My first grave watch

I remember my first grave watch. I raced to get there at something something a.m. in the big fat middle of the small hours because I had overslept and was late. How can I describe what it was like to read that first psalm, psalm 102? I really can't, it was a surreal experience. A first time is always an important moment in time, like... like something that forms and then stays. Like writing your name in concrete. The moment is a thing that can be molded and caressed and put together and loved, all on the fly, and then it it is set in stone forever and ever and can never ever be changed. It kind of hurts to remember a moment that means something, like that night, at my first grave watch. It was like I was in a state of hypnosis. And it was joyful, even though it felt like the saddest thing I'd ever read at that time.

Baby Talk

I don't know a lot about what happened when I was baptized, or how God works in my life, or what the plan is, or much of anything at all. I'm pretty sure though that once I was baptized, things changed and I was no longer wandering aimlessly and without hope. I think that baptism might be a threshold - to put it simply - which is crossed. On the left side of the threshold, there are confusion and misdirection and anguish and despair and ignorance as the predominant properties. But on the right side, there are the Holy Spirit, and a plan, and love and guidance and the grace of God. Now, those things have to exist on the left side as well, or else how would anyone find their way over to the right side? Right?

The trick, or the hard part to all of this, is being able to start moving in the right direction to begin with... to the right, so that you have a chance of crossing over that threshold (I think it starts with really really wanting to, or wishing to). It's like... everything is flipped now, like the complimentary colors of a negative and positive picture. Despair and hope are flipped. It's hard to tell the difference though, during the course of each day, because we're emotionally retarded when it comes to knowing God (we're meaning I'm), so we (meaning I) confuse hope and despair because they're not as easy to tell apart as green and red, or blue and orange, or purple and yellow, or black and white. It's hard to tell them apart, as stupid as that sounds.

The way I'm describing this is like baby talk, I know. But it's these little realizations I have which occur to me in baby talk every now and then that help to keep me from drowning in despair. Knowing the difference between that side and this side, and being aware that after living for 30 something years on that side, that I somehow wound up on this side... well, that gives me a lot of hope. It's just hard to put it into the right perspective and to keep it there.