Stumbling Toward God?

I haven’t really been able to sleep for days. I attribute this to a very strange and interesting weekend.

Friday night went long, and ended traumatically from me. I am definitely not proud of the way I behaved, but I am not impressed with the behavior of certain others either. The details aren’t important, only my reaction. It was the end of something that had been going on for a long, long time. This is about a girl of course, as most things are. I wouldn’t really say that it was the last straw, because the truth is, the last straw had already occurred and I had made my decision. It’s just that I still had lingering doubts, and was not fully prepared to enforce that decision. However, Friday night was, to switch metaphors, the last stop on a very long ride.

This is where I get off.

To allow that realization fully sink in was painful. I’ve started seeing a counselor by the way. (Oh, thank God, I hear you say. And yes we should all thank God. For many things.) However, my next appointment was not until Thursday. It was Friday night. (Well Saturday morning if you want to get technical.) THURSDAY! I can’t wait until Thursday! I need to talk to someone right NOW! Well, you know, I suppose there was someone that I could call. Accept that it was about 3:30 in the morning. Maybe I could just text message to have her call me when she wakes up… At this point I metaphorically grabbed myself by the shoulders and shook. Are you out of your MIND? Have you been paying any attention AT ALL? How about finding a male friend, you moron!

I would not have thought that I got any sleep at all that night, except that I seemed to wake up at some point. Regardless, I was actually lying down for less than three hours, and most of that was not spent sleeping.

Blogger switched to some kind of new system a little while ago. One side effect of this was that my new posts weren’t actually showing up. I had a lot of things that I wanted to write about over the holiday break, but didn’t bother, just figuring I would look into this problem later. It was “later” now. I kept reposting and resetting and just plain kicking my blog until it worked again. Because I’ve had some things I wanted to say.

Morning came, and things seemed far less bleak in the daylight. I’m sure I over-reacted. Still, I asked myself, what part of “OVER” do you not understand? I did find a friend, who gave up a significant portion of his day on my behalf, for which I am eternally grateful.

But where do I go from here? This has been my focus for so long. I’m tired of doing the wrong thing. I didn’t want to do anything without a clear sign from God.

Saturday night I did get a reasonable amount of sleep, but still woke before my alarm. Sunday I can barely believe. I went to church as usual. Leaving the service, the friend that I had been sitting with and I were accosted not once, but twice. The first was by a total stranger who seemed genuinely offended that we were about to leave without saying anything to him. But we had never met the guy. Then again in the parking lot, this time by another of the people who has been a great challenge to me. I couldn’t really understand what this person was trying to tell me. In fact, the core of the problem is that I am never sure what this person is trying to tell me. But the things that I do understand disturb me greatly. The emails even more so. This person seriously needs help, but I don’t know what I can do. I have asked a number of people for advice and they all can only tell me some variation of they think that it’s an unfortunate situation that I have found myself in. I have let things go far too long without doing anything. So today, as I was listening to this barely audible rambling, I could only think, “End it. End it now.” But even so, I repeatedly opened my mouth and no words came out. One thing that I could understand, that kept being repeated was, “You made the right decision.” What decision? I didn’t make any decision! It has been my very lack of making a decision that has compounded the problem! Every time that we “talk” I just stand there like a fool! What planet is this person on? How about just a punch in the face and then I run for it? That would probably get the point across better than anything I could say anyway. Fortunately I was not alone, and my friend eventually found away to gracefully interrupt, otherwise I think I might still be standing there.

Oh, but it only gets better. Through a quick series of increasingly unusual circumstances, I suddenly found myself in what I can only describe as what must be “someone else’s comfort zone.” What the hell was I doing here? You know, when I asked for a sign from God, I was really expecting something a little, well, subtler. Not to be yanked clear out of my own life and dropped off with a nice, “And once you find your way back home, try to pretend that this happens all the time and God had nothing to do with it.”

No sooner had I returned home and lay down to try and nap when I got a phone call with an invitation that I promptly accepted without thinking. It basically involved returning to “the scene of the crime” from Friday night. What is wrong with you? Isn’t that the LAST place you want to be right now? Why did you even answer the phone when you saw that name come up? Like I said in my last post, I will agree to almost anything when caught off guard. And let’s try to keep perspective, truly the last place I wanted to be was, as always, Cal Poly Pomona. Well, maybe I could just not show up. But you said you would go. Well, maybe I could just call and say that I had something else to do and couldn’t make it after all. But you don’t have something else to do. Alright fine! So I went. It wasn’t as bad as I thought. It was actually worse, but for an entirely different reason than I could have expected. So I left.

I went to my church group Sunday night. After getting there, I noticed on my phone that I had missed a call about an hour earlier from someone who happened to be in the room now. I asked him about it. “Oh, I was just calling because…” More bad news. Good thing I had already decided not to let that kind of thing bother me anymore. Then during announcements, I learned that there would be a meeting the following week, “To see if anyone is interested in continuing to meet on Sunday nights.” What again? Didn’t we go through all this last year? Then we went through our study, at some point of which I made what I thought was a trivial observation that for some reason everyone at my table thought was brilliant and wanted me to share with the room. When I declined, not wanting to take credit for something that I felt was fairly irrelevant to the study, some one else announced it and made a point to include, “That was all Tim!” at the end. Yeah, thanks for that.

Can I go home now? Not yet, I still had one more conversation, at the beginning of which I could only think, “Oh jeeze. You? I had forgotten that you even existed through all of this. Please don’t tell me that you’re expecting something too?” But it was nothing like that. I guess sometimes people can have conversations without any drama.

Often times people do something after the meetings but I was DONE. Besides, I had some place to be at 6:00 am. So I went home… and couldn’t sleep. I blogged. I eventually went to bed around 1:00, but still managed to get up several minutes before my alarm. I thought I could come back home when I was finished and get a couple more hours of sleep, but tired as I was, it didn’t happen.

Of course, there was also that annoying revelation, “I still have to go to school?! How is THAT important right now?” Monday happened to be the last day to drop classes without it going on your record, and I rather considered dropping my last class of the day merely so that I could go home early. But I didn’t, and when I did get home… I still couldn’t sleep
.

So, interesting times, but even in the days that follow the question remains: Why Can’t I Just Sleep?

*For the record this post was composed over the course of several late nights.