A Life Lost, but Something Found

I’m much different than I was even six months ago. It’s funny how so little time can change a person. I’m in a different place and heading in a different direction than I ever could have imagined for myself.

I want to tell you about how I found God. I want to tell you about what I’m learning about Jesus. I want to tell you about this journey I’m on. Our lives mean nothing by ourselves. Isolated, only looking inward, we reach no one. Not even ourselves I don’t think. That’s not to say that introspection isn’t essential. It’s so essential, but it is not enough. The lessons I learn and all of the love that fills me means nothing if I don’t share it with you. Even if I can make you feel the tiniest connection or longing or inspiration, that is more than nothing. It is infinitely more than nothing.

My best friend died four months ago.

She was 22. In the middle of her life. Literally. I had talked to her that day and she was going on about work and school and various boys. She was in a similar place to me. Working through college, being suddenly in her life and yet still sort of waiting for it to fully start. It’s where we all are in our early 20’s. Still only beginning.

And then she didn’t wake up.

I work at a coffee shop and at 8 in the morning a good friend from high school called me in a panic to say she had heard that Mary Paige died. My heart started racing and I started shaking and I went to the back to call Mary Paige’s sister to assure me that this was some kind of sick joke. She sounded so calm. God love Peyton, she is so strong. She very quietly told me it was true.Mary Paige was dead.

Mary paige is dead.

I’m not going to go into detail about how hysterical I was that day or how I processed it because it’s still not something I’d like to revist. To be honest I don’t think I’ll ever fully process it. Most days it’s always there in my mind, but I can never grasp it. Never fully comprehend that she’s gone. Sometimes I repeat it to myself over and over in hopes that it will sink in or I’ll understand something or be able to wrap my mind around some small part of it. It never works. All that’s left is me and my life that refuses to stop for anyone. Life doesn’t care if you’re mourning. Life doesn’t care if you’re not ready to face it.

I remember sitting on a bench on campus one day looking out at all the people passing by fascinated that they couldnt see the pain. They couldnt see that I was broken and utterly different than before. They couldnt see how horrible and unappealing the world looked to me.

I could go on forever about everything I felt during that time. I could tell you about the darkness. About the way that it covered everything like some dense fog I couldn’t escape from. Maybe in another entry the darkness will be more important. But I need to tell you about the light. I need to tell you how I got through this. I need to tell you about the beauty that transformed my anger into something profound and infitely more powerful.

I need to tell you about God.

Just a glimpse at any of my previous entries will show you how much I doubt everything: God, religion, creation, I mean literally everything. The existance of a God sounds ridiculous to me. Completely ridiculous. I want to reach the intellectuals out there who don’t just doubt aspects of religion but everything from the ground up. I can’t stress enough how much I doubt the fundamentals of any kind of belief in God.

I don’t know how exactly it happened. On top of losing my best friend, I was in my last semester of college. I was taking an overload of 21 hours because my scholarship ran out, and otherwise I would have had to take out many more student loans. It happened the week before all my midterms. On top of that, I had just been informed that I had roughly two weeks to compose a piece of music for for a 13 instrument ensemble.

I remember thinking that all of this had to be some sort of horribly cruel joke. It all seemed so ridiculous. There was no way she was dead. There was no way I was going to get all this done. There was no way she was dead.

I wanted to quit. Really I just wanted to hide. From everything. I remember I would drive to school and just sit in my car trying to convince myself to get out and go to class. I felt weighed down by bricks, drowning in my own life.

I was going to fail. I even longed to fail. How glorious would it be to give up? To bask in the rebellious power of choosing to do nothing at all. To crawl into bed and never come out, to never have to answer to anyone.

In that time more than probably any other time in my life, I had people praying for me. I heard it so often, and yet it sounded so strange to me each time someone told me that “I’m praying for you”

“I’m praying for you”

“I’m praying for you”

I felt nothing but the obligation to reply with “thank you” and the odd sensation that none of the prayers and concerns in the world could affect or change the situation and how I felt about it. I even felt a slight twinge of anger that their sympathy seemed more concerned with making themselves feel good and selfless than in actually helping me. It felt dismissive almost. Im sure it was kindly meant, but it couldn’t touch any of my anger or pain.

And then something changed I think.

I was sitting in class one day texting one of my good friends about how I was handling everything. I was telling her about all of the millions of things I had to do if I was going to graduate this semester and not fail out of school.

And suddenly something was different. I don’t know where it came from but as I talked to her I remember telling her definitely that it was all going to work out. I was going to do it. I didn’t know how I would do it, but I felt this overwhelming grace assuring me that it would get done and I was going to graduate.

