a kingdom built of seeds

Your whole person was formed to be someone specific—a faithful follower, a committed Christian, on fire for God. You look at all the words, models, and messages now; they appear so vastly different from here, on the outside, than from there, on the inside. There was the message but only one way to live it, to carry it out. This universal message of God’s love becomes so small and narrow, shrunk down to fit a single expression, a circumscribed way. 

It was all you knew. A childhood and youth and young-adulthood heavy with guilt over every misstep.

Again, was it conscience and conviction, or control and conditioning? Now you don’t know. What was real, what was reared? Context is everything. Almost. Everything is subjective and conditional. Almost. What truth lies beyond or behind or beneath the layers of humanness and interpretation, of enculturation and socialization? However we see the world, it’s through a lens. No vision is undiluted or unpolluted. God—our vision of God—is always damaged. Always.

Nearly four and a half years later and still you are nowhere. You feel you are not one step closer to being any closer to who or what you once were. Or closer to the opposite—different, changed, new. Neither here nor there. In the in-between. Living in monochrome gray. This unrelenting tension. You wonder if you’ll ever escape. Not that you ever want to, if you’re being honest. You want to live in the middle of everything, moving along the spectrum of experience. You want to see the world through others’ eyes. You want to know what it’s like to be someone else, though of course you never will. 

Here you are unmoved and unmoving, sitting with your emotions, your history, your upbringing, your childhood and subsequent years. All the old messages, the expectations, the one you were supposed to be but are not, and will probably never become. You grieve this. You can’t help it. No matter how much you are not that person, and do not want to become that person, it is still a loss, even a source of suffering. In losing them you are left wondering who you are now.

At least back there there was a comfortable familiarity, faith like a weighted blanket helping you sleep at night, a security in holding a certain line and biding your time until eternity, in conformity, in taking someone else’s word for it. Then the paper walls fall and the false floor gives way. You know nothing, not who you are nor who you want to be. 

It’s not that you asked for this, or chose it; it asked for you, chose you, called out from the darkness, beckoning while you were perfectly contented within the light. (Or were you?) 

It’s as Jesus says, but in a surprising, roundabout way. “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” Is this darkness a part of that choosing? Must it mean this spiritual separation and homelessness? Something in you bleeds (in all of us). “Write with that blood,” Annie Dillard says. You must write out your life with that blood. You ask: “But isn’t it time to move on? To choose? To leave this place?” Haven’t you somewhere else to go, someone else to be? Or is this your lot and portion—a life lived in the middle, in the in-between, neither here nor there. 

Here is the darkness you have almost grown to love. You do not know when it is time to leave, or if it ever will be.

“Keep at it, keep speaking into the darkness, and even if nothing comes, speak again and then again,” said Buechner.

You must own this, your place in the night.