The middling life.

I wound up sitting along in the little prayer chapel on my campus as I took a break from walking (and let a girl run instead, because evidently I'm too creepy to have walking around while girls are running) and the thought that kept coming up was how much I've lived a middling life. I've never had any huge, crushing failures, but I've never had any vast successes, either. Yeah, I've had highs and lows, but compared to most people (at least, most people as I picture them in my mind, which usually has about as much depth as a badly-written sitcom character) I've never wandered that far from the middle. Even in my spritual life, I keep cruising the middle. The thing that originally inspired this post (and warning, potential TMI ahead) as I was sitting there in the little prayer chapel is how, even when I started going too far in an earlier relationship, the worse I've ever done is sleep with a girl. Literally, sleep with, not bang, hump, have sex, or whatever else, but simply sleep beside a woman. Even when I'm sinning, it seems like I can't bother to go all out.

It's way overused, but all I can think of is that verse to the Laodiceans about how they were neither hot or cold (you're yes and you're no, you're in and you're out...sorry, that's Katy Perry) but always sorta middling. I would have sworn I've hit rock bottom and tried to climb back up to an actual, decent, relationship with God a dozen times, but I've always rebounded and then promptly found a new low to sink to. I guess in the same way Patton said that success is how high you bounce once you've hit rock bottom, failure is how low I fall after I smack into the ceiling like a bird into a window.

Even the way I phrased that last bit shows where I really think my problem is. It's never God lifting me out, it's always me climbing out. I always try to learn the lessons I should and try to get just that much higher the next time. And, to be honest, I do get better. I keep climbing just a bit higher, being just a bit more dedicated, know juts that much more, get that much of a better grade, overuse that bit of rhetoric even more, but I know that it's never going to be enough. Really, all I'm hoping for is that I can rely enough on God that I can skip the next horrible fall. Even then, however, is that "I'm doing it for me" idea. I don't want to follow God because it's the right thing to do, or because it's what I was made for, or because I'll create the most good in the universe that way. I want to do it because it'll hurt the least. I don't even know if it quite makes sense, but I got screwed up by economics at an early age and have a very hard time thinking of things in a way that isn't "this will provide the most benefit and least pain to me."

So, now what? Honestly? I don't know. I keep expecting to be utterly smacked by something around basically every corner, but I have no idea what it might be. I get the feeling God is going to keep trying to break me until I finally give up trying on my own, but that's something that has huge problems of its own. I've even thought about trying to hasten the process by getting wrapped up in booze, or drugs, or whatever else that's self destructive. To go back to the analogy, since I don't seem to be able to make the leap from lukewarm to hot, I want to try the jump from lukewarm to cold (which in this case probably means "completely screwed up," though the analogy never made much sense to me. I would much rather have cold water in my mouth than hot, but maybe I'm just weird) but I get the feeling that's a bad idea.

Honestly, though? I've always been a Nice Guy (a bit of a technical term) and have never been able to bring myself to do something like that. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about the whole Nice Guy syndrome, from the perspective of a guy who really doesn't want to be one.

One step closer to crazy,

-Felix