Since I Was A Child
Since I was a child I've always leaned toward or lived on the serious side of life. Not always well or happily, but persistently. I can't help asking questions about the meaning of things, the truth of things, the certainty of things. I have stopped, for the most part, in apologizing for being the serious guy. I have a place to be that is mine, a place shared with some and not with others. That's the nature of being a self with others.
Pursuing meaning hasn't been so much a choice as a compulsion, one driven by need and desire as much as by any sense of virtue or rightness in the queries.
And then there is this need to connect, to explain myself, to be authentic to a fault with others. That too is less a virtue and more of a compulsion, one I imagine that is born of a deep need to overcome a genetically gifted sense of loneliness.
I was born in melancholia, an introspective, analytic, artistic, anxious introvert called by God to teach the gospel in and with grace. I would have it no other way. But I would have it sanctified by the Spirit, lifted out of it's natural shadow, and placed in the shadow of the cross.
That God has, from the beginning, from his beginning me in thought before I began in life --that God has made me alive, kept me alive, and kept me searching and then abiding in him-- is a thought that infuses my life with grace.
He satisfies me as I was meant to be satisfied by himself.
