First Breath

I will probably regret posting this, but so be it. I can't hold it in because the joy in my soul is tangible, even as much as it might seem to some of you that I have lost my way. Dawn is rising. I am at a place where I need no lectures on the faithfulness of God. I have been around that block, the scenery is so familiar, but it is no longer home, nor real, to me. And I, for one, find no despair in that notion, instead I find healing, a drawing in to something I have carried in the depths of me for so very long. It is in the God I have tried to summon through Christianity that I find despair. This change of focus sets me free. It releases me from a lifetime of unrealistic expectations that have felt to be dirt on my coffin, suffocating me. Today, I breathe.

This time of year, the week between Christmas and New Years, always finds me dark and melancholy and introspective. I have come to anticipate it, even look forward to it in all it's depressiveness, for it often brings me insight that I crave the rest of the year. It is my time to be me, to look inside and not fear what I might see. To take the time to process what I do not have time for any other day of the year.

This week between also brings my birthday, which, in fact, is not a cause for sadness. I look forward to it, for as they say, the alternative is worse. Truly, but it does probably explain the inwardness that comes. So each year at Christmas I feel a maturing that I don't expect. This year has been enormous for me in the maturity department, and I suppose that is why there have been more growing pains for me this Christmas, because I lost it like never before. I have had to stretch and learn in painful ways this year, sometimes afraid I will blow my stitching and come apart completely.

After everyone left Christmas eve, we still had many Christmas duties to attend to: get the kids to bed, do the dishes, and all those other things that come to parents with this holiday, and it blew my gasket. I had dealt with some family conflicts earlier in the day, and although they were small in and of themselves, they highlighted something that had been building in me for months: an overwhelming sense of failure. It has been eating away at my psyche, my heart and soul.

Your first instinct will be to chide me, to tell me all the ways in which I have succeeded, all the failures which are not my fault, or that I could not have prevented. Let me be clear, I don't take these burdens on myself as ways in which I personally have failed (though in some situations one could argue that I could have done more), but ways in which my God has failed me...and not even me, but people who are so important to me. I truly cannot share all the details, for it would be exposing private matters. However, I count 8 major failures in one year, involving death, life changing events, and the breakdown of significant relationships, not just mine, but between people I love. Why will God not solve these things? Christmas for me brought something to the surface, maybe the reason I have struggled so these last years.

Christmas eve night found me wandering the neighborhood in two feet of snow in my pajamas at 1 AM Crying, no, sobbing and wailing for all that is lost and all that has failed this year. For all the ways I have failed to contribute in meaningful ways to situations beyond my control. For all the ways God has not come through in the sense that my evangelical self would normally believe him to.

I have found three things in this night of my heaviest weeping in many years. One, God is so much more than I could ever imagine, for he is in the air and the trees and the light and the earth, the blood in our veins and the oxygen in our lungs. Two, God is not a vending machine somewhere outside me that I can seek solutions from. Three, I have failed at one thing that tears at my heart, one thing that I dream I one day will succeed where God has apparently failed, the thing that keeps me awake at night.

Today I can't help but believe that God is each of us, collectively we are God. We are what has the ability to change things, even one small thing, or many immense things. If God is nothing but good, then he cannot exist, for there are many crying out to him every moment of every day for whom he does nothing to ease their suffering. If God is not nothing but good, then he is not God. For a good God could not turn a deaf ear and a blind eye. So in that, I have failed. I have failed to do my part to be God to the world. In so many and countless ways, but in this one way that has settled in my heart and that rips my soul to shreds every night as I try to sleep. This way that haunts my dreams and shakes me to the core at least once each day.

Common sense would say "Do not dwell on what you cannot change". I would say "Can't I?"

Today I know that when I cry out to God, I cry out to that which is good and strong and deep within me, the power to endure, the ability to act, and the wisdom to move forward. I cannot blame God for failure that is not his to own. And this brings an unraveling of chains that have bound me.

I know I cannot walk away from the idea of God, it is in my dna, in my atoms and electrons. I can, however, walk away from a God whom I expect anything from that I myself have failed to participate in. God is in my breath, in my humanness. He is in his humanness in my humanness, and for that I love him. But he does not live where we think he lives, he lives in the love, in the ligaments in each of us that moves us to do something kind, loving, meaningful. He lives in our learning to be excellent to each other, and the ways we develop his nature in our nurture.

This is not my last word on the subject, just my word for today. And today, I am not sure I still am able to cling to any shreds of that god which I have mostly left behind and still possess any desire to remain among the living. For if God is the God we believe and the world is in the condition it is in, then he has failed. If that damns me to eternal hell, I'm not sure it would be worse than the pain of this life, anyhow. For I sense the suffering and cries that are not heard, and I fade to black and die for the God that does not answer.

And in this admission I have finally reclaimed that elusive final part of myself I have been reaching out towards for many years. The pieces of me that have been scattered far and away but that have been crawling to me, seeking for so long have all come home. Letting go of an impossible notion of a magic God is a freedom that I will soak in for a very long time, and it allows me to reconcile a million conflicts I have struggled to carry for almost 20 years.

And this Christmas day, when I woke, for the first time in all those years, I felt the light inside me brighten rather than dim, as it typically does each day I age and die a little more. Yesterday, in the wee dawn hours as I walked in the snow, I took my first breath as a whole person. It was the morning of my birth.

I will be 38 on Monday and I am finally entering the world of life and light.