Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Dream Again

I was at breakfast last week with my buddy Derek, talking about some of the things I've been contemplating lately and how I feel my faith has been changing. In the vein of my last post, we were talking about Job and suffering and questioning God and the tendency to cut questioning short to provide simple answers like "God has a plan" or "God is in control". I was reading an article a few days ago that talked about the habit Christians have of trying to resolve pain and conflict too quickly with those pre-fab responses. Sometimes, things are not okay. Sometimes things just suck. There's not an answer for everything and sometimes it doesn't feel like enough to just say "Praise God that he is faithful in all things". As true as that may be, it doesn't solve all the questions, conflict, or pain.

As Derek and I were talking, I started to picture my system of beliefs as a boat, a safe place that was providing me protection from the raging seas that surrounded me. Throughout my journey, as the storms have gotten bad, the boat has sprung numerous leaks, which I continuously patched with simple answers. Now, my boat is nothing but patches and it has completely disintegrated, leaving me without protection, floating in the raging waters, vulnerable to all the storms that come. But perhaps this is not such a bad thing. Perhaps that boat of a rigid belief system was also keeping me from fully experiencing.

Jordana and I watched a movie over the weekend called "Visioneers"; it was heavy but incredible. The story was set in this dystopian society where dreams were viewed as bad because they led to pain. Basically, in an effort to remove anything painful, they removed all emotion in general, including the ability to dream. There was a lot more to it, but this is part of what I took away. At the end, I found myself desperately wanting to dream again but with the realization that dreaming can also involve pain. It's so much easier to live in a self-protective bubble. We keep ourselves safe with our simple answers and our simple ways of thinking. Sure, that's safe. But it can also be empty. It's missing something.

I don't fully understand these ideas yet but I know that I want to dream again. I want to believe that a better world is possible. I want to see the beauty around me. I want to think big and believe that youthful idealism is not dead. I want to dream again.

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