Weathering storms

The blue eyed woman across from me is throwing back whiskey sours speaking of our beliefs in the past tense. She’s stacking grievances alongside her temptations as I plow through my third or fifth Dr. Pepper so far.  My eyes are tracing the doubled dimples in her smile as my mind is retreating to its latest battlefield.  We cycle through subjects and memories and roam over the psychology of all the people we know until we’ve closed down the bar and cleared the tab. She tells me out in the parking lot that I’m a Leo rising, but also water aside from the scorpions flame.  She thinks the science behind the moons tides are held in the aspects of us being water mostly, and born when we begin. I can hear her mother’s voice in my mind saying “It’s all bullshit anyway” but the context was for her discarded beliefs, not these.  I watch the haggard dirty street people shuffle along in the darkness, contrasted by the attractive fair skinned blue eyed woman sitting beneath a flood light.  She tells me matter of factly “I’ll never set foot in another church again, I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel at this point in my life.” I stand in the parking lot with the shade of a canopy blocking half of the light splitting my definition.  I don’t know shit about moon tides or birth times, but I know temptations and tailspins. I know that God and I aren’t right together and my mind rolls though the elements of justice; sovereignty, grace, sacrifice, and obedience.  There are days that I wake up with a lie that tells me that I don’t love God. I weigh the deception, sifting through it for truth.  I know my hearts feeling disconnected in a shit storm of life, but then again feelings don’t dictate reality, only perception.  I’m occasionally inclined to think that I took to God less as a King and more as a powerful Ally in my war against life and the world.  I know my souls got a flu and reading the Scripture isn’t putting a pulse into a dead man.  I drove my truck to a night service the other day because I know something's wrong, and I tried to praise and I tried to worship but my voice was wrong. It was like salted earth and I didn’t have the shovel to remove the top soil to dig.  I waited for a word from God in the sermon hoping for some ministry because I’m thinking my heart is flint. All I got was politics and watered down quotes about doing my parts to recycle reduce and reuse.  God is real, and I know he deserves better than me.  An old group told me that I war too much, and since then the words make their way around again.  As I stood in the parking lot yearning to unshackle the restraints that hold depravity in check I recalled the two weeks after my sister died.  The effects on the mind and the passenger state of my own mind make me wonder if that man was the real me and everything else just a version  mask due to cultural conditioning for a people that I love who follow a book that makes the most sense to me? I ask myself If I’ve caught a demon, or just doubt.  Thomas knew the truth but was still a skeptic. I’m a believer but a failure.  I listen to the life of a blue eyed Adonis and I can recall all the faces that have let go. My back aches in physical and symbolic pain. I’ve put myself on trial and my actions make a case that I knew God, but do I know Him?  I think that I walked with Him, and He knew me, but sometimes I don’t know who I am. I war too much and I am supposed to be for peace, but I fight my identity, and I fight a steeped culture, and I fight to be honest with a silent God who sets His hand against me in my pride.  I cannot tell if I am a rational man or one gifted with too much sight pushing me to madness. There is too much geometry to everything

 A trap messianics often fall into regardless of how often we assure ourselves we dont believe is that Works =Favor and lack of works = unfavor... thus Grace becomes merit based which is paradoxical as Grace is essential independant from Works. So, at times God feels distant or quiet and it plays in my mind as "I've sinned, God has left" a.k.a Samsons terror. Compound divine silence with heavily voltile life issues in general and one suspects that the Hand of God has turned against them. In that darkness one begins to question, not God or His Sovreignty or Righteousness, but if one really loves God. Do I love God, who is worthy of love in the highest, or did I cast lot with Him as a supreme allied force in a vendetta against the world? How much of my faith has been, in some small dynamic, cultural? How many lies have I told God when I've said things like "i'll not do X again". Then war, I know we are to be ambassadors of Peace bringing shalom, meek, servants, but I often see the destruction that i can do. Like my purpose is to break, among a people called to mend. I see flaw in myself that i cannot change, along flaw that i try to change, along flaw i hold indifference to. So, questions arise about security in grace among flaws both in reform and atrophy, love and death, peace and combat, sheep and wolf.

A lot of the times I'll walk into a church and I see people buzzing around in their friend groups but I don't fit. I tried to make way with someone that I thought had common ground, to get to know them and their friends, but I think every time I reach out in a sense to bond with someone, it was treated as this alien thing. I often feel like I'm too studied for Christian churches when we're walking through Romans which mentions God's Law and I speak on it in proper context and am asked to leave. I'm ironically at Christian churches because I need the grace, love and fellowship that I find lacking in Messianic places. When I say that I sometimes don't feel accepted, what I actually mean to say is that most of the time I don't feel accepted. In my mind I understand that by challenging certain Doctrines from the scriptures themselves, it is a threat to people’s way of life in the platform of something sacred. It is not my intention to break that which is Holy. It is my intention to reconcile that which is True by the Word, with the rest of the Word as, If I have found something totally in error, I need to understand how. As I've walked in this way, which seems like a sect, a branch, a denomination of which many do not wish to claim, I have watched loved ones of like mind drift out into the disbelief. I wonder at times if I am living by faith, or surviving it. I read of Jeremiahs lamenting at the "church" mocking him and putting him in stocks as God grieves those who rejected His ways, and I feel lonely because I see as Jeremiah does but I am not as righteous. I grieve as Elijah does on the mountain top as a man who stood in front of priests and men and begged them to understand that God's ways are truth, but I am not holy as Elijah. I haven't the ambition or the drive to become some leader and preacher or teacher as some have spoken, I've rejected that pretty much every place it's spoken. I wonder if there is a church I can belong though. A place where we can read and study the word and grow together and be friends, or a family. A place where I am not looked at as an outcast for genuinely pointing out that the scriptures do not contradict, and cannot in the context, and should they then it is the Doctrines of men that should be adjusted. I'd like to be able to enter church and not measured by my shortcomings and condemned for having flaws not yet fully crucified. I'd like to be in a church that I do not hear unbiblical sermons advocating certain sins that they believe God has made a way for them to enjoy. I'd like to be in a church that doesn't perpetually spend hours poring over numerals and pictorial Hebrew letters, and spends three hours discussing Greek words that never touch the state of the Heart or the power of the renewal of Christ in the Holy Spirit of God. I'd like to not be treated like a wolf looking to devour sheep for asking Biblical questions in a search for right understanding. I'd like to be a part of a body that doesn't have Alex Jonesian theologies in adding to the Word of God with widely disputed texts that have been verified as debunked, in order to add "special knowledge" about Nephilim, some secret plot to hide the shape of the earth, or the need to "Enhance scriptural understanding" via something that is not Scripture itself. More and more I see people spin out into deception, and heresy, apostasy and contempt. I'm left feeling like a man with no country. To not fellowship with anyone is tactically vulnerable from a Spiritual standpoint. I am weak as one, alone. I am susceptible alone for prolonged extent. I wonder how long until my own love grows cold. I wonder how to properly love a body that holds me in contempt.

I tell people I'm a man, regular man like any other. I have days of doubt and I have waves of madness and anger. I hold to the Grace of the Divine living God, and pull stones from a leaky boat to keep from sinking. Water rises, and the tides rage around me, But I don't drown holding to a King who can walk on water.