The mystery of God and how he works both scares me and amazes me. I don’t know if that’s the correct thing to think, but I’m both terrified by His power I don’t see and then suddenly amazed when I do see it. It makes me feel selfish, guilty that I don’t continuously seek Him out in my every day life. Dedicating every moment to Him scares me. I am scared. I am too tempted by things around me.  I think of partying, what my friends do, what they want to do, kiss boys, do reckless things, say reckless things. I think of how much fun that is. How much of a rush that is. Is that a sin?

What even is a sin? What does God even want me to do? I’m constantly confused and scared, and I don’t know how to reach out to Him every time I feel this way. How do I be a good Christian? What do I believe? What if I don’t believe everything the Bible says, what other people believe, what other people think God would think of me if I believed what I did, if I thought what I do?

I am not a perfect human being. I have lived and grown up in a small town where everything from grades to college to your clothes have expectations close to perfect. I have felt the pressure of not being perfect, but being accepted to the “standard” that is set for me, which to me, does feel close to being perfect. I am constantly reminded of how important everything in my life is, but they are only important to get me to the “next step”. It is so superficial. It is like a stepping stone process. Life is not a stepping stone process. I believe life is a forest, and there is kind of a path that has been withered away by people walking down it, smushed grass from hurried feet, and plants thrown to the side in a rush. Not everyone takes the path you are on, and there are other to choose from. It’s a wild forest, untouched by humans, just a chaotic mess of tree moss and blooming flowers and branches that sometimes whack you in the face. There are no safe stepping stones on my path. However, they have began to appear, put there by other people in my life, and I don’t know if I like it.

I am not ungrateful. In fact, I believe myself to be entirely grateful of everything I have experienced, both terrible and incredible. I see that there is always something that each moment I live in my life is supposed to teach me—how to love, how to know my limits, how to appreciate, how to express, how to say no, how to say yes, how to look up, how to see. And I believe God has created that for me. I believe the reasoning behind everything is through Him, and when these things happen and I understand that they are happening to me, I know. I know it is Him. I know he is trying to reach me. And what makes me upset is that each time it is like I regain my faith. Isn’t my faith supposed to never fail, never doubt, never go away? Isn’t it supposed to stay there? Aren’t I supposed to keep it where it can’t leave?

Maybe it is just one of those times in life. Maybe it is me sitting at my computer in the evening letting all the world’s surroundings of right now make me feel something. Maybe it is just the stress of everyday life—school, college, my future. Friends. Wanting a boyfriend. Wanting to know things. Wanting to experience things. Wanting to do what I want but things I need to be doing are getting in the way. But that is me being both superficial and worldly. I don’t know how that happens.

I’m at a point in my life where everything moves at a rapid pace. I’m learning how if you are falling behind, lingering in your own mind at your own dazzling thoughts, the world outside of that isn’t going to give you time to do that. I was sitting in 6th period French staring at the map across the room in the middle of a lecture on Le Terreur, and I just wondered how great it would be to go to New Zealand. It’s so far, like a million zillion miles from here. It would take a day on a plane. Its across the ocean, past Hawaii. That’s so far. The ocean is so big. Hours upon hours flying over that ocean to get to another place. That’s nuts. The world is so big. But by then, immersed in my insanely vast thoughts, I’m called on and scolded at for spacing and not paying attention to the message behind an article on France’s last living guillotine executioner. Because that will help me in life.
My brain feels like it is slowly deteriorating, but I think it’s just making more room for things like this.