Everything intense.

I don’t suppose there has to be a theme to this writing. I mainly just want to get these thoughts out of my head.
I’ve been reading and thinking about a little bit of everything intense. Life, war, justice, eternity, peoples’ souls and how God is in all of these things. I am tired and less talkative these days.

I ride the bus every day and watch people walk the streets and sit beside me and drive their cars, and look out their windows. I grow frustrated and kind of sad. Because I have a very strong sense that so many of them are hurting or numb. And then I try to understand this burden and reconcile it with what I gut-wrenchingly feel about God. Not just God in a general sense…GOD. I can’t say it any other way. I don’t know. All I know is my own self, I understand very little about other people.

It’s true, you know. None of us can really understand other people. Even if we have been through their same situations, it doesn’t matter. Every story is so diverse. Experiences, relationships, time, emotions, they all build into our lives a work of story that is thoroughly unique. Seriously. So there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to truly understand what a person feels when something happens to them. Not completely anyway.
We can only know ourselves. I don’t mean this in a selfish way. I just mean that we should make peace with not understanding a single thing. That’s the way it is. I’ll keep trying, but there is a point of surrender.
People spend their whole lives looking for a way out of pain, a way to feel something, someone to hold their hand. Riding the bus, looking into their faces, I feel very weighed down. If there has to be a point of surrender, then God, I surrender. I’ll never understand these people the way I want to. If I don’t surrender this need to understand, I’ll drive myself crazy.
I stop for a minute, close my eyes. I have to do this several times a day. Breathe out. We can’t know.
Truth exists. Mystery holds truth. God is cloaked in unknown…to us. It’s unsettling, but it doesn’t have to be. When I surrender, as often as I need to, there are moments when I am washed in the calm of profound beauty. In the words of a favorite poet:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.” Ranier Maria Rilke