My pastor today explained the entire history of our church from start to present. All the stories were great, incredible even but there was nothing like what he said about the present.

This was my last Sunday here for a while as my wife and I are moving next week. I've been around my church for about 5 years, off and on. My history with it has been a sea of storms, ranging from bitterness, cynicism, flat out pissed-off, feeling condemned, feeling worthless, feeling burned, worn out, hating its frivolous culture, to loving people's idiosyncrasies, being refreshed, feeling more love from people than I have ever known, feeling the presence of God in tears, in tears knowing that I am loved, convicted and wanting to love more. I grew tired of trying to live up to the swaying in my mind, the blistering ache in my heart that told me I shouldn't hate, but I couldn't help myself, tired of faking passion, tired of emotion in general, tired of feeling bullied into spirituality and I said to hell with it and spent about a year and a half in the dark room of myself; a created cavern of isolation disguised as sterile solitude. But there was nothing sterile about the infectious presence of existential anxiety every night alone in my room (if I wasn't having a blast getting high). And anxieties of exitense it was because I found myself not questioning the authority of my cell group leader, but questioning the power I held in my hands to end the anxiety and finally be with Him. I was obsessed with the possibility I saw clearly in my mind; a closed curtain right behind the cocked barrel of a shotgun in my mouth.

Years have passed since then, and as my pastor came to the present words of God that have been spoken over our fellowship after all the super-spiritual highs of obedience, miracles, and rejoicing, I wept:

"Do not forget your first love"

In the present, in front of hundreds of new faces and hundreds of family faces my pastor repented and confessed that he had forgotten his first love. My pastor who has honestly said some of the most offensive things to me, some of the most convicting, some of the most loving and some of the most challenging. My pastor whom I have seen for years as a person desperately in love with Jesus, one of the most I have ever known, here, now after a history of fleeing from his words repents to me.

I wept because I would be leaving him and these people once again, not running from them, but running after God and following the voice of Jesus, and just as the treasure was so brokenly shown to me I must turn and walk into the wind that strips me naked, vurnerable before the God of the desert, the God who wants to show me who I truly am, the God who will speak to the curtain behind the gun barrel and with tears scream, "Come out!" The curtain will open, and I will not speak of who I will find there. He is not the I of my existence. He is not the one walking still with the dust of aloneness hanging upon the emptiness, the delusion, the straddling of ideas, the anxiety. This one has already seen the end of the barrel. This one has already been crucified.