ending up on my own tattered faux-leather couch in a low-ceilinged apartment in Fayetteville, I figured that this was God giving me another chance, a fresh start at life, and that I might as well start doing something with it. But what to do?
Well, I suppose one must simply live. And so I began trying to do so.
Soon after this new beginning I totaled the vehicle that brought me to Arkansas. However, though the movement of my body around town was somewhat slowed, having still a bicycle I found that my movement toward life was actually rather increased. I was at least getting more exercise, and actually found it to be a source of joy to me. I worked a simple job, making drinks of ambiguous quality for people who didn’t seem to care so long as I smiled at them. I learned that people usually liked my smile, and that made me happy. After riding home I’d unlock the door to my palace with my little bronze key and swing my bicycle up onto the hook on the wall. Something about that action was magical to me, and seven years later I still remember it fondly.
My life was simple, and pretty good. But I was also chronically depressed. Each time I descended into the valley of shadows, it became more difficult to think of crawling back out. More than that, being down in that valley was shaping how I viewed God, and making Him out to be shadowy Himself.
When I was 24, I fell in love. Madly in love — for it is mad indeed to give all of your already broken self to one, and think that they will be enough to mend your wounded soul. And while my fall from the lofty heights of love was really prompted by my lingering and unvoiced fears, I wasn’t ready yet to see it, and placed the blame squarely on God, on the one who I’d begun to think was finally letting me into the light, finally letting me find something that would last, a balm for my aching heart. And as that balm was taken from me, I gave up on this God, on all I’d been told of His love, and I walked away. Not toward anything, but toward nothing, for nothing was all I believed I had anymore.
Soon enough I really did have close to nothing, for I decided to flee the country (with the romantic idea that I’d travel indefinitely to heal my wounds and become a sort of Walter Mitty character), and this meant unburdening myself of most of my possessions. Aside from my backpack, I kept one plastic storage container that I filled with my books and a few sentimental oddments, to be left in a friend’s attic. And then I headed off.
As romantic an idea as this might have been, it didn’t turn out anything like I’d imagined it would. Again, I ought to have anticipated this, but I wasn’t in the most rational state of mind. However, wandering aimlessly on the other side of the planet did seem to have a bit of a head-clearing effect on me, and not too long after landing in this strange and wonderful land down under, the fog began lifting, even as the smoke over Melbourne persisted.
There will perhaps be another time in which I relate more details of my days in Australia, but that isn’t my desire for this piece. No, I don’t wish here to elaborate details of my adventures there, or spin stories for entertainment. All I really want to do at this time is point out the fact that I was running away, and doing so without an idea of where I’d end up or how I’d get there. And yet, for all my irrational flight from life and existential crisis, there was one constant, though at the time I wasn’t quite aware it.
The presence of the living God was with me in my runaway journey. From one end of the globe to the other, this God who I didn’t trust with even half of my heart was seemingly unwilling to let me go off on my own without following, just in case I needed a helping hand — as He knew that I would. Somehow, even in that place, I was always taken care of. Somehow, in spite of what seemed like chaos when viewed from the vantage point of the present moment, the days I lived out on the edge of my own spiritual wilderness were shaping me, and molding me into a man who would look back on that wilderness with gratefulness for what it taught me. Truly, I am grateful for those days, and not only for the moments of peace that I found in that place far from home, scattered and infrequent as they were. I remember sitting up late at night with coffee in the living room of friends I didn’t anticipate, talking together, and listening. I remember walking through a field of golden grass in the Kallista hills so idyllic I felt like I’d stepped into a novel. I remember sharing fish and chips with two happy strangers in the early afternoon on the edge of the Atlantic. I remember the bus ride through Tasmania chatting with the drivers and looking out at the rain on the lush green mountains around us. I remember lounging in a park in Sydney and having lunch with new friends, people who didn’t know my past and didn’t mind it, because they knew Jesus, knew that He loved me, and so loved me also.
Those memories are real, and I hold them dearly. The Lord was generous to me in those days, though I had not the eyes to see it. And beyond even the light and love that I felt in those times, even the darkness and storm that I knew would be made use of. All of the hurt that I knew, and all of it that I saw, was not unnoticed by my God. Though it would take years for me to see it, and I’ll spend years still learning what He was up to in that time.
