There's a ditch on both sides of the road

As a kid, I used to ride in our giant 1970's van with my brothers and my mom out to the field to take my Dad lunch when he was plowing.  Most of our land is contiguous to our homestead, but we have one place that is 8 miles or so east down a long, straight country road.  One day, instead of driving our normal route into the field through the pasture, we needed to drop the lunch and head to town (oh, glorious day!), so we pulled off the road to wait for Dad to circle back around in the tractor. 

Little did we know that the very tall weeds there obscured a deep (very deep) drainage ditch.  Now, in the Texas Panhandle these are not full of weeds or water very often, but this was a wet year, so it had grown up with weeds which had hidden how deep and dangerous it was.  So Mom pulls off to the side of the road and within the blink of an eye the giant 1970's van was teetering on the edge of disaster, hanging from a cliff over a drainage ditch.  Luckily, my Mom's panic was allayed by a man driving by who took to rescue us from certain death (it was only three feet down).  By the time the tractor made it's way around the field, Dad reminded Mom that of course there was indeed a culvert there that had always been there - didn't she remember? This did not please her.

Generally ditches are used in one of two cases: either to avoid something bad  (say, a car passing another car in oncoming traffic and they cut it a little close) or after something bad has already happened (when there are flashing lights behind you and the man in the Ray-Bans asks you to pull over).  I almost had a convergence of these two circumstances south of Valley Mills, pulling over to let others pass me and almost hitting a highway patrolman who had someone pulled over in the ditch right in front of me. I think we both saw our lives flash before our eyes that day.

I say this sometimes when I refer to problems with extremes.  There are fundamentalists on both sides of all issues.  More often than not, they have more in common with each other than anyone in the middle.  There are problems with almost every area of human life related to extreme overuse and extreme underuse of our bodies, nutrition, work, liesure,....  Exercising too much leads to injury.  Exercising too little leads to heart problems.  Eating too little leads to digestive problems.  Eating too much leads to obesity.  Working too much leads to relational dysfunction.  Working too little leads to poverty.  Too much free time results in bad choices related to boredom.  Too little free time makes you unavailable for spontaneous fun.  When the issue of extremes comes up, I always say "There's a ditch on both sides of the road."  More often than not, people will stop and say, "Yeah, that's true!" 

The thing with life on extreme terms is that you can only be there for so long before the drainage culvert of death catches up to you.  That's when you're going to need someone to swoop in to rescue you.  When that happens, I hope your road is easy to get back on and someone kind heps you back to the middle. 

Can you imagine a place without God?

            This was my first thought when I woke up this morning.  Strange, I guess – but this is fairly normal for me – having deep thought type questions wake me up at 6:34 on Saturday mornings.  This one connects to Psalm 139:7-8 “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I run from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there.  If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” 

                So, can I imagine a place far from God?  I have to remember times when I felt far from God to get at this one.  I feel far from God when I am in the wrong kind of relationships. I dated a kid in college who was the wrong kind of person: more charisma than good sense, manipulative, gauged his self worth by how many people followed his lead of getting coffee and dessert after eating out at the restaurant…you know – a real winner (or so I thought at that time).  I very consciously turned my back on a lot of things that made me “me” to keep him.  I felt very far from God in that relationship. 

                I feel far from God when I hit this rock-bottom thought: “What am I gonna do?”  This is usually accompanied by rubbing of the forehead with both hands and a sense of deep panic that I feel even now just because I’m writing about it.  When I hit this thought, it has usually been triggered by some thought about the future, uncertainty about my present array of choices, or feeling like I’ve aged out of the dating market. This is a question that comes from a place of desperation, a place where I feel like all of the things I’m doing and have done have led me to a dead end and I only have bad options to choose from. I feel very far from God when I feel like I don't have any good options.

                So imagining a place far from God is for me about feeling like I’ve been painted into a corner where I have to deal with my own choices.  Being far from God feels cold and panicky to me, so should feeling close to God feel the opposite?  Should feeling close to God be warm and certain, planned and logical? 

                I am facing the most precipitous of moments less than two weeks from today: graduation.  In these times, it is a dangerous cliff indeed.  I feel like I’m being pushed toward it by the flow of time.  The closer it gets, the more panicky I feel about my future prospects.  I would love to be in a place where I could be in the right kinds of relationships and not have the question “What am I gonna do?” hang over my head.  It’s difficult for me to think that I could make these choices anywhere I am.  I guess it brings a sense of calmness to think about the prospect of new relationships and new options to choose from that God will still be there, no matter where I am or how I’m feeling about where I am.  That said, I would sure love to stay close to my support system of people I know and love.  I also would love to have a satisfactory answer to "What am I gonna do?"  I think that is the bigger issue for me -