bread making saves my life. :)

how now shall i live?

a group of us read the bible aloud in the evenings...we go down to the guy's floor about 9:00 and read a few chapters at a time. i don't go all the time but i did tonight. we read Mark 14-16 and then talked and now i am in the midst of crisis.

i need community but people are leaving for various reasons and i am so afraid i will never know the people i want to know and they will never know me. life is confusing and hard and i want some guidance from people who are living in the same circumstances as me but are further along on their journey. blech. life just is making me say blech today. how can i live Christianity the way it should be lived? when it is so hard to just think charitably towards my neighbor how can i live justly in a global sense? how can i be holy? what does it mean to live simply? and does any of this really matter? it feels somedays like everything is just too big and my little life doesn't matter at all. i mean if half the world's population is living on less than $2 a day, how much is me hopefully becoming a physician actually going to matter?

i wish you all (my PA readers) could have been in the room tonight when we were talking. because Taylor and Rebekah and Lucas and Meg just make faith real. reading Mark and asking about Judas's life and wondering if we should give our clothes to poor people. one time when i was downstairs we had a conversation about taking vows of celibacy. we talk about intentional poverty. intentional community. about what it means to love until it costs something.

lucas said tonight that Ron (a pastor at the early church) says that the Kingdom is right side up and the world is upside down. i feel like i am in a bit of a free fall, my head pointing in all directions, vacillating from day to day. i want to live well. i want to be mad for life, to love God, to love the world, to take all i have and be poor. but it is SO HARD. ah.

i mean. this is sort of how it feels:

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. ... Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament." - Soren Kierkegaard



in any case, finals are coming up in like 2 weeks...this is so not the time to be having an existential crisis...

i baked bread tonight. sometimes it helps to drop all the heavy thoughts and just make something with your hands. i kneaded and braided the dough and i still feel like my head will EXPLODE but the explosion is not quite as imminent.

happy musing, everyone! :) see you at Christmas.