Arrogant

I remember when I was a snot-nosed kid fresh into college, feeling like a seasoned veteran of life. I remember speaking with a girl in her mid twenties about how much it stinks being single, and I was essentially told that I had no idea what I was talking about. I tried to justify it with my long years of experience, something she more than matched.

Looking back, I can say wholeheartedly that she was right. It takes on a new flavor as people who were just starting kindergarten when you entered middle school are getting married and you're still single.

But it makes me wonder how many things I have yet to learn. I have been called a pretty smart guy, by those who presumably don't know me as well as they think. But all I know is how very little I see. It is hard for me to keep that perspective in dealing with God.

All I see is hurt. I see no redemption from it. Every good I try to construct to say "here is the hand of God" is as a twig house in a malestrom. I want to believe but don't know what to believe in. I am an eyelash from becoming a firm practical atheist, and only the stigma of accepting the title of faithless and the fear of alienation not from the God it seems has left me alone, but from the bulk of my aquaintances (as I count my best friends as unbelievers). I cannot describe how I feel with words, and to try only brings a twinge in my heart and tears to my eyes.

My smallness, my aloneness in a large, cruel, and painful world hurts - to be a vapor with no mark, no rememberance, no trace of me in the world once I am gone. But also as the closest thing I have to comfort, it reminds me that I do not know everything and my prognostications for the future however bleak, are not all there is to it. It may yet be far worse than I can imagine, though without some flesh-rotting disease this is difficult to imagine. But it may yet be better, though i don't believe this with even a fiber of my being. I simply don't know.

This is not hope. Hope implies a salve for the soul that this does not bring me. But it is a sort of apathy that is better than the turmoil that is it's replacement and even then it is a weak substitute. But I'll take what I can get.