Living in an Ivory Tower

I am home now. The bagpipes of Covenant have been calling me back for the past half-week; however, I remain in the town called Lexington, North Carolina. My time here, in some ways, has been beautiful. Yet each time I return home it seems that the pain and struggles within this old farmhouse have increased.

Sometimes I feel like the plankboard ceilings and old, cracked walls are pressing in on me, trying their damndest to squash my spirits. At Covenant, everything tends to feel majestic. Though I have problems at college, they seem small and insignificant in light of the struggles within the home I come from. What are confusion about theology and boy crushes compared to a family struggling to keep its head above water? I give advice and often feel tired at Covie (nickname for Covenant originally coined by Heather Manning); however, at home, I don't only feel tired. I feel exhausted. I, at times, wake to find that I feel 45 rather than 21.

I had a dream the other night that I was sitting in a bathtub full of murky water. The nasty fluid was heavy on my skin, and I itched to remove myself from the tub, to somehow get to a place that felt lighter, less oppresive. I tried to drain the tub, but when I felt for the drain at the bottom of the porcelin structure, I felt no holes. I couldn't even lift my body out of the mire because even the air around me seemed to be holding me down, trapping me in a place that made me feel too much.

The environment of my home is indeed heavy. Unlike Covenant, it often seems like there are no drains. There are no hallmates to dump on at a second's notice. There are no prayer groups waiting right outside my door. Even the air at Covenant sometimes clears one's head--it's almost like the joy and hope around campus can be tangibly felt. If I remove myself from my room here, there is only an entire house filled with the same hopelessness, the same all-consuming despair and stagnancy waiting for me. Lexington itself, I have learned, tends to feel this way. I walked around Wal-mart today looking for a smiling face or a quick expression of elation and was only meet with faces from old black-and-white photographs. No-nonsense, serious faces that, even when attractive, clearly express a heaviness--clearly show one that life is not beautiful. It is hard. It is a fight. It is a game of survival rather than chance.

Now, you may say, "But everyone in Wal-mart looks that way. Those faces belong to mindless consumers attempting to fill their lives with something." Well, perhaps this is true; however, the faces of today stick in my Lexington memory bank all the same. I started questioning myself, after having dreamed of drowning in nasty bath water and walking around the McDonaldized institution some like to stamp a smiley face logo on. How was I okay in this house, in this town, before and now I struggle with depression when I am present here? Why is it that I feel such a heaviness here now when, though I felt it in high school, it seemed so much easier to deal with?

The answer I came to, my friends, I must say is not one I liked very much. I wanted to say that home has simply gotten more difficult or that I have grown more healthy and thus see the non-redemptive elements more readily. Though these things hold truth, they are simply welcomed cover-ups for the real reason that life at home is so much harder. I am no longer used to hardship. I am no longer used to environments filled to the brim with brokenness and pain. I have been living in a lovely ivory tower some like to call Covenant College.

Quite literally, my hall, Fifth North, is situated in a beautiful tower that grazes the heavens. And quite literally, I have now learned to expect beauty and hope rather than struggle when I step onto a scene. Though this can be a good thing, it is not enbracing the simple fact that there was a fall from grace and that now life, whether my positivly-inclined self would like to believe it or not, is hard.

I have been reared in an ivory tower for the past two-and-a-half years. Coming home is venturing out of this tower. When I am home I get a look at the way life really is. I myself would rather run back to the shelter of a private, Christian college in the mountains I like to call my second home than watch the brokenness around me. For if I watch, I must understand. If I understand, I must try to engage and honestly...I'd rather not.

One of favorite books, the one that once inspired me to teach says this, "It was as if God was saying, 'I can't use ivory-tower followers. They're plaster of paris, they crumble and fall apart in life's press. So you've got to see a little of the way it really is before you can do anything about evil.'" When I'm home, I see "a little of the way it [life] really is." And it's honestly not usually something I want to see.

God needs to further break the ivory towers that I have built in my life. He needs to take a chain saw to Rapunzel's tower and shake her out of her comforting room, a room far away from the realistic, down-to-earth struggles she'd like to think she towers over. I pray that God would break these bubbles of comfort in my life. That he would show me the world's brokenness so I may in turn attempt to (in relationship with Him) address that brokenness. Whether the ivory tower needs to be broken by more volunteerism in Chatanooga when I'm at college or simply by making more phone calls to the home that made me who I am today, I am praying the God yanks me out of the ivory tower I have somehow, between twelfth grade and adulthood, placed myself in. What ivory towers have you built, dearest void? Feel like handing God a bulldozer?