[ Reflections ]

Instructions

Blessings and greetings dear friends!! Please take care if you are bothered by discussion of religion or disturbing imagery Non religious thoughts in notes and comments towards the bottom ———————————————— I wanted to post a project that serves as a collection of reflections from my trip along with some photos :-) It did me a lot of good, and I would highly recommend anyone to take a small hiatus and sit outside with just your thoughts or some books and good company. Talk to people you don’t normally, and learn the sound of the wind and how to distinguish the croaks of frogs ———————————————— [ Worship ] i’m trying to quantify what the feeling of being surrounded by the spirit of God as your brothers and sisters worship around you feels like and the closest thing i can think of is the feeling of the arms of a parent holding you like a blanket as you fall asleep as a young child at a family gathering while everything is laughing and talking and living around you. the feeling of something so large and enveloping and beyond yourself, but so personal and close. separate conversations happening outside of you, but you can hear the life in everything around you. this is why i think there’s so much comfort in community, and so much comfort in the saints, and reading the accounts of the martyrs and everyone who came before you. I wrote a poem about the experience last year but while I share similar feelings of basking in the love shared, I’m no longer just a passive outsider. It’s a shift from being so overwhelmed by the possibility of divinity to an active participation and it is so beautiful how clearly I can see it and feel it. ———————————————— [ Dreams ] The second night I woke up in the middle of the night greatly disturbed - I dreamt that I was looking into a room and a man watched as his heart fell out of his chest into his hand. It still beat. His chest gushed lifeblood continuously, and he scrambled to fix it. The man frantically tore across the room, pressing his hands into the cavity, any cloth he could find, desperately trying to staunch the wound. It did nothing. I knew how it would end, he would not make it, and I awoke. The next morning, a friend and brother of mine and someone deeply connected to divinity asked us all if we had any dreams that possibly could have been God speaking. I said nothing, because I struggle to accept anything without clear truth, and visions seem nonsensical in the modern Western world. Still disturbed, I thought on that dream and prayed relentlessly for a potential meaning and resolved to ask my friend about how he could be so certain about visions in dreams and how one could practically discern it. He said that it is often difficult to tell, and warned me against over spiritualizing things, but said nonetheless that this dream could have been a warning against trying to fill one’s heart or emotional gap with things that cannot satisfy. I’ve reflected on it at length, and even if there is no scientific proof or certainty whether it was a mundane yet eerie dream, or a message from my Lord, it serves as a potent reminder to myself. I struggle often with loneliness and trying to fill the ever present void, whether with friends or media or distractions or anger. I keep thinking about it, and it brings me a good deal of peace. ———————————————— [ Injustice ] “They made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth” Sometime in the morning, I was at the pond reading, and I was looking at Isaiah foretelling Christ’s death in Isaiah 53, and reading the account of his death in Matthew. I was incredibly struck by the objective injustice of Christ’s death. It can be easy for those who believe in the resurrection to ignore that part - that objectively by the law, Christ was innocent and that his death was a grievous injustice. Pontius Pilate himself could find no evidence of wrongdoing on Christ’s part, and yet was bound by his duty to keeping the peace and to prevent a riot, handed Christ over. If such a travesty of justice occurred today, many would be understandably outraged. And yet it is so odd as a believer to be both outraged that Christ was murdered and so thankful that he was. Because by every letter of the law, I was guilty of being there instead. It gave me a lot of appreciation and a lot of thinking to do about how insane my salvation actually is, and so beautiful. ————————————————