Louisville and Athens are one and the same

"There’s always been someone missing in my family, Hans Thomas. Someone has always gotten lost. I think it’s a family curse."
Dad, in The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
Tonight, I long for a sense of satisfaction, a sense of completeness. In one month, I’ll be embarking on a three year journey of Biblical theology and pastoral methodology, a dream of mine that has finally become realized. I know how blessed I am to be given the opportunity to follow the yearnings of my soul as I pursue full time ministry. I know that through this process, and through my future career, I will learn and discover new and exciting ways in which God is being made manifest in our lives anew each morning. And yet, it’s still not enough. There still seems to be one piece missing, something that leaves me feeling unsettled and unfinished.
In the last few years, my relationship with God has become very raw. While I still believe deeply in our very beginning in the Creator, the redemption of Jesus Christ, and the empowerment of the Spirit, I am still very angry and very numb about they ways some things have worked themselves out in the last two years. I don’t understand why, when I leave what I know and cherish to follow God, I end up being misused, belittled, and diminished by the very organizations through which and with whom I was and am striving to further the Kingdom of God. I am scared to enter seminary, though I do sense a calling and a desire, because I am afraid to be irreparably broken if these patterns continue. I don’t know if I can handle another Cincinnati, or another ACORN. Just this afternoon, I broke into tears again as I remembered the bitter and hostile relationship I had with one of my coworkers in Cincinnati, despite my own best intentions.
I remember in high school, going to my Saturday night bible study with my fundamentalist friends, talking about how people would just feel wholeness like they had never understood if they were to just accept and enter into a relationship with God. It all felt so simple. Yes, I knew that there would be hardships, but I believed in an unshakable faith that would enable me to continue to pursue God when the world around me was in chaos. But how do you respond when it seems that it is that same pursuit of God that seems to leave you bewildered and damaged by those alongside you?
Like Hans Thomas, I have left my home a long way away in order to learn and discover how to become complete. Hans Thomas left Norway for Athens, thinking that the woman they would find there would be able answer their questions about why someone was always running away. I left Washington for Cincinnati, and then Louisville, and now am trying to find what I have lost, a faith in and understanding about where I am being lead.