I Used to Write

I am not quite sure when posting on here became difficult. For a long time, I chalked it up to a big life transition. I changed jobs and moved to a new state. I told myself that my creative capacity was being diverted to other places: youth group meetings, coming up with games, communion meditations. But there were always other avenues for creativity.

Yet the words on this blog--a practice that I have undertaken for a good decade-plus--have become more scarce. Days turn into weeks turn into a month. I have written here and there, but many times it has felt labored. The feeling that I was forcing something that I have loved for so long has been frustrating and the more frustrating that I have felt the more difficult it has been for me to log on here and put my thoughts into words.

I am getting the sense that this is something other than a big life transition. The last few days I have had this creeping dread that the reason I don't write as much anymore is that I don't think words matter anymore. Or maybe, I feel like I live in a world where words have been stripped of their meaning.

Take this week and the horror stories coming out of our southern border. Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended 2,000 immigrant children being taken from their families. They called such atrocious actions "biblical" and somehow implied that what they were doing was good. The president said that it was his oppositional party who was at fault for this policy even though that is not true and, even if it was, his party has all the power to change it. A member of his cabinet simply said that this wasn't happening even though others in the administration have said that this is a policy decision that is being used as a deterrent.

When all of that brazen bullcrap is being flung around, it is hard for me to write anything. No matter how furious I am that children are being torn from their families. No matter how incensed that I am that God is being co-opted into policy that is so thoroughly anti-Christ that it is cartoonish. Questioning which way the wind blows has wearied me. Because I'm not sure that words, that truth really matter much anymore.

The fact that the talking heads that, for some reason, represent the tradition in which I grew up have been steadfastly defending and lauding all of this nonsense has sucked the life out of me. When Jerry Falwell Jr. declares Trump a Christian's dream, I want to scream every word I was told I shouldn't say. When church choirs bombastically belt songs called "Make America Great Again," it makes me second guess a large chunk of my upbringing in the Bible Belt.

And I have skirted around these problems for years yet I never want to fully go down that road. Because if the pen is mightier than the sword then I am worried that if I truly write what I feel that the text will read like a slasher movie. And maybe I don't write because I don't want to unleash what I truly feel every time there is another school shooting, another lie, another person dehumanized, another non-white child hurt, another time the Christian faith is conflated with this country. I keep it all at bay because I have always worried that raging will shut down conversations. Yet I don't think my half-hearted protestations have really aided in any dialogue either.

I used to write and as I spill out these thoughts, I feel like I should write again because to not do so would be to lose heart. But I don't want to just write solely in reaction to the darkness in the world. I want to speak to a fuller experience rather than letting some bloviated blowhard suck up all the oxygen in the room. I keep saying that I want to recapture the childlike awe and wonder of faith, but I keep running into walls. Perhaps I have to just break through those walls with a keyboard.

I want to try to write again. Not because I think that it is going to add anything great to the world. But because I feel the absence in my soul. I have been too tired, too timid, too numb, and too intimidated to try to put my thoughts, my hopes, my conviction, and my imagination to page recently. I don't know if the words will come tomorrow, next week, or next month. The road back is likely going to be rough, but I need to try.