I went to a movie yesterday. It was the one starting Daniel Radcliff placed in the 1800s. In the film Radcliff is a lawyer told to go to huge old manner house covered in ivy and a layer of dust. I don't really watch horror movies but one thing I've learned is that if you are going to watch one it is always a good idea to be looking where you are not supposed to be looking. Always watch the casual small areas of the screen the dark out of focus places in the backgrounds. These are always the places the demons live, always the places the whispers seem to slither from. They touch you like feathers on your neck, like whispered breath licking your skin. They suggest lightly that there are terrible things out there, things that you do not understand and more, things that know you. Everything you have ever known is less than there actually is. This mystery speaks to us all...we hate it and at the same time love it. It is why millions of Americans pay to have scary creatures and the unknown make them change their change their shorts several times a year.
...It is the kind of fear that makes you rethink what you know and even more, fear what you do not. I understand this fear and at the same time the fascination with the unknown.
Lately I've been feeling the weight of my own failures. There are too many God's to worship. One foot in Heaven and one in Hell and I cannot tell which is which at times. I sometimes feel I am the prodigal who has forgotten his home.
Being forced to live out one's principles I suppose is where life becomes real. When no one else around you cares how you live, the questions that have long sat in silence start to rhythmically ring out against the quiet of your mind. They whisper to you, wondering out loud what you are doing, bringing with them a familiar silence and loneliness that can be addictive. You sit in them and stew in them, then those voices tell you that it doesn't matter, that there are other ways that you ought to try, ways that can “bring life,” said in that reverential way that is both thoughtful and ambiguous. They say you ought to do what you think will make the voices go away, what will fill the dark corners where the whispers echo from. And you want to listen. It is hard to not do so. The darkness is appealing, it offers mystery, that although you may not feel the same curiosity or awe, I do sometimes. I am drawn to it in the right situation. Without a clear voice or face, the unknown murmuring about itself seems a compelling companion.
I do not believe I have believed wrong. But I am saying that taking Jesus at his word is harder when you are not living as an image for others to see. When no one else cares, when the only person watching is you, you find out what you believe. You find out who Jesus is to you.
I feel I am turning into something new here. Brown and earthy, like seed planted in fertile soil. I am not always sure what I am becoming, but I am becoming something, I can feel the scratching of something like wings plastered to my back, the stirring of a soul in cocoon... I am still clay on the potters wheel.
It is a weird place to exist, to know one is changing, but not knowing what was in changing into, it's like infancy all over again. I am learning to speak to myself and God in a language which is honest and yet incomplete, helpless and at the same time wishful.
I know there are dreams, and I know there is goodness. I know I want them both but I often carry them them like water in the palm. It is to easy to see them slip, to look away or one wrong step and they seem to disappear. I carry hope with fear at times, like I'm holding a snow flake that I'm afraid might come to close to hot breath. It is easy to forget the solace in my heart, the hope I have in Jesus, was not placed there by human hands. My control of hope often falls on it's face, to easily distracted by my body and mind's ventures.
I am a beggar in a land at harvest, the continual blessings of God laid out before me and yet I feel like a child at table being told to keep his hands in his lap, it is not yet time. I am told to not listen to the voices that whisper my name, that clamor for my attention, and I believe I should not listen to them. I have listened to them before. They are never what they offer. Yet they beckoning me closer, their desire for me is more relentless than the sea, and my eyes often drift over them like one searching for a horizon.
I believe I am rich beyond knowledge but I know a man with a great credit score is still poor if he cannot access his banks and the stock laid out for him by his Father. An inheritance still in waiting.
Thanks for reading,
-JS
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