Strange and Unprepared

I am not happy. At the deepest core of my being, I am not happy. I’m totally unsatisfied and I’m totally aware of how much I lack and how much I screw things up. I have whole “relationship with God” thing that is supposed to cure it, but it doesn’t and the reason why is because I have it all out of wack. I’m totally imbalanced to the way Jesus really wants me to operate and I don’t know how to fix it. My idolatry of choice are two-fold as I can see it (we’ll just leave out the good ole’ idols of comfort and materialism). The two that are the DEEPEST, most driving parts of me are my desire to be successful, not even really in the eyes of the world, more in my own eyes, and my desired to be loved or maybe just liked and admired more than anything. I realized two things today, 1, I have never been successful at anything that I’ve really put my energies towards. Not in the ways that I really deeply wanted and strived for, and secondly, I desire to be admired and loved because of that admiration means more to me than I am really even able to say honestly. I heard the Copeland song “Strange and Unprepared” today and it is the perfect soundtrack for how I feel. Aaron singing, “I never stop feeling strange/cause you never know if you really change/you can never tell if your center stage/is thin as glass and never meant a thing” is so haunting to me. I really feel like I’m dying. Not like I’m going to kill myself at all, but I feel like I’m dying inside. I felt like as I took a drive today that someone was going to spin out, hit me and kill me. I don’t know why, but I just really did. And I wasn’t scared or anything, I was at this weird peace, but at the same time totally insecure and unsure about everything thing in my life. I am 28 and I feel like I’m further behind right now than at any other time in my life, maybe outside of 6 months ago when the shit really hit the fan. Every key part of my life just seems to be at a stalemate and growing at the rate that isn’t even measurable. I don’t know how to feel. I don’t feel like I know how to change. And the saddest part is I feel like right now if I got the things that I really wanted I would either screw them up or they would end up masking the deepest issues of my life and stunt my growth if there really is any growth happening. The sad part to me is that I have been given INFINITELY more than literally 99% of everyone in this world. If you lined up 100 people from across the globe and added their resources and gifts I would be in the top 1 percentile, not out of talent, I don’t think, but more from a work ethic that honestly comes from my insecurities and from just sheer gifts of God. I have no idea how to reconcile any of that because for the life of me, I can’t make anything really work. And I don’t know if I will ever be successful at any of this that I’m working at. A campus minister friend of mine told me in college that God never asks us to be successful, only faithful, but honestly, I just don’t really believe that anymore. He’s probably right, but I feel like I have to be successful or no one is really going to love me. And when people love me not for what I do or can do for them, it’s utterly confusing to me. The second part of that is I think I realized that I need/want people’s admiration so badly that I will work my fingers to the bone to show them I am worthy of it. I really thing that it goes back to high school or god, before that. When I was a loner kid just trying to relate to people, I think I developed this desire to be liked that I masked under a facade of introversion. I used to sit all the time alone and I think that I convinced myself that I didn’t care, but I think I really did. The hard part is being this self aware of my condition and my problems doesn’t necessarily bring change. And I seem to live in this really strange world of not being self destructive enough to distract my pain and problems away, but also not spiritual mature enough to deal with them and bring them to Jesus and to mature past them. So I sit and wait in this middle ground of waiting and wanting. I have no idea what to do.