Today I took a hike. I took a trail down by the Chattahoochee river and I went as far as the trail would take me down. Further and further I descended into the wood, where the path eventually ended beneath the shade of a beautiful tree by the riverside. In this quiet moment I sat to take a rest. In the water at my feet I noticed a moth drowning in the water. The current had forced the moth to be stuck in the water against a tree branch. I bent down and gently gathered the moth upon my finger and brought it to a dry treebranch.
As if to gasp for life itself, the moth opened her wings. Its color a soft ivory with a single pin trip of bronze down the wings. Its entire fur body the same color of ivory, and its eyes the most subtle shade of red. Her wings may have been an angel’s, made of the most delicate and divine fabric, desperately trying to catch flight once more. I watched for many moments to come as she fought to spread her wings. Her wings would shake violently at each attempt. I could see them vibrating and shaking, as if she were giving her entire being to allow them to function again.
I sat and watched as she continued her attempts to fly, her velvet wings shaking against the spring winds. I was sure, because I had saved her from her fate, that soon the sun would dry her drowned wings and she would fly away free once again.
But in the end, after many moments of struggle… I watched, helpless, as she eventually jumped back into the river where she drowned and died.
After this happened today (it really did happen) I sat on the riverbank and wept. I sat there and shed about 1000 tears on the Chattahoochie. It wasn’t just for the moth, but for everything - all the truth, pain and beauty that this moth represented. The nature of life itself, of us - as fragile, drowning moths.
A few months ago I set out to do an entire series of blogs about Christianity. I had planned all these stories and topics that I wanted to write about - some serious and some more about the blatant ironies of modern-day organized religion (of any sort) from my own experiences as a Christian and Christian Artist. But as I continued down the path, one that originally I thought was going to be full of great stories, interesting topics, and conversation - I suddenly realized something… that I no longer had anything to say.
I felt like we could have gone on and on about the stories - the weird pastor stories, the subtle racism, the mission trips, all this stuff… but in the end I began to feel like it was becoming a futile conversation.
In the end, I realized the thing that I could never reconcile about the “God” that was presented to me was that no matter what I ever did - pray more, sing more songs, correct my life, do this, do that… flap my broken wings… it was never enough to satisfy who this “God” was. Despite the rhetoric behind this God being forgiving and unconditionally loving, I still never felt like I could actually please Him. So after carrying the cross for so long of my life… bearing the weight of unworthiness, shame, and an entire web of man-made and hypocrticial expectations to an abstract and always-moving destination…the haunting question began to rise within my own soul:
If God has already carried the cross for me…why then, am I still carrying this thing around?
And just like today, no amount of my intervention or best wishes could have ever saved the moth from her fate in the river. Is it also the same with God and us? That God may take us out of the waters and onto the dry branch, but in the end he cannot make us fly. Will we find that after all the clamor of our religions, idealogies and dogmas….that there is actually no one coming to save us? and that we are all simply moths upon the branch, being given the choice of the skies above or waters below.