What Must I Do?

So this is the first post on the blog that I have been promising to the Facebook community for over a month and to myself for a much longer time. I'm sorry that it is so late in coming to fruition but my honest reason for not beginning it sooner is that I have never made adequate time in which to complete it. I finally found, after a month and a half of trial and error, that I can accomplish much more in a limited space of time if I simply make time for everything in advance (meaning that I actually use my planner for once.) As this is the case I believe that I have been humbled to the point where I must publicly make note that my mother was right and being able to keep a calendar is indeed a very important skill to have.

Now I want to get down to the essence of why am writing this blog. However it is already 12:30 Thursday morning and I need to get enough sleep to wake up in time for my 8 am Calculus class tomorrow. For that reason I am going to attempt to finish this blog in as little time as possible. Anyways, getting back to the blog, the name of this particular post and it's content were both inspired by another blog written by the Rev. Kurt Wiesner. His most recent post by the same name is a sermon written on a reading from the Gospel of Mark and it is certainly one of the best that he has ever published. I will try to avoid telling the entire story or paraphrasing too much of his sermon since I believe that he had done much better justice to the story than I could right now. But I feel that I must tell you a little bit about the man that this story revolves around. I don't mean Jesus as much as the man who seeks him out. He is a man who is searching for greater meaning , but he is sad and frustrated even to the point of despairing because though he has led a virtuous and admirable life up to this point he still finds that at times his life is lacking meaning. It's that feeling that you get where you are just empty, drained an worn out, and when you really think about it the question that you always ask yourself is "Why does it feel like something is missing?" Maybe most of us don't feel this feeling as acutely as him but there are always the times when at least I feel that no matter what the effort I put forth, there is always just something deep at my core that is absent and has always been, I just learned to be without it.

I live a life that sometimes feels empty, what should I do? Should I try to fill it up, cram my life so full that I have no time to feel empty alone or lost? I don't really believe that this would be an honest way of dealing with the emptiness in my life. If I were to just fill up my life I would never have asked myself what is it that I am missing and much more importantly, if I never gave myself time to feel the emptiness how would I ever know if indeed it had been filled. This wouldn't be honest because it would give me such an easy way to lie to myself and to claim that I was whole and healed without ever having proof that I actually was. It's only one of many ways I could have tried to fill the hole in myself, there are probably as many hypotheses concerning how to fill this hole as there are stars in the sky. Hey if there are so many ideas why hasn't someone told me how to fix my life already, really it can't be that big of a secret, right? Well the truth is that I have been bombarded with possible solutions since I was a child, but not a single one has gotten through to me. That's why I'm not going to talk about the solution Jesus gives to the man in the story for now. Even though I am sure that he is right in every possible way, I just cannot believe that his solution is exactly right for me.

The essence of this blog and the meaning behind it's existence lies in that previous statement, I cannot believe Jesus' words or the words of anyone not for any lack of faith or understanding. The only reason that I cannot believe them is that they are not my own. Not to say that the words that come from my word are better than any other words but any thoughts that I construct with a deep personal understanding are a truth for myself even they on the surface they don't seem profound or of universal importance. The reason that I am seeking this personal truth is that it is essential to what I am really searching for and that is a way to live life itself. I actually don't believe that finding truth about myself, knowledge alone really can't fill up the emptiness in me, however I believe that living into life as fully as possible is something that can. It is such a contradiction to say that to undo this empty feeling in my life I am trying to live a full life but to do this I cannot just fill my life up. But they are not the same thing. Living a full life is a bit more complicated than that and interestingly enough it begins with a very similar contradiction for me.

I have said for a month or two that how I begin to live life fully is by choosing to live every day. Well, how is that really different from what I have been doing for my entire life? Obviously I must have been choosing to live for more than just two months otherwise I wouldn't be alive to write this blog. But I believe that choosing to live is a much different thing than just waking up and going about my normal routine every day and before I discovered that I could make the choice the only time I ever really did live was when I chose to through random chance. You see, choosing to live is such an important step for me because once I choose to live I find that I want every other choice I make to agree with that most basic decision because if the subsequent choices I made did not reflect the first then if would mean nothing at all. What I really want to say is that once I make the choice to live I can no longer go about my life forgetting to ask myself the most basic questions that really if I forgot to ask myself them I wouldn't really be living at all. One thing that I believe defines human life is our ability to make choices about everything that we do but if we hold off from deciding anything at all what makes us any different from the rest of the world which goes on only according to the laws of physics and their own instincts. Understand that to me this simple daily act of choosing life over death is so much more important than choosing not to die. It is choosing to be human, to be a creative force not bound by any laws of nature and have meaning beyond that of a rock or tree or toothbrush. Now to bring this back to the idea of personal truth and the meaning behind this blog, I try to choose every day to live fully into the world, but only with a knowledge of myself can I understand what choices I must make to fulfill this dream of living fully, and once I have a complete knowledge of myself then the life i live will be complete as well.

In this final statement I want to draw again from Kurt's blogs as well as from the blog of another Episcopal priest Joy Caires. The conclusion of Kurt's blog post is that what the man who has come seeking help from Jesus is missing is simply that he is not vulnerable to the world. Wait what does that have to do with choosing to live. We the wonderful thing about vulnerability is that is allows us to make choices every day that we wouldn't normally make, to never take things for granted which is exactly what makes us alive. The other side of my understanding can be found in Joy's blog. In a post from this summer she concludes that "living is daring to do the joyful things" not just doing the joyful things but daring to do them. In that word lies all the meaning of life. That we cannot just live a certain way and be alive, we have to choose and dare to live the way we want to. Being complete is not a state of being that I can achieve by living according to a set of rules, it is just a mindset where everything is chosen, to keep me alive.

Well now that I have already given away the essence of what this blog will be about I will certainly have to get more creative in the future just to keep you all interested. I hope to post again soon and wake up in time for my Calculus class tomorrow.

Bonsoir!

p.s. Since I am posting this almost 24 hours after I wrote it I would just like everyone to know that I did make it to my 8 am Calculus this morning, which was a good thing because we were learning integration by parts which I really need to know. Anyways I woke up 13 minutes before my class started and still made it there with one minute to spare. Hooray!