54. mood swings.

Mood swings, shifts in attitude, course changes, peaks and troughs. Maybe this is the first real test of my new outlook on life...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Today, and a little bit yesterday, I detected a shift in the earth. It's a shift I recognize because it's been a part of my life for so long now - it's the shift that means I'm sailing into dark water. Maybe it's Circadian Rhythms ganging up on me, maybe it's bi-polar-Serotonin-re-uptake problems, maybe I haven't been eating enough fruit. Whatever it is, I'm finding it difficult to maintain my positive outlook on life.

In the past, when I felt the slide coming on, I'd coast right on into it. I didn't care because really, it was just reinforcing my already bleak outlook on life. But this time things are different. To me, there's a lot more at stake because I don't want to lose the positive momentum that I've gained. I didn't care before because I was only going from bad mood to worse mood whereas now I have a lot more to lose. And I don't want to lose a bit of it.

And so I'm trying to find the brakes. I'm trying to grab onto branches in the hopes of breaking this fall. But despite the metaphor, this is not a physical kind of falling and there are no freeway impact attenuators to keep me from crashing. So all I have to call upon is the Lord because I'm powerless in this situation.

The Lord's help was always there to grab onto but in the past, I had no trust in God's love and so I didn't reach out for it. But faith, trust, belief, hope in the Lord is part of my new outlook on life and so now I cry out to him. But living in faith can be like living in a foreign land where you don't speak the language.

I suppose some history is in order here. See, I've never really understood what it meant to have a "relationship with Jesus." That word, "relationship," seems so concrete and tactile but as real as I believe God is, he is also so different from me as to seem virtually inaccessible. I mean, think about it - I'm sitting in this little chair in this little house on a little island on a little planet circling an average sized sun in an average sized galaxy located in a universe that's really fucking huge (and I believe that's the scientific way to put it). So I'm sitting in this chair trying to figure out how it is that I'm supposed to have a relationship with the thing that created it all. Some of the greatest physicists who ever lived talked about trying to know the mind of God through their studies, and they couldn't figure it out. Now if they couldn't then what the hell chance does my pea brain have?

Okay, zip back to the present. I still really have no idea how this "relationshp with God" bit works but I've been trying to listen. I've been trying to be open to whatever it was that God wanted to share. And wonder of wonders, bits and pieces have been breaking through. But like I said, it's like I'm in some foreign land and I can't quite make out the translation. Or maybe it's more like a bad cell phone connection - bits cut in and out and you can't quite make out the whole of what's being said and sometimes you can't tell if you're hearing the person on the other end of the line or the cell phone tower bouncing your own voice back to you.

But I suppose this is just another lesson. Another episode of trial by fire. I want to trust God to be with me through this dark time and to deliver me if possible (I mean, of course it's possible, but is it what God wants). And so I leave my old coping mechanisms behind and trust that the stillness and the smallness will be there to hold me through the night and through the day and through the frustration and the loneliness and on to the other side where the sun breaks through the clouds once again.