fall(ing) reflections
I've never been one to post about God, talk about God, think about God... For those of you following me on Instagram, you might have seen that I made a post today about LEAF-ing live through God, and if it were a couple of weeks ago I would never have even thought about posting something like that. I have never ever mentioned God in any of my posts before unless it was to talk about my doubts and insecurities. I've never felt secure and safe in my faith and I always had questions upon questions about the entire concept of religion. It's motivated me to take a freshman seminar about the psychology of religion and that class has done anything but strengthen my faith. According to Freud religion is an illusion created because we are too weak to live life in its anonymity and lack of knowledge. Jung meanwhile says that it's a wonderful myth we've created as a collective conscious to deal with the world with the knowledge that we have as we use our projections and deal with our shadows as they are.
God to me was always so fake. If I'm being brutally honest, I never really wanted to believe. God seemed like something that weak people used as a crutch because the world around them was too much so they needed a higher power to handle what we as humans could not. It's mean and unjustified and I was and am fully aware of that, but it was hard to reconcile something that contradicted with so much logic and evidence and say that it could be JUST be corroborated by faith. I hated it when people told me that I just had to have faith.
Until I started crying.
Yesterday when I was at Fall Retreat, I couldn't stop crying. I was talking about the racial injustices happening in the world and how much I hated the apathy for life and I started bawling. The tears streamed down my face as I hastily wiped them up with the sleeves of my sweater. I was gross and all hiccup-y and yet I couldn't bring myself to stop shaking with anger and sadness in front of 2 people I had met only a week or two before yesterday. It was crazy. I had never cried about this. Yeah I've been on the verge of tears (seeing as how I'm a sympathetic crier) but I've never let myself succumb to my tears and this demonstration of weakness. It was so absurd to me. I had no reason to be this upset. I wasn't racially connected to these tragedies, my direct family hadn't been affected, and my friends were all safe and sound. But something in me broke inside every time I heard someone's wife, husband, father, daughter, etc... died. A life had been lost and yet the world chugged onwards as if another ant had been stepped on by accident. But I had never cried.
Yet yesterday was different than the rest. Earlier that day (I think) God gave me a heart during an activity and said that I would take this heart out into the world and help those around me. At the time I thought I was just talking to myself because I desperately wanted to hear something because I had never talked to God (as far as I knew). But later when we were talking about our racial tensions and injustices in the world, I couldn't stop my heart from crying out for each and every story cut short and each and every future untold now.
I'm going to try.
I'm going to try to bring myself to faith again. It was hard for the past couple of years because I was suffocated by my religion and the expectations shoved on me as the pastor's daughter. It wasn't anybody's fault - it was really how I saw it. I was overly conscious that I was judged for every little thing because I was the PK. Instead of talking to God, I let myself resent Him for making it so hard for me to have confidence in my voice and in my actions. I overanalyzed everything and didn't let myself be a child who made mistakes. I made myself seem perfect and in that I lost a lot of chances to express myself and for that I resented Him, when it wasn't His fault to begin with. I just needed something to blame and when I shut my ears to God, it was easy to say it was because of Him. I was a coward. But now I'm slowly becoming more ready.
I'm not fully at that place to accept God as my Savior. But I am at a place where I am willing and slowly able to approach him as my Father and the love of my life. It'll be hard... so hard to let go of the worldly temptations, but that's okay. No Christian is perfect and God knows that, yet He loves us anyway and I think that's beautiful. Where else can you experience such unconditional love and acceptance?
AACF Family!!