The Depth of Our Fall, and the Weight of it All

Note: I apologize to those who read the first draft of this. I concluded that it was terribly uninsightful, and rewrote the second half to better reflect what was the dominant lesson I drew from this experience.

The story of my Halloween is long and complicated. The evening was spent enjoying the party we (my roommates and myself) hosted at our condo, then a bit of meandering around State Street without actually paying to get into Freakfest. However, when I returned home thinking only of my bed's warm blankets and pillows that smell like me, I found people still there. When I left 30 minutes prior, everyone at the party had left, either for home or the bar near our house. I locked the front door. These people, upon finding the door locked, logically went to our BACK DOOR. Sketchy. (Though to clarify, they had been at the party earlier that evening.) I wasn't about to go to bed while there were people I didn't know in my house, so I stayed up, cleaned up, and read blogs until 3:30am, when the others returned from the bar. By that time, I felt so... heavy with the sin of this fallen world, listening to many drunk and sober people talk about how smashed they were, how much they hated so-and-so, or how they had failed to score a one-night stand at their last party. You get the idea. After having 4 hours of this kind of input, I curled up in bed and just cried, because I felt "the depth of our fall and the weight of it all", as David Crowder says.

On Sunday morning, I listened to an illuminating sermon by Rob Bell at Mars Hill Bible Church (check out the link on my sidebar) about the beatitude, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be filled." His thesis was just what I needed to hear after feeling our separation from God so distinctly the night before: God is on the side of those who feel the difference between the way things are and the way they should be, and long with every fiber of their being for a change. Essentially, God is with us in the struggle and the tension of knowing that things are not as they should be, that we were not made for this. We were made for so much more, we were made for communion with our Creator!!! We were made to adore Him in Heaven, yet we go through our lives causing Him pain as disobedient children pain their parents. We make bad decisions because we often only consider what WE want rather than what HE wants for us (and always makes us infinitely happier). We get drunk, we use His name as a curse, we get involved in gangs, we fall in and out of sexual relationships. How much it must tear our Father apart to see us destroy ourselves and each other. I cry for my brothers and sisters, that they have turned away from God in order to do what they want to do. On the night of Halloween, I felt this pain as I have never felt it before, because, quite frankly, I am not usually in the company of those who have turned away from God in their actions. Seeing this other side of my generation (the side on which I grew up, btw) made me long for the Kingdom of Heaven to be established on earth. The young men and women my own age who seemed so unhappy with their life at 3am on Halloween were created by the same God who created John Paul the Great, Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinus, St. Therese of Lisieux - all the holy men and women whom we celebrated the following morning, All Saint's Day.

Because we were given a choice, there will always be people who turn away from God and His will in their lives. There will always be a separation between what we were created for, and what we are doing now. That doesn't mean I have to like it.