We are always looking for the character the God. We want to prove to ourselves that the world is indeed as we think it is, and the best way to prove that is to find the examples we want. But that selection, that picking of what we want to show, is disingenuous. Some choose only to look at the good; others to only look at the bad. How did only looking at the bad become “intellectual” instead of the flipside of blissful ignorance? Unblissful awareness misses the point of the world as much as blindly ignoring the evil in our sphere.

When we look at a dark world and only see the dark, that is the example we use to say God is dark, or dead, or not there. When we look at a bright world and use it to say that God provides health and wealth to those who call on him, we are not telling the truth. Those are not the real character of God; those parts of God are things that we (for whatever reason) wish were the whole of him. But when we look at the whole world, in its misery and majesty, there is so much to love and so much to hate. There is so much to work for and so much to enjoy. There is reason, there is unreason. Both. All. And this wide world to be explored, to be parsed, to be celebrated, this is the character of God, wild and wooly and wonderful, the whole world crying and singing at once and we get to live here.

For if we want to be alive, we must find something worth living for; and if we want to be inspiring, we must find something to be inspired by. And what greater than the whole world? The whole crater of creation, the cosmos of cosmopolitanism, the exchange of evils and errors and excellence. We have a burden, yes; there is pain here. But such joy! And such opportunity! To be alive should never cease to be amazing, even on nondescript Monday mornings at 9:21 a.m.

I imagine that this is the character of God; seeing all, taking joy in what should be reveled in, sorrowing at that which should not be. And when I start to look for the character of God in this way, I find it–because we always find what we are looking for when everything is available. Seeing the whole world, taking it in, living a full, wild life; this is the way to see the world. Not to fixate on the good or the bad, but to take it all in, to weave it into the tapestries of our thoughts, to work to make beautiful in future lines of the rug that which is not at the moment, to joy in the work that has already been done on that front.

What we think about the character of God reflects on the world we see. I see wonder and awe at it, awing not only at that which was made but that there is a creator who loved me so much that I get to live here with reason to not fear death.

Let’s get something straight: You matter. And not just in a “oh, everyone is special” sort of way. You actually matter. Not because you pay taxes, or because your friends love you, or because you’re in a great job or a terrible job or no job. You matter because you are human. You are made, I believe, in the image of God. And if you don’t believe in God, you can interpret that to mean your soul, by whatever name it goes, is what makes you matter.

The world hates that. I believe the world is a fundamentally broken place, full of broken people, people that have been beaten down and made to feel like they don’t matter. And because they feel like they don’t matter, they’re making it their mission to make sure you know “the truth”: that you don’t matter. They’re wrong. You matter. And even though it may be seemingly uncountable days since they last felt like they mattered, they matter too.

How do we become like that? How do we get broken-down, resentful, lost, angry, all of that? Oh, you know. The mortgage, the insurance, the health bills, the job, the myriad different pieces of life that got in our way and stopped us from where we want to go. The money ran out. The partners quit. The grades didn’t come in. The dissertation stalled. Downsized. Sidetracked. Lost.

Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

My generation was told, over and over, that we were special, that we could do whatever we wanted. And when we hit obstacles, older pundits laughed and said it was proof that we were coddled. Maybe some of us were coddled, I don’t know. But anyone telling you that you have a human being’s worth, anyone saying that the weight in your soul crying out to do something is a real thing, that person is not wrong. That person should be applauded.

Is it hard as hell? Very literally, I believe it is. This is not a world occupied only by the good and holy. Take a look around, and there it all is: all the stink, and blood, and hate, and fight, and loathing of this broken world. But that doesn’t mean you don’t matter.

It is hard as hell. And many of us have been stopped short by this. Maybe you didn’t get in to grad school. Maybe you didn’t apply for the 49th job because of the first 48 applications. Maybe that day wrecked the next six months of your life, and it’s taken six years to recover from that. Sixteen years. These things happen. They’re real. But you still matter. Your soul is real. The desires you have are real.

Follow those desires.

Go for it, even if you’ve been beaten back fifty times before. Maybe you think you don’t want it. Maybe you’re afraid to even want it anymore, because you don’t want the weight of that 51st failure crushing you. But if you’re afraid to want something, you know what that means? Down at the very core of you, you still want it. Maybe someone said X was logical, or easy, and therefore the best thing. Forget X. Logical and easy don’t make something right. The logical and easy thing could be right, but there’s no causation there. Don’t let them steer you from the hard thing. It could be the best thing.

