Feels Like Coming Home

Looking over this journal is like taking a piece of the home within my heart and placing it in a quaint little box for review fifty years down the road. Aww, who knows if this will be around or if the Internet will still be the method of worldwide communication...chances are they're already developing the next innovation. We'll have video phones hooked into ourselves, wired for HiFi and WiFi and everything we could want from birth.

That isn't the point today, though. The frightening cold growth of technology, while important, is not pressing enough for me to be hypocritical in my digital expression of those fears. What's important to me today is the darkness. Darkness, in its simplest terms, is the absence of light. As we have heat, so we have cold - the absence of heat. Every force in the universe has its opposite. Gravity, antigravity. Good, bad. Heaven...and hell.

We are all bound for one or the other. Certain actions and thoughts will get us to the golden gate and through it into the Narnia that will never die. Now, I am not Catholic. I don't believe that faith and good works are necessary. I believe that justification by faith is the answer. I believe that God is my Lord, and that He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die for our sins, and I accept the saving grace for which He sacrificed Himself. Good works are certainly important, but I perform good works because I am saved, not in order to become saved.

Lately, though, I feel as if I've been consumed by darkness, as if all the lights on my path have been extinguished by...what? Fear, doubt, anger. Uncertainty, to be sure. All I can see is where I want to be, but I don't know how to get there. I try to leave it to God to go before me and clear my path, but it's so hard to let go. I try to love my neighbor and to be kind and quiet, but on every side there are obstacles - the rude woman in the parking lot or the seemingly innocent comment that just throws me off balance. I know that I am not a quiet person. I never have been and I daresay I never will be. And that's alright, because part of what draws people to me is my volume and my outspokenness.

Sometimes, though, all I think is "Peace! Be still." And I try and I wish for it, but it doesn't come to me. All life recently seems to be broken promises and building anger. There's Brian's mother, who God knows I resent even though I know it's wrong. I see what she's doing to him and I just want to get in her face and tell her how it is. It's so difficult to keep a civil tongue and to maintain my silence when I see him hurting...and that makes it difficult to see God working in the situation. But I still must have faith.

My walk with God is suffering. I feel as if I am so far away from Him, and that He's right next to me but I can't get to Him. There's a wall of plated glass between us...the scary part is, I'm the one who put it up.

Let me be open, God. I know You can hear me. I hear You knocking on the door to my heart. Help me push the obstacles aside to open it back up for You.