There's a Little Boy Singing "I'm Blue, Da Ba Dee Da Ba Da" On the Bench Next To Me

Aloha.

An airport policeman with Aviators just rode past on a Segway.

I spent the past thirty hours on a plane. Two nights. One day. Two continental breakfasts served in a tray. Three total hours of sleep. Six different airports.

I watched Braveheart and Harry Potter 7.2 and cried during both.

The distance between Doha and Maui is much farther in reality than in theory.

And here I am, waiting for the family to arrive in six hours.

Six.

Hours.

Should be enough time to sort out my life.

I can imagine that, once I see my lovely mother, father, and sister, they will want to eat dinner. And at dinner, they will want to have a conversation. And that conversation will require me to explain how I am. Oh, pesky subject. I suppose I ought to prepare a statement. Especially considering the state of lucidity I find myself in.

Well. I left the United States to live in China four and a half months ago. Now, I like tomatoes and apple pie and pomegranates and sweet potatoes and pork and white rice and dark chocolate ice cream. I have read The Five Love Languages, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, The Weight of Glory, Velvet Elvis, Love Wins, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Einstein’s Dreams, One Thousand Gifts, Stories for the Nighttime, The Naked Gospel, Evolving in Monkey Town. I have traveled to the Middle East, and Tibet, and Beijing, and Hong Kong, and Kashgar, and Yangshuo, and Hawaii. I have ridden a camel and run a marathon and studied mandarin and fallen in love with international education.

But all those things, they are only surface things.

I am more deeply changed by others. I can follow those shifts in me backward through little things that happened along the journey.

My “theology” is different. As in…it no longer exists in the same way it once did. I think somewhere along the way I experienced a sort of saturation of broken people, people who were unsure of God’s good plans for them. This brokenness was present in my group, in the Tibetan monks setting themselves on fire for freedom, in the East and the West, everywhere. My visit to the Middle East rekindled my passion for the Islamic culture, rekindled my questions about heaven and hell and salvation and balancing the wrath of God with the grace of God. I witnessed street evangelism, the "hit-and-run gospel," that made me question whether or not I even wanted association with the label “Christian." It can be such a trudging word, baggage-heavy with unfriendliness (perhaps “follower of Christ” might do?). I began reading John, and if anyone were to look through its chapters in my Bible he or she would find my pen highlighting passages about Jesus’ character and the requirements for salvation (belief, belief, belief, belief), amongst other topics. All of these things made me want to know more, to search deeper into who Jesus really was (is), what He wanted (wants) from us, and why He created humans in the first place. I guess somewhere along the way, life happened, and I decided that I don’t know many of the answers that a “good Christian girl” should probably know. I don’t have my theological ducks in a neat and tidy row. For now.

But I do know this. I want to pursue Jesus. I want to live His radical life and be transformed right here and now, and partner with Him in His transforming work in the world. Here. Now. I want to be a Christian who is not afraid of having conversations with God about doubt and anxiety and anger and confusion. I think He can handle it. And furthermore, I realized (to the liberation of my soul) that I will never quite know all the answers. I will die one day, and I will still have doubt and questions and concerns. And that is okay. That is okay.

So. If I strip my current theology down to its fighting weight, I get this:

1.   God didn’t give up on the world – He sent His son for it!! So neither will I give up on the world, but rather work to put as much light and goodness in it as possible.

1.5       I have learned more than ever that people are convinced about Christ not through argument or apologetics or theology. From what I can tell, they are convinced through the love and action of humans who are trying to pursue Christ.

2.   Jesus loves me.

All that should at least get my family and I through an appetizer.

Brownie points and kudos and such if anyone actually read through all of this twenty-year-old angst. I think even I’m too tired to go on.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will, gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.” – Rainer Rilke

I suppose this is all part of the phenomenon known as “growing up.” It can be messy sometimes, and I think I’m learning to respect that messiness. Play in it. Be patient with it. Dance in it, before it gets too clean.