Fifty-three years of heaven or hell

I recently bought a book called Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. I think the title is rather self-explanatory. It's all essays and reflections on the author's thoughts about different topics, like redemption, and tithing, and community and romance and the connection between faith and penguin sex. (Yes, you read that correctly. Go read it.) It's quite an amazing book, one that I will read over and over again and perhaps include in my musings many times. Only time will tell.

A couple of days ago I read the section about loneliness. I had no idea it would affect me quite the way it did, but it did. The author starts off describing being in love, how he thought about this woman all the time, and how he believes "love is a bit of heaven". I think any kind of love--romantic love, or parental love, or the love between a community--is a bit of paradise in itself. However, I couldn't understand why he started off an essay about loneliness with a description of a small slice of heaven. You don't either, but bear with me.

The author continues by describing how he is "a recluse by nature". He is introverted and prefers being alone, but recognizes that community is an essential and healthy part of life, of being human. He didn't always think that way. He had previously lived alone for six years, and it got to the point where he would leave events or church early because he didn't want to talk to people. People intruded his world and irritated him. He had purposely isolated himself because he was used to taking care of himself.

I can relate. I love people, but they are draining after a while. Whenever there is a large church event that takes up more than a day, like DTS or the church camping trip, I am always exhausted by the end because of all the people, and retreat to my bedroom for a long time after coming home. I love being around my friends and family, I love the noise and the laughter and the new memories being made. But I need downtime too, to recover.

But there's a darker side to this preference to being alone. I have always struggled with telling people what's really going on inside. It's so easy to be artificial and to put on a sunny smile and never cry and pretend everything is alright. It's frightening how easy it is.

I like helping out other people. I love giving advice and talking people through their problems. Yet I have such a hard time talking through mine. I've gotten much better with being open and honest, and I suppose I thought that was the end of the problem. But no, it still looms overhead and dwells in my heart. I have no problems encouraging others to be open and to trust, and yet I find it so difficult to take my own advice.

The problem used to be that I didn't know who to talk to. That's changed. It's almost overwhelming how many people are willing to sit and listen to me rant on and on. That's the good news. The bad news is that they all have lives, and that I am often reluctant to take them up on their offers to call and talk whenever I need. "Whenever I need?" I think to myself. What if I have a problem late at night when everyone is asleep? Then I'll not only have that problem, but will have the added problem of dealing with a potentially irritated friend.

I am always so afraid that I am irritating others with wanting to talk about my problems. There have been so many times where I have asked for help and couldn't receive it because it was a bad time for them, and I can't bear for it to continue.

Often there will be a specific person I'll feel inclined to talk to. A lot of times I'll hunt them down and talk to them. A lot of other times I won't get the chance. Either it's not the day we see each other at an event, or they aren't at the event, or things just happen and leave no time to talk. Or the talk happens all right, but there's either no time or there are constant interruptions from the talk I really crave to have. The talk I yearn for can so easily become hurried and superficial.

So I shut myself in. I swallow the urge to talk, make myself wait until I am around the people I really want to talk to, and then sometimes it never happens. I lose a chance to be vulnerable and to let someone in. And I lose a chance for someone to really get to know me.

There have been rare times when someone has seen through my mask.  Some people don't put up with my crap and chase me down to ask what's really going on. They care so much they don't let me run. They make me stand and confront the real problem. And I absolutely love it.

There's a lot of problems going on at the moment, and I've talked about it and asked others to pray. Everyone that's responded to me has been so sweet. Some have asked on their own how things have been going. And it blesses me.

But at the same time, I'm a little depressed. Yes, people care and have been inquiring as to how things are going... but no one has ever looked at me dead in the face and asked how things are going inside of me. All I've talked about has been informational news, but I've yet to really share everything going on inside. If someone came up to me and asked me "How are you feeling?" instead of  "How are things going?" I would probably collapse on my knees right there and weep. Actually, that would most likely make things pretty uncomfortable for both of us. But still, if you don't feel comfortable going to someone with tears and snot streaming down your face, maybe it's best if you don't speak about uncomfortable things at all.

Anyways. So like I said, I was reading the section about loneliness in Blue Like Jazz. In the middle of the chapter, the author inserted a short little cartoon, which you can view here: http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/images/DonAstronaut.pdf

Seriously, click that link. It's pretty crucial to my little rant here, and it's extremely short. I promise. Go back and click it, fool!

I'm assuming you've read it by now. Okay, so quick review: an astronaut gets in an accident and winds up drifting in space, orbiting the earth fourteen times a day. He's not going to die because he has a special suit that recycles his fluids. That becomes a blessing, and very quickly a curse. He orbits the earth, the earth where all his family and friends live, the earth he has lived in all his life before going to space. He may have had a wife who had anxiously awaited his return, and upon hearing of his supposed demise, had broken down in tears. He might've had young children. Still he orbits around his home planet. He sees it, seemingly within reach but so, so far away. He has all the time in the world to think about all he's missing, and how life could be if things hadn't gone so horribly wrong. He does this everyday for fifty-three years.

Don Miller, the author of Blue Like Jazz, was bothered by this story, which one of his friends had made up and wanted to write about. He says, "I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of hair and thatch... Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing."

This is surely what hell must be like: "...a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God... And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all."

This story more than bothers me. It terrifies me. Everything I fear is wrapped up in one little story: being completely alone, without people. Without God. Absolutely no rescue. Loved ones thinking you're dead. Everything you love being tauntingly close. Being driven insane from the loneliness. It's a frighteningly accurate description of what it's like to feel disconnected from those that physically surround you. And it's a frighteningly accurate description of how I've been feeling lately. Because even though I don't watch television all that much, I am still that proud person. And I have the terrible thought that something similar might happen to me, if I don't purposely reconnect myself with others who do indeed care.

Lately I've complained to God, "There are people who have stories of getting phone calls or visits from others, out of the blue, that suddenly turned their whole perspectives around. Why isn't anyone doing that with me? My phone is completely silent. There are no personal kind questions in my emails. No one can sense my loneliness. No one has come up to me asking what's wrong."

Interestingly enough, He took the time to answer. "You have a community all around you... it's YOUR job to take the initiative to connect yourself."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa... I'm supposed to tell them about it myself? Instead of them just magically sensing it and chasing me down?"

"Yeah."

"Shut up..."

I think it's a good disciplinary action though. God sure knows what He's doing, and what's best for me. Gone is the time where I had no idea who to talk to. Now I know a bunch of people to talk with, and instead of unintentional loneliness, I have purposely not told anyone what's really going on. Because I'm afraid of being dismissed and pushed to the side as unimportant. It's a lie Satan has been screaming and whispering at me for years.

I know it's a lie. And I hate that I succumb to it so easily, so mercilessly.

"Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other, love each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the fall.

If loving other people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in what state we would like to live.

...I should be living in community... I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow--I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families, and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among one another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus, you are a human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy."

I don't want to be a fungus. I don't want to live fifty-three years of hell. I want to be a human who chooses to love others and, somehow, allowing myself to be listened to and loved even though it can hurt. It often feels so scary that sometimes floating around in space seems like a better plan.

But I know it's not. God has a much better plan for me and for all of us, and while it most certainly involves Him most of all, it also involves other people.

I choose fifty-three years of heaven.