I have been ill for a little over a month now with something that has been recurrent and progressive. I’m not going to go into details about it here, but late last night (and on into early this morning) I wound up in the ER. I got in and out pretty quick – three hours – and am going to see a specialist early tomorrow morning.

Don’t worry; I am fine. I was out of school today, and will be at least for tomorrow morning, but hopefully nothing more. I am more inconvenienced than anything else right now, and not looking forward to the length of time it will take to make a diagnosis and prognosis from symptoms.

But I have had a day – nearly a whole day (I except coordinating with a classmate for a school project) – with no demands. I didn’t do a whole lot: caught up on this season’s episodes of House, loafed around, did a little reading and a little cleaning (though very little of both, I’m afraid). There was one thing, though: I’ve had time to process my own thoughts. There was no running checklist up and to the right in my head titled Things Which Need To Be Done. I gave the checklist the day off.

Not having a checklist makes me think about what I actually want to do. Drudgery and pushing on through a task is worth something, given that there is a desire to see it carried through to the other side. Talking with some friends of mine, particularly with two men I look up to – let’s call them C (who I was under in a church-like ministry) and A (who it has been my pleasure to get to know more recently) – has helped me work through part of what I want my doings in life to be. A particularly has been of enormous help in regard to the church (but that is for another time). My priorities – or what I want them to be – run something like this, from the most important down:

1. Serving
2. Being alone
3. Being together
4. Making a living

It is interesting how nearly inverted I have made this. My top priority has been my schooling (which is the analogue of making a living, once I am out of this place), and then being in community. And as a result, I have not been myself. (Though I am sure having poor constitution has not helped with this.) The wild, intoxicating idea that I can possibly have community – and truly be together with people – has lifted me up and carried me quite willingly away. I love community, but I have been shallow in it and idolizing of it.

But service is the Gospel. I don’t mean necessarily the images of homeless people under the bridge and the starving in Africa. Believe me when I say they comprise most of the opportunity to serve. I also mean the lonely in school, the needy people I see from day to day, the thankless and necessary jobs which are cleaning up after our friends and enemies. All this is hard for me, but what else did Jesus say he was doing? What, according to Luke, was the first teaching he ever administered?

The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Or what is heaven and hell? Heaven is given to the sheep, who see God (Christ) hungry and feed him, and thirsty and give him something to drink, a stranger and welcome him in, naked and clothe him, sick and in prison and come visit him. And hell is to the goats, who see him hungry and do not feed him, and thirsty and do not give him something to drink, a stranger and do not welcome him in, naked and do not clothe him, sick and in prison and do not come visit him. And how do they do this? Because as they did to the least of these his brothers, they did to him. Jesus’ ministry is service. The ministry of heaven’s children is service.

And I am firmly convinced that heaven is not the hereafter. It is the here and the after. It may well be that there is only one reality facing us after death, and it is the face which we have been hating or loving our whole lives, but until now have only seen in pieces. If I reject the pieces because they smell bad or look funny or repulse me, how great will that repulsion be when I see the whole! And if I love the pieces even though they smell bad or look funny, how great will be that reunion when I see what I’ve only glimpsed at!

I need to be alone because that is where I prepare myself to find the face. This is where I know who I am and why I am doing what I am doing. Without it, service is meaningless and community is meaningless and making a living is meaningless. But this is where I do Lectio Divina, if I choose, and not just rush through a reading plan. This is always where I let myself look for and drink in the beauty of nature that my heart is craving. This is where I listen. Sometimes this is even where I talk. And I’ve neglected it.

Then I need to be in community because it is where I know where I am. I’m not a person without a place, and community is my place. In my inversion, I’ve made it a who rather than a where.

And last of all, I need to make a living – not in order to live, but in order to support the above. I must find myself useful so that I have something to give in service and to respond with in community. It may consume the biggest and most consistent chunk of time. But it is not an end. It is not the checklist.

