I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from the realization that this world is passing away.

I’m not supposed to care about this world? It seems real to me. Yet this is the same world that Jesus died to save. This cursed, dying planet.

Until now I’ve thought that God gives certain desires to each member, and that by doing what they enjoy doing, people glorify God. We are different members of the same body, with different purposes and ways of seeing reality. But no one of us has the entire picture, or enough information to even piece together the entire picture. Operating by faith in the truth of the sight of our counterparts, we can work together. It is this unity that gives God glory. Also, they will praise God for our good deeds. It is as if we will make ourselves vital to the proper functioning of a law-abiding society. We will be the salt in a flavorless world, the light in a dark world. Undeniably indispensable.

Jesus died and was resurrected. He left his disciples here on this flawed and dying planet. Having taken away from them every hope they ever had of a better future, he gave them a counselor.

I’m tired of being awake. Too often I wish I was dead so that I could be alive with Christ. I insist that I don’t know how to live, that the Bible isn’t enough to console me and show me what to do, that the church isn’t trustworthy enough for me to make a part of my life.

Grafting.

Why did Jesus have to come to this earth and make friends of us all? I don’t get it. We aren’t capable of making friends of our enemies unless Jesus is with us.

I can only change myself. I can’t change anybody else. My main concern should be myself. But love is about everything other than myself. Love cares about other people. But I can’t change other people. I can’t even influence them. I don’t even know right from wrong.

I don’t want to have to tell people what to do. Maybe that’s why I want to die. I want to be with Jesus so he can tell me what to do. If I could only spend eternity bowing at his feet I would do so. But this world disgusts me.

The people in this world love to follow leaders who tell them what to do. People like to give up their free will to do another person’s will. The world wars. Millions of people chose to kill millions of other people rather than die.

Death of our enemies is the only thing that will preserve our lives. But Jesus died to save us from our sins. That doesn’t mean we can take people’s lives and expect not to be penalized for it.

All of the friends are fake because when they aren’t with me, I don’t have any friends. They are only real if they are next to me.

When my mother isn’t with me, I’m by myself. I’m not safe by myself. I’m afraid. I’m afraid that everything I do is meaningless. I want to be in a safe place where my actions have lasting importance. Otherwise I’m just scribbling in the sand before the tide comes in and clears my markings away. What I do here will be forgotten, but the decisions I make have lasting importance, not to me but to God. The world is meaningless except that God said it was good. If nobody is watching me, I have no ambition.

God is good. I am evil. Nothing I do can have value unless God works his will through me. So what is God’s will? Where is my burning bush to awaken me from my stupor of games and vanity?

I can’t live for myself since there is nothing I can possibly do or say that will make me happy. Happiness is being with God, the source of life.

Jesus Christ is the only person in the universe that I care about. Everything else is a distraction—or is it? Why is it that people must go on eating and drinking and getting married and having children and fighting wars and doing stuff all the way up until Jesus comes again to this earth to fix us once and for all?

We aren’t allowed to see Jesus directly. We aren’t allowed to see the Father except through Jesus. And Jesus left his disciples on earth to make more disciples of these stubborn stupid inane persons like myself.

Are we here all alone?

Where are you, Lord? You aren’t in the room where my earthly father sits secure in his isolation, forgotten by man and God. He is safe with a wife and children. I don’t want to grow up to be like him.

I don’t understand why his wife loves him. I will never understand that kind of love, that kind of self-sacrifice for another. Why sacrifice for one person rather than another? Why should anybody care about another human being more than another human being? And yet…

God invented marriage, as if he knew that he had made us too stupid and weak to be able to stay sane without some sort of guarantee that at least one other human being on the planet would love us unconditionally.

So what is it, Lord? I need you above all, but I also need my fellow believers to guide me in my pursuit of you who pursues me. If you love me, then why do I need another?

You made me the way you want me to be. So why am I messed up? Is it so I will need you more? I am depraved and broken. You know this.

I don’t want to be safe, and yet, and yet….

This is why I don’t have any friends, because I choose to forget about them, because I know that they aren’t real, that people aren’t really real, that the only thing I know to be true is the love of Jesus Christ.

When I see people doing good things, I don’t see God or Jesus. I see people who seem to care about the practical needs of a world that doesn’t matter at all. That’s my error, isn’t it? The “doesn’t matter at all”? It does matter, but it only matters so far as it allows for the disciples to make more disciples. God isn’t a practical God. God asks his disciples to make disciples. That’s it. There’s no mention of getting to fit into society at all. There’s no mention of prosperity or high social status. From the orders Jesus gave to the twelve and the seventy who were to prepare the cities of Israel for his visitation, we could well assume that Jesus was calling his disciples to a very austere lifestyle, of one who is grateful for what is received but does not work to accumulate wealth. The lifestyle of a transient, of a traveler, of one who is homeless because his home is in another world. The lifestyle of a man who dies with only the clothes on his back to his name and not a penny to spare, because he has already given it all away.

A life lived and died perfectly. Our example, our hero, Jesus.

People can be true, but statistics speak otherwise. My own parents speak otherwise. The church my mother took me to when I was in elementary school speaks otherwise. So many people with good intentions listening to hour long sermons by a pastor who speaks on behalf of a bunch of doctrines that were invented by men to make life easy in lieu of a terrifying relationship with a personal god. It was that relationship that compelled Adam and Eve to hide themselves. Rules and regulations, the seduction of legalism. Of a priest whose hand you can touch, of scars you can put your fingers in. Of a pastor who tells a body of believers what they should do for the glory of God. Of misguidance and wasted valor, of courage spent on the wrong merchandise.

