In Which The Hero Journeys Toward The Rising Sun

It wasn't long ago that I had reached a precipice.  I found myself standing at the edge of an infinitely immense chasm.   As far as I could see was nothing but futility and darkness.  The path of my life the past year and a half or so had led me to this place.  At times I stuck a foot out, testing the emptiness, taking in its lack of substance.  I would wiggle my foot, imagining what it would be like to force myself forward, to step onto the plane of nothing that lay before me.  In a way it was as if the invisible before me was more real that the ground I was standing on.  I felt compelled to make the move and see what happened.  Would the fall hurt?  Was the ground below closer or farther than I could imagine?  In the quiet I stood there with my thoughts.

When I was younger, I never doubted the truth of my Christian beliefs.  They were a given.  There is a God, I believe in Him, and so I believe in Christianity.  That was the way I thought.  The struggle for me was in relating that to the world around me.  My biggest question was why so many people believed differently.  Why were they so blind to the truth?  Years later I would find myself with a whole new set of questions.  The childish naivete of my beliefs was subsiding and the simple acceptance of all I had grown to hold as true wasn't good enough any more.  I was coming to the end of my journey, to the edge of belief where doubt and disbelief create a shelf of blankness.  And I was becoming convinced that what lay past the edge was where reality began.

To put it bluntly:  a month ago I was close to abandoning belief in God, throwing in the towel on any hope of Christianity being true, rejecting things I had once thought unrejectable.  I was ready to give up and take a step forward, letting the plunge lead me where it would.

I hesitate moving forward here, explaining what happened to change things.  Besides it being somewhat of a blur, I feel inadequate to describe what occurred.  I will only say one thing about it:  I have embarked on a new journey, which is really just a fresh start on a path that I have intersected with in the past.  The questions I was once asking, I am finding to be the wrong questions.  And so many of the things I was once thinking, I am finding that others think as well.  

On this journey of being-in-becoming, I am going in a new direction.  It's kind of like going east or west when the only options you ever had before were north or south.  And while I'm not completely sure where this path will lead me, I know that it is a direction which will lead me where the sun rises and sets, which is so much better that the direction that was leading me to one of two poles, both of which are as cold as Dante's center of hell.