Writing my Faith (3.12.06 draft)

In many ways my writing began with my faith. They both seemed to start at the same time. Early on my writing took place in my journals, in private, as time progressed they began become more public, much like my faith.
My journals became a place in which I could ask questions, questions that often held no answers. Questions that were essentially my cries of pain and my hunger for comfort spelled out on the pages of notebook. Incomplete in many ways they witnessed the struggles I was going through. They were my early prayers—and in many ways God was being condensed into the few pages of a spiral notebook that I hid from those around me. The question were always “why?” --Why had this happened? Why did dad have to die? Why am I the way I am? Why don’t you get rid of this discomfort?
Spoken or unspoken, written or unwritten the questions and the journey of my faith began on a sheet of paper. From the early pages tucked away so has to hide my pain to the more public writings shared with friends and counselors. My faith, which is a foundational piece of all my writing, began to creep out the crevasses of my room and into the world I knew. Who knew what would happen as I began to write, as I began to type. Would clarity come out of this?
In high school I wrote about my dad’s death as a way of understanding. I couldn’t stand to be isolated anymore and in my sixteen-year-old brain it only made sense to write about it. Maybe I would get attention from it, maybe someone would care. That is all I really wanted. So as time past and I was invited to youth group that met at my school, I began writing. This time privately, at night when no one was looking. The depths of my soul were released from the prison in which they spent their day and my questions took life. God if you’re real will you just make things better? I hurt. I wish I were like other kids. I miss my dad.
So much remained a mystery in my faith and in my writing. It was a work in progress (something that is not refined to this day) that I tried to articulate with my limited vocabulary. …