I’ll admit, I’ve been putting this off. Near as I can tell, the biggest reason is because I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m thinking the end game is supposed to look like. It’s tricky.  That’s not quite true, exactly… I know what the end result  is supposed to look like, more or less…Ish. In theory, I should be able to foster a relationship with God in which real, active communication takes part. As our relationship grows, so should I. The decisions I make and the things I do should be placed under a filter that examines whether or not the issue at hand is pleasing to God, then if the “all-clear” sounds, I should go along with it.

Honestly, what makes this so hard is that I barely remember what that lifestyle feels like. It’s been about four years since God has felt terribly… significant? Real? Present. I’m not blaming him. I know I’ve not really done my part to try and keep him front and center… But I tried, for a while, I think… and it feels like it didn’t amount to much. So where are we now?

I’m out of school. I’m out of church. I’m out of relationships with any kind of spiritual mentor. I suppose my current status shouldn’t be a surprise? If I haven’t been fighting to keep my spiritual side alive, who would be? Everyone else who would has been excised out by life. Andrew has two kids and is already plodding his way down real life whereas I’ve just begun my journey as a grown-up. Johnson never really added much depth, honestly I think my time there was spent somewhere in the midst of a contact buzz… With all that God-talk floating around it was hard not to occasionally get a heart-full of it. Church? The last time I had a church home was when Andrew and I were so blindly feeling our way forward. Even before Glenn became the pastor, I was always somewhere on the outside of Abundant Life. Andrew helped me find a place and a purpose there, and that helped… Then AL decided we no longer had a place or purpose there. And then the floundering began. And it continued. And it remains. That was… What? 2003 or so? I’m going on a seven year stretch without having felt particularly connected to a body of Christians… That can’t be healthy, right?

So, I’ve been playing it solo… Only… I’ve not been playing it. At all. I still think about God, of course. I feel like I haven’t fallen off the deep end by any means… I still hang on to my background of faith, even if my present of faith leaves much to be desired. I look back on who and how I was years ago and I’m not sure how to reconcile the differences I see in myself today. Statements that used to light a revolution in my heart now make me roll my eyes. I think the thing that scares me the most is how little that bothers me. All parts of it. The fact that I now find the causes I used to believe in laughable, the fact that I’m now utterly ambivalent and apathetic to just about any cause you could put in front of me… And why shouldn’t I be? Life is good. Life is fun and comfortable. Not talking to God has been the easiest thing in the world.

And yet…

Here I am, hours after my gorgeous wife has gone to bed typing away at a computer in what was supposed to be a prelude to a prayer but has turned into a blog gone awry. The thing is, God hasn’t let me go. I’m still tethered to him, be the cord as tenuous as it may be. The proof is the fact that I’ve been putting off saying a prayer for a little more than a week now. The proof is the fact that I feel like God is vaguely whispering something new into my ear, and I’m terrified of missing it.

The proof is also held in the belief I have that all artistic talent I posses can only be effective if I’m channeling God through it. The increasing dry spell in my blogs? The lack of new paintings hanging on my wall? The increasingly numerous half-written in journals that may never be opened again? All these things are testament to my failing spiritual life. For me, art is an expression of a soul that is running over with the things God has chosen to give it. When the soul runs dry, so does the inspiration, so does the talent, so does the ability to create things that transcend who and what we are. And so…

I play video games. Or watch movies. Or read literary junk-food. Here’s another fun fact: I cannot scan through the titles on a Christian shelf at a book store and not roll my eyes, shake my head, or in some cases, shiver and walk away. I haven’t read a “Christian Living” book in a few years now. Every time I try the ideas remind me so much of my youthful vigor and passion I write it all off as idealism and stop caring. Or, I concede that they may be making good points, but since when is a strong argument a cure for apathy?

So. Here I am. My soul would be leaking out my holes, if I weren’t so dry on the inside right now. I broken, I’m wrong, I’m lazy, I’m stubborn, I’m prideful, I’m a myriad of awful, ugly things… But God hasn’t let go… And I don’t plan to either.

The trick to it is that it’s been so long… It seems so long ago since I last held on, I honestly am not sure I know how anymore. Which… I think might be exactly what God has been waiting on. Maybe if I just show up, no preconceived notions, no specific ideas as to what things should look like… Maybe if I just give God permission to be… I can be with Him again.

I’m not going to promise I’m going to read my Bible every day. I can’t even promise to make it to church this quarter. I’m not stepping up and saying I’m going to do everything different, this has not been a Christmas Carol experience in which my old Ebenezer Scrooge has just found a new lease on life… That lease has expired too many times in the past. I refuse to make promises that will just riddle me with guilt, force me to live under an arbitrary rule of life, then leave me despondent and pissy at God again.

No… I do believe I’m going to take this thing slow. I’m going to start looking into the whisper God seems to be saying, and we’ll see how that goes.