Some people are born leaders. Charismatic and ambitious and loud. Others enjoy following more than leading. Some like to do what they are told to do. Some hate telling other people what to do.

If you want to tell me or anybody else what to do, o God, then why can’t you tell us directly? Why do you leave us here to guess what to do, to play Jesus even when we aren’t Jesus and aren’t perfect enough to always move in perfect synchronization with your will. But then again, you never said you expected perfection of us in this world.

People who smile on Saturdays in church—the seventh day Adventists and their Saturday Schools.

Was it real? Were any of them real? Was their love real, if the one thing that really unified us was not the Holy Spirit but faith in the power of man-made rules to save us or at the least increase our status in heaven?

We were buying salvation, one good deed at a time. I can’t close my eyes to the danger of authority. The only authority I can trust is Jesus Christ, but who speaks for him in this world at this time?

We are priests. We don’t need an intermediary to speak to Jesus. We don’t need leaders. If we are Jesus’ disciples then we have been filled by the Holy Spirit.

Filled. Full. Our thirst is quenched, our hunger satiated. God gives us hunger, and God gives us the solution to that desire. There’s plenty more to go around. There’s enough here for everyone.

So what does Jesus want me to do? Am I supposed to live and in the process of eking out a living brag to people about how Jesus fills my weakness and my emptiness with his strength? Is that what it means to make disciples? Or is it enough to be part of a local church and take part in the prayer that fuels that faith that softens hearts and shatters preconceptions about what God is supposed to look or feel or sound like, because he isn’t to be found in the church, but in the shattering therein, in the mountains in motion, in the planets circulating, in the crying child who finds a reason to feel safe, in the orphan who finds a mother and father and sister and brothers on a planet where nobody really knows who he is or why he is still here, in the flights of birds, in the fields of grass that we mow and burn, in the end where buildings burning topple inwards and it is only one voice next to another, one voice saying “you are loved by Jesus” and the other saying that “you are alone” and out of the two choices you would really want to believe that Jesus loves you.

The prayers add fuel to the fire. But that still doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do with God’s love. I don’t have any ambition for this world. If this world mattered then I’d jump at the opportunity to build in it. But the social structures and rules of this world are passing away. This cursed world doesn’t matter. People matter. People are what matter to God, and that is why they must matter to me.

I want to work with people and talk to people, but I hate them. I hate them because I can’t trust them. I refuse to trust them since I can’t even trust myself. I can’t even trust my own parents, those promise-breakers. I can’t trust anybody except Jesus. So how am I supposed to live in this world where I need other people in order to survive?

Why should people care about me? I’m unattractive, you’re my electromagnet. You’re my substitution and my atonement, the means of reconciliation, my key to reaching eternal life with my creator God.

Solvency.

Soul vacancy.

God seems exciting because there is so much about Him that we don’t know and don’t understand and cannot even hope to comprehend. God is an infinite mystery that we can’t approach, except that Jesus approached us first and showed us what it means to be truly human—to live according to God’s power and not on mere bread and water, as a starving man might attempt to live in a desert for forty days and nights.

Life is more than that which happens in response to an adequate amount of energy and nutrition and water entering into our body. Life is that, to be sure, but it can be far more. Life can transcend the material and enter into the spiritual, where the impossible is routine and where God chooses to answer prayers so He will get the glory.

Jesus was perfect. Jesus resisted all temptation. We saw the Word of God in action, active and alive. We saw the Word praying to the Father. We saw the light and our jaws dropped. We turned away in utter disbelief.

What God would do this sort of thing? How could a just God show so much love to people so under-serving? Secretly we judged God in our hearts, like Jonah we were resentful that He would offer life to the undeserving. There was so much light that we couldn’t take any more of it. We had to kill him, to hang him on a tree, to stain him with the worst of all legal punishments, so that we would be able to sleep soundly at night, our storehouses filled to the brim, our brainpans full of dreams and aspirations for the future ever increasing in power and glory… accumulated by ourselves, for ourselves.

God won’t share his glory with another.

We are the inhabitants of the bottom level. We grasp at every scrap of truth we come across, as if we were starving vermin licking up bread crumbs fallen to the floor of his dining hall. But if we got the entire slice of bread we’d probably choke to death on it. We can’t take more than we can handle. We aren’t ready.

Lord, please help me to learn via the experiences that you put me through in this world, something of you and what you would have me do in this world. Lord, please make me want to care about people in the same way that you care (constantly) about people like me. Lord, please make me grateful for all the ugly evil people that you call “saints” that you use to bring glory to yourself in ways that I can’t possibly understand. Lord please take my uncertainty and replace it with faith that you make things work even if we choose to follow the lead of humans that we know we can’t trust. Lord please help me to see you at work within people, to recognize your Holy Spirit.

Truth.

Does truth have the power to change people? Some people can quote the truth. They know the truth, but it doesn’t compel them to do the same things that other people who quote the same truth would do. Maybe truth doesn’t matter so much as it is your compulsion that matters, for it is your presence that changes us from ugly to beautiful.

We can’t change ourselves. We can’t change other people. We can only stand in awe of you and your creativity. Who would have thought that the darkest heart could be redeemed? Yet you did it.

Compel us to do your will on earth as it is in heaven. Make us see the reality of heaven as if it was more real than our entertainments and games. Make us love the things you love. Change us into your servants. Make us serve one another in practice for serving you.

Maybe all this world needs to be is practice– meaningless except for the preparation.

I might start posting again. I just wanted to clear out the old stuff.