A Day of Atonement

After yesterday, I decided to spend this Day of Atonement reflecting on what God has brought me through by looking through my Logseq graph to try and map out what God has taught me through my experiences and interactions with others. It started off a bit amusing, seeing the time that Denature asked me to watch a video that was posted almost a year before today, as well as a time that my laptop wasn't coming on, which I was actually excited about, since I was getting somewhat sick and tired of the laptop, only for it to come back on when I tried following the manufacturer's power troubleshooting steps, earning this reaction from me when the laptop came back to life:

I looked through some more journal entries in my graph to find multiple moments of me wanting to hide from the world, to shut myself away and be alone. Eventually, I stopped and told myself that I was going to look at some more stuff from the past once I ate dinner.

That was the plan, of course.

As I was preparing dinner, I started thinking about the fact that I was going to be leaving for the Feast of Tabernacles in about 2 days. On top of that, I hadn't even told my Dad when I was going to be leaving, despite the number of opportunities that I had to tell him. Why?

Because I was anticipating that he would ask me a bunch of questions about plans and stuff for the trip, and I didn't want to deal with the stress of being questioned without having what I felt were adequate answers that would allow me to escape the blitzkrieg of questions sooner rather than later and have less of a chance of becoming so overwhelmed that I would basically freeze up trying to search for a perfect answer like I was a computer stuck with 500MB of memory, forced to try and run a video editor¹ while everyone else had their 16GB and 32GB. Just like what had happened with my mom just earlier today.

Sure, I could just go ahead and leave without saying anything, but I would feel bad doing so. It wouldn't feel right at all.

I did understand where they were coming from. They wanted me to be safe, and since they never heard of the feast, and I never met the people that I was going to be traveling there with, they were understandably very skeptical. However, it did make it hard for me to talk to them about anything that needed to be said about the trip.

However, as I continued to get my dinner ready, I made a connection: This was something that I had been dealing with for a long time. In fact, the issue goes all the way back to my childhood, and in fact, it also explains some of the experiences that I've gone through in the past, even in my adult life. I won't go into much detail, but to put it short, my experiences as a child were what led me to live life as if the mere presence of others created a stage for me to perform in a play that, by everyone else's standards, I should have memorized. In fact, something that I even came to realize as of late was that most of my reasons as to why I was so against companies and even governments tracking you was because I feared being watched and monitored out of a fear of judgement, even if I wasn't a criminal trying to avoid being caught.

But I know that God didn't allow this fault of mine to be magnified to cast judgement or condemnation on me. He allowed it so that I could see it and ask for His help in doing something about it. This is why the feasts are so important, these days when God's presence is closer, because it's during these times that God allows our sins to be magnified so we can see them and seek His help in doing something about them.