It's been an exhausting week. I realized I didn't need a vacation from work, I needed a vacation from my entire life. And well, that's difficult to coordinate. I've been full of frustrations, many involving God.
I feel as though most of my life involves me shouldering burdens- wherever I am. At home, at work, with family, with friends. I ask God why I have to carry so much. Of course, he replies, in the voice of my old Gospel choir director, "you've gotta lay your burdens down, child. And you know you'll feel betta, so much betta, if you lay 'em down." But I still think of my future, the end of my 70 weeks and I just see more challenges, more burdens.
I feel distant from God, a large portion of which I am at fault for. I find myself spending so much time talking about God, talking with fellow Christians, surrounding myself with Christian ideas that I forget to talk to God and have an actual relationship with him. It's like talking to all your friends in relationships about your relationship and reading advice books on relationship but then never spending anytime with your significant other. It doesn't work.
But I also feel as though I'm just so distant from His will, off from where he wants me in my daily life. Not in the big things, just in all my millions of small actions, in my thought process. I'm distant in that I put things before Him in value, want more things than His love.
Yet, here's the kicker. I've been working on loving God properly and so sometimes I'm in a better place and really wanting His love, trying to fathom it, trying to understand the depth of it, and on the verge of grasping a small speck of it's grandeur, it's wildness, how it makes any human love I know look "like milk and water." And in those times (and really all the time) I just realize how I can't grasp it, full feel it, and ultimately, can't have as much God as I want. I drink Him in, feel His presence, but it's never enough. I can't get enough of it here on earth. Of course, this is no shock, but it's frustrating. God wants to be in my life so much but I can't have as much of Him as I'd like, I still feel distant. As I said to my friend, sometimes my relationship with God feels like a long distance relationship. "There's a reason," I said, "why people won't do long distance relationships. Because they're already in one with God, they can't deal with another one." Now, I know he's right here and present all the time, but his presence is like a phone call, sometimes maybe like Skype. You're talking to him, you can hear Him, even feel him, but his presence is never going to be as strong as it could be, say, if you saw Him in person.
I have a lot of frustrations, I know the answer to these is to turn to God, pray, lay my burdens down, put Him first, rest in His love, but when I do that, I just realize how much of Him I don't have present. I'm thankful for God being present in my life at all, don't get me wrong. But, knowing how big God is, even thinking how his pure presence would feel, I can't help but desire it so strongly. Normally I'd end on some positive up-beat note about how I was in a bad place but came to some heart warming realization. This is sort of an exception.
I'm not going to say how lovely everything is because the reality is, I just miss God (and I know He misses me too) and I'm sick of this long distance relationship.
I told a friend of mine about how once I wanted to do something drastic, probably sinful, just so God would take me back, so I'd feel his presence especially heightened as I have in the past. Of course I wouldn't, but I desired to feel God's strong presence so much that I thought about it. "You're sick," he said. I started to argue but instead replied, "Yes, yes I am. I'm sick because I'm separated from him and I'm not going to be well until I see His face." And my typically argumentative friend clinked his glass against mine.
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