The Reckoning

My brain processes the world through sight and emotional connections. I believe something exists solely based on what I see in front of me and those things that solicit a strong emotional connection for me.

Shortly before I made my list, I made the decision to leave my church. The decision was partly that I didn’t feel at home within the church I was attending but even more so what I had come to realize was that church had become a habit. I was dutifully attending church every Sunday and occasionally doing churchy things during the week. I grew up in the church. So I’m familiar with the Bible stories and the bulleted, friendly sermons and the hymnals. But in the end all of it had kept me from the truth: I could not see God.

And I knew that if God existed, this habit of mine was doing nothing for me or him.

So I entered a new world. It was one where church didn’t exist and one where I wasn’t being held accountable by anybody or held responsible for anything. And I’ll freely admit that I loved it very much.

While I enjoyed living without the chains to a God I could not see, I still did not like myself. I began to feel frustrated and alone.  Trying to pursue a life where I followed all the rules laid out by the church led me to a feeling of disconnect with God. But living a life free of those rules led me to a path of loneliness without God. Where was the middle ground?

I decided that I was the problem. I needed to fix myself and get back to God later. So I made my list. I decided to focus on making myself a better self, a better friend, a better person. The original intent with the blog was to set goals for myself and chronicle my journey in attaining them. As a result I've established the mindset of continuously seeking forms of self-improvement; to never be content with where I am. In that sense, I feel the goal has been nearly satisfied. But greater things have resulted that I never thought I could directly link back to these intentions.

God placed some really pesky, persistent people in my life. They offered me nothing but simple love and a willingness to indulge my doubts. Through them I was consistently reminded of God’s existence simply through their refusal to let me go. It’s because of them that I saw what I had been looking for, the proof that I needed.

I am slowly removing myself from an equation that I cannot solve because I believe that no equation exists. Through this process God has begun a work of enlightenment that seemed so distant before.

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“Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things…A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it. God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality.” - A.W. Tozer