Wilderness

I feel as if my life is a wreck right now. I'm indecisive, depressed, lonely, uncertian.  Shitty things are happening to people I love.  I cannot agree more with what St. John of the Cross calls Dark Night of the Soul. The point where everything you believed about God seems to fail, and God doesn't "work" anymore. This is what Ol' Johnny has to say about it:
    
   "[God] is purging the soul, annihilating it, emptying it or consuming in it all the affections and        imperfect habits which it has contracted its whole life......These are deeply rooted in the substance of the  soul.....At the same time, it is God who is passively working here in the soul." 

"Times of struggle and doubt seem to be an integral part of our journey towards God and appear to come to all of us at some point as we continue to grow in our spiritual lives. After all, if we didn't have times of doubt then our faith wouldn't actually be faith - it would be certainty - and probably a very unattractive and arrogant certainty at that."

I mean it sounds like this is kind of a normal thing when you are following The Christ.  Well, honestly, I'm kinda pissed off that no one told me about this in the beginning. Because when you are actually in the midst of this, it really blows.  And I'm sick of hearing the same old lines, "Oh, God purposes everything for good", and " Oh, just persevere and you will make it through".  Let me just say I'm kinda sick of you telling the those things, it isn't helping anymore. 

I think back on this time when a friend told me that as we look back on the leaders of the Old Testement, we see that it is kinda normal for them to go through this "wilderness" time, where, in the moment it prolly sucked, but it is where God really molded them to be the men God wanted them to be. Shoot Jesus himself went through the wilderness. I like how St. John says that if we didn't doubt we wouldn't have faith. I was thinking about how I feel that we make faith to be this big complex thing, but in the wilderness we realize the simplicity of what faith it, just choosing to trust, choosing to believe. It is simple, but ...hard.

I heard someone say this  about these times in life:

" The quickest way to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west chasing after it, but to head east into the darkness until you finally reach the sunrise."



Well, shit why is following Jesus always the hardest thing to do? I mean, I'm gonna end up following. I may curse, mumble under my breath, cry, get angry, and try to do things my way.

But I know for a fact those are the exact people God likes to use....