120. holding on/letting go

So last night I kind of went off about some of the frustrations I've been feeling about life and Christ and the awkward space between the two. I was sharing these things at a home church that a friend started up (more on that in another blog) and the people there were kind enough to listen and to try to help me out, and while I appreciated their attempts, it wasn't resolving anything for me.

On the drive home (Mililani to Makiki), I was ranting and raving at God. I hurled questions at him and waited, but there was no reply, at least none that I could discern.

Sleep that night was fitful, frustrating. I got up a bunch of times because one thing was coming up again and again and I didn't want to be thinking about this thing (sorry I can't be more specific...it's...aw, fuck it, I'll share). This thing was Orange. See, Orange goes to the home church, and as I was sharing my frustrations, she was the only one who seemed to know where I was coming from. And the thing that kills me is, why her? Why does she understand?

Anyway, Orange keeps making appearances in my dreams and I keep waking up because even in the unconscious soup of sleep, my brain is aware enough to bolt at the thought of Orange being any kind of answer to all the angst and frustrations I've been feeling lately.

Bottom line with Orange and I, I'm too scared to do anything and I don't trust God to pull me through. I know that's fucked up and it's the cowardly way out, but that's just where I'm at.

Okay...

Back to the original reason I started writing. This morning, I get up and I felt different. Not better, but different. I still had the same frustrations from last night but they were more blurry, harder to hold on to. Strange thing is, I wanted to hold on to them because I felt like the issues between God and I hadn't been resolved yet. I wanted to hold on to them until I received an answer.

And then I realized how futile that was. God doesn't have to give an account for what he does, not to anyone or anything, and certainly not to me. I was holding on to the frustrations because...maybe an analogy would be useful here. Have you ever had a problem with your car that only happened every once in a while? Like maybe the air conditioner makes some random shrieking noise, but it only happens a couple times per week. When it happens, you hate it and you push buttons and turn knobs to make it stop, but nothing works except for turning the air conditioner off but once you turn it on again, it's there again, and then the sound just goes away by itself. And you're happy because everything is working normally again, but you're frustrated because you know that if you were take the car in to the shop that the mechanics wouldn't be able to hear the sound and so they wouldn't know how to fix it and so you secretly wish the sound would come back and stay so you could get it fixed...but it doesn't, it just comes and goes as it pleases.

Well this morning, I wanted to hold on to the frustrations even though they had dissipated. I wanted to latch onto them, keep them close to me so that I could share it with friends in hopes of getting some kind of resolution. If I thought about it enough, I could conjure up some semblance of the angst, but it lacked the visceral, icicle-through-the-heart impact of the real thing. And after a couple attempts to hold on to the fake plastic version, I realized what I was doing and just let it go.

And then I decided to blog about it.

Enjoy.