It seems I am at this place in my life where I know where I am going, (I think) I know how to get there, just can't seem to get there fast enough. I have found that no matter how much I try to tell myself to let go of the social boundaries and timelines that are imposed upon me daily, I forget to fight and let them consume me.
It is ok to not have graduated yet. It is ok to work a labor intensive job. I am Happy. It is ok to be single. All of these things mold and push us to pretending to be someone less than who we are. An abbreviated version of ourselves that is easier for everyone to swallow because we are all pretending to follow and live by the same rules. It is bullshit. More than being bullshit, it is poison. It has so many people unhappy. So many people compromising their convictions. We have to stop making people who we want them to be, and we have to stop being who people want us to be.
I have found that this happens a lot in our faith as well. We all allow our faith to be attuned to someone else's walk. I take a lot of heart in an analogy shown to me many years ago when reading Nouwen.
He tells a story of a piano tuner who tunes every piano he tunes to a precise tuning fork. Therefore minimizing the amount of human error involved. He then begs the question, what if one was to tune one piano and then tune every according piano to the previous. If one was to try and play one hundred of those piano's there is no way they would sound in one accord. In order to tune a piano precisely and accurately you must tune them all to the original source, such as the tuning fork.
This analogy applies all aspects of my life.I can take elements from Buddhism or other religions and see the similarities and differences in those, and learn from those, but at the end of the day, I don’t care as much about man’s interpretation of religion. What I care about is what God tells me directly.
My hope is this. That we do not put our faith in people. that we do not put our faith in who we are supposed to be. But that we put our faith in god and can learn to be ourselves...
