A Sigh, A Complaint

I want to complain a little bit. I'm not very good at that, so we'll see how it goes.

Way back long ago when I first discovered how hard it was for me to talk, I blamed it on the fact that all I knew how to do, all I wanted to do, was to reach down into other people's guts, and basically no one appreciated that.

It's amazing how accurate that still strikes me today, even though I've gone through layers of dismantling the untruths in that. I struggled to talk because of other reasons too: and the two biggest were my pride and the degree to which I suppressed my emotions. There's probably no separating those two things, at least not for me.

As I look back through mental snapshots of my spiritual formation, I see things like learning to chit chat, realizing the value of a trip to the mall or a museum for the sake of passing time among people, the joy of understanding movie references, and other little signs of love I picked up from being part of the human race. Silent retreats and the profundity of discovering prayer? Yeah, sure, but that's the easy stuff. To really open my heart to people in a group of people: that stuff was downright miraculous, transformative and healing.

Ok, wait. I'm supposed to be complaining.

I'm still the person who really only feels designed to reach down into people's guts and pull up. Maybe the way I want to complain is to God for designing me this way. I get myself into this wanting-to-complain spot not infrequently. First of all, if I do something, I want to be good at it. But I've learned this is not a something that I get to direct, or a talent I can choose to hone. Other people's guts, after all, are holy ground. One may not go there by the force of one's own will. There's obviously quite a bit about this I don't get yet.

However, secondly, I do sometimes find that I am in the midst of someone's guts when I didn't realize I had gotten there. And I have learned that it is really, really hard for people to respond to this sort of thing without a strong emotion. People's strong emotions tend to freak me out, mostly because I'm always so surprised and bewildered by the experience. I'm learning I have this ability to make people really upset. It's not even, I think, so much that *I* upset them as they are upset by what is getting pulled out of them. Subsequently, people seem to get to feeling either angry, guilty, impotent, or (perhaps scariest of all) deeply moved, all of which does not make people rush to embrace me and cry: "Please! Pull more of my guts out cuz I love feeling all of this confusing inner turmoil!"

But you know what? I'm just a normal person, and I'd love to have normal friendships that go beyond stupid fluff, though I respect the value of stupid fluff. I mean, like everyone, I just want to be natural and at ease and be so with others where that works.

Just got a teeny, tiny hint of despair wafting up in that department. Hope is wearing thin.

But here are a few things I'm learning: God is calling me to a prophetic life. It's the normal call of a Christian, but there's something else there, too. That explains why God has been after my mouth since my young adulthood. Also, God is calling me to live in faith. This faith is not the intellectual thing about a list beliefs. This is about seeing and speaking forth that which is not yet seen with physical eyes. This has a lot to do with invisible realities.

A little aside on this point: This morning as I was praying I was presenting some stuff to God, some struggles, and admitting that I couldn't tell what the source of the struggle was. I laid out the options I could think of. I prayed on, and it came to my mind that I recently had a very small business interaction with someone I discovered was quite involved in the occult. This was via computer, and in this business I have an avatar of Pope Francis for my account. The way it occurred to me was this: I say little prayers of blessing on people randomly throughout my day, true. Well, people who are dedicated to evil are going to do the same, especially when they see the Pope smiling at them. So I prayed against any hexes or curses that may have come my way, and suddenly the struggle I had presented to God became so easy to understand, and was wiped away as easily as dust.

Inside, this kind of thing gives me a sense of understanding and confidence. Socially, it is just one more thing I scratch off my list of casual conversation over non-existent tea with my non-existent friends.

So I blog instead, since writing is what I have always done.

C'est la vie.

I know I am not stuck in a bleak spot. I know I am before, in time, something good and significant. I know these things by faith. I just don't really know how to like being here. (There, I think that sounds like a complaint, now. And now I will tell myself to buck up, because being able to like things is not all that important.)