Heroes from the west
We don’t know you, we know best
This is not a test
You treat me like I’m blind
– Jars of Clay, “Light Gives Heat“
I don’t think I’m going to go to Nicaragua this year.
I’m feeling nothing. The insights I may have grasped at in all the previous years have left and been replaced by frustrations.
That, alone, frustrates me, that I think I should go or not go based on feeling or insight, instead of obedience.I remember hearing one woman ask how she might be blessed by going on a trip and I was repulsed, wondering if that’s all it had become, just one more way for us to seek more blessings when we had so much already.
It’s too hard to strip out my Western culture. I don’t understand why they can’t get it to work. Why they keep having the same problems, and never seem to grab onto the solutions or help we leave. It should be so simple, and my compassion struggles to live in a growing tide of judgement.
When did I start using the word “they”?
For years, the same problems, only different versions, and our foreign attempts to help that never stick and are never understood, and only seem to add confusion. And I’m burned out. I don’t want to go back for another round.
I’m tired of living off of the idea that God is going to use all the broken mess and make it beautiful, both in my own life and all things that are part of it, including what I’ve taken part in down in Nicaragua. When, exactly, does the beauty show up? Is it ever going to get here, or will it just be pieces and shards with which to cut my hands, and little else down here?
Parched.
“When God closes a door, he opens another,” my mom told me.
“There are no more doors to close,” I said. “None. He’s slammed them all shut. Every one. He could start opening something — anything — any time now.”
How in the world does God expect to do a work in us humans? In me? The same problems never solved, the inability to hear or understand Him, a refusal to keep our word, to make even the smallest effort.
Why does He stick around?
The doors must still be all shut. Seems pretty dark.
Blind.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I can say nothing, offer no solace to the hopeless reality you describe. Maybe God opens a window when he closes a door and you happen to be a good looking talented actress like Julie Andrews.
When your paradigm finishes shifting, I want to hear how you see these days you are living. Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity, says the preacher.
Julie,
We all have to learn how to die to self. Only when do we do does any of this life begin to make sense.
This really struck me…sometimes I think it is just me feeling this way. It is lonely to think it is just me. You writing, honestly like this, is very affirming and I appreciate that very much. Thank you.
I like what Don (above) said about “your paradigm shifting.” That is a really helpful way of looking at what feels so permanent to us. To be human is to change…I think C.S. Lewis said that.
Sometimes it helps me to realize that each person I meet and know is a kind of foreign country to me.