"I will be who and what and where I am."

So I had a completely different thing planned for my second blog, but I was so excited about this thought that I decided to share. You may or may not know me very well, and so, you may or may not know that I consider myself a Christian. Sometimes, even I don't know why anymore. I feel like so much of my personal philosophy doesn't match with what I was taught to believe, but at the same time so much of my personal philosophy is inextricable from those same teachings. And I got to the point this year where I thought, "God doesn't want me. Obviously He isn't seeking me out. I'm too busy for Him and he doesn't care enough about me specifically to find me where I am." I imagined this great bubble being blown between us, getting bigger and bigger until I couldn't see through the soap to Him. Or I imagined God as being on a ship that was sailing away from me. "Fine," I thought, sort of childishly crossing my arms. I gave up.
I was driving up to school today and decided to opt for NPR over my usual iPod. Two beautiful shows about religion came on, one about a preacher who recently came out to his congregation and one about a Rabbi's new book, The Dignity of Difference. One of the major points of the latter being you can believe deeply in your own personal religion, be it Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or Judaism; in fact, it is wonderfully important to do so. But God is so much bigger than the ways we can think about him. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks more accurately translated God's message to Moses at the burning bush from "I am that I am" to "I will be who and where and what I am." I may or may not have said an amen aloud in the car. (I totally did btw.) So much for God not finding me where I was. Through these men, I felt like God was saying, "I know why you are frustrated. But everything doesn't have to be the way you were taught and everything you were taught doesn't have to be invalidated either." He met me half way. I'm by no means saying everything is better and my confusion as found its way into harmony. But God hasn't given up on me, not even when I gave up on him. Maybe, just maybe there is hope for me yet. There is enough hope for all of us.

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/dignity-of-difference/video-intheroom_sacks.shtml this is a link to a video version of Rabbi Sack's interview I was listening to on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=131096915&m=131096699 this is one about the gay preacher, Bishop Swilley.