So go.

Go until you can’t go anymore; go until you are you know you won’t resent anything when you stop. Resentment is not maturity; resentment is the last vestiges of a dream, clung to desperately. “The world kills dreams,” someone will tell you. Oh yeah? Then why is yours still haunting you? I believe in hell, but I don’t believe in ghosts. And resentment is one of those.

Go for that thing, but go wisely. Dropping family and friends and responsibilities for whim-seeking is folly, and pain, and resentment. Some things are toxic; some habits must go. Some time must be re-allotted. But there are yet sacred things in our lives. Keep loving them. Learn to re-love them. Love them for the first time.

There will be failure. I wrote near-daily for seven years before anyone paid me a dime to do so. I was rejected by 12 graduate programs the first time out, and each felt like a personal blow to my gut. My romantic relationships all ended, whether by my accord or hers. I ran my little company into the ground twice.

But if you feel that fire in your soul, barely there, stoke it. Stoke it, stoke it, stoke it. Let not yesterday color tomorrow. Don’t let X beat you twice. Shake that shit off. Let’s go. You matter, and what you want to do matters.

When I teach writing, my most important mantra is this: there is no right way to do this. The only thing that matters is that you take the tools I have given you in the framework you’re in and use them in a way that makes sense to you.

I extend that philosophy out into life: there is no empirically right path. Use those tools in the framework you’re in. Even if there’s been so much failure, so much pain, so much everything; even if you feel there’s nothing left. (There’s always something left.) Christ has been there, and he calls out to you, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden. He is not calling to people of a political party, or of a certain color, of a certain intelligence, of a certain way of being; he calls to those who matter. And as we’ve established, that’s everyone.

Because tomorrow isn’t the same as today; and tomorrow you will be one step closer toward resentment or toward realizing that thing which is in your soul. Choose from your soul, not from someone else’s. And never quit fighting until you won’t resent the rest.

Since I have spent most of my life cheering for the underdog, it is not often that my team wins. It is even more rare that my team consistently wins. But seeing my team win a big game is most rare of all. (Even when I had an interlude in my underdog appreciation and rooted vociferously for the University of Oklahoma football team, we still didn’t win the big games.)

It’s such a rare phenomenon for me that when Kevin Durant hit the game-winner tonight, I danced around my living room a bit, dashed off an all-caps Facebook status, and didn’t know what to do next. I mean, what do you do when you finally get the thing you’re looking for? How do you live in light of what you’ve accomplished? Do we just go on to the next thing? Rub the trophy every time we leave the locker room for the next season? Bragging rights?

I’ve pondered this question a great deal; if I had an answer, I would have finished my second novel by now. It’s not enough to write poems, essays and songs about this idea for me; my next novel (should it ever be finished) deals directly with this topic. And I’ve been stuck for a while, because I don’t know what it’s like to get that which I long for. I’m starting to think that the longing may be the nature of life on this side of the eternal line. No wonder asceticism and meditation are popular; when faced with a chronic hole, the space filled with something or shrunk. Asceticism is shrinking it. Christianity is filling it with the joie de vivre that comes from a life lived by the Holy Spirit (regardless, it should be noted, of circumstances; although I fail in this all the time).

And I do let a lot of things get between me and the crop of the fruits of the spirit. Sometimes it’s the desire itself, grown out of proportion, that blocks me from filling the hole. When the hole is too vast for anything to fill it, everything feels underwhelming. Everything, that is, but Christ. The love of Christ is infinite, and can fill any hole that is cleared for him to fill with his love. And we have a Father who clears those spaces in us.

And that is how I live in light of the completion: that which was necessary for me was done by Christ. All that follows is a rejoicing in that truth, and an outworking of that truth. I must constantly look back at the event and rejoice. It is not always what I want, but it is always what I need.

Many of my Christian actions were legalistic ploys. If I did this thing right, and didn’t do that thing wrong, God would be in my favor. And that’s not how grace works, as I am starting to see. However, I don’t know how to live in grace: where do I go with no guilt complex? How now do I choose not to sin? I need the love of Christ in and through me all the more, now that I am grasping grace: I am the man who makes the argument to sin on more so that grace may increase. Perhaps not as directly as Rasputin, but indirectly, I am just as much a transgressor.

