This is something I wrote on New Year's Day, 2006. I found it this new year, and could not believe what a difference a year has made. I could not write this anymore. I post it here just to show what my life and my thinking was like a year ago, what it was for years, and how profoundly changed it is now. This was not written for publication, obviously, but since I'm not living it anymore I can publish it without fear:
I’m sitting here alone, in my rented room, high on the second floor of the house. My housemate and her guests were gone all afternoon and came back in a whirl of snowy laughter and left again just as quickly. I’m eating my not-too-bad packaged pad thai, cooked up for my evening meal. I feel as if I’ve spent the whole day cooking, and cleaning up afterward. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. A significant portion of it more than usual, at least. . .
Alone. I’ve been alone all day, since coming home from church. I left early. It’s to be questioned if I really wasn’t alone there either. I went, took in the service, talked to a few people and said the expected “happy new years”. The profound sense of not belonging, not fitting in, finally became overwhelming enough to make me walk out, long before the social hour afterward ended.
The service was jubilant. The church was celebrating those who’d come to Christ in the previous year, and showed a video with highlights of 2005. The worship was exuberant, excited, and many people were dancing uninhibitedly, clearly enjoying God. I watched, the acute pain of feeling like an outsider in the midst of the celebration overridden in moments, but coming back with twisting sharpness just as inevitably. I watched with a smile on my face as Russell and his brother jumped, whirled, and clapped with fists raised in the air, totally abandoned to God’s worship at the front of the church, completely unconscious of what anybody thought. I watched as Megan worshipped God with arms spread outward and a smile of pure joy on her face. I watched as Seth received prayer from a group so large they were jockeying for position to lay hands on him. His hands were upheld and a peaceful smile of bliss was on his face as he received from God. How God must love that, I thought, and the whipping pain of realizing, “I’m not like that,” hit sharp as a fist. Why can’t I be like that? I wonder. How do some people sustain that? Why do some people have such tender hearts? Why do they have no problem allowing God to penetrate them? Why do they so easily bear fruit when I don’t? Hidden and shut away in loneliness and pain, I weep silently and nobody sees. I cry out to God but it seems to make no difference. Hidden from my sight, any prayers for help seem to be met with answers that cause only more pain and don’t bring the solution. Why, I wonder? Why?
And I know the answer is nothing. I don’t know what the answer is. I bear this pain with a silent grimace and cries inside too stifled to be heard or even felt. I buckle under my pain and settle for enduring it because it seems no help is to be found, no answer is to be had, no solution is at hand. Wretched and hopeless endurance of what I feel that I cannot endure is my life. No amount of prayer, no amount of prophecy, no amount of “inner healing” seems to make a difference. I know that the problem lies with my stubborn will and my refusing to allow God in. But even realizing that makes no difference. I can’t overcome it.
I live in pain. My days are spent in misery. I am eaten up with loneliness, with the longing for someone to see me inside as I am and care. I wish that someone could help me. I fear utter abandonment, total loneliness. My social encounters are meaningless and bored. I can’t recall the last real or memorable conversation I had with anyone. Glib exchanges focus on appearing as normal and happy as possible. Never do they dip beneath the surface because my highest value is self-preservation, my worst fear being found out. I keep polite conversations as short as possible, to minimize the length of time I have to make the effort to pretend. I hate parties, groups of people, and conversations where people ask about myself. Which is most of them, since all of us are polite enough to play that game.
Whatever. Even writing this provides no catharsis. I will go to bed alone, in sodden and sullen pain, and wake up in the morning, and go to work at my meaningless job, and come home and go through the routines of eating and cleaning and checking email and talking on the phone and getting ready for bed and going to bed and I’ll get up again the next morning and do it all the same. No light breaks into this darkness, no respite from the pain. Where this will go or I will go nobody knows. Stay tuned.
When I read this now, my only reaction is profound and absolute gratitude to Jesus. He broke in. He changed everything. That's the answer to anyone who wonders why I, or anyone else, would want to live for him?