As I write this I am overlooking the Caribbean from the third story balcony of my hotel in Port Maria, Jamaica, where I will be all this week. My room faces the ocean, so the sun rises through the window and the ocean breeze blows constantly here as I write. I wear no shirt. Here, a shirt is a thorn in my side. A shirt is a vibe-desecrator. A shirt is the enemy. I am shirtless as often as humanly possible. It definitely could be way worse.
It’s been a while since I’ve written, and it hasn’t been due to negligence of the blog. I love writing this blog. It is one of my great joys to put my thoughts into writing and to hear that some people out there are also feeling and seeing the things that I am. The fact is that I have been going through a lot of deep, personal growth over the course of the past few months. Growth that has been brought on by the intense revealing of my own darkness, shortcomings, and failures - what some of us might call sin. I’ve had so many thoughts regarding God, and what I felt Him doing in my life, but felt like I couldn’t say a lot of it with integrity during that time due to the head space I was choosing to live in and as a result - the decisions I was making. I have been through a time where I wasn’t sure who I was, what I really wanted to be about, and whether anything mattered. I thought for a moment that everything was meaningless. I felt blind and a little lost. God felt fiction to me. I felt so incredibly small, wondering whether my actions would change anything at all in this massive world. I felt that though I had tried my best in life to live for God, it still was so ambiguous, painful and uncertain, so I figured I’d at least get some pleasure for myself amidst all of the mess. I really just lived for me for a while. So with that, came a doubt about whether I had any authority to write about my own faith, much less write about lessons I’m learning with God that might house suggestions for how others are to go about their lives with God in the picture. It just wasn’t a good time.
However, over the course of the past few weeks, brought on by probably a thousand small circumstances that I am not fully aware of, and a completely ordained trip to Dallas, Texas, I’ve had a really personal, visceral experience with the grace, goodness and closeness of God. To put it shortly, I felt like I was a sheep that had wandered off alone, only to find myself suddenly and violently yanked back into the fold by the shepherd’s staff - unexpected, unpredicted, and unearned. Someone woke me up.
I don’t want to go into the details of this dark time in my life because one, I don’t think it’s always appropriate share your deepest darkest secrets on the internet (though sometimes it can be very beautiful) and two, I’m trying to receive this grace by moving forward in a way that recognizes and accepts who I was in my time of weakness while also acknowledging the wonderful and beautiful truth of the gospel that Jesus invites me into - that I am not my mistakes.
I wanted to write about my experience of crawling out of my hole of meaninglessness, and how this experience ties into the principles of stewardship and gratitude. I wasn’t able to reason my way out of my doubts and darkness, and I believe God had to do something deeply spiritual in my soul, but as I have begun to heal and walk out of this dark passage in my forest, I have begun to connect these crucial dots in hindsight. I would like to share these connections with you.
IOU. Meaninglessness, Stewardship, Gratitude.
As I mentioned before, the last few months for me have been a time during which I questioned the meaning in everything I had previously thought my life was about. I questioned my faith, my purpose, and whether or not trying to do life well was worth it at all. Though I am an artist, there is a really strong critical and analytical side of me, and it doesn’t take an observant person long to realize how messed up our world is. While a critical view of the world can be helpful when coupled with graciousness and the desire to use that viewpoint to improve the world around us, it can become very dangerous and destructive when wielded with a bitter spirit. I think, for a little while, I had been wielding my critical gift with a bitter heart, and all it did was isolate me and distort my view of who I was, who God was, and as a result - who people around me were. I stopped showing up to stuff. My body would be places and I would be going through the motions, but it felt like my spirit was absent. I felt like a ghost, and wished that in a lot of places I could simply disappear. I described this time in the previous paragraph as my “hole of meaningless,” and it was just that. I started to believe that everything was meaningless, so I’d treat everything as meaningless, then I would act like even more things in life were meaningless. I lost the key ingredient of respect. Respect for my on life, respect for the people and places right in front of me. I was digging my own grave.
But for some reason, and this could be what come might call “snapping out of it,” but I call, “salvation” - over the last couple of weeks I have been led to consider and revisit all of the people and places that have allowed me to be where I am today. My influential teachers, my first youth group, my first youth pastor, my beautiful college experience, my first internship mentor, my parents, my friends who have believed in me over the years, the people who opened doors for me, the people who gave me chances before I was ready, and the countless moments of grace that afforded me a way upward and onwards. I’ve been remembering all of the opportunities that I’ve had, never earned, to see the world and learn about myself and God. I’ve been trying to recount the many unsolicited encouragements, kindnesses, and breadcrumb moments that seemed to appear in the perfect time to lead me through my life. And as I have become more and more painfully aware that I did not design my own life, and very little of what I have I have earned on my own, I have came to a wonderful and demanding conclusion:
I do not get to disappear.
In the Christianity that I live in, as well as American culture as a whole, the idea of owing anyone anything is vastly foreign. In a country that so values individualism and each person’s right to realize their own personal dreams and agendas, I feel like we’ve lost some of the beauty of stewarding our lives in light of all the people and circumstances that made our lives even possible. In the name of freedom, I feel that we’ve lost a sense of belonging to a group and a purpose that extends beyond our individual identities. I believe this often times can distort our view of our own lives, leading us to be concerned solely with how our actions affect the “me” and not the “us.” In regards to my experience over the last few months, and my deep sense of meaninglessness, I found that the more I began to live like I didn’t have a responsibility to those around me, the world, and people that made me, the more and more alone and meaningless I began to feel. It was only through a deep and profound reminder of all that was sacrificed for me that I was able to begin to move out of my isolation and selfishness.
So, in light of my new perspective, I’ve decided that for me, I am going to make “owe” a non-cuss word in my life. To our western ears, “owe” is a harsh word. But the more I think about it and how much I’ve been given… it just feels right. It feels honorable. It feels respectful. I owe it you, I owe it to me, I owe to anyone who has ever believed in me, I owe it to God… to be fully awake to the opportunities and the adventures laid out before me. I owe it to myself and to the world to turn on my heart and to engage as fully as it is possible for me… to steward my days, and to steward my life. We’ve all wasted our precious life in our own ways - living out of our fears, living out of our “cant’s”, living to please people who don’t really care about us, living to fit into a cultural illusion, ignoring what we know we need to change, avoiding pain, protecting ourselves, trying to control our worlds, try to control others, consuming, pursuing endless pleasures, taking, sweeping things under the rug, sleepwalking… the list goes on and on.
So for those of us that feel like, if we were honest, we were given something good, however small or hidden… who might also feel like they are just moments away from throwing in the towel: Would you take some time to consider the fact that someone somewhere laid a foundation for you. Someone somewhere broke bread off of their own lives to feed you. Consider the idea that the world might be holding up signs for you that say, “it is worth it,” but you might not be able to see it because you can only see yourself in this time. And as you open up yourself to feel the weight of how much you really have been given, might you adopt the same convicting sentiment, that you do not get to disappear. Lord, God, would you allow the grace for a shift in our perspectives to happen… to begin to see the abundance and not the lack. Would this awareness help us to understand our responsibilities, which are our divine opportunities to affect and heal our worlds.
For those of us who are struggling to find meaning in our lives, would we combat this temptation to give up with an acute awareness of what we healthily owe, and let this awareness move us out of our selfishness and complacency. I can’t help but thinking that: if we knew just how loud God and our clouds of witnesses were cheering for us, it’d be a lot harder for us to fall asleep. It would be damn near impossible to want to disappear.
IOU.Wake up.