I got a slap in the face the other day. After a selfish, angry poem to God a guy left me a comment that really woke me up to the nature of the attitude of the poem. He said, "Why not blame God? It saves you from hating anyone, least of all yourself."

The phrase "blame God" had not occurred to me until I read Kevin's comment. When it came to me from his mouth (er... Internet-ly speaking), it really hit me. Was I offended? Well... Affronted for maybe a split second, but just after that split second I realized he was right, after all. Blaming God was what I was doing.

The poem was a perfect description of how I felt in the moment I wrote it. For that I'm thankful. It was the most real I have been with God in my entire 20 years of life. So I'm keeping that poem... As, one, a humbling reminder when I get too uppity with God, and, two, as a reminder that, however, I can still be real with him with my emotions.

It's hard to reconcile those two, don't you think? One of the (many) paradoxes of the Christian faith. Christianity is a hard religion to go with. It really is. It asks for contradictions to everything you believe in, everything you know, every most basic instinct. I wonder why God made it that way... I wonder that a lot. The church answer of today is, of course, "God didn't; we did." Whatever. I've heard that all my life, and now I'm gonna question it. Maybe God made it that way. He is, after all, all-powerful. He is perfectly capable of tuning the world to a perfect pitch. He made humans selfish. Why did he do that? It's yet another contradiction.

I used to pretend to have the answers. What am I saying? I still pretend to have the answers. I'm not going to do that right now. College has taught me otherwise; nothing's the same anymore. I'm ready to strike through this tangled forest called Christianity; I'm going to find out what holds and what dissipates into oblivion. I'm going to be real.

You have to go to extremes to find the middle ground sometimes.

-Stephanie

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