When I was a lad, no more than five or six, I remember being at Wal-Mart and somehow I got separated from my mother. She was right next to me, and then suddenly, she wasn't. As soon as I noticed this, there was a rush of independence as I realized that for the first time, I was my own man. She wasn't there to tell me not to touch things, not to go too far, or to stop army-crawling on the floor between the racks of clothing. Bravely I sauntered out of the boring female fashions department and ran to the open arms of the toys section. I ooed and aaahed and marveled over the shiny pieces of plastic... And I was there long enough for that giddy rush of solitude to give way to something else... mild anxiety. I figured my mom was probably still around, but... I knew enough to know the world could be a dangerous place. So, I did the only thing that made sense at the time, and found a plastic motorcycle helmet that was sitting next to the cowboy hats and cap-guns. Putting that on, I figured I was more or less prepared for whatever the world would throw at me. Deciding that I had enough of the toys section, I began to hunt for my mother.
Walking down aisle after aisle, I continued craning my neck in search of my mom. I marched down one end of the store to the other, trying to find her. With each step, there was a pit growing in my stomach: Did she leave? Did she forget about me? Had I been too bad? Why didn't she love me anymore? I scoured the store trying to find her, but alas, she was naught to be found. Then, almost in full blown panic, I walked towards the front of the store, up by the cash registers. As I walked I suddenly felt someone grasp hold of my arm and lift me up by it. Before I could try to kick and scream or fight back my mother's arms were around me then suddenly I was being hugged.

For a long time, God spoke to me pretty regularly it seemed. I’m sure if you’ve been a reader for any length of time have heard me complain about how it seems God has been incommunicado for going on years now. On the way home from a friend’s wedding, my wife and I had a discussion over the general state of our spiritual lives. In the course of that conversation and the subsequent days, I’ve been thinking a lot about God and his seemingly imposed “silence” in regards to me.

In order for any of this to make sense, I’m going to Tarantino back a few years. I’ve made mention before (albeit, not recently) of a prayer group I had back home before I came to Johnson. We called it RoFo (ROck your Face Off) and at the time of its inception, it was perfect. Myself, my youth pastor, and some friends got together in our church’s sanctuary, and played ridiculously loud music. It would start off soft and worshipful then move into things with considerably harder an edge. By the end of the night, we left exhausted for having fought with ourselves, our burdens, our sins… And to some degree, with God. I’m sure I’m idealizing it a bit, but there has never been a time in my life since then that God has felt so close. One night, after our meeting we decided to do it again the next night. We showed up, and the youth pastor had a word of warning to give us. He said that if we entered into the second night of prayer trying to recreate the first night, it would fall flat on its face. As soon as something else usurps our focus from God, even if it’s trying to feel God, our prayer loses its potency.

Well, time passed and I went off to college. While I was there the Great Silence was enacted and months had passed since I felt particularly close to God. Not knowing what else to do, I tried to rekindle what had worked in the past and managed to get a few people together to attempt RoFo 2. It was, what you might call, a “complete and total flop.” The lesson that came out of that experience was that God moves. The same path we used to get to him before, is not guaranteed to work at any other point. I don’t believe that his movement is arbitrary, that he just wanders off… But I think that God knows what we need even if we don’t, and because of that, he will hide himself in places that we haven't even thought of.

So, fast forward back to the conversation I was having with my wife. I told her about the struggle it has been watching the ways in which I used to speak to God wither into nothing. I was just about to hop into my rant of how easy writing used to come to me, when she said something that finally connected the dots in my head.

What if my writing was nothing more than a temporary pathway to meet with God? Not that I'm an incapable writer, but I'd be lying if I said I feel anything akin to the magic I used to feel when I went into a writer's trance... There was a time in which my writing was more than me pecking at keys on a keyboard. Never once, in any of the blogs I've posted have I really sat down with any kind of a game plan. I sat and typed, and sometimes profound things came out... What's more, is that I recognize that those profound things have very little to do with myself, and more to do with the One that was whispering them in my ear. Maybe this blasted dry spell you've all seen is because the stream that used to feed me got redirected somewhere else? And that's not to say that writing will never get me close to God again, it just means that maybe that stream isn't currently flowing through my keyboard.

So. All of that, has reawakened a phrase that was floating through my head a year or two ago... "God-Hunter". I'm beginning to realize the truth to the adage of "do what you've always done, get what you've always got" and I'm tired of it. Okay. Maybe God won't show up in as real a way when I pray to loud music anymore. Maybe when I write, he's not going to trip over himself to give me something substantial every time... But maybe, he's waiting for me in as real a way as those seemed, somewhere else. Maybe it's time I pick up my hobo-sack and go wandering through this realm of existence, looking under every rock, up into every tree, trying to find the treasure that is an intimate experience of God.

So, where to begin? I've been reading a book by Tony Jones called, "The Sacred Way". I highly recommend it. Basically, it's a book about some of the ways ancient Christians used to try and find God. It talks about different types of prayer and meditation, lectio divina, walking labyrinths, using icons, etc. While it's all interesting, I'm feeling like perhaps I'm being directed to come at it from another direction...somehow... I feel like I'm supposed to apply those principles to myself in a way that's not necessarily textbook Patristic.

I've talked before about how your entire life can become worship if you approach it correctly. I think the time is fast approaching in which I'm going to begin a series of experiments to see if I can accidentally trip over God in ways and places not often thought of as being particularly spiritual... So far my list of things to try includes: Growing plants, coloring with crayons, fishing, cleaning, haiku, and assembling puzzles among others. Why? Because I've never tried to find God in those things before, and maybe he'll be there waiting for me. I have nothing left to do with my life at this point in time other than walking up and down the aisles of my existence looking for my abba. Honestly, I feel like not doing any of these ridiculous tasks with at least a mild expectation to meet God there would be a sin on my part. To do what I've always done, or have been doing, would be to continue to be content without really meeting with Him. I need an experience that goes beyond me speaking words to the ceiling. I need something that goes deeper than going to church and hearing someone else's thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. One way or the other, I'm either going to find God, or wind up with a ridiculous series of stories to tell people, and either way, I'm looking forward to it.