Growing Up

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the 23rd post on my blog! It's interesting that it worked out like that, because this is also my first post as a 23 year old. Hah, I almost wrote "the first post of my 23rd year," but that obviously wouldn't be true because this is the beginning of my 24th... but yeah.

Anyway, I've been feeling for quite some time like this particular year was going to be a big year of change and growth for me. It all has to do with the process of growing up. I realize, of course, that there's no getting around the fact that being 23 years old makes you an adult by any reasonable standard. It's just that I didn't really feel like one.

See, in way too many areas and situations, I've still been waiting for life to come to me. When you're a kid, that's pretty much how things go. Life happens to you, and you roll with it and have as much fun as you can while still fulfilling the demands being placed on you by authority figures so you don't get in trouble. In America, we've managed to extend this phase even further than just grade school or even high school. College is pretty much the same deal; it's like a four-year (or more) extension of childhood and freedom from the dreaded real world. Then you get spit out at the end of it, and (especially if you graduate with a liberal arts degree) you're no closer to knowing how to handle the real world than you were before.

At least that's what happened to me. Anyway, the end result for me was essentially a vague and nameless uneasiness about my life and future. Kind of like, wow, I'm a college graduate, but who am I and what am I doing? And because that's such an open-ended question that has no easy answers, the path of least resistance becomes doing nothing.

Unfortunately, that pretty much creates a vicious cycle: you have anxiety, you ignore it and don't make progress, which makes you more anxious. It sucks. The question, both for me and for others who find themselves in this situation, is whether the crushing weight of expectation and fear will drive you to God or away from him.

For quite awhile, I resisted what God was trying to do through my anxiety. Eventually though, the desperation it created led me to his feet. The funny thing was, he actually wanted to heal me, not make me do a bunch of stuff I felt powerless to do. He wanted to teach me the fear of God and help me get rid of my fear of men, and he also made much more of his love real to me.

I can only be a man because I am his child.

As that truth has been steadily sinking into me, a lot of things have been happening. I'm becoming more truly myself than I have ever been. I care much less about what people think of me. Plus, God has been providing for me greatly, both spiritually and physically. He's giving me strength and vision again, not to mention a job (or two jobs, actually). I'm learning how to be much more purposeful with my time too. I regret the time I've wasted, but I believe God is redeeming the years the locust has eaten (Joel 2:25). He's leading me into a brand new season. At 23, I finally feel like I'm growing up.

A Heart for Cleveland

One of the biggest things God has been doing in my life recently is teaching me how to feel. If you know me well at all, you know that I'm a thinker. I love to analyze things, and I tend to turn them over in my brain repeatedly until I arrive at what I deem to be a "solution," whatever that means. I've always wanted to have a logical reason for things, and that pretty much leaves emotional considerations in the background.

I've come to realize, though, that my unflappable logic and analysis has often just been another layer of my biggest weakness: pride. My refusal to feel was really just arrogance, an attempt to control the world through understanding. If I remain unaffected, I stay in control.

When it comes down to it, I really have believed that I was in control in my life. Now, it obviously takes some pretty selective memory to believe something like that in the face of all the craziness of life, but I was getting the hang of it. Problem was, the One who really does have the control wasn't too thrilled. He's not really a fan of competition for his position.

Long story short, God started shattering my perceptions of control by using my emotions. Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to make yourself feel something (e.g. joy, love, etc.), but if you have, you know that it really doesn't work. If you haven't, give it a shot sometime. I don't think it's possible, at least not for long. Anyway, the conclusion of all my logic and analysis was that if I had all the answers, I should be happy. Needless to say, I wasn't.

To give an example, I'll share a poem I wrote somewhere in the midst of trying to analyze my way through life. During my Junior year of college, my mom had totalled her car (she was fine) and was borrowing mine, so I had to take the bus/train to school for a while. The experience had quite an effect on me, and I wrote this in a subconscious attempt to deal with what I was feeling but didn't want to admit.


