Many Sleepless Nights

Writing is humiliating.

Not just poor writing, I opine, but ANY writing.

Why?

Because putting words down, whether for private or public viewing, immortalizes the thoughts you were thinking-- carves in stone who you were in that moment-- and creates a benchmark against which to look back and measure your foolishness.

Rare is the person who looks at a photo of themself in middle school and thinks, "Dang, I was cool."

Rare the thirty-year-old who thinks of their twenty-year-old self and confidently says, "I sure knew what I was talking about back then."

Based on this, I usually assume that sixty-year-old me will think current me is an asshole.

("She thought she was so edgy, swearing in a blog post. She was so concerned with her own righteousness, considering whether to leave it in or not. She spent twenty minutes writing one sentence in the hopes that someone would read it and think she was a Cool, Deep Genius. What a dummy that kid was.")

So it is with some trepidation that I make a spontaneous return to this blog. Is what I want to say important? Will it impact anything-- is it even worth sharing? Will I think the same things decades from now, or will I be a completely different person who looks backwards with amused pity? 

I have been thinking a lot lately. Thinking thinking thinking thinking thinking. It is often difficult for me to sleep at night because I am turning things over and over in my mind. Part of this is obsessive rumination, a symptom of OCD. On second thought, it is probably mostly obsessive rumination, considering that the content of these late-night thoughts align with my primary OCD theme (moral perfection and sinfulness).

I've struggled with rumination for many years. At one point in high school, I was so completely and agonizingly consumed by my inner world that I failed every class. Rumination is no stranger to me.

But today, something felt different.

I had a long commute home and occupied it-- of course-- pondering existential and ethical questions. "Who is God? Is God good... or a tyrant? Is He "just," and what does that mean? How can the Old Testament God also be Jesus? Who does God love? Who does God not love? Does God love people of other religions? Will He act on that love by somehow mercifully uniting people from other religions with Himself in the afterlife?"

For over a decade, the main motivator of a vast number of my decisions has been, "Will I go to hell if I do 'X,' think 'Y,' or believe 'Z?'"

Today I found myself asking a different question: "If I knew for certain that hell was not an option for me, would I still want to follow Jesus?"

If I were either a) so confident in Jesus' covering of grace over me that I believed my eternal destiny was irrevocably secure, or b) if the threat of punishment by eternal conscious torment had never been a factor in my faith at all, would I still be interested in Christianity? If I were not desperately trying to avoid the pain of hell, would religion have any appeal for me?

What about the alternative: if there were neither carrot nor stick, if glorious eternal reward in the form of heaven were not proffered or even mentioned in the Christian faith, would the example of Jesus' life in the gospels be enough to compel me to follow his way?

Most of my life, the answer has been no. If it were somehow revealed to me that there is no afterlife-- no punishment to avoid, no reward to seek-- I would have said, "Phew. I can finally stop following all these rules!"

Today I felt like the answer was tipping towards Yes. 

In the midst of my Jacobean mental struggles, a persistent seed seems to be growing: the idea that God might be better than I have always thought. 

Jesus was chastised for eating with sinners, and he in turn chastised the Pharisees who idolized rules and righteousness. Maybe-- just maybe-- JUST MAYBE-- that really is who he is. A good God, who became human, who KNOWS who we are, what we are like, and what we long for.

It was not that long ago that I wasn't able to conceive of an actually good God, someone I might choose of my own free will to follow, not out of fear of punishment. These days I can, at least, conceive of it. I can catch a whiff of it-- of something truly worthy of worship. It's not a lot, but it's more than I've ever had before.

So I got out of bed, where I had been thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, to put these words down on "paper," to mark a moment that feels new and exciting and hopeful. I hope that when sixty-year-old me looks back on this, she will not be embarrassed or pitying. I hope that she remembers this feeling I have now and says, "That was just the beginning. Better and more beautiful things are still to come."

Photo credit: Brenda Colthorp