I know where I am in all this, and in the light of the above this is a quick path to despair. But I know where I want to be and only have to change my direction to do so. How far away it seems, but faith is stillborn without action. And so it is the specificities of service which I am directing myself to, the specificities of when and where I will be alone, and the selection of how to interact in community, and the utility and ultimately the periphery of work. I have some of these specifics lined up; and others I am still forming. My bet is I should go with what I’ve got. What a strange and wonderful thing to look to.

This is a post about two exiles.

For those of you who couldn’t tell, I can have a decidedly cynical bent on the world. This is not in itself a bad thing, as the world needs people like me to put ground underneath the castles which others build in the air. (Not that I am incapable of building castles in the air, I just tend to talk myself out of it half-way through.) But this bent has gone unchecked lately, and become something emotionally and mentally damaging. I have my reasons for it, circumstances which have made it easy to slip into, but these are explanations and not excuses. Through cynicism a pragmatic and realistic view of life has degenerated into something bitter, and a bitterness which infects its carrier (me) and makes the relationships I have with friends more difficult.

This is my cynicism in response to the church, which I feel is founded and reasonable, and it is the first exile.

I think I have realized, at least in part, how I have been relating wrongly to the church, and how it is that I should be relating to the church. It begins first in dealing with reality: I may never have the sort of continual fellowship in a church that I desire. There is a sad irony that the leaders who cry that ‘church is about community’ are frequently the very ones with whom I find none. But I have been blessed to be able to find fellowship, though nearly always outside the institution of the gathering together of those who call themselves Christians.

I have approached church community with the question: what need is it that I can have met here? Don’t be mistaken: I do have deep needs for a community of believers. But I love the church, and this means I cannot approach her with this question in mind. I cannot ask where I will fit in or how I can be edified. I have to come to a church community with the question: whether or not I get anything out of it, what of myself can I give to the people here?

Some people fast from material blessings for the sake of remaining undistracted before the one who both gives and surpasses material blessings. Some fast from sexual intimacy for the sake of remaining undistracted before the one who gives and surpasses sex. And besides that it is good to fast from time to time to remember the giver, we all fast from these in a sense when we don’t have them, and it is our choice at those times to focus on our desires on our current lack or on our savior who, somehow, makes up for every lack. Like physical needs, and like intimate needs, community is a need. I may withdraw myself from this need for the sake of focusing on Christ, but when I find myself in the course of life without it, I can become upset with God or dependent on him. Unfortunately my response has typically been the former. This is a real need, and it hurts because it’s unmet. But do I really believe that Christ is sufficient to sustain me and bless me with himself? Yes, and I ought to behave as if I believe this.

This line of thinking, frankly, scares me. I don’t want to abdicate the primacy of my own desires – and more than that, I think my legitimate human needs – and instead serve the very people who are contributing to my difficulties. But there’s something wondrously Christlike about that, isn’t there? And that’s what makes me think this is the right approach to take. I am concerned about being myself in a desert and continuing to pour what I have to others already receiving blessings I don’t have. But that is not my business: my business is to love Christ’s beloved.

From here on out, my posts will probably be rarer and focused on other things: that is, trying more to be a blessing than simply ’self-expressive’. I cannot continue to focus on my problems (in my mind, of course, by causes external to myself) in my small forum on a corner of the web and not have it affect me in a manner counter to the change I am trying to produce. This means more posts coming from my journal – such as this one, modified and reduxed to a less personal degree – and more journaling period. It means a different focus and purpose for writing. It means finding in everything an opportunity for my words and actions to bless those around me indiscriminately – and this includes you, if you are reading this – in whatever small and, ultimately, insignificant way I am able.

And this is the second exile, concerning this blog: not to use what little I have simply for myself, but to live in honesty and truth with those close friends in my life, and then to take things like this and make them less about my own rants and needs. This will take some time, and I may disappear for a while as I figure it out. But it is, I hope, good.