i originally posted this over at thoughts from the sugar bowl:

there have been times in my life where i’ve thought i had God figured out. not even in that hubris-laden way of ‘completely figured out’ but even in relatively small ways. ways where i looked at my faith, theology, practices and was quite convinced that i had put together a solid religion with my ducks in a row. those are the times when i stopped wrestling with God, stopped fighting with the world around me and acquiesced to a shallow road of simple beliefs.

the first time i did this was as a nonchristian, looking at the world around me and knowing there was more but refusing to engage with it, desiring only to be left alone and to live out my days. surprising only myself, i again faced that same error years later as a young christian; convinced that i had arrived, i achieved my salvation and now needed only continue on as i was and happy to preach conversion and teach scripture to those around me. i was insufferable.

God disabused me of that notion right quick.

that brings me to where i am today. down in the trenches, fighting. doing battle with my own beliefs and wrestling with God as revealed to me through scripture and through relationships. trying to understand in tiny ways the church, the community of broken people around me and what is it all worth? this tension is the only thing that keeps me moving forward, bumbling in ways to try to understand just what the hell i am doing with my days on this planet.

i have to recognize that even in this simplistic look at the world – this recognition of tension and questioning – there lies the seeds of trying to be ‘arrived’, to be done with it and able to focus on other things.

to which gabrielle responded:

What is the point of all this struggle anyway? Can we really be assured that there IS a point? Is HOPING that there’s a point enough? Every time I think I’ve survived some major turning point in my life and come out ahead, I wonder how much God had to do with it and how much I just hit the right combination of blind luck elements and came out ahead. I am terrified of losing my love. I am terrified of losing my freedom. I am terrified of losing my sobriety. If I have to start being terrified of losing my salvation as well, what is the fucking point? I’m sorry, but there it is. Why can’t we feel assured in God? Is there NOTHING that gives us a sense of calm anymore? Are we to even doubt our very faith and salvation and existence until the end of our days because struggle is the only religion there is of value?

I can’t accept that. We might as well die then.

a response to which i am pretty much dumbfounded. in a sense it forms another experience to support my point that every time i think i have something understood i’m brought to a place where new information causes me to have to rethink my theology and worldview. this is one of those questions i don’t know how to answer. i don’t want to have a gospel of “suffering” – nor for that matter one of “prosperity”, “easy answers”, “power”, or any other single aspect of our life and faith.

of course the sunday school (or bible study!) platitude might be to say i want a gospel of jesus christ, but even to say that is burdened with imagery and associations that are inherently flawed. so am i becoming completely postmodernist, tearing apart my beliefs until i have nothing left and trying to reconstruct reality as a discursive framework?

i hope not.

still, what assurance do i have and where do i get it from? why don’t i just give up? is it all just a fool’s hope, a child’s self-centered expectation of safety?

i think something i’ve been noticing about my interactions with people the last few months is a lack of depth. it feels like it’s been a year of nothing but surface-level interactions, how-do-you do’s and how’s the weather, oh that’s nice, and the family, good i hope? while there have been notable exceptions, i even think that part of my creation of this blog had to do with a need to express what’s going on deeper inside, even if i only use it for that purpose ever so rarely.

even now as i try to look at what i’m trying to say, the paragraphs flow unevenly and without clarity. it’s like i’m fundamentally out of practice with baring my soul to others, lowering my defenses of cleverness and humor and taking a stab at brutal honesty. the most frightening thing about this is that i don’t know how it happened. like the lobster that sits contently in the water as the temperature slowly increases, so too have i sat by and watched my heart harden and my retorts become colder, my nature more bitter and salty.

of course my analogy is flawed. i have to acknowledge that i’m the one turning up the heat, as it were. i want to be more bitter. i want to be hard, impenetrable and unhurt by those around me. a snarky asshole? i was once one of the best, tearing down the best of them and always on guard for a faster gun. i haven’t properly been one in years, even approaching a decade. and now i’m in conflict with myself for dragging out those old skills, for going all clint eastwood unforgiven and pulling out the gunbelt that long ago i’d sworn to put behind me.

the only solution that i see is to try to turn that behavior around. to seek out deeper interactions where i can, and to discourage in myself defensiveness and perpetuating surface-level interactions.

that, or i could just move to barrow and hermit down.

i have a pretty substantial collection of t-shirts, (and thanks to r. stevens it just grew by three ) and every now and then i think it’d be cool to sit down and design a shirt or two. unfortunately i lack the ‘mad skills’ to turn my ideas into designs. still, here’s a few i’d like to come up with.

i love this quote:

I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft… As for me, give me a fixed gear!
–Henri Desgrange, L’Equipe, 1902

but not the shirt i found it on. so i’d like to have a better design for that.

there’s also always my desire for a point83 logo shirt, as well as one based off the starscream/wackacon logo visible at the top of my website. unfortunately, with such a crappy source image it’s going to be hard to ever get anything nice without basically redrawing it.

i also like aaron’s forum banner:

even though it’s already been an urban outfitters shirt, i prefer the wider layout and green color. also, i simply refuse to pay $28 for a single t-shirt.

oh well. even if i can’t get the t-shirts i want, i finally did get myself a cool new messenger bag. we’ll see if it actually replaces the venerable hacker timbuk2 or not. i did try out my friend garth’s bag and found it to be massively comfortable. hopefully the company didn’t fail because their bags were bad.