Looking back

I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past two weeks moving. I’ve been transitioning out of a pretty cush living situation in the fraternity house into a two-bedroom apartment with no living room far from campus where I have to pay my own utilities and internet for the first time. Inevitably, this has involved packing up and unpacking everything that I consider worthwhile keeping.

During this packing and unpacking process, I’ve come across many small sheets of paper that contain my thoughts about faith at that moment. Usually I wrote them during church services, fellowship meetings, or Christian events when I felt that processing my thoughts would be more constructive to my relationship with God than listening to a speaker. (As I progressed through college, that became a higher percentage of events that I attended.) Because I’ve kept these papers, I can review what I was thinking about one, two, three years ago concerning faith.

What this has shown me is that during my college faith, I was usually thinking about love. When I say love, I specifically mean love for myself and whom God loves. A huge lesson I learned in college was that it is ok to take care of yourself before others. I heard a different interpretation of the command “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I had previously taken it to mean: give priority to other people’s needs, and reduce your view of yourself to worthlessness so that you will view them as more important. I heard for the first time that this command implies that you need to love yourself in order to love others more effectively, and that that is ok. Through counseling, I also learned to give legitimacy to my thoughts and feelings, and about the power that I have over destructive, untrue thoughts.

I also frequently wrestled with whom God loves. Yes, of course, God loves everyone, but this gets more at to whom he shows grace. What I’ve written often deals with same-sex relationships, those who are “unsaved” but good people, and people with different beliefs. I can see in my writing a broadening of my understanding of how far God’s love extends, which has also coincided with my uncertainty about the existence of hell. I think my writing also points to the fact that I have become less and less certain about who is "saved". I don’t and can’t know whom God has and has not given grace to, so I would not be at all justified in treating some people as less important. This in particular came up regarding different denominations. At my conservative Christian high school, I was taught that Catholics are going to hell and needed to “truly meet Jesus” and “be saved”. In college, I was in a Christian fraternity with a couple Catholics. I also attended a Catholic mass once. How on earth could I dare to say that these people weren’t “saved”?

It has been encouraging for me to see the person I have evolved into through these writings. And as I begin a new chapter of my life moving into this new place, I wonder where I will be in one, two, three years, and what writings I will have to remind me of the journey along the way.