Who I Am

A lot of the things I post here have their beginnings in my rambling thoughts as I clean.
I should clean more often.

I have been undergoing an enormous amount of stress in the last few days and weeks trying to figure out who I am. I have felt so beat up and bruised by life because people keep coming up to me and blasting me for these things that they see in me - some of which I don't see myself. And I spend a lot of mental effort having a pity party and making myself think of the answers - which of course works out brilliantly well.

I have come to recognize the fact that I don't have anything that I am grounded in. To put it as I did to Katie Scrafford the other day, I feel like events that happen to you should pass through you... And as they come up against the core of who you are, it is that which affects and changes you.
But I have made my core to be very, very small. It is nigh impossible for an experience to touch me deeply. I don't allow myself to dwell on any one thing for too long. I don't spend time in though or in prayer about things that have happened to me, for I am constantly looking forward. I don't let things mean enough to me - or risk enough - that they can truly touch me at the core of my being.

And this has driven me crazy! I have felt so direction-less and so out of whack amongs my peers, so passionate about their lives and what they are doing and what they are accomplishing for God. And I look at everything in my life and I see how it only points back to myself.
Call that what you will, but I'll settle for SIN.

And I don't necessarily know how to fix this. I know that of course I should be grounded and rooted in God and that He should determine my identity and that I should Love Him with everything I am.

But let's be honest folks, who really knows exactly what that looks like? Jesus says "take up your cross, sell everything you have, leave everything behind and follow me!"
What is my cross? If I am leaving something behind, what am I headed towards? Not that I have to know my future, but I don't think that I have the faith enough to give up everything and seek only Him.
But even if I did, what does that mean? Monastic life? Or can it in fact mean finishing out school here at Houghton with the double major that I have and going out into the "world" to "do something with my life".


The HC Viewbook that is next to my bed says "to find your place in the world, start in a place that honors the search."

There is a trend at this point in history to start "your place in the world" a lot earlier in life than at any other time before. Think about it: athletes go pro out of high school, people skip their master's degrees to get a Ph.D., students choose their major straight out of high school in nhopes that they'll make their childhood dream their lifelong path. And for some paths, you must do that.

But so much of life doesn't work out that way. We don't often acknowledge the fact that you really have no certainty to what you are going to be doing in life. One of the verses that is super-convicting for me right now is from James 4:
"Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. hwat is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.""
Granted, I am in such an uncertain state that I don't know what I'm going to be doing, and I certainly don't really make plans to do it. But I have felt the pressure lately to know what MY plans should be in case God doesn't really care enough to make His known to me. Not to mention that I SUCK at listening for God's voice in my life, so I wouldn't really know His plan if it came up and hit me in the face.

But I think, as at so many other times in my life, I have become too centered on right now (did I really just say that?) and thus too impatient. The profound thought came to me while cleaning: College is supposed to be where you start figuring these things out about life!
I have been so upset and so frustrated about feeling directionless and lost, that I have lost sight of hte fact that part of the reason I am here is because I don't know what my life is going to be about yet and I need to start to figure it out. Isn't that one of the points of coming to college? Isn't it supposed to be about the search, and not just a single step in the path of some larger plan that you already set out before yourself?
Granted, I know it is only a single step for some people, but that is not the case for me.

So, if you read this and feel so inclined, pray for my patience. Yes, I do need direction. Yes, I do need to spend more time listening for God's voice and building a closer relationship with Him. Yes, I do need to be grounded and rooted in Him instead of whatever single event I happen to be engaged in at the current moment. But my request right now is that you pray that I will have the patience to sit back and let Him work, instead of wresting control of my own life and trying to force things to fit on my own.

And probably screwing them up in the process... And then being really stressed about it.

Question of the Night

When
Why
How
Did I become everything I hated?

When
Why
How
Did I become so shallow?

When
Why
How
Did I become completely disconnected?

When
Why
How
Did I become so callous and uncaring?

When
Why
How
Did I become so empty?

When
Why
How
Did I become a machine?

When
Why
How
Did I become so confused?

When
Why
How
Did I become so stretched?

When
Why
How
Did I become self-worthless?

When
Why
How
Did I become self-all-important?

When
Why
How
Did I become so rootless?

When
Why
How
Did I become so fruitless?

When
Why
How
Did I become so distant?

When
Why
How
Did I become such a crappy friend?

