a mess of me

So I began this year hoping to learn what it means to love God and love others and by doing so find what it means to live. I’ve learned it’s hard.

I usually think that I can hold my own. I go about my day under the impression that what I see and experience is true, is right. But I’ve recently been finding that I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust that what I see—an old woman on the 49b with wiry white hair, frail, skin cracked like an elephant’s, hunched over twig crossed legs, in an all dark blue ensemble, squinting through large maroon plastic frames at a tattered copy of War and Peace—is real. I can’t see the page she’s on, what she thinks about it, if she’s on her way home, what she had for dinner last night, if she lives alone, what she thinks about death or the life she’s lived, is living, if she watches Conan or Letterman, if she watches television at all, if she is a mother or wife, if her and I would get along. And even if I knew all these things, I still couldn’t begin to understand. All I can see is a woman on a bus and can only pretend to understand the woman in her. But I can’t pretend because it’s me writing my story on her.

I write my own version of my own story on everything I see. So everything is complicated. Truth is unperceivable through my eyes because there’s a war in me and it’s making a big mess.

Say I like someone. Is that her I’m seeing or who I want to see? Say I don’t like someone or what they’re doing. Is it because of them or is it some complex self-esteem booster?

There are deep desires in me that I’m not even aware of—things driving me and halting me, chemical and cognitive things, things that maybe I can hypothetically analyze (childhood factors, social expectations, etc) but can never really grasp or moreover control. I’m driven by another me and it frightens me.

Because there is this great tension in myself between who I want to be and who I am. There’s a tension in this world between how we want it to be and how it is.

So if I follow the Son of Man, the essentially perfect incarnation of Love and Truth, how do I live with myself? Do I just pretend? How do I love others? As someone once said, I’m just a crooked soul trying to stand up straight."

What do I do? The Shepherd King prayed, Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

From this, even with the mess in me, I’m learning peace—that Everything sees everything in me and loves regardless. He, like a shepherd, leads me away from myself and guides me towards everlasting. So I don't need to worry. Even with the war in me, I can have peace.

As another Shepherd King prayed:


I’m learning that although it’s hard to live in the constraints of my own limited perception, to love God and others in this self-cage, I can trust in the Good Shepherd, who understands and leads. Because he loves and guides me, I don’t need anything—The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.