I wasn’t alone in this. I wish there was a way that I could better explain my experience of God in this time but it was this quiet certainty that got me through everything. Everything was heightened for me in this time of grieving which I believe allowed me to feel God in a more present way.

I felt him in everything. I mean, everything.

The sky looked different to me in this time. Through all the pain I couldn’t help but feel God in everything around me. Even the air seemed full of Him and his promise.

I firmly believe that in the same way that my experience of pain was heightened, so was my experience of beauty. I felt like I was coming alive in some way.

I don’t want you to read this and think that any part of this was easy and that I wasn’t suffering. Some days seemed a little brighter and more hopeful and then the next minute I plunged back into this haze of depression that seemed to paralyze me from doing anything besides feeling it.

I missed her. I miss her right now. I miss her in everything.

There was beauty in those weeks when all I did was study, work, write papers, and spend any free remaining time I had composing. I discovered a different kind of strength than the hardness I generally like to exhibit.

“Of course I don’t need any help. I’m fine. I’m fine.”, I would always say.

I couldn’t say that now. The strength I was given was more than me. It was strength through my own wounds and weakness.

It was grace.

I found myself thinking back to my favorite bible verse that I tend to revisit at various difficult times in my life:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness…this is why for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”   -2 Corinthians 12: 9-10

I used to think of God and religion as a sort of bandaid or “opiate for the masses” as many like to say.

This experience of suffering shattered that idea for me. There was nothing sparing me from pain or covering up my wound. It was freedom and transformation through the pain.

Im different.

My composition was the best thing I’ve ever written. It was real. I channeled everything I was feeling into it and in turn other people felt it deeply as well.

I graduated.

I met an amazing man that I never would have met or known without Mary Paige.

Sometimes I cry because of all the blessings I feel have been poured out on me during this incredibly challenging time in my life.

I cry sometimes because I’m so thankful for the deeper understanding of God I feel I’ve been given.

I cry because I’m so happy. I honestly am happy. I feel like I’m filled with a light and openness that was never there before. I feel more capable of loving the world and those around me with even more depth than before. My family sees it. My friends see it. I see it.

I desperately want to share this with you. I hope it touches you in some way. It’s changed me in more ways that I can count. It’s how I found God.

This is why I believe in Him.

“Just have faith”

I just spent a while talking to my aunt, who is a very strong Christian. I swear, she and my uncle are the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. They have very strong Christian values and have been avid Protestant church goers for as long as I can remember. For whatever reason, I decided to open up to my aunt about some of the religious searching and questioning I’ve been doing lately. I think maybe it was out of curiosity for how she would respond to my intellectual/spiritual journey. Like I said, I was raised Catholic, so I know that fundamentalist Protestants approach things a bit differently, so I was interested to hear her thoughts. I tried to express myself as best as I could, talking about my questions about the origin for the universe and causality and a few intellectual arguments that I felt pointed at least in some way to a God. I think I was rambling and fumbling for the right words, and wasn’t having much luck. It’s an odd feeling laying my doubts so openly on the table, especially to someone so firmly established in their faith.

She asked me very poignantly what I thought would happen to my soul when I died, implying whether I thought I would go to heaven or hell or how I thought I would be judged. This stopped me because I didn’t know how to answer it. To begin with, I’m not sure what I believe about the afterlife. I don’t know whether there’s a heaven or hell or if the light just simply goes off, and that’s it. The only description I’ve ever been able to get on board with about heaven and hell is a particularly beautiful one and, in my opinion, the only one that is in any way seemingly consistent with a God of pure goodness. I’ve actually seen it described in more than one book, but the general idea is that after we die, God reveals all of his goodness to us, and at that point, we can accept Him and come into his kingdom, or reject his goodness and go to hell. I don’t know if this is at all what it will be like. After all, speculating about the afterlife is about the most speculative thing a person can do.

I told my aunt that if this were the case, I would definitely choose to accept God’s goodness. She seemed to veer off in a slightly different direction at this point, saying that accepting the absolute goodness of God was something I could do on earth. At this point (please forgive any mockery in my tone) the conversation turned into a bit of a “just accept Jesus into your heart” and a “just have faith” conversation. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it seemed equivalent to me to someone telling me to “just accept that Hinduism is the only true religion.” That very well may be true, but how can I “just accept” something I don’t know if I believe in. It would be a falsehood. I cannot claim to believe in something I don’t know if I believe in. I cannot claim to accept something I have not accepted.

I wholeheartedly admire the people who seem able to “just have faith”, and I wish I were more like that. I guess we all have our own gifts. Maybe it’s one of those things that only comes about once you have put at least a few of the puzzle pieces together. I don’t have my puzzle pieces together at this point. I can say I have faith in one thing, though: that my questioning is the only way I can truthfully and honestly begin, and that this searching will lead me somewhere.