Come

October 16, 2014

A Sunday after I first visited Mount Rainier.
I would have just started my Sophomore year in college, visiting home for the weekend.
I had just turned 20, but we found a bottle of vodka and made an occasion of it.
A treasure of a memory, perhaps with my most intimate moment with the Earth, singing to a little mountain stream with my ukulele.

I now use the word "Call" to embody this sentiment of "come"
Forgive any triggers you find around the bible, it's verbiage was how I felt connected to and processed spiritual ideas. I used the word "sin" in place of what I would now express as shame. ("I have sinned" = "I am ashamed of my action or inaction")

I use the word "temptation" in a self-judgment sense. I used it to express my struggle with a mix of  activities to the ends of "numbing out". I use the word drowning to describe feeling caught in a cycle where numbing behavior begets the suffering that inspires the numbing behavior to begin with.

These were my reflections immediately following the mountain trip:

“Come.”

I experienced a really spiritual kind of melancholy the other day. My ultimate goal tonight is to start my writing with where I am, and arrive at the top of a joyful hill. My invitation is to be open in yourself, breathe, and take a walk with me.

This is the spiritually celebrative part:

When Jesus walked on water, he invited Peter to join him in a very simple word.
For me, his beckoning in the story captures the wash of peace God uses as an invitation to the grand love fest.

Simplicity makes me think of silence. I’ve considered the honesty found in silence and the expression found outside of words, so I thought about swallowing these meditations for once, but God made me a writer, so I will write.

Right now, I am working from a self-designed bad day to sitting atop the lofty embrace of joy, because that’s where I want to end up. I want to invite you, too.

Here’s how today starts, and where the shadow work is: I have sinned.

I steeped my knees in carpet for forgiveness, as I do. My knees dried and I turned around to sin again before dinner. I do not like to be without God, but to be without him is more immediately enjoyable. I dwell with myself, loose my bad habits like a spoon trying to dig a salt shaker. I am not alive in these moments. Though God fights these waves of temptation for me, still I drop, I rise, I drop.

Two days ago, I celebrated the song of a streambed down Mount Rainier with an old friend. So sure of God’s whisper, I sang in awe of the vista, the listening, and the heart. Upon returning home, my foot sank out of faith into temptation, the wind blew some distraction like it does.

Leaving the comfortable understanding of the universe I had, we tore doubt in our faith together to consider the other’s view. I, in some arrogant evangelism thought I could recite a candle to life. While this lost yelling goes on, still, supernatural grace brings me warmth. What selfish, power-hungry and corrupt human would engineer such a thing as grace?

I am thus drawn to continue exploring this grace-given love. Still, I grieve over these word documents I fall into. I look and suckle light into these fiber-published fonts, but I am afraid that I only dilute, fog, and dim the good words that are already there. After all, doesn't fire ruin a good wick in order to be fire?

So, I’ve been ignoring and forgetting God in key darkness where His strength can shine brightest.
This is where the story shifts.

I recently learned about the introduction to 1 Corinthians and I am reminded again that more noise does not merit greater listening. It is the whispers in these small places that deep wisdom dwells. According to the sermon I heard, the Corinthians had forgotten Paul’s teachings after all he sacrificed to teach God’s love. I am the Corinthians.

I am lost, and here at home, my frequented comforts are the easiest and simplest to find. When love does not find me, I claw at everything I have to drown the suffering of love. My heart becomes heavy and seeks drowning between temptation and loneliness.

I leave, I return to God, but what has stopped me from returning to that dry fountain? I have returned again and again, and each time I lose more faith in myself. When will I consider myself old enough to be too mature for and so finally capable of overcoming temptation?

Only when I make room in my heart for more than myself can I stave temptation. I am already holy, and I take it for granted, so I’ll forget all that I have promised and all that I have released for a quick fix. I consider myself, then.

What do I keep in my life?

If only I had just a floor and a bed. A mattress and a floor and this light. Could I live without this guitar? Can I be without these screens? These cameras? I could be with a pen and paper. I would be with God’s words. Yes, I could write poetry, as well as read it. I have been blessed with reminders of what it was like without internet. What if I only kept anything given by God?

Tonight was not a joyful night.

I laughed and ignored my family again. I grow fear in my heart in the face of wide goodbyes and new hellos that litter my horizons. I step through mountains into plains, and I often grow sad looking back, remembering the mountain’s wildflowers.

Tonight I looked back at the peaks. Some small fruit of joy in the past risen against the dry soil I choose to roll my bare legs in. Ahh, these self-inflicted woes, what joy is there in them? There must be, since as best as I understand it in Christian faith, I have been saved from sin so that I may write joy.

So, if I am saved, I remind myself that, when the majestic peak fades from the HERE to the background, to return to the wild mountain flowers at the foot so often overlooked in considering the peak. I hope to learn about them again so that I might cry again with the lord, and feel his hand on my heart again.

I am frayed knots of lost spirit. Tonight, I am woeful by my own design as my spiritual pangs fill these wings. Tonight, I write in the joy of writing for the sake of my heart and spirit, for the joy of writing what joy God has to give in the space of this self-induced middle class misanthrope.

I leave you here to consider the small, unappreciated introductions at the beginning of grand creation. The wildflowers at the base of a mountain.