Grace will always guide us on toward Christ all the more. Oh, to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.

“The bitter betters” rolls off my tongue
a slogan kept close to a legalist heart
but grace now, like a spring
undermines my heart’s feet
and I fall into Christ’s circus net

Building walls to hold back a flood is easy; keeping patched the cracks which water pressure creates is much more challenging. I compulsively establish these defenses. The best I could until recently claim is the hard-fought knowledge that weaker fortifications give in faster, and that there are far worse things than being drenched.

Here are five ways to say the next thought:

The pride of not giving in, however, motivates my worst excesses. I would rather sabotage myself than give in to a difficult realization of truth. Being the song of the drunkards is at times more palatable than singing my own songs. Failure sometimes comes with a large and appreciative audience, while walking a narrow road necessarily leaves little room for companions. I’d rather hurt myself my way than heal myself someone else’s way.

For that reason, I have not written any poetry in two weeks. I felt that it would be too revealing of the misguided melancholy and beleaguered bitterness that I have harbored. I did not tell myself that, particularly; I phrased it too myself as “Too moody” or “Too personal” or “Too close to situations involving other people for propriety’s sake”—and while that last one may have been true, the other two are cop-outs. I didn’t want to deal with acknowledging that I am becoming something. I rather liked being the messy thing I was.

It is particularly sad that I could convince myself in the face of change that I actually liked liked the ways I was; I did not. This is further complicated by the fact that my ability to build walls was the quality in question: my brooding, struggling, stubborn reluctance to just admit the truth and instead wallow in a false creation of uncertainty has/had been with me so long that the idea of relinquishing it felt more like an abnegation of self than a liberation. This is how I deal. I don’t know how to deal otherwise.

A threatened man will fight, and that’s where the argument comes from. It is not hard to see that stubborn pride is a malicious mistress. But it is my horrible idea, and I’ve used it for a long time. Admitting and accepting the truth in humility does not allow for the devotee to wield power. That’s the reason it works; that’s the reason I recoil. I like power.

But I want to be humble, peaceful and stable. Until recently, I have idolized instability (which often goes hand in hand with power): at first publicly, then—upon chastisement— furtively. And I will build more stubborn walls that stop me short on the path to those desired characteristics. But I will build smaller and weaker now; I no longer want to win. I can’t win. I can keep fighting all my life, or I can give up to the one who made everything.

Sometimes it takes losing hard to see that you can’t win. I am, it appears, not one to subscribe to the easy lessons. But to torment myself by trying to hold back all the cracks in my wall, or to let the torrent of truth come raging through, was no longer an option. Not just the wall, but the will to wall, broke. It is time to acknowledge that I am becoming something else. I know what the name of it is, but I don’t know how to apply humility, exactly.

Perhaps only in this situation is the will to wall gone; I am not so optimistic or foolhardy to think I will never again struggle with pride in any area of my life. (That may be a prideful sentence.) But there is a real victory in my soul’s Atchafalaya victory, and it is one to be cherished.

Life will fill in
the hidden parts of the mind
the blank spaces now full
with either good or evil;
most likely evil, unless
we know the one who removes
all evil from its throne.
He dictates our lives.

That is what I’ve feared.
Stating my life is not my own
even if it already isn’t
gives away the appearance of power.
I like to seem in control.
But I must turn over the reins.

For there are colonies in my mind
that must be forcibly removed
places darkness has encamped
and will not leave except by force.
There is a knife, and sutures
to reorganize my futures.
This is not the way I wished,
but the way that things must be.

–

For until pain is severed
from the thought of pain as treasure
there is no way to enact holiness.
For I must come to terms with all
the things that I have been and learned
and many of those sins must be destroyed.

And one day, with bad ties severed
and when right loves are remembered
I will call my Dad, e-mail my bros
forget lost pain, and dance some more
for the bigger, better Father
will remind me life is, whether
we decide we will acknowledge it or not.

And despite the listless wand’ring
and my heart often desponding,
I will praise the Lord and follow all my days.
For removal of my darkness, ever ‘curring, as a timeline
is the joy that I have sought through painful haze.

And the purifying filter
is the Spirit that has moldered
as I uselessly filled up my anxious days.
But now with knife, stitches and blanket
I have found a new amendment:
Sanctifying love is all I want.
The clean, well-organized, young love
that lets us go where go we must,
no money, car, nor place we love
above the fact that sanctifying
love has taken dark parts of our mind.

