"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.

I'm a little self-conscious about the Biblical epigrams. I suspect that people who enjoy my personality and way of writing don't want the Bible up in their snark and introspection, and that people who enjoy blog posts that start out with Bible quotes are less enthused about the workings-through of anxiety disorders and existential crises. 

And yet: my thoughts suck, to be honest. They are the closest thing to oppression that this privileged girl is likely to experience. They hold me back, make me lame, and are to no purpose whatsoever. So it is a profound relief that while I flit like a doomed moth from fear about my own moral failings to fear about never getting a job to fear about my student loan debt, God is... wherever God is, fearful about exactly none of the above. 

If God thought like me, we'd be well effed, is what I'm saying. 

Those of us who don't enjoy the certainty of either devout, literalistic Christians (God is like this, Heaven will be like that) or devout, literalistic atheists (God is a Lie, Heaven is a Myth) do, for the most part, enjoy some level of certainty that there exists something larger than our thoughts -- however incomprehensible that thing might be. This is not always reassuring to me, and my preference in those times when it feels terrifying is to attend to what is happening to me at this moment with all the unreasonableness and small-mindedness I am able to summon. 

But when, like a very small child, I am able to peer over the edge of this panic, I can see that I am not all there is, that now is not all there is, and that no amount of condescending memes on people's Facebook statuses can make it so. And however I feel day to day about the possibility of knowing God, of having what the kids call a "personal relationship" with God, there is also this: no matter how insistent and abrasive and ugly my thoughts become, they are never the final word or the authoritative word or even the loudest word. They are only the nearest to me.