War in my head...

Tonight I left to go to work with a lot of anxiety. It was nothing to do with work itself, it was a deep sense of dread that nothing matters in life. It's hard to believe I could walk out the door from a wife and daughters I adore and cherish and still even question life's meaning. But I'm a complicated guy and my intellect and my work as a psychologist have led me to some dark spaces. I have a strong theology of suffering, but the hellish thing I heard this week...well...it reminds me of all the other torture stories I've heard in the past 10 years, and it sucks me into those powerful questions I have about human life being anything more a terrible mistake of evolution. Consciousness allows us to do some amazing things, but it's also an enormous burden.

And at the risk of sounding like I'm coming unglued, I think I heard a voice tonight.

I had a patient cancel at the last minute, and in the mean time I decided to confront my angst with silence.

In the silence I heard that voice I've so rarely heard - probably because I'm such a terrible fucking skeptic.

Oddly, it was a voice that reminded me of something my friend wrote about church.

My friend said that a church is a group of people trying together to learn to have their hearts beat like God's beats. That we learn the rhythm of God's heart, and try to have our hearts beat in time with His.

Beautiful.

If the spiritual metaphor is too vague, what I'm saying is that I think we have to learn to love the things that God loves, in the ways that God loves. That life's meaning is to be found in emulating Jesus...not by being religious...but by loving in those radical ways that overcome darkness and torture and death. We defy the horror of this life and that sick empty feeling that chases a lot of us whenever we slow down, by choosing to love extravagantly.

And as I tear myself away from my own internal battle long enough to realize that I am not the sole decision maker about whether my life is ultimately meaningful or worthwhile,  I'm captivated by the thought that those whom I'm bound to in life - my family, my community, the patients I serve, the God that I wrestle with - also have something to say about whether or not my life is meaningful. It makes me realize that I need other people - that any question about existence is not for me to work out as a private intellectual enterprise - but can only be resolved in the context of who I am in relationship to others. And hesitantly I acknowledge that for me this must include others who believe and doubt this story of Jesus.

But I have a lot bad feelings and thoughts about church. These days fewer of those thoughts are judgemental angry ones, and most are just despair because I can't find an enduring or satisfactory answers about who we are to be as a church.

Yet maybe it really is so simple (not easy, but simple) as learning to pattern our own hearts after God's, and learning to do this together in the context of community. As much as I struggle with Christians, I need them. I need to have them in my life to learn how to love...and they need me...with all my selfish, critical, over-thinking, brokenness. They aren't just the blue section on my Google calendar, they are a part in God's invitation for me to learn how love as God loves. They are God's invitation to a life saturated in meaningfulness, redemption, and hope.