My Vanilla Sky
Recently I have been to two consoling sessions at the UNL health center. Two people close to my life have seen signs of depression in my life and so I went to ask professional advice. Like any medical visit, there was good news and bad news. I guess in my case, since depression is not a life/death matter, the news is relative. I knew that I didn't have a full blown depression if for no other reason than I was sleeping well. The consoler confirmed this and labled what I have as "melancholia." Full blown depression is though of as a huge dive below the "normal" line. Melancholia is a relatively small distance from the normal line. The difficult part is that melancholia is experience as a constant for two or more years. When the consoler added the "two or more years" part of the definition things started to make sense.Whatever is going on with me has been very active these past few years and could have started as far back as high school. As with any negative condition, there is a huge desire in my heart to head back towards normal (whatever that is? right!), however there have been other nails pounded into my life-- nails that have made it so difficult to even see the nail of depression. One of the largest nails was (as sometimes still is) the shame of wanting more. I thought I was an odd ball-- an outcast. Why do I want so much from life and God? Why does no one around me share that desire? I heard no teaching or though on desire and felt no permission to feel what I feel until June/July of 2001. In a series of discussion at Brugger's Bagels in Omaha, a dear friend exposed me to questions, conversation, and thoughts from desire-minded thinkers and authors. "What is your largest dream?" he ask. "How does that dream fit in with Genesis 3-- be fruitful and multiply, subdue the earth?"
I didn't know. What I did know is that I like the questions, even if the answers where hard, and that in some way the questions felt like I was breaking out of a box. I started to feel some freedom. My "Vanilla Sky" moment hang on a hinge pin. The hinge pin is not a moment in time or a single event, but the dichotomy and tension of huge proportions in my life.
Going into the 2001 school year God sent me my own long-haired wise man, Tim. Tim and had coffee and even traveled the world together for two years. He passed on to me his dreams of community and sought hard after those dreams. I attempted to discover how to lead and inspire people into a community space where we could learn and re-learn how Jesus calls us to live and how the early church discovered freedom. Things were going... never extremely fast, but they never seemed to stop. I saw God moving and people growing and I believe most days I had some holy hope. Yet, one August afternoon in 2003 my life started to change.
Returning from a favorite summer vacation spot I took Elissa (now my fiancee) to Iowa State University, I went on to Lincoln, Nebraska. Simultaneously my long-haired wise man moved to Montana and one of my best friends in the world and my cousin left Lincoln for school in Chicago. Two weeks later Elissa left for a three month trip to Spain. I was devastated my friends were gone and unavailable. But the worst thing about it was a growing feeling that community was non-existent in my life and that I would continue to live in a world where all tides would blow, change, grow, and contract EXCEPT for community. And no one could enter that conversation. No one in my life had a group of souls that shared a journey. No one wanted to dream with me and I felt stuck and isolated and left and ultimately alone.
Concurrently with this aloneness I got angry at many people. I thought that my anger against them and the loneliness could correlate if I wanted them too. After trying for a few years I found those to things don't correlate. Much of my anger has now been given up and washed away, Elissa is back stateside and ready to marry me, and Tyler has come back to Nebraska several time. But I still don't see myself as having community. I don't feel that God has inputed community as a world-tide and/or I believe Satan has the community idea under great control in my world. But the desire and needs continue. All around me people are hurting and hopeless. There must be a place where The Healer can come. There must be a space where community-- biblical community-- can be discovered and lived out the Glory of God. There must be a place were Freedom and Life can be something as real as it was in Jesus' John 17 prayer.
Secretly, I still think this community is still possible.
posted by Simon Yost @ 12:23 PM
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