Peut-être

Is a discovery ruined if you know it's going to happen?

It's certainly not serendipitous if you know that this is the time when you're going to 'find yourself,' whatever that means, but does that mean that you don't find yourself? Is the person you were going to be lost in the gap between what could have been and what happened just because you were expecting a change? Or do you force the change to be a different change than it was planning on being? Because I kinda like the idea that I can mess up change's eternal day planner by just thinking about it.

I think I'm expecting life to be something that it's not. I think life is rebelling a little. Since I want it to be awesome, since I have such high expectations, life is doing its absolute best to prove me wrong because goodness knows the universe would explode if Addie Jo was right about something for once. But maybe it's all for the best.

I was recently told that I seem like a big picture person. I like that. I love the phrase 'at the end of the day.' If, at the end of the day, there really is a God that for some crazy (and I mean legitimately insane) reason loves us, who are so very tiny and insignificant in comparison to Him, then believing in Him now is worth it. It gets me ready for what I'm sure will be the surprise of my existence when I finally get to know Him as He knows me. It helps me put this life in perspective. It inspires me to change to world into something better than what it is. It helps to bring me into relationships with others that I would totally shun if I didn't know that we were all looking for something bigger.

That doesn't explain me, though. In my philosophy class, we were talking about absolute space versus relative space and Leibnitz insists that if space were absolute, if we were all sitting on some big invisible 3-D coordinate grid, God would have to be arbitrary and that just makes everything bad because God is reasonable. Newton says, 'Screw you, Leibnitz, I'm right and you're wrong,' and that's all I got out of philosophy the past three weeks. But, as my professor put it, 'God is the elephant in the room,' and we took Him out of the argument. You ended up with the same result. I kinda want to do this with my life, theoretically. Take God out of it and see if you get the same result.

I mean, He's the elephant in the room in church. Or maybe that's the Holy Spirit. Jesus wasn't this nice, happy kid all the time- he said a ton of stuff just to throw people off balance (ref. placing a kid in the middle of the disciples and telling them to be like the kid). The Holy Spirit is something we're all not really comfortable with believing in. Yes, of course I have God living in me. Doesn't really jive with living with the rest of the world- they don't have God living in them. I am obviously more informed and better than they are. It's all the Holy Spirit's fault for being this big, mysterious thing that we don't get. So take it out. Take out God. Just leave Jesus as this guy who said a lot of good things and started an organization with a couple of good ideas and explain all this worship stuff as traditions and social constructs that make people comfortable and happy.

Minus God, I'm still an overly-vocal and quirky Sunday School teacher. I'm still VP-M of SAI, with all the odd phrases I throw into emails and life. I'm still a dying physics major, with all the disdain and sarcasm that must be piled on top of the unsure and fundamentally shy student who tries to sit in the corner and take notes at 1/10th the speed of light. I'm still in band, I'm still a vocal football fan, I'm still a thinking person, I still breathe. I still miss someone I have no right to miss and who does not miss me back. I'd still watch the puddles gather rain and sing and read and laugh and smile and cry. 'I apply my personality in a paste.' (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). I read Shakespeare, I watch Doctor Who, I listen to Relient K, I stare up at the stars and wish I could be one, watching the millenniums pass by as I slowly burn away and die in a glorious explosion while people an indeterminable distance away stare at my dissipating form and sigh in wonder.

But please explain to me how this little thought experiment works. I've got a bit of an epistemological issue with it. How can I say for sure that I am all those things without God? How can I say I am all those things with God? One of the guys in my learning community maintains that he knows the truth, as a Christian, but he can't prove it to anyone else. Whatever the universal truth is, he says, we can know it, but we can't prove it to someone else. God is everywhere, or He's nowhere, and they're the same thing, just stick a negative sign, by convention, in front of the second one. How can you, a human, say that He's one or the other? How can you say that you know the truth? I don't want to fall back on warm-fuzzies here, I want cold, logical facts. And the cold logical fact is that you can't.

So we get to choose. A, B or C. God exists, He doesn't, maybe. Great thing about this test- no one can tell you you're wrong. Not so great thing about this test- no one can tell you that you're right. Oh, one of them is right, but a long time ago, the test stopped being about whether God exists or not and started being about who had the better argument and was therefore the better person. So I choose to believe that God exists, that there is this eternal, omnipotent entity who for some miraculous reason loves me and cares about the state of my soul not only because you can't prove me wrong but also because I feel it. When logic fails, you have to lean back on the wonderful and terrible things that you feel and somehow the combination of that teaches you.

And I think I am that combination. I know who I am, under the layers of quirks I put on in order to make myself interesting, maybe only to myself. I think, I lean on what learned people can tell me and what makes sense out of what the learned people have told me and I learn about other things so I don't lean too heavily on the words of one agenda. But thinking leaves you alone and then you have to breathe, sit and listen, look up and wonder. You can't leave out one, though. You can't have too much of the other. And I don't think I'm the ideal balance. On any given day, my brain tells my feelings to stop being so pathetic and on another day, my feelings will tell my brain that it gets no choice in the matter. But I'm not leaving either one of the two of them at home and that's the important thing.

Is this a discovery? I think I was expecting it. So maybe I'm wrong. But I may be right.