feeling desperate

It's quarter to 5 in the morning.
My parents left for Ontario yesterday. We waved to them from the front lawn as they drove away in their UHaul Truck, towing their car behind them. They are now driving thousands of kilometers, over the mountains, through the prairies, past the Great Lakes.
How can the leaving of two make my world feel like it just emptied out of people?
Feel like our little family is surrounded by a great blank ocean.
I wasn't expecting the loneliness to hit so hard.

The last few months, as this day approached, I began taking stock of all our connections- and building these connections up in anticipation of my parents leaving. I realized that the best connection I have is with my neighbor, K. We met in the park last year, and struck up a quiet and gentle friendship. It sort of snuck up on me, but as I look back over the past year, there is a solid history of giving and receiving, of being a support to one another through life's difficulties.

What I also noticed, however, is that I don't have this kind of friendship with anyone in our church small group. My husband and I joined this church 2 years ago. We found church, but I don't think we found real community. The women in the group are good people, good Christians, but our friendship hasn't extended beyond the homegroup or church times, so to me, this is not a real organic friendship that lives where we live, in our ordinary everyday life.

Maybe we will have to go looking again. The only people who seem to understand what is going on with us in our struggles with faith is the online emerging church, and its network of blogs. When I think I'm going crazy- wondering how everyone else can just fit in with church so well- I read some of their writing. and I know I'm not the only one. I hope we can find some people in our area that we could relate with about these things.

I try to reconnect with some of my friends in Ontario, with a similar faith past as mine, who I know have come to question a lot of these things too. But it's reaching across the distance of geography, and time, and the growing apart we've done over the years. I want so much to talk about these things with them, and we do a little, but I can't really express how desperate I feel inside. I have more questions now than when I started, and the more I try to dig and sort, the bigger the piles become. I think this blog might be the best avenue available to me right now, to try to find a way through. To find a faith that makes sense, that we can practice as a family. A faith that is real, and lets us be free and be ourselves and live out the real life inside us. A faith that is good for my children. That will help them to God, not send them down winding side roads of fakery and religion.

I know I started this blog post about my parents, but I guess it's really about transitions and the feelings of anxiety and loneliness that are experienced in those times.

I feel like we are losing all our moorings, one by one- all those assurances I used to possess- the assurance that I knew God and Jesus and right and wrong, my faith in the church to bring us closer to God, my faith in myself as a Christian, in my way of believing. And now my parents. Feels like someone just pulled out the last mooring, and now our tiny family is just drifting.

The Christian Label

For the last couple weeks, I've been reconsidering whether to call myself a "Christian" or not. At the moment, I feel that I'd like to stop using the label indefinitely- but not because I don't "believe in Jesus" anymore, or have decided firmly against the Christian doctrine. I more have an issue with using a label to define my spiritual state. And "Christian" is a very problematic label, I think, because of its huge range of understood meanings.
What does the label "Christian" really mean? If we're in conversation, and I tell you I'm a Christian, then there are immediately quite a few different meanings now in play: there's what you think "Christian" means; what "Christian" means to me; then there's what I actually am; and of course, what God thinks of what I am. And these meanings might be drastically different from each other, so I wonder how usefully, really, is it to call myself a Christian.
In the past, it was always emphasized that we should declare ourselves "Christian" when asked- and to do it firmly and proudly. If I were to somehow deny this label, that was equated with denying Christ Himself- a serious sin indeed. But I wonder if God is so stuck on us using this label. Are "Christian" and Christ synonymous? I think of a few examples in the gospels where Jesus shakes down people's confidence in their labels: when he says that there will be some people who do miracles "in my name" who will be denied entrance into heaven- and Jesus will say he "never knew" them. And also Jesus danced around the label people tried to put on him: Son of God. He almost never gave a straight answer, usually returning the question to the asker, ie "Well, who do you think that I am?"

I like that approach. I'd rather have people draw their own conclusions; look at the "stuff" of my life and decide for themselves what they think I am. If they think I'm a "Christian" (according to their own definition), then fine, that's what they think I am. If not, that's fine, too. Because really, what does it matter whether people attach me to a certain label?
In other spheres of life, I think it matters more what people think you are- the labels they attach to you. But when it comes to my spiritual state, I think it only really matters what I really am- underneath all the labels- and what God thinks of me.

It might seem at this point in the post that I'm completely ambivalent to the label "Christian"- but this is not quite true. I think I've actually become somewhat resistant toward it. At this moment in my life, the label Christian stands for a lot of things that I don't want any part of. For me, Christian means being "different" from others- "separate"- "better than"- with a special "calling" that sets me above others- having "the answers." I really detest this kind of thinking now- and don't want to see myself as above others. I want to look in the mirror and see a human being- just a human being.