I'm taking a break from working on my Confessions today. Honestly, it's been taking a toll on me. I've been forcing myself to be brutally honest with the things I've done, and my ego/mind/identity isn't happy with me. I've been dragging all of it into the light and putting in print, and it doesn't want to be. I've been getting headaches, been a bit more irritable and out of it, and it's just been a hard several days. And I've only written about who I was up to the age of eighteen. I've been trying to keep a reasonable cap on the length of the chapters, so I haven't included everything that has come up, but enough to build a fairly representative picture.
It's not about whether or not it's forgiven by God. That isn't even in view at this point. It's the fact that I did them. It's the fact that I hurt people among other things. It's that up to this point, I have intentionally pushed this person that I was away, hoping to forget him altogether. I had an aversion to this person, and the person I was at other stages of my life, to where I wanted nothing to do with him. But I've come to realize that my aversion to who I was at those times also triggers anger and aversion towards those now who remind me of who I was, regardless of whether I'm aware of it at the time. My aversion to myself is translating to an aversion to others who remind me of myself. I think my purpose in writing this, beyond just writing an honest, even cathartic memoir, is to work on accepting that person, those people whom I was at those times without judgment, without aversion, and without trying to push them away. And in learning to love those different people that I was, maybe it will clear the way to loving others that are just like I was.
This is a person I'm describing who, to be perfectly honest, I have shuddered and cringed almost any time one of these memories surface. It is something of a genuine miracle I didn't end up dead or in juvenile hall when I was younger. I do not like being reminded of him. Although, to be fair, in writing it out I think maybe I'm coming to have a little more compassion for who he was and what he had been through to bring him to those choices and the direction he was taking.
And while I already knew this, it became very clear to me when writing it out that it was only God's direct intervention in that direction which changed the path I was on. It wasn't an evangelist, it wasn't a friend, a pastor, a mentor, or anyone else who initiated that change within me when I was fourteen. It really couldn't have been, because I kept myself away from other people most of the time, and usually didn't want anything to do with them. I felt a lot safer enmeshed in my fantasy and science fiction books, comic books, games, and was so far into my own head that my greatest aspiration at one point was to go running naked in a forest with a pack of wolves. A lot of people questioned my sanity, and they were right to.
But this is where I was at. And it was God who moved me from there, putting it within me to start taking steps to climb out of where I was. He reached out to me first so that I would eventually reach out to Him. I didn't really know or understand anything an Evangelical church would have considered a requirement for being "saved" at the time. My relationship with God began before all of that indoctrination, and it was sealed one afternoon during the lunch period at Bolsa Grande High School with the agreement between the two of us that He would be my Father, and I would be His son. This understanding came first really, before the Trinity, before "accepting the Gospel," before anything else. And it was enough to build a foundation on between the two of us.
The next chapter will focus on my two years in Bible School in Wisconsin, and possibly the year and a half following it.
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