And that is the way we change;
the love of God affects our brains
affects our hearts, and we will see a brand new way:
for if we are now his sons, then
oh, the Lord our God’s grace beats,
for we have now, and then, and soon will be
adventurous, young and lovely,
unnatural, yet, clean, and
wondrous lives.

Many of the words I would use to write about passion have been co-opted by romance, sports, art and other endeavors. These situations have passionate language associated with them because they all are an avenue to touching the great life of the soul; that moment where a curtain is torn down and suddenly everything seems larger, more real, more solid, more alive. And all that surrounds you becomes elevated: this is a life, and it matters. Every one of these things can induce that feeling, if only fleetingly.

But they point well. They point to a love greater than game 7, or a career’s work, or even a life’s love. There is a love that transcends all of this, that offers us unlimited access to that great life of the world, both now and forever; and instead of relying on a collection of men, or women, or men and women to come together in a particular way at a particular time, it depends only on one man, who has already done something. We are our only barrier to an unlimited store of the life that never ends. And this life of the world is so vital that one man not only gave everything so that we could have it, but he finds us and gives it to us—when we know not what it is.

The Packers don’t do this, and neither do The Mountain Goats. And a lover may often seek us out in our distress and distraction, but there is only one savior who always does. The great life of the world, brought by the great light of the world, to us.

This is the passion that I seek. And every sports game, and every song, and every love that passes through my senses is but a flickering image of that greatest love, so powerful that I can’t stop it, so vast that I can’t comprehend it, so beautiful that I can’t look upon it fully now. But then, one day, we will see each other as we really are, and there will be no sun or moon, for the light of the Son will be the only light we need, as we live in the passion of the world, forever.

The steadfastness of my relationship with Jesus was historically dictated by the highs and lows of my emotional life. The emotions ran the show, and Jesus was along for the ride. Over years, Jesus’ work in my soul has slowly tipped the scales in the other direction. I’m used to my emotions and my spirituality wrestling around in my soul.

But the wrestling is of a different type right now. More than ever, my outlook on things is like that of Jesus; this allows questions that have previously been sated by pat answers to reanimate. How is the Lord’s lovingkindness better than life? What does the joy of the Lord consist of and look like? Why does God put up with not just evil, but people mocking him? What are Christians supposed to do about that? How does having these questions increase the Gospel? Does it?

And I want to know the answers, because He is my God. He is the way things are. He, when he decided that this is where my soul would go, knew this was coming. He knows the answers; He is the answer.

Even when I don’t understand yet, because I do not know. But I seek to know.

My old model of prayer was boring. I threw words across the void and hoped that God heard.

Thanks, God. See you soon.

And I felt detached from it.

My separation of church and state of mind never let my emotions meet God. I’ve prayed to have less emotions, but I’ve never felt at God. I have raged against myself, and against the world, and against God, but never to God until yesterday.

And I was so tired, and so angry, and so hurt, and so lonely, and so bitter at the fact that most of my sin is just rebellion now because life doesn’t go the way I want it to. I don’t even enjoy my rebellion. I do it so that I don’t do what I ought. I do it to make God mad.  I do it to try to get his attention, so He’ll do what I want. I know that doesn’t make any sense.

And all of this makes me angrier than the facts of the situation would have.

So, on a frustrating night in a frustrating week, I stopped railing against God, and stopped trying to bait God. Instead, I just prayed violent, angry prayers, directly to God, like I would tell a person I was mad at. I said all sorts of horrible things that I actually feel. I am certain that this will happen again tonight. I am certain that God, knowing that I wouldn’t talk to him, is happy that I’m talking to him instead of behind his back. I don’t anticipate doing this long-term; God knows what to do. God will change and form even (especially) these parts of my soul.

It’s not that I don’t love God; I love Him a great deal. I love him so much (or so little, perhaps) that I wouldn’t get mad at Him. It’s disrespectful. But my respect for him built an ever-widening chasm from my good face I put up to respect God and the reality of my soul. God knows my soul already; but I tried to hide it in “respect” or something. Now that I’m not hiding it, my prayers were a mess last night, and will be a mess again tonight. But perhaps I will rebel less in my soul, having told God what is really in there. That would be a joy to me in itself, to have less rattling around inside me, making dents in my walls.

And so my horrible honesty psalms continue.