Faith thoughts

Faith is a dangerous thing.

I wanted it to be different this time around--not to lose myself and my hopes and dreams and truth up to the ever-commanding (yet ever-abstract) leading of God's purposes. Are God's purposes big enough to lose myself in? Yes. And then I find myself simply spirit and no body; in a place of existence that matches Star Trek's "beam me up" and somehow gets stuck in the process of particl-ization.

I wanted it to be different--I need a faith of both the spirit and the body. I need to know God and also be able to answer people when they ask about my hobbies. Last time I came back to America from Japan, I came back knowing God...and unable to relate to anyone around me, stuck in this horrible false existence. I need to know how to be a real person and be a faithful Christian. I need to be stretched in faith and also know about good boundaries. I need to know what dreams are of God and what dreams should be sacrificed due to the call of "leave your people and your country and go to the land I will show you..." I can't lose myself completely...can't come away from this with no personality again. My biggest fear is to become some sort of religious vegetable who has fed herself lies to cope with an existence of hopelessness, with failure--and to end up once again curled up on a floor somewhere, unable to move, unable to answer even the simplest question about myself because I only know spiritual things.

Is it faith to trust that every time I lose myself, God will find me? Is this fear of particles and spirit and atoms stuck in space somewhere just an irrational fear similar to fearing vampires and a fantasy world? Reality is so ill-defined and hastily-cut. If reality is not what I see and experience, nor what I have learned or been told, and is only what God is telling me in Scripture and who He is...well, how do I answer all of the people who think they know what my reality is/should be? How do I answer my own heart?

Brian would say something about "good faith" and "bad faith" at this point, I'm sure. :) How dearly I wish he were here to talk about it!

I'm back in the same place I was years ago: no real attachments, nothing to keep me outlined in a solid color. The line from ReliantK comes to mind, "Through all the times I've faded, and You've outlined me again..." How will God outline me? Do I have no choice in the matter? Brian would say that I do--that that's good faith, that God has given us a choice, wants us to decide actively to live and love and see what He'll do with us in it. But where does calling fit into that? Am I missing something?

I'm scared of the particles, of vegetation. I'd rather not exist at all than to be a spiritual vegetable...and I don't know where the middle existence is of neither vegetation nor stubborn control of my own life. Somewhere within this middle, I think, is the faith that I'm supposed to be looking for...