The threat of the tsunami.

These are the thoughts I think while waiting for a friend in a parking lot: 

Again, the overwhelming weight of those who don’t see nor care crushes my hope and threatens despair to paralyze life and growth. Friends, family, strangers, billboards, they all seem to be stacking up against me, leaving my paradigm broken like shattered glass.

Why so angry? Why so resentful? What did God do to ear this name, this defame, leaving his name going down in infamy from now on into history.

Leaving the safe sheltered bubble some called home opens up the mind to the darkness of the unknown, where truth is relative and everything is subjective. My comfortable paradigm is challenged and I’m left having to examine the depth of my devotion to what many consider a fanciful notion of magic and unreality. All of these questions I’ve had come rushing back, flooding my being like a tsunami scene from the news, threatening destruction in every way, to wash away all that I once stood on. It leaves me in a whirlwind of thoughts and ideas, not knowing which ways up due to their manipulation of what’s what.

Why so bitter and hateful towards something you claim is unreal. If it was unreal why would you care who I told or what is being sold as truth.

I want to say that I have enough confidence to claim that if you’re searching for Truth you WILL end up finding it in Christ, but I’m afraid to say that because it seems history has proven otherwise.

All of the Muslims, all the Buddhists, all the Hindus. Can I say they have not a clue of what is Truth? They’re just as convinced as I that they’re willing to die for what some critically call a total lie. Sure there are some who just follow suit because their ancestors have done so, but isn’t that the same in Christianity?

How can there be so many who have thought through this all and still end up claiming Jesus as Truth, the Bible as the perfect powerful presence of God in written form? Where does their confidence come from? What’s the core that holds them up against the torrents of nontraditional culture and challenges of views?

I’m left wallowing in my own insecurity and uncertainty of what’s right. I know I cannot disregard the past, the stories of millions who have asked for Truth and have found it in You, radically transforming their very beings. Yet if only seeing was believing, for even in the midst of these stories I’m still questioning.

Where is this dissatisfaction, this unquenched curiosity.

So many who I know and love have turned from what they once claimed to be their all, and I’m left in awe of the bitterness they harbor toward what they once held so dear. Where is this all coming from? What’s the root of this entire lack of love and conviction, a radical change of direction.

So many different people, and my heart wishes to know them all, to see where they fall in life and where they’re going. To share the life I’ve found, the blessed peace of rest in Truth, but as soon as I open my eyes and realize how exceedingly many differences there are even from those from the same gene pool, I am overcome with a weight that presses on my chest, sucking all rest I once found in what I thought I knew. With each new person, each new story, I’m left with thoughts that have wrought my mind in ways I know not how to repair.

I don’t know what to say or even what to pray in response to this reality.

It’s not exactly fair for some to say that Christians haven’t seen reality because we haven’t questioned anything and have just blindly believed what we’ve been fed from when we were wee. But how are there some who come through the kiln of questions stronger than before, ready to take on the world in the name of Jesus yet some who build up so much pressure of hatred, uncertainty and anger that they explode from the tension and walk away entirely, not able to even mention the name of God without a grimace.

How are there such extremes? How can something so beautiful seem to create such division and elicit such extreme contradictory life trajectories? I can’t wrap my mind around it and I’m still unsure of where I fall in the middle of it, but rest assured, I will press in, press on, and see what comes of it.