Longevity

How long do we have to wait for that one person to understand us? How long do we have to be the outcast of religious communities before we finally find that one person who is right there with us? I am used to being ganged up on. I'm the youngest of three children. I'm used to having to fend for myself, and to do so against the odds. So whether it is two, five or twenty Christians that disagree with me on a specific interpretation, I've become accustomed to battling all of them by myself without any help. But now it turns to being generally resented by people. Of course they've been raised in teh South, so they do it with a smile on their face. But I can read the underlying emotions on someone's face from a mile away. I know when people think poorly of me by the faces they make to other people in the room, regardless of the fact that I am ten feet away from them. How long does that last?

He's been trying to get me to come to this group for months. Finally I go with him, and as I walk in, I see two other people plus the professor. They all have a book in their hands. I read the book when I was fifteen. That's pushing three years in the past for me. They start a discussion about what they've read over the past week and how absolutely mesmerizing it is. Three years. Three years of intensive questioning, reading, arguing, crying, yelling, and generally being frustrated. How am I to talk to them about anything? I've read the book three times since then, revised my opinion of the author twice, read dozens of other books that sprung up from it, critiqued those authors, critiqued the entire movement as well as the theology (or lack there of) behind it, and am now aiming for something else entirely. Yet I'm the youngest person in the room. What am I to do in this scenario? When I read the book for the first time, I was in a room with a pastor and a handful of people in their mid- to late-twenties. I ahve been plaed into environments my entire life where I have been the youngest person, yet have been required to think just that much further ahead of my years.

I have one perosn to look to. This man has a Masters of Divinity, was in the ministry for fifteen years, and with three children having grown up has had to recalibrate his philosophy for the past twenty-two years. This is a man I can respect and look up to. His intellect/wisdom suprises me, and only he can say things to me without me disregarding them almost instantaneously. And he is two-hundred miles away. How much longer is it going to take for me to find someone else like this? Who can surprise me? Who can make me speechless?