Out With the Old...

There is a lot to learn from reading back through old journals. Reading page after page of high school writing is pretty taxing, and I find my year 2009 self having to hold back from wanting to violently shake the naivete, insecurity, and general high school-ness right out of my year 2001 self. I often have to remind myself that I was only a 15 year-old boy.

But it's great. There are all of these "Aha!" moments and all of these good, though misguided, intentions, and all of these dreams and struggles. And, really, things aren't that much different. I'm convinced that the things we struggle with and dream about now are the things we will still struggle with and still dream about 30 years from now. It will just look a little bit different or be a little bit more developed or subdued.

For the most part, I plod along through these journals, writing about experiences and conversations and moments and a whole slew of other things that probably only mean something to me. Then, the other day, I arrived at February 2005. It was the second semester of my sophomore year of college, and I was engaged in an all-out battle. I had been trying to sort something out. Here's what I wrote:

"I feel like I've given up on the old Jesus and the new Jesus has yet to come to take his place."

At the time, this was written with a good measure of cynicism and doubt and, probably, yes, fear. I was disillusioned with most things, especially church. But the other day when I read that statement that I wrote almost five years ago, it stirred something in my heart. It hit me with a little less cynicism and negativity but just as much truth. Something different had taken the place of those feelings. It was hope.

I tend to think of life as a journey with no final destination, at least not this side of life. We never get "there"; we never "arrive" (after all, the feeling that we have "arrived" at God is probably a good indication that whatever it is we are arriving at is most certainly NOT God). We are always searching. And the search is the good part. Frederick Buechner says this about the search in his book The Sacred Journey:

One way or another the journey through time starts for us all, and for all of us, too, that journey is in at least one sense the same journey because what it is primarily, I think, is a journey in search. Each must say for himself what he searches for, and there will be as many answers as there are searchers, but perhaps there are certain general answers that will do for us all. We search for a self to be. We search for other selves to love. We search for work to do. And since even when to one degree or another we find these things, we find also that there is still something crucial missing which we have not found, we search for that unfound thing too, even though we do not know its name or where it is to be found or even if it is to be found at all.

I hope that I have a curiosity about life, that the "unfound thing" draws me in. I hope that I never lose my willingness to let go of the old in order to grab onto the new, even if the new is not yet in reach, even if I can only barely see it approaching on the horizon. I hope I'm willing to wait in that uncomfortable space between. I hope that I have enough faith, even when I'm 80 years old, to let go of the "old Jesus" and let the "new Jesus" come to take his place.

dave