Commute

Today I am riding through
the steel bowels of a single
manmade mountain. It isn’t
very impressive, but it is all
the subway we have here. I
haven’t eaten for hours,
but I don’t get off as I reach
the city center, a hard rock
that only turns to living flesh
at certain quite specific
times. Those times, you can
lose yourself in the hurrying
humanity and quietly pretend
you have the answer to the
endless iron question. Other times,
it’s better to pass quickly by
the dirty Modernist monuments
and hope you can catch
the next bus at your connection
further on.
Thursday, 4:34
by the market tower clock
and I am boarding the 4:25.
The conglomerate smell of the
market is all I will enjoy today, not
the shouting vendors as they
make their best deal or set up
the stuffed pig’s head at
just the right eye-level
to scare the children. I don’t
have time for the homemade
glazed doughnuts from the
baker in the far northwest corner
or the fresh produce that
is somewhat less fresh than
the sellers say, but still a bit
more fresh than it smells.
No,
today my goal is just to make
it home, taking the redline 66X
and the 20A through the shades
of culture, death and life
to my refuge from the smoldering
embers in the dying heart
of the fire, where I can set myself
apart and analyze as I prepare
for the inevitable onrush of
tomorrow and my next ride.





I knew even then that this withdrawn analysis was not going to be the answer, but writing this poem provided me with the first realization that that's what I was doing. I had always thought of myself as a city kid, in touch with the problems of the street. Really though, despite the fact that I lived within the city, I had left it, to protect my heart from the hardness and pain. I was taking sociology classes, learning how to analyze the problems of the city without really feeling them, trading emotions for statistics. As I hope you can tell from the poem, I love my city (well, most of it anyway), but I was turning my back on it.

Even more pressing on my thoughts was my own survival in finishing college and managing my life. I spent a lot of time in survival mode in those days. Living like that gets tiring though, and God had other things in store. First, he had to bring me face to face with my own emotions, which turned out to be darker and much less controlled than I had thought. I had to learn, as strange as it might sound, to feel what I was really feeling, even if it meant admitting that I had no idea what to do with it and very little (if any) control over it. It's a journey I'm still walking on, and probably will be for quite awhile.

As I feel my own emotions more and more, though, I'm finding that God has more for me than just that. He also wants me to feel His emotions! I think we can easily forget that God feels things just like we do. Actually, I guess a better way to put that would be that he feels things even more deeply and profoundly than we do. And the biggest thing he feels? Love.

In asking God what he feels, I have become much more conscious of his overpowering love. For me, for others, for his Son, his church, everyone. God feels sorrow mixed with love, anger mixed with love and joy because of love. In fact, one of the most amazing and praiseworthy things about God is the way that he loves us beyond explanation, despite ourselves.

So, back to my poem for a minute. The problems of Cleveland are pretty overwhelming, and you can see a lot of them if you take the rapid from University Circle to the W. 25th street bus. They seem too big to handle from the perspective of just me and my thoughts and feelings. When I look at my city, I can feel frustrated, afraid, or even depressed.

But what does God feel about Cleveland? In most cases, I'm guessing it's something like compassion. I'm sure there are things that make him happy, angry and sad as well, but I think the overriding current is compassion for people who have lost their way. Therein lies the difference between God's thoughts and mine. I see large-scale societal problems that I don't even know how to begin to change, and the result is the overwhelming emotions I've tried to get rid of. God sees the problems and could rectify them instantly, but his heart is for the people. Although he could change things on the grand scale, his method of choice is compassion.

That's why it's so important for us to be in touch with God's heart, not just to know but to feel what he feels. Compassion, it turns out, is not nearly as overwhelming as fixing all the deep-seeded problems that plague my city. Each person I see on my commute through Cleveland is someone God loves, and I can treat them like that. I don't need to analyze so much as I need to feel God's love, and if I have no idea where to start, I can just start where I am. If I can just do that, I can break out of my protective bubble and really start making a difference.

And if we all could do that... who knows what could happen here?