The past few years have been full of odd seasons. It all started with a mass exodus of friends from Colorado, coinciding with the disintegration of the young adult group at my old old church. This lead to a wandering in the desert, a desperation for community at my old church, and finally seemed to settle down when I began attending my current church.
I just…never got the feeling that things were finished.
I’ve been dying to write for the past few weeks, and today is as good a day as any. Tonight was the official last day of the young adult group at my church. We’re still hanging out going forward, but to be honest, there is a bit of a slump in my step as I breathe into the night air, wondering when things will finally settle down.
I don’t believe I have ever been truly depressed. I think every winter I suffer from a mild version of the so-called “seasonal affective disorder”, but that’s about it. Otherwise, I suffer occasionally from…extreme sentimentalism. I’m not even kidding you. Dwelling on the past too much can really make me sad. I had this big-time when I lived alone in my apartment, just some evenings all I could think about were the “good old days”, especially with family (oddly enough, I also remember experiencing that before I moved to the apartment…when I still lived with my family!)
But this season has now joined the others in being…very odd.
I had specific goals with money. I no longer know what those goals are, I just keep shoveling money into the retirement accounts. I had countries I wanted go to, but the overwhelming message from God is to let go of those because the time still isn’t right. It was originally my goal to be married before age 30, but that definitely wasn’t in the books. I thought my career would be further, too, but I’m still stuck writing boring database code when I could be building fun web applications. I’m currently in a lot of prayer over that.
And even thought it is very likely that our young adult group will in fact stay together, I just don’t know what my bigger community will look like going forward, even just having received the clear message that things are not done changing. Some day, my parents will probably retire to Idaho. Some friends may move to California, others may move to Colorado Springs. It makes you want to look to God and ask, “The fuck do you want from me?”
In the midst of it all are my own fears of what people think of me. For example, sometimes I’m tempted to remove the “harsher” posts I’ve put on this blog. I enjoy letting myself be raw and emotional, but it often causes friction, and a lot of those things aren’t necessary to say. And there’s always that temptation that if I can just manage to please everyone, to say all the right things, then everyone will think highly of me. But I don’t have perfect opinions. I can be arrogant in certain areas of life, while also being dreadfully insecure in others.
I struggle to feel like community is ever enough. I long for deeper connections, for deeper friendships. But sometimes you have to realize that people can’t necessarily provide that. It wasn’t until I learned about the Enneagram and realized I was a 6 in that system that some of my past begin to make sense. I think a lot of my social searching has just been a searching for something to be loyal to.
You could put a theological spin on it, but I hate theology. Theology isn’t the heart, the soul; it’s the “supposed to be”, the theory behind the real bread and butter. Don’t theologize community to me. I’ll fight you.
This is a just a vent post, musings. Fortunately, there’s nothing cataclysmic about the de-official-izing of this group, but it makes me think about the bigger picture, where things in my life are going. More questions are on the horizon.