Eric and the Questions

“Father, give me Wisdom to develop Strategies to walk in Victory for Your Glory.”

That's the prayer that Anthony White gave to me at the presbytery.  He said that I need to repeat that prayer for the rest of my life.  I'm going to be honest and tell you that while I know it sounds good I don't entirely understand what it means.  Of course I get the wisdom and victory and glory parts but the strategies thing is weird.  I suck at chess and even checkers for the most part.  I'm just not a strategic thinker is what I’m saying.  I realize that I am asking God for the ability to become a strategic thinker, but that just feels light years from where I am mentally right now.  I'm a questioner; I am the most inquisitive person I know.  I have driven more than one teacher, boss, co-worker, girlfriend, friend, parent insane from all the incessant questioning.  I'm like a four year old in that respect.  The problem is that most of these people view my questioning as argument.  Maybe I've just been asking the wrong people.

On a Sunday about seven months ago (2/20/11 to be exact) Michelle and Rick came over and prayed for me.  Michelle told me the she thought my first letter was inspiring to other men. (Men? Really?)  It's not something I've ever heard anyone say about anything I've ever done.  Mostly at work I hear things like “act like a man” and “He's the daughter his mother always wanted” and “doesn't your dad wish he had a son?” etc... I hope she was right because it would cool to know that all of the crap that gets me down could somehow inspire someone else.  Rick told me that he feels that I should start asking God all of my questions.  This is hard for me because a lot the time I feel like my questions are a little more than borderline blasphemous.  I don’t want them to be but sometimes they just jump into my head and I’m like “wow, why is that like that?” or “if that’s the case then this can’t be that”.  Maybe doubts are okay because God made us with brains and free will.  I guess my problem is that I don’t want to ask a question that’s so bad that it somehow offends God.  I know I’m crazy and somewhat neurotic.

I have trouble with faith and following blindly the people who see symbolism and signs in things that are to me just coincidence.  I’m not going to say that there haven’t been things in my life that I couldn’t easily explain away as happenstance because there have been moments in my life when I knew that God was there.  But there are times when people seem to just take another person’s word for it that a miracle happened.  Sometimes I hear people reading into a situation so much that it seems far-fetched and I’m like “how in the hell did you get that from this, I mean seriously?”  I really wish that I could just turn off my brain and believe it all but part of me feels like I would be dishonoring God because He gave me a brain.  He made me intelligent, I may not have people skills, I may be lacking in wisdom and strategic thinking, I may not have any mechanical instinct or much common sense, but I am smart.  I have a gift for words and retaining information and over the years I have wasted that gift so much that I think it might be dying inside my brain.  I’m trying to get it back (that’s partly the point of this blog)

I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself today so even if no one reads this it’s cool because I’m really not doing it for you/them.  Don’t get me wrong, if you/they do read this I appreciate you/them very much but I have to do this for myself and try not to worry about what you/they might think.  That being said this only counts as half of an entry for this week because I wrote the first paragraph and a half on February 20 and then left it until now. Why? Because I’m a slacker.

Eric Anderson