Heavenly Father,

I used to just say “Hey God,” before talking to you.  I started that because the kids at work crew were doing it, and it sounded friendlier to me.  Not that you’re not friendly, but I still prefer to address you by what you really are to me.  Again, that sounds bad.  You’re a lot of things: the least of which being the creator of my enjoyment, the reason I can sit here and just pound on the keys of my laptop until my stomach fills up with Italian soda and I have to bike home.

I guess I’m writing to you just to talk.  That’s what everyone does, right?  We’re all supposed to sit down with you or walk with you or just lie and cry with you often.  I’m writing to you, because the words on the page make a lot more sense to me than my thoughts all trapped up in my head like this.  Maybe this way I’ll develop some sort of a habit.  A good one, that is.  I’ll carry my heavy 15” MacBook Pro around in my backpack and hope I don’t develop back problems later.  I already did though: I remember my mom’s chiropractor x-raying me to assuage her fears of transferring her scoliosis to her daughter.  He discovered I have two fused vertebrae, or something fancy like that.

I’ll sit in front of a dark coffee shop on a nice day like this and dive into the side of me that really enjoys a story.  It’s not really a side anymore, it’s more of a large portion.  I don’t think that human beings can be divided at all, actually.  In the metaphorical sense, that is.  Sure, there are some who can do intense math problems all day sitting at an uncomfortable desk and not break a sweat, then get up and paint the freaking Mona Lisa (I’m talking to you, Da Vinci!  I hope you’re in heaven so I can chat with you later.).  But if they’re a child of God, they’re just one.  And they’re not by themselves in that oneness either, they’re a tiny pinprick part of a whole.  As a visual artist, that blows my mind.  If you’re a chemist or a construction worker or a professional swimmer, it probably blows your mind in a different way.  To me, though, physical lines can be drawn.

Imagine a thick red cloth tied around your heart, just snug enough to feel cozy.  It wraps through your body, an unending circuit between your organs, then shoots out through your limbs in so many strands.  Then it goes off, swallowing up others in its tender grasp, weaving through their fingers as if to hold their hand and whisper to them, “I’m here.”  The process is never ending.  That’s the part that surprises me whenever I think of it.  It’s you, God.  I’m sure you got the imagery by now, but I’ll spell it out just for me.

This is why I’d rather be cold than hot: when I’m chilly, I can simply adorn myself in a jacket or other snuggly cloth that wraps around me like great big flexible arms.  I love that humans use fabric as a makeshift closeness.  Clothes literally envelop you.  Your underwear spends more time close to you than any human ever will.  It’s tragic really.  However cold our life stories get, there’s usually never enough earthly blankets or arms to wrap around us and make us warm.  When I get cold, but I’m in a comfy position, I curl my toes and hug my knees a little tighter in a futile attempt to warm myself.  I could just get up and grab a blanket and/or striped Christmas socks, but I’d rather sit and shiver in my comfortable discomfort.

I suppose I should get to the meat of things.  My problems, and such.  I keep getting pulled towards the blasé events of life, though.  I want to tell you, Papa, about the homeless guy who sits on 15^th ave in front of the boarded up building whose name is Marase Noble.  I want to pray for him, but I mostly just want to talk about him and how I’m a little obsessed with getting him to not be so scary religious and uncomfortable to talk to.  I want to tell you about how I walked through Chris’s dorm hallway this morning before visiting hours to bring him coffee, and the dim lighting made me excited and nervous.  More than that, I really want to complain.

Now I’ve written that sentence, and it strikes me as undeserving of page space.  It is crammed at the end of a paragraph, and it doesn’t take up much of the line, but it makes me shift in my seat and check the moral part of my brain to make sure it’s functioning on the right frequency.  I asked you something a few nights ago when I was stuck in my leather chair at redemption groups being talked at by my leaders trying to pick apart my sins.  I asked you to reveal everything to me so that I could better serve you and not just sift through life without realizing.  Realizing what?  Well, sin, of course.

A lot of people do.  They sin without realizing or acknowledging.  They would call it innocence, or more accurately indifference, since you, God, function on such another level than the one they grew up in, the one the world tosses at their face.  But me, I function within the filter of scripture.  This isn’t to say that I know it all.  Scripture, that is.  Because I really don’t.  I guess this is another attempt to grow in that department and really see the Bible as a collection of the kind of riveting stories I love.  So this is how I feel; that “religion” is evil, yet rules really do matter and scripture must be followed.  I feel that I must keep my mind alert to when I’m screwing up, because I might miss one of your signs and then where would I be?  Except, you are good at signs.  You’d show me a sign, tap dance, and twirl a dog on the tip of your nose all at the same time, that’s how good you are at them.  If only that’s how we could see your messages: except, then we’d screw up the tap dances and the twirling dogs too.  We’d start to worship them, and that’s just not right.

What do I worship?  That’s not as easy a question to answer as I’d like to think, and that sucks.  I worship these tiny moments of happy.  Happy is an ugly word for me.  That’s what we talked about in redemption group that made me stick more firmly to my chair.  Happy is like the complete opposite of joy.  I will literally run from it, yet towards it at the same time.  I’m not proud of that.

I have enthroned the feeling of “alright”.  “Alright” is friends, smiles, and avoidance.  It’s not always that way, but I’d like to present whatever reality I can for consideration.  I will most certainly bow down to the possibility of an invitation, or if not, the route to an escape.  The cloudiness that hovers in me during times of depression is a bit of a comfort.  I suppose if you added up the times I’ve used the word “comfort” in this letter so far, you’d get a high number.  I just did add them up, and it was approximately seven times.  That’s a lot for a small little letter like this.  Here I am, passing judgments on this piece of writing when it’s not even two pages long yet.  I should probably end this paragraph before it gets too lost on the cloud I was just talking about.  

There it is.  I can’t think of anything else to say about my ugly sins.  I’ll add some more adjectives the next time I speak about them.  They’ll be along the lines of sinister, sickly, gross, abominable, etc. and they’ll be merciless.  Then I’ll remind myself that you, God, are the only one who can judge me in that way.  The biggest part of this all, I think, is realizing that no matter what I do, your arms will envelop me in the end, and I’ll get to meet your Son.