I’m a Christian. Shocker, I know.
All my life I was told to blindly follow rules. Do this, do that, don’t do this, do NOT do that, and I did as I was told. Can I be real with y’all? (You can’t answer, so I guess that leaves me no choice). Not only did I do as I was told, I judged everyone who did not do as I was told. I hated them with a passion. I believed that they didn’t deserve God’s love, that they were going to hell, that they were evil. This isn’t a therapy session, though (totally not making a reference to my favorite artist of all time, NF).
There was a point in my life when I lost everything. My friends. My family. My voice. Myself. All I could do was write. At the age of 12 I wrote this line in one of my depressing journals:
If pain is an ocean, then I must be a reservoir.
Emo, I know (IT’S NOT A PHASE MOM). It was at my lowest point I had a revelation I was pushed even lower. Imagine being at rock bottom and losing everything and trying to find hope by reading The Bible and reading this as soon as you open it:
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. (1 Corinthians 13:1-3 MSG)
All this time I thought I was right, and I hated anyone who didn’t agree with me. My Real, in reality, was just as bad as the Real of someone from the KKK or any other terrorist group. When there was no one to love me? I realized what my Real is. It is to love. Many people tell me I’m one of the kindest people they’ve ever met, but honestly, I still have so much more to go. The Real will always be out of reach, because to completely reach The Real is to reach perfection, just as Passing Strange ends with ambiguity and the Youth not reaching The Real, which depicts life as it is. The way I get closer to The Real is by searching and finding. Searching and finding new roads to love. Searching and finding new approaches to love. Searching and finding new [all] people to love.
I’m a Christian. Shocker, I know.
