Start with Despair

I'm reading John Piper's mini-book When the Darkness Will Not Lift, right now, and I just came to a passage that is becoming quite revolutionary.

"Bunyan went home rejoicing when he saw this his righteousness was outside himself. It was Jesus Christ. I pray that this will be your experience too. Where should you start? Start at the easiest place for those in darkness. Start with despair. Despair of finding an answer in yourself. I pray that you will cease from all efforts to look inside yourself for the rescue you need. I pray that you will do what only desperate people can do, namely, cast yourself on Christ. May you say to him, 'you are my only hope. I have no righteousness in myself. I am overwhelmed with sin and guilt. I am under the wrath of God. My conscience condemns me, and makes me miserable. I am perishing. Darkness is all about me. Have mercy upon me. I trust you.' . . . The light will rise in your darkness in due time. God will hold onto you )Jude 24). You will make it. The glory is coming. In the meantime [and this is possibly my favorite verse] 'this slightly momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to things that are seen, but to things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.' (2 Cor. 4:17-18)"

It's easy to try and find hope in myself. It's even easier to pursue some sort of intellectual enlightenment, believing that it will be my hope.  The only deserving object of our hope is Christ, who was crucified and resurrected.  All others will fall short, leading only to despair.

Confessions of a ...

Today was an excruciatingly hard day. It was the kind of day that makes reality seem like a figment, and makes me absolutely resent everything that goes on within my mind.
I feel like I lead three separate lives: one at school and etc., one at work, and one that really only exists in my head.  They rarely coincide, despite the fact that I live all three in one day, and often even simultaneously.  Today two of my worlds took shocking blows, right to the left eyebrow, and I've been left feeling nauseous and uncertain.  The problem, however, is not really that I got punched in the face, because I am, by nature, a boxer. The problem arises in my attempts to address the ramifications of the shots, i.e, the blood dripping down my shirt.  After the first hit I tried to get a little help stopping the blood and cleaning up the mess, but it was made infinitely worse. You see, the person I so eagerly pursued for help unintentionally (or maybe intentionally) elbowed me on the side of the face . (Now this analogy is getting confusing and beginning to fall apart, but I feel I must hold it together for the sake of my own security.)  And this second blow crippled me.  It ripped out all of my sanity and left me lying on the floor of an alternate reality.  Nothing in the former reality was (or is) tangible, and this new reality is spinning in such a way that I can't get back up. My soul seems to hurt, and resentment for that elbow and its owner is quietly growing within me.
I don't like leaving things without conclusion, but that is where I am left.

Certain nostalgic emotion

There is this certain nostalgic emotion that creeps up every now and then, when a cool breeze lifts my hair, or when my kids bring me acorns and ask me to "pop the hats off of them," or when I'm walking in the shade and catch one small sliver of sunlight on my face. This emotion is quite inexplicable, and to be honest, one I rather loathe.  It all seems so lovely on the surface; those things listed above are a few of my absolute favorite things. They are also things that last only a second and then are gone, leaving me feeling achy- like I am grasping at straws.  I was in the middle of one such moment today when something struck me.  When we are resurrected to the New Earth, our deepest desires and cravings will be satisfied by intimate communion with the Son of God. We long for these manifestations of Christ's perfection, but the day will come when I will be in the presence of the creator of all of the beauties that constantly slip through my fingers. That day will be sooo glorious.

Two kids in a photograph.

I was hanging up a photo today, of two kids I had photographed whilst in Africa.  I paused for a moment to reflect on how unbelievably beautiful life is, and then realized something.  The two kids in the photograph mean nothing to me, apart from the gut-wrenchingly-nostalgic emotional reaction seeing them elicits.  I never had a relationship with them apart from the quick utterance of "sura? shukran," and I will never know what kind of men they will grow up to be, or even if they survive into manhood. To me, they really aren't people. They are subjects.  They are representations of an innate urge to capture as much of the world as I can and stuff it into little 4x6 boxes.  They are physical manifestations of my selfishness and all of humanity's inability to truly empathize within itself.  They are reminders of my sinful desire to puff up my own ego through admiration of my art. Most of all, though, they are proof of how vast this world is, how complex the human race, and how small my cognitive abilities.
I love this photograph. It is beautiful and I am proud of it. I am frightened and confused as to how some ink on a piece of paper provokes such a reaction within me, but I am amazed that God created us as such prodigiously complex beings who will never understand this earth from this earth.