an introduction

oh friends,

i am beginning this blog in an effort to re-join the blogging community, a community which, may i say, has matured a lot over the years i have been a blogger.

i also want to blog my journey back to my real name (thus the name of my blog)… i just feel that this section of my hike is gonna have a lot to do with me finding my identity in nothing external. a spiritual identifying.

at this time, i am quite deep in a river of grief, for a lot of things. everywhere it looks, it seems, i am grieving lost relationships, broken relationships, and relationships that have waned out of necessity or distance.

also at this time, or about several weeks ago, i realized i had lost any semblance of thinking that heaven is good. i have earth-head, or something. earth-heart, probably more like it.

one of my best friends told me quite bluntly that he thought i was quite comfortable being a doubter. what he meant was (or what i took from what he said) was that i had taken the idea that “it’s ok/good for Christians to doubt God, to doubt everything, etc.” and i had run with it.

not that i had doubted too much. actually, that i had just become really comfortable with the label of being a doubter, and sitting on it. i hadn’t pursued my doubts, and i hadn’t re-traversed christianity to see what was there. in other words, i wasn’t a doubter at all.

this friend’s blunt words made me think that i needed to stop sitting, and start moving somewhere.

one of the only things i had to hold onto at that point was something i had realized after traveling with some “ex-christian” and pagan friends in Mexico:

One of those girls i was traveling with had grown up in a christian family, but through many turns of the road, had come to believe that the Bible was a human document only, and not the Word of God. If you stop believing the Bible is the word of God, it obviously unravels your christianity pretty darn quickly.

this girl honestly shook me up a bit. but i had a moment of clarity one morning, a clarity that was given. i realized that the Bible had to be the Word of God. If not, and if it were a human document, we would have never concluded that God was good. we would be way too angry for how this world is, for how life is. and that is what the Bible consistently says. that God is indeed good, good beyond our understanding.

so this was my starting point.

as of now, i am starting to hunger more and more for a personal relationship with Jesus. the ears of my heart are starting to re-open to hymns and sermons.

meanwhile, everything i planned for my summer has unraveled:

my plan for summer: quickly find a job, buy a car, and live elsewhere than my house. have a great summer with family and friends, and with my boyfriend.

What has happened: i couldn’t find a job until almost mid-June, i haven’t bought a car because of the hold on my job, and i am living at home. i had a rough start with my family, a lot of my friends aren’t even in the country, and my boyfriend–probably the best man my age that i know–and i aren’t dating anymore.
my mom recently pointed out that i had planned a lot of things that i couldn’t control, at all. that’s true, but boy, when your summer reverses this much, it sends you for a loop.

meanwhile, i have much to be thankful for. the delay in the job worked out perfectly since i needed to finish my independent readings class this summer, the car juggling has worked out fine thus far, and living at home has turned out to be a much-needed support. i am learning to love my family in spite of my and their extreme mess/chaos, i have been embraced by friends here that i don’t deserve, and with my boyfriend… well the Lord will work His will. i think He is using this time to grow me a great deal and make me a healthier half of a relationship, whether that be with him or not. Tanto que crecer, so much to grow.

It hurts a lot to grow like this. a post on “Piebald Life” resonated deeply: Lessons Learned on the Farm.

you are very welcome to my blog. i invite you to walk with me on this path to my real name, this hard path to knowing to Whom I belong.