I could go on relating stories of the years that would follow, but I’ll save that for another time. Because the turning point for me took place in those days that I’ve written of above. Those were the days of my greatest despair, and thus the days which have been most dramatically transformed. And while I would continue walking through cycles of depression and healing on my return to the the United States, continue learning to have faith, continue being surprised by the joy of friendship freely given and seemingly perfectly timed, somehow the heartbreak and tempest of 2019, giving way to the softening of my heart in 2020, would lay the ground work for all that came after. My running away from God inevitably would serve as the turning point in my relationship with Him. Perhaps because in my flight, I was able to become aware of His pursuit.
You might be wondering what the point of all of this is. Why am I sharing this meandering reflection of the last decade of my life?
Redemption.
I want to draw attention to the fact, for myself and for you also, that the life of my twenties felt like chaos much of the time, and often I would have described it so. I had little idea what I was doing, had little faith in my ability to meet even the most basic demands of my life. Sometimes I still feel that way. I still have days when my own inadequacy looks back at me from the mirror, and the questions in my heart don’t find their answers in the pages of my Bible, in the silence of the morning, or in the kneeling of my body in prayer. There are days when I long for resurrection, true and complete, when I can escape the woes of this world and be at home with my Lord. The Apostle Paul evidently felt as much. And yet he pressed on.
Whatever my fears in this world might be, whatever the worries that seize my heart and shake my knees, the faith that I have in my God is only growing. For I have seen Him already turn my sorrows to joy, and my weeping to dancing, and I have seen Him do it in others’ lives also. My hope is not that my questions would all be answered, or that the weight of life would be lifted from my shoulders and I would go carefree and frolicking. My hope is only in the person of Jesus Christ. He has not changed, and He is not shaken by the anxious fretting of the world or the collapse of our little kingdoms.
Of old You founded the earth,
And the heavens are the work of Your hands.
Even they will perish, but You endure;
And all of them will wear out like a garment;
Like clothing You will change them and they will be changed.
But You are the same,
And Your years will not come to an end."
— Psalm 102While this world lasts and I endure in it, I will see summer and winter, storms and sunshine, the passing of joyful times into sorrow and mourning into singing. While I live I can be assured that the things that come with living will accompany me, and ever and anon the stillness of my heart will be rent by the breaking in of tumult and terror. This life is not my own and I am not its master. Yet I have a Master, and when the darkness closes in and threatens to overwhelm me, I can submit myself to Him, along with all that I am given, the dark and the light also. For none of it is without purpose, and in time even my eyes may see it, and I will have that much more by which to remember the faithfulness of my God.
And then, someday, I shall die. My body, this fragile flesh wrapped about my soul, will age and crack like the dust of which it is made, and going into the ground it will decay, as the leaves of autumn decay, or the scraps of vegetables in a compost heap. In those days my life upon this earth will become but a memory for those who knew me, till that too fades with the passage of years. Nought that I have made will last, but only that which is not made, which simply is, and which I have allowed to pass into and through me, to transform me, to destroy me and remake me: Love.
None of this is about me, what I’ve done or not done, or even the legacy I might leave. I cannot bring into this world anything new. It is my hope however that through me, through the sort and manner of life I live, that some part of that which is oldest and truest may become known to any who might not otherwise know it.
If in the previous decade of my life the Light within me, that Light which is the Life of mankind, which existed before and beyond time, has become even the smallest bit more visible, then my life has indeed been a success. And it is my prayer and fervent hope that in the years to come, whatever else may be given me, that Light within will grow still stronger — that when one looks at me, one cannot help but see my Lord.
I love how the prevailing sentiment in your peace is one of “my life is not my own” whereas today’s culture encourages us to have an “own your life” mentality by this age, speaking as one who has also turned 30 in the past year. My twenties were far more wandering than most of my friends and family, which feels discouraging unless I remind myself that God is the master of all this. Thanks for an uplifting piece!
I love this. You do look like Jesus. You've got similar eyes sometimes (as I imagine them).