2017 Reflections Part 4 (Christmas and New Years)

I am going to skip a few events since I became much more inspired to write following the events of the road trip, and my thought processes have therefore already been documented here.

I took that test and felt good about it. It is a lot easier to drop stress and give it up to God when you have already failed at the thing before. The following day, I went to karaoke with my sisters and saw those friends that I had made at karaoke during the study program. Sunday was Christmas Eve, and we celebrated at my mom's house with some presents and whiskey provided by yours truly, which is a delicacy about which my mom has only recently begun to learn. The real present for each of us was a cruise in late January, which happens to also fall on my mom's birthday. Every year.

The following day, we went to my dad and stepmom's house for Christmas. Mimosas were flowing and everything was fairly laid back. Because of my recent months of studying in isolation, I was happy to converse with humans, and the step-family introduced a nice change from the usual conversations. Little cousins arrived in the afternoon and, much to all of our surprise, they were not all so little anymore. The oldest of this batch of cousins was now looking at colleges. I made a pitch for her to attend my alma mater and assured her that I knew the admissions counselors, so my word could carry some weight. Another cousin is a freshman who kept making his insecurities known. It caused me to remember how I overcame or, just as often, ignored my own insecurities. You change what you can and put your best foot forward with what you cannot. The youngest cousin is in her preteen years, just now spotting up with acne, but she is the favorite because she is crazy, and I am hers because, well, maybe I have both a patience and an appreciation for the crazy. I remember when my crazy was perceived as something to deal with, to suppress, when I was in junior high, when really I just felt like I was filled with unused potential that just needed appropriate outlets, if only someone would give me the opportunity.

I spent eleven hours with family that day, hours after my siblings became bored and went to see a movie. I went from family to meeting with that nonbinary friend in Dallas, since they and their boyfriend were visiting their family here. The boyfriend, a Jewish fellow, asked me if I was very religious. And given that I was raised to dislike the term, I replied that I read my Bible every day. I suppose that I am religious if I try to go to church regularly, but it does not seem overly religious if I just talk to God. I was going to use a comparative simile here, but nothing comes to mind. "Religious" hardly seems like the correct term for something that you cannot turn off because He does not turn off.

A couple days later, I went to Arkansas for my doctor friend's surprise birthday, and also to see a few other friends in the area. The trip was relatively brief, but I did meet a few other residents at the party, which made it a very professional trip. That and the several drinks I downed that evening. The following morning, I made the drive straight from Northwest Arkansas to our family's lake house, where I was to host a New Years party.

Most of those that I invited could not make it, but that turned out to be for the best. I caught up with some of my closest friends from middle school onward, one of whom had since acquired a spouse. I learned that I was not the only one who with an identity crisis of some kind on their hands; a number of us had individually been hit with such a need to reassess and retrace their spiritual life up until now. I left the year comforted by the thought that though 2017 was pretty bad, 2018 was going to be a considerable step up. Having undergone so much failure, been stopped short at so many obstacles, it is tempting to only view a new year with objective skepticism (as a side note, Star Wars Episode 8: The Last Jedi seemed to be very much in tune with the mood of the past year). But there is a reason for this spiritual awakening in all of us. God is moving, separately but congruently within all of us, to bring about a change. We are all relearning how to be Christians, attempting to strip off the excess burdens of a religious culture and holding onto what makes this faith change us and our world for the better.