Gradually Graduating

So tonight I was walking home right around that mysterious moment when days switch, lost in fog. For the past couple weeks, I've been processing that I'm about to graduate, and that I'm getting married, and that I'll be moving and starting a new job and…life. As a result, I've been mulling over my four years here, and who I've been throughout it all. Fog is always super special; my first kiss was in fog, and I think it makes the world magical. Anyway……as I was walking back, I passed a bridge, a bridge I crossed that day, that wretched, beautiful, ending beginning day. And the year between that day and the summer after came flooding back; agony, hopelessness, devastation.

And then I had this moment where I realized I was gazing straight at my younger self of three years ago, standing on that bridge, a hundred yards away. In my memory, my younger self stared back at me, broken, aching, destroyed too thoroughly for words, begging her future for some scrap of hope. And I smiled at her warmly and said, "Take strength, little one, all will be ok; you will find meaning once again. You will discover that you are a human, and when you soon begin asking yourself, 'Why prolong my existence?', you will, after many vast failures, find an answer. You will embrace the purpose that is intrinsic to humankind and know beyond doubt that it's perfectly ok to be that…human…and nothing less and nothing more. Your pain is overwhelming at this moment, but at the end lies great reward, when you get to spend the rest of your life discovering what humanity truly entails."

---

I'm at the last few pages of the Olivet book; that point where you know everything has to get wrapped up somehow, and quick, even if the author still has a little trick or two left to spring. Well, here's my trick: somehow in the midst of this weird time loop — something healed. It was as though I became my own redeemer, validating familiar old pain. Is that sacrilege even possible? Can dopamine bathe the miserable neurons of deeply painful memories and soothe them, making them sweeter for the contrast?


Enh, maybe it was just the fog.

One Beginning

On July 12, 2011, a Christian at Olivet Nazarene University hit an end and would never be the same. That was about ten months ago. At the time, I took deep consolation from the blog Leaving Eden, written by a girl an hour up the road from me. In some ways this blog is started tonight with the same motivation as her: to extend consolation to those who have broken the boundaries of a Christian university culture and feel the isolation that accompanies. But in other ways my story is very different.

As I mentioned, it all really ended and began ten months ago. So unfortunately, the journey I've experienced since then may come out in bits and pieces. Sorry for all you obsessive chronological folk. :) At some point I may get around to writing out more of that history. Suffice to say, I started at atheism, then existentialism, then nihilism, then kind of evened out at agnosticism for a while. Most recently, I've taken up the label Christian agnostic. We shall see where that goes. In the meantime, I dedicate this blog to anyone else whose faith has, at some point, hit an end, and who has been faced with the overwhelming prospect of building a brand new worldview from scratch.