Last Exit Before Oblivion

A friend of mine wrote "One thing that has helped me is to realize (decide?) that all the pain comes from caring that has been roadblocked in some way. Underneath all that pain and things gone wrong, the basic caring and love is enormous, and still there."

This is quite an amazing statement to me. I've never heard anyone else say it, yet it matches my experience exactly.

People want to care. They don't want to give up. They go on trying dead end after dead end. Or they go after that little hope-plant with weedkiller, hammer, shovel, rocks but it just won't die. I describe my own experience there. Not caring is a great survival tool, but a lousy life tool. So, the question becomes: How do I learn to live with caring?

Caring gives whatever I care about a handle to use in my manipulation. I can care about sand sculpture because it disappears. No handle remains. There are other ghostly aspects to my life: there, and then not there. No one can touch what they can't see, nor what turns to vapor before the hand reaches out with its hammer.

God cares. He died for caring. I don't know how anyone who doesn't know God can care about anything, but perhaps caring a sign that God really is with a person even if the words aren't quite right. We put doctrine before caring. If the words are right, who cares about anything else? We'll go to our graves being right, and we can be proud of that. I don't really care about being right, though; what I want is truth.

I want to know how things work. I want to know what life is about. There must be more available than the daily grind of work amid people who are so surrounded by noise that they haven't noticed that they don't care about what they hear. Could there be some truth to my childhood idea that there really is magic in our world? Is there really a good reason for living, for caring? Living requires caring, it seems. I've learned that much from the Holy Spirit. He's doing his best to enable me to care, also, which is an uphill battle even harder than that of Sisyphus. I'm one heavy, slippery rock, but God knows what he's doing.

I wonder how much of this is affected and effected by choice. Can I simply choose to care? Probably, but that calls for more courage than I have. Disappointment looms large.

God has never disappointed me, though, so I use my experience with him as the model for other things. There are signs of new hope in my life, small ones to be sure, but there. A restiveness in the same old routine, thoughts of what else I might do, feelings of expansion. I've always been able to control this kind of nonsense in the past and return to the real world but with God pushing the ideas and enabling them, well, the only way for me to win is not to care, and I know where that leads. Losing.

Perhaps that's what we should really being doing for each other: Giving reminders of why we should care. Give me a double helping of hope, please, and hold the judgment. Maybe hope is like vitamin C: I can't store it, so it has to be supplied each day. Where does it come from? In my experience, only God. Maybe if I were more open I'd receive some from others, and be able to give some away.