Wary or Weary

I'm fasting from social media for the next couple of days. I know many people are fine checking Facebook and Twitter regularly but I have found I substitute for everything else in life - prayer, conversation, reading, cleaning, school, name it I will be on twitter rather than engaging in it.

I feel a weight in my chest. Actually I feel it more in my gut, as there is an ache in my heart that prevents its engagement. This weight is heavy - full of uncertainty, fear, lethargy, and desire. The desire burns deep but the waters of uncertainty begin to overtake, and with the rains of fear pouring down the sublime creature of lethargy takes desires place. There can be no heartbreak if there is no heart to break.

I want to move on. So very desperately I want to seize what lays before me - a truth, a life, a dream that is almost and not yet. Yet I feel a deep and subtle hesitation. It pulls me back, like a paddleball I feel free for a sheer moment before being pulled back to into place.
However even deeper than my desire to move on is the commitment to not have regrets by leaving too early. Having gone through a few situations where I had to come back later and 'relive' it in order to move on - I certainly don't want to do that here.

I feel a pull, an internal conflict, and either party may win. Deep inside I don't want to return. For many it's just a job, for me it's been my life - what I pray about, think about, dream about, stress about, regret, love, where I've found admiration and approval daily. In some crass way to leave is similar to getting a divorce - the change is final and there is no going back, the relationship is cutoff and you have to move on. I think about it - really knowing all the problems, stresses, and sheer amount of energy that goes into a semester and my body goes into slight panic. I'm too tired, too worn, I'm weary of the continuing.

Yet I'm wary of moving forward. I know the grass isn't greener - maybe a different hue but it's the same grass. We can try to fool ourselves and believe that switching jobs, majors and churches will magically make everything better - but in reality it doesn't. The exception of course being the Voice of God. If God tells you to go and you don't - things simply get worse and you miss a 'greener grass'. If you follows God's voice the grass is greener simply for the obedience and confidence gained from obeying His voice. It still has it's trials, but you have the Everlasting Arms to lean on, to keep you going as you pursue His will.

But what do you do when it feels like He is silent? Do you stay or do you go?

Perseverance is not my forte. Is it really anybodies? I am a persistent sort, but I am also used to working hard for a prize I tangibly receive. I talk to my sister about this regularly - we work hard and find favor in our work, it's not that we sit around it's a hard earned favor, but still it's beyond even our abilities often times. I've seen many changes occur in my job, and when it seemed I reach the culmination of the hard work - the reason for the hours, the tears, the joys, everything - it was pulled away as quickly as it came. If status and power wasn't going to be my pinnacle, what would be?

As Christian we are often told to shy away from such words as status and power; it's a pride of this world, a self-absorption that gives only you honor rather than the Creator. But what do you do as Christian, when you are working in a system where without those badges you are unable to speak, to move, to be much of anything. That at the end of the day without power to bring change you are simply another pawn in the scheme of the machine?

I know at this point there should be a story. A revelation of the martyrs, the saints of past and present that worked in governments and systems that hindered their faith and yet they brought revolution, transformation and love. My cynical response yells that they didn't fight systems that pretended to be something it isn't. That it's different when you serve three masters, all of which have differing standards and all you want to do at the end of the day is ask why is it this way? Again I say, for many it's just a job, for me it's everything I given my life for the last three years, and I can't simply clock in/clock out unless the Lord Almighty gives me strength to do so.

I know it's silly, but as I wrote I had three words pressed into my head - Ezekiel, China, Missionary. So I did what any good Pentecostal person should do, I Googled those three words together. The first result was this: The Cat's-Paw. It's a 1934 comedy film that used sound in a thriving silent film era.

Ezekiel Cobb, a naive young man raised by missionaries in China, is sent to the United States to seek a wife. He is promptly enlisted by the corrupt political machine of the city led by the corrupt boss to run for mayor as phony "reform" politician. He is expected to be the "cat's paw" of the political machine. Cobb unexpectedly takes his job seriously. He embarks on a campaign to clean his town of its corrupt political machine. Fighting back, the corrupt politicians frame Cobb. He turns the table on them, however, by enlisting the help of his friends in the local Chinese community. They end up using tricks of illusion to gain the support of the political machine again. Then town is swept of its corruption.

Stories remind us of truths that our hardheaded hearts would not otherwise hear. 

I don't know, and I need to know. It's hard for me to say, "Thy will be done", I don't want to stay. But I don't want to leave either, and therein lies the juxtaposition. While God can speak through a donkey, He can't answer our heart's knocking if we keep running back and forth between doors.

I just imagine a cartoon version of myself knocking at a large door then changing my mind so I begin running down a long hall to another door to knock. As soon as I walk away from the first door, God open's it for me to look inside but I've already changed my mind so He hears the knock at the other door, closing the first to answer the second. But as soon as I knock on the second I change my mind just as quickly and run back to the first; though God just opened the door to the second after I ran away. I see this play out dozens if not hundreds of times - all the while my little cartoon version of myself grows more weary with each run, and God longingly wanting to offer His Shalom to my aching body. I want to change the town, fight the political corruption, turn the manipulation on it's head and save everyone in it's overturn. But I feel I am merely a puppet, unable to make much movement, restrained by the strings of the system.

Or perhaps the strings are merely show? That really they are not tied to anything at all, and instead the restriction is self-made, self-induced into believing God isn't big enough to change this place? Perhaps the problem isn't in the system, but in the belief that the system is the evil rather than the enemy of our souls causing chaos and darkness in order to shroud the light? Maybe God is able to make the weak strong, the fearful brave, and the wretched new - even in the midst of corruption?

I hope to change
The tired and 
Same state I'm in
I hope to face
What lies in front of me
I won't turn back

Tonight we fight 
The battle at our sides
Don't close your eyes
Tonight we fight 
The darkness in the skies

I'm going in
Try and stop me (x2)

I hope to break
Through this barricade
Of skin and bone
And I'm not afraid
To face the foreign arms
I'll fire back

Tonight we fight 
The battle at our sides
Don't close your eyes
Tonight we fight 
The darkness in the skies

I'm going in

Try and stop me (x4)
(I'm Going In by Autumn Film)

I don't know the answer, this is just the beginning of the questions. But at least I know the enemy I fight, rather than the puppets he uses - I fight not against flesh and blood by principalities and powers of the dark. I serve the King of Light and the darkness will not prevail in the midst of His glory.