Feelings with no adjectives

So I heard about this absurd story concerning a hospital. Every Sunday morning around 11 A.M, a patient died in the ICU. This happened for quite a while and it was a wonder and a mystery, not just because of the consistency of deaths but also about their unknown causes. It became a great matter of concern to the surgery team and the doctors on why they had to lose a patient every Sunday just when they thought they had saved them. They decided to investigate what actually happened every Sunday morning at 11 A.m.

This particular Sunday, they all showed up on time and stood just outside the room watching and monitoring the patients on the transparent glass wall. They stood there for a while and at around 11 in the morning, a man walks in with a vacuum cleaner. He then unplugs the life support machine cable connected to one of the patient and plugs in his vacuum cleaner and starts what now we all agree is a routine work he does every Sunday.

The more I think about this I just want to laugh. Laugh because it is ludicrous or relatable, I don’t know. I just want to laugh. The cleaner was just doing his job, and perfectly I assume. He didn’t go to a med school and only cleanness was listed under his job description. He wasn’t judged by the number of people saved or healed in the hospital but by how clean the rooms are. Still, he was responsible for numerous deaths. Absurdly, of course.

I am a student of life, and I don’t miss classes. It is not as if I can miss them. Yet still, I don’t get to learn everything. And this is what I mean. I can’t explain everything I do. I can’t give a justification for every turn I take. It is just like the answers we give in exams that don’t make sense.

 I am a Christian and I have been one for quite a long time now. I love my journey with Christ and every day I get to learn and grow in faith. Or maybe not. Truth is, sometimes I almost feel sorry for being a Christian. I get depressed by the fact that I have been made a standard. I am a constant mirror through which everyone wants to see goodness. I am like a river that should keep flowing. I am like a battery that should always provide a charge. And here is the problem. Sometimes I get drained out. I dry up sometimes. I can’t just explain how desperate these times feel. Like what would do you call a sun that is not lit? How do you explain water which is not wet?

 I know and believe that life is all about finding yourself. And that is and should be the struggle of this life. Unearthing your passions. Meeting your interests. It gets complicated, however, when people want to use you to find theirs. Light and salt of the earth I know I am, but savior and redeemer of humanity I cant be. Until recently, I realized that my life had been revolving around preset expectations and standards. Everybody that knows your name(n/b: name, not you) at least feels an entitlement to have an input in your life. And for long I struggled to balance this entirety of different mindsets.

I have many testimonies on what God is and has been doing in my life.  I can’t just explain the many coincidences that happen in my life when I trust God in prayer. The comfort and revelations His word brings to my life.  And it manifests every time, everywhere and In many situations. I always hunger for him, to always feel his presence.

Yet, the irony shows when I interact with most of my fellow Christians. I wasn’t that good in chemistry, but I know the more the abundance of a constituent, the more concentrated the element..or something like that. Like Christians are solvents in a solute word. That the more we are, the more concentrated Christianity should be. Sadly, most of my fellow Christians might turn me into an atheist. I confess. How is it possible that nonbelievers are the ones boosting my growth in Christ? That the solutes who are supposed to dilute me are the ones improving my concentration.

It pains me to admit this, that probably even myself I’m adorning so many shades of gray. A puzzled Christian whose mind is a surging perplexity. That our arms and doors are always open but it is exhausting to embrace or walk through them. That I can’t even find words to explain my feelings and thoughts about this. Almost like my lips have been killed, my head stuck underwater and words have left me. But maybe sometimes, the loss of words says more.

People can talk the talk but only God can work and walk the talk. Only at his feet does my trust rests. It is my only place of escaping from the rest of the world. The only place where I could go when I need to be alone and long for reassurance. So I am sorry when my light doesn’t seem bright enough when my salt is insipid. In the war between pure truths and twisted lies, I just want to be imprisoned in the authenticity of life. The axiom in the fiction!