Life is short, heaven and hell are for long...
Ok, so me and my thinking again. My brother's excuse for that is that I'm 13 and that' s what I'm supposed to do. This is a time in my life when I'm going to be questioning things a lot! And I noticed. I've questioned life, why do we have to go through life to get to Heaven or Hell? Why do we even exist? Who is God anyway? And even sometimes I question death, suicide, things like that. And yeah to admit it, I have thought about suicide like every other teenager in this world, I think that we see it as an easy way out of our problems, but really it's not because we will regret it after we are gone. I'm a teen, apparently I think that everyone around me doesn't know anything and I KNOW ALL!!!! Well I'm gunna be like Jeremy and say that the things that people assume about teens and the way they act is LIMITING! I'm not stupid, I know what I should be doing but that doesn't mean that I'm gunna take the right path. I like the easy way out of things, I mean who doesn't? Jeremy talks to me a lot about my spiritual life and things that might be helpful or that I should take advantage of the things handed to me. And yeah I agree with him. But a LOT of times(and by that i mean like 99 out of 100 times) I feel pushed into things by my parents (especially) or the people around me. I know they are trying to do me good but sometimes I need to come to things myself instead of right away when my PARENTS are ready for me to do things. I'm not always ready to take these things that are handed to me. I know that right now my spiritual life is a wreck and I should be working on it, but I'm not mentally ready to take such a large step in life. It' s just now registering that life is what prepares us for Heaven. Heaven and Hell are for an eternity, these things never die out unlike life which may adventually disappear. Yeah, once this registered I've been scared out of my mind and want to curl up in a corner and cry but I can't because I have a life to live too. Like no joke I've wanted to cry for the past week but can't. I'm actually not really sure why I have wanted to cry. I guess it's pressure from friends, teachers, family and even myself to do things all at once and then at the same time as doing all of this stuff having a spiritual life. Me being a teen, again assumed and usually correct, I have a lot of friend drama and guy drama, well that's part of the reason for wanting to cry and curl in a ball in a corner. But I think that it's more of the reality of what I'm doing to my life. I have to go to the monastery for two days. Yeah I'm not really looking forward to it to tell you the truth, but it's not that it's kinda boring and I don't get to use my hair products for a day, but it's more that going to the monastery to me is like a judgement of my spiritual life. And I DO NOT like that, but that is because I know that I'm not doing a very good job with it. I've been confused about life and kind of almost depressed about things. But I had to pour it all out on my readers....srry bout that. I had to get it out some how and talking about it to someone is kinda hard.
Thanks for listening.
Kenzy
posted by Kenzy @ 10:41:00 PM
3 Comments:
Dear dear McKenzie,
You are way too much like your dad....of course in all the good ways too. :)
Actually you are way too much like most human beings, but ahead of many by a lot of years. It is a rare gift to be able to see yourself clearly and admit your struggles and failures and desires, both good and evil. I too had that rare gift from a very early age. In a way it does make your life "miserable" because you cannot live "at the mall" in your head. Life isn't like just non-stop shopping for something new and cute and cool and giggles all the time. It is for real and we know inside we have to do all of it, even the parts that hurt and are hard. In that sense, the "drama" never ends. There's ALWAYS drama. TV shows make the drama go away after 30 minutes or an hour, or sum it up with a nice cool ending (sometimes a hard one...) but our life keeps going and we don't get commercials, and we don't get a preview of next week. I was talking to Jeremy about "life" the other day (yeah, we talk about that stuff too), and told him two things that I can remember. One was kind of a joke when he was mocking me and said, "You know so much!" (In the Jeremy sarcastic voice). I told him I know more than he suspects. The other was when we were more serious and he was talking about how we should live more spiritually. I told him that when you are younger you don't realize the suffering and struggles your parents have to "be spiritual". It was not until I was 40 that I realized what my parents were REALLY going through in their marriage when I was in high school. I just didn't know enough about marriage to be able to see the "signs" of their struggles until then. They are still married, but now that I look back I know they almost didn't make it then. That was a very hard time for them. Parents in general know more than kids suspect because we went through being a teenager. It hasn't gotten any easier, and in some ways maybe harder, but I doubt it because it still comes down to relationships and how to fall in love and lose love and have friends and fight with them and survive emotionally with your family and God and life telling you so many different things that you don't have the ability to deal with because you don't have the freedom to do what you want or people tell you what to do and you just plain don't want to do it, even if you know it is right. Thoughts of suicide are normal in a lot of ways. I thought of it many times until I was almost 40. I don't think of suicide much any more, but I look forward to death because it is the way we will all finally be free of our failures and struggles and the pain of life. St. Paul said "I desire to depart and be with Christ, for me to live is Christ, but to die is gain". So it is kind of "escapism" to want to die, but to "live is Christ" means that we have to learn to love, not just romantically, but love other human beings like Christ loves them...even people who are "unlovable". I knew even before I was a teenager that this would be my life's work to learn to love like Christ and serve God. I knew (even though no one taught me that at a Bible study) that eternity was real and heaven was about love and hell was about not loving. I didn't know exactly what all that meant, but it just made sense to me. So, my whole life has been focussed on how to love the ugly and rejected and difficult and outcast people, even in junior high drama. I didn't do it perfectly then, I still don't. I think as I got older I realized that, like St. Paul, thoughts of suicide is in a way the desire to depart, but ultimately it is a selfish desire because it is wanting to run away and hide forever. That is part of being human and wanting the easy way out rather than waiting for God to take us when our purpose for life is completed in His wisdom. In a way that applies to just getting up in the morning and not curling up in a ball and crying in the corner. Yeah, that goes on and on too. Even now. Life is hard. Its not miserable, but hard. And no one likes to do that hard stuff, but we all do. Well... most people do parts of the hard stuff. We all run away from some things we know we should be facing up to. Everyone's spiritual life is a wreck in some ways no matter how good it looks on the outside. It is easy to put up a fake front and act happy and "together" than it is to look inside and deal with our real faces and feelings. It is easier to avoid people that make us look inside ourselves. It is easier to surrender to the easy way out than take the hard roads. But that is the human struggle with our fallen nature. Every time we take an easy path (sin) we break a part of ourselves and it makes it harder to do the right things later, even the things we want to do. Its like your knees. Its a small part of you really, but because you bent them in the wrong way (even doing something you liked!) you're now broken and can't do a LOT of other things without pain. That is what choosing to do sin is like. We like it but we don't realize we are breaking something important that will affect us later when we are trying to do something else we REALLY love. The choices we make matter later in life and yes, into eternity. God is merciful and forgives, but we still end up hurt and crippled in life that we have to deal with. That is why we need people (even nuns!) to keep us on track. We have to learn to love, but we also have to learn to BE loved and let other people into our life and our secrets and our pain and sorrow so we can bear life's hard parts. Sometimes, like Cheri did with your knee, they can tell us an "exercise" we can do to strengthen our crippled parts of our hearts so we can do life better. But, then we have to do it...which comes back to the slacker struggle....sigh.......
Anyway. Its 4 in the morning. I couldn't sleep because I was thinking too much. I'm glad I checked your blog.
I love you,
dad
you are a good person and friend. and hey i might come visit st johns some sunday. YAY
hehe...COME!!! OMG!!! COME!!! :)
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