When
Why
How
Did I become not even a friend at all?

When
Why
How
Do I change?

When?

Why?

How?

Extrovert Stamina

So at Houghton we have this required course called First Year Introduction, which is really just this gerneral college student information course, and for the large part a waste of time. I mean, there's value to a lot fo the information we get in it, but I feel like it's not worth what goes into it.

Anyways, among the 30 or so upperclassmen student leaders for F.Y.I. next year are my roommate and my girlfriend, so I get to hear pretty much all about what they do for trianing and such. They recently took the Meiers-Briggs (or whatever it is) personality test, which led to some pretty interesting conversations, not the least of which was her realization that we are completely opposite... I am a ENF-P and she is a ITF-J.

Really though this is mostly about my introspection and trying to figure out the many parts of my identity that I am so confused and lost about what to do with. One of these is the part of me that I have always treasured that has me bouncing around from person to person and group to group, always interacting with tons of people and not having one single group of friends to really call my own.

In high school this was borne out of the fact that I had a large number of very close friends that were based in very different groups, and I went from group to group to be with those individual people.

Now, it's based off of me just being so accustomed to bouncing from group to group that it's what I do naturally. And I have come to realize that I don't really know how I feel about this.

My roommate considers himself an introvert - I have long known that he is not one at all. For instance, last year when he was gone during MayTerm I was something of a social introvert, because I didn't really want to be at meals or around large groups of people without him there... I realize that most of you won't believe this at all, but it was true. He also has aquired himself a harem - not really, but we did just have a conversation about the 8 people he is married to, by Houghton standards.

So I wonder why he considers himself an introvert. But upon thinking along these lines as I was cleaning tonight, I decided it was an issue of stamina. I think that he considers himself an introvert because he spends a lot of time alone in our room, or maybe talking with someone else on the floor. I, on the other hand, still view my room as for the most part just a place to sleep (I left this morning for my 8 A.M. class and didn't get back until 10:30 P.M.).

And with all this going on, I have still noted to myself several times in the last semester that he simply seems to have so much more people energy than I have. and that doesn't make sense to either of us, and I don't know that he would even believe it.

But the realization I came to is that the real difference between us is that he takes time to "recharge" as it were, while I am constantly surrounded by other people. I can't really think of a time during the day where I am deliberately alone, or deliberately take time to think about my life and how I need to relate to other people.

Which is related to how I think that I have nothing that is the kind of guiding force in my life, but that's a longer story for another day.

But it has become second nature for me to always go looking for people. And because of this, I know an incredible amount of people on campus... There are probably less than ten other people on campus that can claim the same amount of people that I know. So it's all too easy to just go out and see someone and stop and have a conversation with them.

But because of the way that I have set my life up, I don't really have anything to offer people beyond a quick-fix. I can make them smile and laugh, or offer a hug and a word of encouragement, but beyond maybe three people I just don't have the ability to care / remember / consciously think about more than one or two people on anything but a surface level.

Because I'm so constantly surrounded.
And never alone.

As Dr. Bressler pointed out to me, I have such tight control over how I spend my time that I have left absolutely no room for God to work in my life.

So, I really need prayer.
Not only that I can begin to understand my identity in Him, but that He wil give me the strength to change to who I need to be, and also that He will give me the wisdom to know how to pass my time in His service, and not in my own.
And that I can have the strength to once in a while be alone.

Nouwen and I

I have recently become a determinist, I think. At least, I find much more freedom and joy in the thoughts of life as a determinist who believes that the only free will can be the free will out of God's will and into sin. It really is a much more beautiful system that way.

The words that I just read from Henri Nouwen pretty much describe my life exactly as it is right now:

"But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to face directly our own condition in all its beauty as well as its misery. When we are not afraid to enter into our own center and concentrate on the stirrings of our soul, we come to know that being alive means being loved. This experience tells us that we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our life is a gift, and that we can only make others free because we are set free by Him whose heart is greater than ours. When we have found the anchor places for our lives in our own center, we can be free to let others enter into the space created for them and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song, and speak their own language without fear. Then our presence is no longer threatening and demanding but inviting and liberating."

Mostly - as it was so very true in high school, for those of you that knew me then - I am just incredibly scared of knowing myself, for as Nouwen wrote a few pages earlier, the wound of my loneliness does indeed run deep.

But if I can't enter into it on my own and learn from it, I can't ever expect it to change or to heal.