Today I made the questionable (and rather impromptu) decision to down 24 chocolate mints all at once. I am approximating, of course, but the sugar slump I am now writing to you from feels distinctly like it was caused by about 24, so that’s the number I’m going with.
You might say I’m not feeling shipshape right now; in part due to my chocolatey indulgence, of course (I recommend chocolate in moderately excessive quantities), but there actually is something else. Dark things weigh on my mind. Things darker than chocolate.
Like loneliness, for example.
Sometimes I feel all alone, like right now. It’s hard not to, sometimes. I am an individual. You are an individual. We are beings independent of all other beings, with a vastly different life experience than anyone else. No one sees the world the same as you do, and no one ever can. No one can always be with you through the hard times in the day when you feel like you just can’t go on. No one can truly, really understand.
Confusion, too.
There’s so much dissonance in this world, it’s hard to know what to believe, who to trust, what to do.
Life just doesn’t make sense sometimes. Why do pastors and well-known faith leaders often fall from grace? People like Ravi Zacharias and Joshua Harris. They did stuff to hurt people in the name of God, and people were scarred by it. Real people like you and me who believed in the Truth turned away from it because of people like them. Why is theology and love so easily twisted? Why isn’t the truth plainer? Why are pastors so often the bad guys? And why are people who don’t know God at all sometimes so nice?
Disillusionment, also.
The people we look up to don’t know everything. No one is free from the scourge of sin. We have no one we can truly look up to all the time, and God sometimes feels as far away as the sun on a moonless night. The historical figures we’ve been taught to revere as saints and heroes weren’t really all that nice. Martin Luther was an anti-Semitic jerk, Abraham Lincoln was a racist politician and spiritualist, and Martin Luther King Jr. was unfaithful to his wife. (I could expand on that list, but I’m too lazy to do the research. Also, it's late.) And modern day people we’d look up to aren’t all that great, either. People are quite disappointing.
The world is such a perplexing place sometimes. I’m tired, and I don’t want to figure it all out. Maybe tomorrow when I’ve slept away the sugar, things will once again make sense. But I don’t think so. Things will continue to confuse me. They always find a way. So when things don’t make sense, when the things in my heart feel as heavy as iron, I can’t do much, but I can hold onto hope. Hope in His everlasting love. I am a shipwrecked sailor in a stormy sea, and this is the only rock I have to cling to.
May God help me hold onto hope.