God, where are You?
In the midst of projects and papers and friend crises and trying to plan all my future I’ve felt lost lately. I can’t find You anywhere in all of this mess. Yet it appears as if I am doing everything right – I get good grades on exams, go to the gym, I say hello to people in the Union and ask them about their weekend. And I appear pious – I wear a cross necklace, I don’t drink, I do service, make good impressions..

But something in me feels dead. I feel like a zombie, a haunted spirit possessed by stress –

Some nights, when I walk back to my room, I realize my eyes are digging into a cell phone screen while the trees glimmer, the moon waxes and wanes, and I remain swallowed in my thoughts, oblivious to existence –

And when I crave silence, I ignore it. I schedule my days full to the maximum out of fear that I will be unproductive and waste them or become an invisible no-one –

And when I see the monotony of white-walled classrooms surrounding my four-squared mind, I run as far as I can to escape it –

Today, my Spanish professor told me,”It is difficult to be faithful here.” What does it even mean to be faithful at a place like Davidson? At a place where I feel pressured to be a walking intellect, plans for the future in hand, a supremely rational and scientific being? What am I supposed to be learning for, anyway?

God, I don’t think You made me for college. I just don’t fit here very well. I have to go to bed before midnight, I don’t have Netflix, yikyak or snapchat. I feel relentless guilt for having a $60,000 education that could send sixty Guatemalan children to school. And truth is, I don’t get what I am on earth for to begin with, why did You put us here in the first place?

All I want to know is that I am not alone in asking these questions. These searchings for reality, ultimate reality, the capital-t Truth of our existence.

Even if it’s taboo at Davidson, I want to talk to people about religion, like not in textbooks, but real mind-blowing faith that people bear at the core, a faith that means kneeling to pray five times a day, that means gathering for Shabbat dinners even when it doesn’t feel the same away from home, a faith that You exist, God, because you live in Spanish poetry and the face of the Commons staff and I sense that

You are here – somewhere, breaking through the cracks in the brick pathways, when I can’t grow thicker skin and everything feels like it is flooding in – You exist when nothing in the world, and especially not Davidson, seems to make sense

Please, God, don’t let it make sense.

Even if it means not fitting in at Davidson, I don’t want to lose this,
this inexplicable, mysterious, precious thread,
this rope of silence,
the struggle to make life meaningful,

This faith that You are speaking –
telling me to be quiet,
sit down, still,
and listen.