I'm sitting in my apartment and we opened a window earlier while we were cooking and now it's really, really cold. I don't remember September being so cold here last year, so I didn't bring a lot of jackets or warm clothes.
Add to that homesickness for the first time since fifth grade, 2-4 hours of sleep in the past few days, and seasonal depression which typically makes me as weepy and emotional as a post-partum first-time mom, and you've got yourself a good idea of how I'm feeling inside and out.
For these depressive episodes, I'm always thinking along the lines of, "I want to be a good person but I just can't." I want to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, whatever, but when things don't turn out right, I pretend something bigger got in the way. I blame it on exhaustion or hunger or PMS or my (tentative) partial hearing impairment, then go about thinking it's not really my fault, I didn't want it that way. It's my tiredness's fault. It's the bed's fault. It's the weather's fault. Because when I come around to blaming myself, I feel like a complete failure.
I guess that's where the whole sinner concept springs up and appeals to me, a piece of oddly given and twisted comfort. It's not my fault I'm a bad person.. I was just born that way. I can't change the way I am, something else has to affect and change me. Someone had to die for me.
God knows this more than I do, and it was so awkward to explain how my summer was at our class meeting yesterday night in the midst of all my weepiness and exhaustion. Because who really knows if I have any faith, or if it's just a psychological illusion? How do these things happen, and how do they present themselves? During the summer, I slowly destroyed almost everything spiritual that I built up freshman year because of a turn of events for the worse. There became a wall separating faith and real life, and logical reality struck me in the face. I didn't want to go back to Ann Arbor or church and I didn't want to hear another word about how great God is. "How is your relationship with God?" people still asked, and most of the time I lied. It's good. I'm feeling lost but I'm trying. I'm right on track with Bible study. It wasn't that I didn't care, it was just that I knew He was there but I didn't feel the need to pray or read the Bible anymore. I felt so strong and liberated and comfortable, and I never stopped to think I would be in any sort of trouble.
So it was almost creepy the way one day's short car ride back to campus as well as failed expectations broke through the denial I had built up in the past four months. Suddenly I found myself breaking down at 4 in the morning, not wanting to live anymore, then finally forced to run to God because I had no one else to turn to. And in the midst of defeat through prayer, despite all the rebellion and angst of this past summer, God led me back to him, and for that moment I knew I was safe.
A mustard seed of faith can move mountains, and then give you back your hope. God didn't cure the emotional train wreck in me to let me know what I was missing. Rather, it was the one thing I needed in order to be reminded again of His presence, that I can turn to Him in my darkest, sorriest hour and He'll listen. I'm not good, not fine at all, but I know I'm in the hands of someone who is.
