Behemoth Rising

I have decided to undertake a venture of cosmic proportions.

Actually, I'm just trying to piece together a beautifully written and meaningful assessment of my life thus far. And it's hard. Frankly, it's hard as hell and I don't know where to begin.

You should have seen me this summer. I strategized with reckless abandon. I spent hours, literally hours of several days, several weeks, and several months creating outlines, discussing form, attempting beginnings. I even have a fairly serviceable first page or so, though it ends there. It ends before it gets too personal, because I am afraid, so very afraid, to lay my soul bare.

I have done a lot of things in my life I am not particularly proud of. I have done a number of things that anyone who has only met me in the last few months would probably have no idea. For those that aren't familiar, there's a game people sometimes play called, "I've never," wherein a group of people lists, in a circle, things they've never done. If you have done the mentioned thing, you get a "point." Depending on the length of the game, (generally dependent on the general level of boredom) you get five or ten strikes, points, before you're out.

As is often the case with late-teen-early-twenty-somethings, topics often settle on the vaguely sexual and subtly rebellious bemoanings (braggings?) of past mistakes. To this date, I have never won "I've never." If we played, "I have" I would be the gloriously shameful champion.

Even so, I think the scariest part is not exposing me, but exposing my family. My family is not a pretty matter, frankly, but it is what I have. What I have is broken and terribly flawed; within our immediate history is of course that which is tragic but understandable: cancer, high blood pressure, severe arthritis, mysterious brain diseases (stumping even the Mayo Clinic), and more. But among the uglier items lie alcoholism, insanity, an amazingly complete history of divorce, brokenness, and bitterness. Depression. Homosexuality. Et cetera.

This is who I am. I am all of these things, all of them are in me, specters that brush against my existence in one form or another, at one time or another. Things I gander even may get me fired, and certainly would have barred me from being employed in the first place by the conservative Christian school that employs me.

And yet this place, this school, for all its flaws, for all its opportunities to explores the phantoms of my heritage, is also the field in which I have sown seeds of faith. My Christianity is very imperfect. I often forget to read my Bible, and my best prayer times come when I realize I have just sped past a police car on the highway. But my faith is a thousand times stronger than it was when I entered this school just a few long and hard years ago, and I have never loved or appreciated my God more than I do today. To me, this faith is more valuable than year some might see as wasted. To me, this faith is bigger than all of my perpetual faults. To me, this faith is, I suppose, worth putting into words, even worth losing everything, because it is only by losing everything that I found it in the first place. This story is a behemoth I am not sure I can lift, but am, perhaps, fool enough to try.