in which i find myself homeless

today i realized something: i'm only funny in small snippets, about the length of a twitter post. for a moment i thought about limiting my blog posts to that length and then i realized that's what twitter is for. HAH.

anyway, as usual, the cooler breezes put me into a thoughtful sort of mood and i've been thinking about jesus and church and my life. a few facts about right now:

- we are church homeless. sort of.

- i've been wandering around near jesus, but staying just far enough away so as to avoid actual growth. i think he would call that lukewarm and i ought to be cast into the fires of hell. um. hm. as i type this, i find myself imagining the agents of god's wrath (they look sort of like FBI agents) arriving at my doorstep with a notice that reads "you are hearby declared lukewarm and summoned for deportation to the FiresOfHell." of course i know that's not reality, and that god's grace abounds in my life, and he says my sin is as far away from me as the east is from the west, but i know in my heart that until this moment, i've been okay with my floating, and that i truly deserve to be deported.

- such a realization really makes all my other issues i have with finding a church and dealing with the dissolution of our old one pale in comparison. (although truthfully, i think i have very few issues with finding a new church, since that's something i've done about every 4 years for my whole life... my issues really lie in what happened at our old church)

that's about it.

sparrows and snow days and my family emergency.

i had a breakdown of huge proportions the other day. it was at night, so of course, the next morning, i woke up looking like a family emergency had happened to me (basically, i looked like someone took my face, turned it into old playdough, and then put in the microwave for a few minutes). thankfully, it was a snow day; god's gift to me, on one of the worse days in my life. it's not like anything truly terrible happened to me, i had just sobbed for an hour or so the night before, wiping my snotty nose on my loving husband's shirt, and trying not to get too hysterical. i was sobbing because i was coming to the realization that i had walked so far from god, and had just sat down on a lonely street corner, refusing to look for a way back home.

it was a self-imposed misery. it was brought on by laziness, selfishness, stupidity, and bad time-management. or, as could be summed up so succinctly by jesus: "oh you of little faith! why did you doubt?" i have this verse written on a post-it note beside my bed, so i see it every day, and yet, it is a concept that always escapes me, every few years.

a lot of times, i find myself sitting in church thinking to myself, "i wonder if they know i'm an imposter." and, shamefully, "what am i doing here? what is the point of all this?" i know it's not a waste of time, but i'm just not sure why not.

i am a woman of little faith. sometimes, i don't remember why i am a christian. i go through my life not acknowledging god's work in me - god's work in everything around me! that is my confession to you. i struggled to admit it to myself, but once i did, i realized that i had to go public with it, because it's not real till other people know. i can always pretend it never happened if no one else ever knew.

life for me right now is not the future i imagined for myself when i was still in college. things turned out differently, and while i do love some things about how things are, i am struggling to accept the things that i wish were different. being at this point in my life has forced me to realize that i really can't handle things without god's help, though. here's a short list of things i love about my life, because making lists helps me cope.

- andrew, my loving husband
- leah, my best friend since we were 11.
- my parents
- my cute, tiny apartment, with the wall of windows
- knitting, and teaching others how to knit
- making new friends in my new home.

i don't know what i'm doing with myself. i feel so weird about this whole thing because i've been a christian for so long, but i just feel like i'm back at square one. i don't know a damn thing. fasting? what's that? praying? oh, i do that sometimes when i'm about to cry.

but, you know, the truth of the matter is that i do know, deep down inside of me, that all hope is not lost. i have to dig real deep in there, but i can find it, and when i do find it, i know things will be okay. i'm not a lost cause, and i do know what jesus said about how he leads his people. "i will never leave you.... as the father knows when a sparrow falls, how much more do you think he watches over you, his children?"

so, where, from here?