Tuesday is Creative Writing Class

There is something about literature/compostion/creative writing type classes that the Lord seems to love to use to speak to me. I guess when he walked the earth he used parables, so a short story isn’t a stretch.

So tonight it wasn’t so much the stories we discussed as the discussion and just my general state of mind for the last few months which is close to confusion, an increasing sense of peace and both a giving up and a renewed effort. Confusion is maybe a poor word, because in the Christian culture I live in it is associated with evil thus, God is not a God of confusion. I beg to differ only because I totally KNOW he doesn’t explain Himself, at least not to me. Half the time I just don’t get Him. I am slow to process. I think faith walk is a walk in the dark. Sometimes without bearings maybe just the still small voice that say… be open to this… And I am off in a direction I never imagined or I have fought, just because I didn’t believe it was the direction God was leading me in… just a distraction.

Tonight he said rest… awhile. Maybe I will catch up on all the stuff in my head that I am trying to figure out… or maybe I will rest from figuring it out… because I can’t.

I won’t go into the story that one of my classmates wrote, but I will share part of my review of it. I was about the death of a child from a fatal inherited disease.

The care the father gave was imperfect and inadequate, because there was nothing he could do and he was such a wounded character that really when he turned to God there was a beautiful plea to God for life. There was nothing for the father to do, but he did something. His prayer was not answered. Then there was the burial which again was imperfect. It seemed to add to the father’s despair. The author left us with the father’s only solution, to drink, again an imperfect solution. The story is an expression of the knowledge that life is lived in a fallen broken world sometimes without answered prayers or answers to our whys.

Add to this how angry I was about another story I had to read which was so full of obscenities, spiritism, drug, and homosexuality. When I found out the story wasn’t finished I hit the ceiling and refused to read it again in order to review it. I did a harsh review of it.

When I got to class I realized who had written it. I had written a bad review of his last story for the same reason. There is something about this kid when you see him in person that tells me he has been dealt some very severe blows in life. I know from his countenance and stature that he is beat down and broken. I didn’t give him my review I handed his story back uncommented on. I hate what he wrote, but the Lord broke my heart for this kid. He has softened my heart towards some others too. But even more than that he showed me how guarded my heart is and how un connected I am to people. I am there, but not really connected, not like I used to. I used to invest emotionally in people. I haven’t done that. I have a few friends that I feel safe with, but everyone else I keep at a distance. I have been too wounded and sad to invest. Or maybe I had nothing to give having been devastated by the events of the last few years. As I have worked so hard to forgive and have had some measure of success by feeling the pain, I am also feeling other emotions. I am very emotional lately and trying to deal with it all, thus some of the confusion that I don’t want to call confusion… maybe just restoration.

How God brought all that out in class I don’t know, but it all fell into place as I walked through the place that God speaks and out to my car in the parking lot.

I need to let some people in my life. I have really been in isolation.