a german, and two americans write some books.

I'm struggling with my Christian identity.

I think the tongues threw me a curve ball. I keep drawing these lines that I'll "never" cross, stating these things I'll "never" do, and then it happens--lines get crossed, stuff gets done. I have fun at a massive womens' event, I accept that Christ died for my failings, I bawl my way through a Good Friday service, I get baptized in a charismatic megachurch, I stay in that megachurch even when the pastor openly states he thinks the earth is only 6000 years old, I allow myself to speak these words I don't understand. Faith happens.

And later I start to wonder--why did I do that?

Was I caught up in the moment? Did I feel pressured to fit in? Or was my heart full of God? Some of each, maybe?

Looking back at each of those moments--and others--I know it was God. I haven't faked any of it. Faking is something I worry I've done later, a worry to displace the Truth, to give myself an out. But no, fortunately (sometimes it feels unfortunately) none of it has been faked. So, at least in the moment, it has all been an authentic expression of my emotions.

But emotions are so easily played upon. Can I trust that those moments were based upon something more than wild hope and desperation?

Suppose that it was all hope and desperation-- is it any less valid? Is either of those things inconsistent with the basic condition of humanity, and thus, the core absence that is filled by God? Or, do both hope and desperation act not as "outs" to explain away a mystical experience, but rather as sign posts to the Truth of things?

I was reading back through some of my favorite passages of poetry and prose yesterday morning, with my journals and emails, and I started to feel oddly displaced. As though I'd left myself behind, and gotten swept up in this crazy Christian thing. Like I'd lost my intellect.

These were the words that shaped me, but the truth is that each of these authors was searching. Hesse wrote that he realized he was "a nomad, and not a farmer...an adorer of the changing, and the fantastic," that salvation is "neither to the left nor to the right, but straight into your own heart, and there alone is Truth and there alone is God." But Hesse never found happiness in his own heart. He found struggle, and lived there. Whitman asked, "What good amid these, O me, O life," which might be paraphrased, "Why all the suffering? What's the purpose?" And he answered his own question that the purpose is "that you are here. That life exists, and identity, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." But...that's not true. There's no comfort to be found in mere existence. Our human existence alone, apart from God, is mostly a struggle. And ultimately, a physical loss, a failure. Frost wrote, famously, that "two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." He lived a life in fear of God, but divorced from true faith, and though people often think that poem is resolute and content--it's not. To hear Frost read his own words, you'd hear a pause at that hyphen--a melancholy admission that the difference has been made, but who knows to what end?

I read Hesse for the first time when I was 12. The others followed soon after. These kinds of writers and their ideas have been my bible, old testament and new, for years. I think I've somehow deeply internalized the idea that to be content and certain is apostasy. That to find the answer to hope and desperation is an impossibility.

Yet, I've found the answer.

Now, I just need to remember that it's possible. That my sense of longing for God--a sense shared by the very people who penned the philosophies I'm struggling against--is in itself a proof for God.

I don't have to live a life of uncertainty, in service to intellect. God allows it all, and it's all in ultimate service to Him.