Stream of Consciousness # 42
In nights like these, surrounded by the silence of your room with the mutterings of the outside world, I can't help but wonder why I am here. Why am I in this exact spot at this exact moment. At SSJE the other day, the sermon talked about faith, hope and love... well, more specifically, hope. The brother giving the sermon (I can't remember his name) said that not many people preach about hope, but yet it is so essential. Sometimes I think it's easy to lose hope.... after traveling to a war torn country, or having a loved one die, or many other things, it is nearly impossible to see where the hope is. I think we get caught up in the big things so often, and that hope is really in the small things. Hope that tomorrow can be better, in so many ways actually... I wonder if hope is also not worrying about the future. I've come to realize that I have a lot of difficulty living in the present sometimes. I like to play these what-if games a lot of the time, dreaming up all of these scenarios, 99% of them which will never happen. "Just let it flow," my best friend Julie says to me. That's a hard thing to do for control-freaks like me. Letting things flow is admitting that some things (most things) are beyond your power... well, rephrase... you cannot make everything go your way. You can change the small things, but you have no control over the end result. "Let go and let God," is a phrase that I've also heard a lot. It's astounding how my faith in God can vary so much some times... how I can have this heart-filling experience, and then feel so alone later that day. I think that's part of being human though... or maybe that's the difference between joy and happiness... whatever that is. It's funny that I had three different people tell me while in Is/Pal that I should be a minister, because I honestly never thought of it before. Is it something that I would be good at? I don't know. I don't have enough faith, I argued, to which Emily completely disagreed with. Faith. Such a loaded term. It seems like faith and hope are actually the same some time. Reflecting on that, faith and hope are different (to me) because faith seems more solid. Like when you have faith in something, there is no question. Whereas, when you hope about something, you are wishing that something will happen, but are not really sure. Maybe that's where I'm stuck right now, that I am leaning more on hope than on faith. That's an interesting thing to think about, but I feel like that's almost fringing on semantics too much, but who knows, it'll be interesting to explore.