Read this if you want

To anyone who thought I lost my faith,

I wanna shout about how I’m sososo human. How I’ve effed up in so many ways and caused myself and others pain that I wish we didn’t have to experience, but we do. I I see the world from a way more humble place than I used to, knowing that I’m a stumble away from crumpled on the ground. I feel like that's all of us. I know about how life is fragile. I know about how it’s also beautiful, ugly, ridiculous, wonderful, so full of meaning and so meaningless all at once. I guess we’re big and I guess we’re small.

I’ve sat lonely and quiet with my questions and my fears because I’m scared of disappointing anyone who invested into me. Because I’m scared that you’ll look at my decisions and write me off as off the rails. Because I don’t know how to tell you that saying you’ll pray for me feels like a cop out. Because I don’t wanna disregard what’s personal and true for you. But man, I do wanna be honest, and I feel like my silence on where my head and my heart have been hanging out lately isn’t that constructive.

I know I went away and came back different, and I know that was bound to happen. I didn’t ever imagine it would be this much. I’ve been afraid that Malawi will get the blame for my ‘loss of faith’, that’s the last thing I want you to believe. Malawi didn’t do this to me. Malawi provided the context in which everything I ever thought I knew about anything could be deconstructed. All the illusions, gone.

Now I rebuild. 

All this means is that I wanna learn to live in the trust that truth wins, whatever that may be, and that if grace is real then it’s big enough for all of our humanity. 

It means that I’m not signing up to anything out of fear. I’m not searching for any kind of high. I’m not trying to be anyone else’s saviour. 

It means that I’m wide open.

It’s had me terrified. I’ve felt an urgency, that I have to figure this out before it’s too late. But maybe all ‘figuring it out’ really is, is realising that I never can. Anyone who says they can is lying. There are people much wiser and more intelligent than me but none of us are gods.

We’re all just figuring it out, doing our best with what we know.

Let’s have grace for each other. Let’s talk about stuff. Let’s figure out why we’re uncomfortable talking about some things. Let’s dance outrageously outside the cages of our beliefs. Let’s search for radical truth. Let’s not look at religion in any of it’s facets and make a god out of it.

I was driving back to Blantyre after a trip to the lake, the sun was setting. Bright pink and serene, a perfectly defined sphere balanced above the horizon. You could cut around the edges. But I’ve seen representations of the sun’s surface and there is nothing calm or serene about that. It’s raging hot fire, always changing, always the same. There’s no cutting around the edges.

What we can see from here isn’t the same thing. And I’m sure if we visited the sun it’d be another story all together.

Maybe God is like that.