A walk in the gardens....

Summer has come. I am feeling the thaw.

Every time I have prayed for a man in my life, for someone to love and share my burdens, I received back the answer that "he will choose me." Meaning, he will pick me and pursue me, and I have little control of when or who that will be.

And so, after months and months of desperate longing, I have reached a place of solace, a cottage of sorts, muffled from the world. I am not whole. God knows I will never be... but that is what God wants, and in the sightless way of my own small heart, I have finally stopped looking. I have made peace with loneliness. I have stopped looking for a savior in anyone other than Christ.

I am far from accepting all of the imperfections of the world, but God is showing me how to continue to love the world despite them. Faith is a long journey -- as my 90-year-old grandfather often says, we never stop growing in faith. I am very new to the road.

Did I mention that my Uncle died? My father's only brother, the last of our bloodline. This is God's impeccable timing. We went to Washington to visit my grandparents and I was worried that it would be our last time seeing them, since they are in their 90s, but instead it was my uncle who passed away. We spent the night at his house -- the next day he was gone. His heart stopped with no warning. Despite the shock of the death, I am somehow unsurprised... when I lost my mother at 12, I prayed for God to always give me the chance to say goodbye to those I love. So far that prayer has been answered.

God knows what death is and what it does to us... yet all things that God makes are good, so death must not be such a horrible thing, and the misery it raises in us must be for a higher purpose, something far greater than we can understand. I am as sure of this as I am of my own name. In all the strange contradictions of my person, I, too, am death, and death is alive in me, and we are siblings, he and I.

And finally, finally, I have reached that place of calm summer nights and long sunsets, where I am happy to be alone. Perhaps not always or in every second... God knows we waver as an ocean... but this is a peace I have found deep within myself, and I can return to it as often as I need. God's gardens are a deep walk through the heart. God's happiness is in valuing all things, and most importantly, in seeing what we have... and accepting that it will be taken away....

But what always, always remains is God's magnanimous love, His awe-inspiring presence, His endless grace and the foundations He has laid in my heart. Even in misery, I am in bliss, for I walk with my true Father and the One who will always love me.

Christ....

It can only be the spirit of Christ who has kept me alive this past year.

So many times have dark thoughts passed through me... so many times I have doubted, tossed and turned, thrown God's gifts away and then driven back to recover what was lost.

I do not think anyone will truly understand what happened to me. Losing my father was not the death of a person. It was the death of myself, the death of an entire future that lived inside of me. Even now, my feet often trip over moments and minutes where I am once again lost and collapsing. Everything I ever thought of myself, everything I ever looked forward to, that I ever expected to have, was struck from me in one fell blow. The only thing that was not taken from me was God.

And now that the ocean is calming, that a new season is beginning, I can see exactly the barren landscape that I am leaving behind. I can see the winter that God turned into a garden; the dormant flowers that still found enough Light to bloom. I can see the hopeless, spiraling tunnels where I wandered indefinitely in search of what I had lost, knowing I would never find it again, not in this life and who knows what awaits in Heaven. I have been walking a hellscape with Christ at my side. How do I ever explain to an atheist what faith has done to me? It has built me anew. It has made me more of who I am, and more of what He is, and more of what God wants me to be.

And my longings, my desires, my painful and sacrificial love of God... it is Christ. It is Christ who loves me so much that He gave me some of His grace, some of His magnanimous spirit, to keep me alive. To keep me from descending into a realm where I might have been lost forever. That is where my desires arise from, my longing to serve, my need to submit to God. It does not come from myself. It comes from Christ, who has found space in my heart to live through me -- to save me.

I am finally beginning to understand that Christ never died. He is next to all of us, inside of us, living with us and suffering with us. Christ carried my cross for the past two years and I have been lifted by His unconquerable heart. I have done nothing but cry and complain. I am so weak, so far from what I want to be for God, and yet exactly what God has made. Any beauty that has come out of me these past two years -- beauty in verse, in life, in word and in love -- has come purely from the Spirit of my Lord and Father.

God, thank you for being my family. Thank you for giving me Your Son. Although the tides are changing, I pray only that I may continue to be your daughter, and that wherever these new fields take me, it will always be in greater service to Your Will.

An Orphan with God

I am a tiny sapling tree and every time we talk about God, I grow a little bit more. Thank you all for sharing your faith with me. :)

Since I became an orphan, an amazing transformation has happened in my life. I am now fearless. Psychologists say that our relationships with our parents form the majority of our identities, and wow, is that ever true. How many people's lives have been ruined by a bad relationship with a mother or father? Well, now my only parent is God, and I have been forced to become who I have always wanted to be.

Before my dad died, my greatest fear was that I would not be strong enough to carry out God's will. I was very emotionally dependent on my father. Everything in my life revolved around him because we had so much in common. We were both writers, both musicians, both deep thinkers in our different ways. His atheism was like a sliver in my side; it caused me to doubt my faith, to make me question what I believed, and whether or not I was strong enough to share my spiritual experiences with the world. Also, fear of his death held me back. I didn't want to travel or leave home because I was afraid of losing precious time with him. Perhaps very deep in my heart, I always knew that he was going to die.

I spoke to God a lot about it... I was encroaching on 20 and I still hadn't progressed enough on my spiritual path. I hadn't reached where I needed to be. I felt like I was floating in a stagnant pool; life was too comfortable and I didn't know how to take the next step. I thought... maybe I am too weak to serve the world. Maybe this is all just a wonderful, fantastical dream, and one day I will be on the other side of the hill and realize that I have lost my chance. When I thought of that, I felt a deep, wallowing despair.

