The Outage (Pt.2)

At 3 PM, I returned home, and the hallway was pitch dark.

I had originally planned to grab some cash and go out to buy food, but for some reason, I picked up the Bible and went to the balcony garden instead.

I first read Ecclesiastes: a world sustained and nurtured only by general revelation is still vanity.

Then I read the first ten chapters of Isaiah: the fate of both the irreligious and the religious is to fall.

Judgment and salvation, curses and blessings, like the counterpoint of a musical composition, run throughout the whole book, reaching their peak at the verse “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” Afterward, the world, upon entering the tenth chapter, sinks once again into darkness, waiting for daylight.

As the light of day began to fade, I went out for a walk. I walked toward the sea, and several hotels and office buildings had already turned on their lights, with many traffic signals also restored. But these lights seemed smaller and more helpless in the approaching night. Many pedestrians were carrying full shopping bags, and conversations I overheard were in Spanish, which I couldn’t understand.

It was the first time since moving abroad that I felt a tinge of fear from being in a foreign land. Since the second day I arrived in Barcelona, my social life had been closely tied to the church fellowship. But now, with no signal on my phone, I couldn’t reach any of them.

On my way home, the streets were noticeably emptier. I quickened my pace, looking up at the sky, and silently prayed.

Only when the night was fully upon me did I realize that I still relied on a world sustained only by general revelation. In that moment, “electricity” became another gospel. I prayed for the workers restoring the power grid, yet struggled to rely solely on God. The daylight had completely disappeared, and large, dark gray clouds floated in the sky, with tiny airplanes leaving behind faint trails of light.

I went to my landlord’s restaurant for a while; they had emergency lights. Several neighbors were still sitting outside chatting. My phone signal was weak, and I received a few messages from brothers and sisters checking in, but couldn’t respond. Patrol cars passed by one after another, their flashing red and blue lights cutting through the darkness.

I returned home, brought my computer to the open-air balcony, and tried to read Fear and Trembling, but couldn’t focus. When I looked up at the stars, I actually felt comforted. The neighbor’s children were chasing laser points between the buildings, and after a while, the landlord’s family came out to the balcony, playing games on their phones.

In that situation, I wasn’t sure if I was relieved that I wasn’t alone, or if I felt that this world didn’t tolerate me being alone.

After washing up, I went to bed early. It turns out that the human eye can’t adapt to complete darkness. No matter how long I looked, it was just pitch black.

At that moment, there was only me and my Father in the darkness. I couldn’t help but cry out to Him:

“Father, I know You are with me, but I’m so lonely.”
It wasn’t just the loneliness of being out of sync with the world, nor was it the loneliness of giving myself away during my first love and not being received. It was a suffocating loneliness after crossing an absolute threshold.
My loneliness reached from my heart to the tips of my limbs, and though my eyes were filled with tears, I couldn’t cry out loud. If I didn’t desperately cling to Your presence, I would be left with nothing but destruction.
…

I don’t remember when I fell asleep that night, nor how many dreams I had. The only thing I remember is the last scene in my dream: electricity was back. When I opened my eyes, the room was lit up by the floor lamp’s white light. My phone showed the time: 3 AM.

There were still people online in the fellowship group’s WhatsApp chat. We chatted excitedly for a while.

I turned off my phone and the lights. The room wasn’t as dark anymore. I could still feel the pain of loneliness, but I had calmed down enough to analyze the many layers of loneliness I had endured in the past…

The first layer of loneliness was enduring emotional abuse and even physical violence from my family, as well as being isolated and bullied by peers. I couldn’t understand why I suffered so many unwarranted calamities and troubles. I was obedient, studious, and kind-hearted, yet it seemed like there was always an atmosphere of hostility and hatred in my environment that needed to be vented on me.

In a hostile environment, I was forced to build my sense of self alone, and I realized early on: “My soul doesn’t belong here.”

The second layer of loneliness occurred when, as a teenager, in a backward, closed-off, idol-driven, competitive, power-worshipping, and old-family-tradition-heavy place, I looked up to God by myself. My mother opposed my exploring Christianity online and insisted I read about communism, even though she didn’t understand any of it—she was just a bootlicker. Even my closest friends only saw me as a mysticism hobbyist.

I instinctively longed for truth, eternity, and holiness, writing naive reflections on faith in my journal and drawing various angels. At that time, I had only the internet, classical sacred music on my MP3, and the few philosophical writings I could find in bookstores from Western thinkers.

When adults treated me like an object to be judged and fixed, I was acutely aware that the spiritual world I possessed was something they could never reach. I once wrote in my journal, “My only way out is to escape the evil of mediocrity.”

At 18, I left my hometown, forgot about God, and charged forward into the world.

The third layer of loneliness was the external appearance of success as an adult, but an internal disregard and neglect. I had escaped mediocrity, but the so-called elites didn’t understand me either. Whether in prestigious schools or top companies, no matter how evident my insights and understanding were, I was always seen by higher-ups as “clumsy,” “weird,” and “awkward,” and among my peers, I was always teased as an “oddball.”

My efforts were never driven by ambition; instead, they stemmed from an inexplicable sense of mission. I always felt I had to accomplish something. I forced myself to live like a zombie, and every time I poured all my energy into completing something precise and beautiful, I couldn’t compress myself to fit into the rough, chaotic language system around me.

Yet, whenever I entered a new environment, a voice inside me whispered:

“This is not it. This is not here.”

Until I was 28, I once again turned my gaze toward the cross.

Thus, the fourth layer of loneliness came when I finally returned to the Christian faith after leaving the world, wanting to make up for the lack of church life in my youth. However, the Christians I encountered were those who had grafted Confucian values onto Christianity. They hadn’t reflected on the environment they were in at all, yet they eagerly wanted to prune the living branches of my spirit with external rules.

I realized I had to completely pull myself out of the ingrained cultural habits of my original background to preserve the purity of my faith.

And when I finally cast off all the constraints of human relationships and left China, finding a stable church life and fellow believers, I encountered my fifth layer of loneliness—
I am a person centered on God, revolving around Him. They are not.

Shortly after joining the fellowship group, one icebreaker question during a meeting was for everyone to introduce how they came to faith. I noticed that everyone else had experienced some event, or that God had performed a miracle in their lives to change them—it was “God for them.”

But for me, from a very young age, I had been looking up to God. When I returned to the Christian faith, I fully understood that He is indeed the only truth and way to life. Even before my rebirth, I knew that Jesus was Lord. At that time, I had already dissociated from myself, unable to see the wounds all over me, but after empathizing with Jesus, I began to cry out loud—I saw His suffering, and I couldn’t help but love Him.

Half a year ago, during a fellowship meeting, I expressed my panic: I found that I could no longer engage in anything unrelated to the gospel. A sister who cared for me said, “I think your panic comes from not having enough faith.”

And after Holy Week, during the Wednesday fellowship meeting, when I was almost brought to tears by the revelation from Heaven, I once again received cold, indifferent well-wishes from others.

When they spoke of theological concepts, it was so rational, as if everything that happened could be explained and resolved based on their theology. This made them appear to have much more faith than I did.

But being centered on God means that no matter how much or how deeply you study theology, it doesn’t matter. There is only one theology: acknowledging one’s “ignorance,” and feeling the deep powerlessness in that ignorance.

I understand that their goodwill toward me is sincere, but there are moments when I feel angry at their intellectual ignorance and moral arrogance.