And then my father died, my last surviving parent, and I realized that I had only two choices: sink or swim. I was faced with needing to live on my own and provide for myself, and at the time I didn't even have a job. My father was thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, and to be honest, I still don't know if we will lose this house or not. I had to drop out of school and I thought I would never be able to continue with my education. My vision of the future was erased. Everything changed.

But even as I was standing next to my father's death bed, there was joy in my heart... because I know God very well. Even though everything was ripped away from me, and my life had completely changed, I was finally back on my spiritual path. I knew that if I could handle this, I would be fearless. I would be able to conquer the world. If I could learn to swim by diving into a shark pool, then I could easily tread in the deepest waters. My father's death was God's greatest sign to me. God was saying that my prayers had been heard, and that yes, I was strong enough. My path was exactly what I thought it would be.

Everything since my father's death has been a trial of faith. The jobs I've been able to find in this harsh economy, the scholarship I received to finish college, the blatant signs from God that have shown up on my doorstep... my entire life is one long unfolding miracle. Every day my faith is stronger. I've always known God, and yet now I know God in a different way. Before, I knew the truth of unity, and God's presence in my heart. Now, I can see the power of prayer, and how God works through the hands and feet of other believers. Now I can experience it for myself. I don't say God is my Father because of what we learn in church. I say God is my Father because He is. Because he provides for me as a Father, guides me as a Father, pulls me from the fire and brings me peace. I gave up my parents that I might have this relationship with God, and it is worth it. It is so very, very worth it.

I was once reborn in God... and with my father's death, I am now made new again. I am a child, but I am unafraid of the world. God's passion lives inside of me. I wish I could live every day in silence, sitting in my back yard and listening to God. If I died tomorrow, I know it would be with peace in my heart, having lived a life full of meaning and revelation. We are all so blessed to be here. We are so blessed to be alive.

All of the structures of man,
founded on nothing.

We live in denial of God's purpose, even as we undeniably live it.

We are strangers to ourselves, orphans of existence, defined by what we are lacking, blind to what we have, confused and lost in a changing world where our equilibrium must be founded on willpower alone.

Man is confused because we lie to ourselves. We look away from the only truth in life, the only experience that is real, the only thing we cannot confront. We seek truth and yet run from it, because to find truth, to find the real meaning of existence, we must confront our own mortality.

Once we force ourselves to become aware of death... once we make ourselves stare at it, look it in the face, meditate on it, and see it in ourselves... once we make a commitment to dying, everything becomes much more clear. The illusions we create for ourselves, the structures, the ideas, the debates, the ups and downs of history and current events, all fall to nothing. None of this matters. Nothing but the state of our hearts.

Because we never know when it is our time. Only the lucky ones die slowly. We must be prepared, because whatever comes after death will be as real as what we see around us now, more real, more vivid, and by the time we reach that point, it will be too late to change anything.

This life is very real. The consequences of this life are very real. Stop living in the illusion of tomorrow. Wake up. Now is the only time we have to change.

Death

Most of the meaningful things in life revolve around death; as though there is some mysterious unknown, some world beyond the veil that we cannot touch. It is in that search that we find religion. We find science, progression, the search for knowledge and improvement which is really the search for immortality. What is this holy grail of mankind, passed down from our oldest forefathers, that drives men and women alike to the brink of madness? Seeking to change the world, seeking to open hearts and open minds, to persuade opinions and prove theorems... for what reason? To be remembered? To somehow find a meaning in the empty existence that we call life?

Mayhap it is in death that we find value. We realize the importance of trivial things. Yet everything that we know about life leads us to seek a greater meaning - all our scientific answers confuse us, our religious ideologies are limited and empty of understanding. We seek answers in our friends, our family, the trusted officials of our society and the people that live within it. We even seek answers within ourselves. Some are so desperate that they travel the world in hope of an answer to the riddle; as though an explanation for an entire universe would exist in one lonely, outcast planet.

What is it about humanity that makes us search for meaning? Is it because there is pain, and a deep seated mental structure has taught us that all pain must be for a reason? What if a person was devoid of emotions - would they continue to seek a meaning in life? Would they even find it in themselves to wonder, vaguely, why are we here? Perhaps it is the wrong question - perhaps it is more simple. As simple as 'why am I'? It's that word again, "I", and what happens to the "I" when the body disappears. Have we seen any evidence that something happens at all? Have we felt it within ourselves?

And then I suppose one is to realize that the world is only real from the inside out. We experience the world first and foremost within ourselves - which can then perceive the outside environment. But if it was not for our own perceptions, who knows what the outside environment would truly be.

There is a greater pain than loneliness. It is in not knowing the answer to the only question in this world that has meaning, to every individual soul, to every nation of past, present and future, in every cycle of human life. And yet it cannot be answered; not directly. It is the question of death; of what happens after, and what happens to the "I."

Which, in turn, is our individual need for immortality.

If not the immortality of ourselves, then we wish for the immortality of our loved ones, for those we hold dear and those we selfishly bond to throughout the struggle of life. For there is no greater pain than death - the not knowing, the soul searching, this giant game of hide and seek. And so science carries on, filled with its ranks upon ranks of brilliant minds, seeking to answer the unanswerable question, both for themselves and for the whole world. And so religion carries on, comforting the hearts of the broken, structuring the societies of yesterday and the generations of tomorrow.

And here, the lonely traveler walks on... seeking answers to questions until he loses the question in and of itself.

Perhaps we are living the answer?

Perhaps we are not.