Child in me feels let down by life, but I cling to faith in elusive love

I started my life full of hope. I believed people were good and that my future was bright.

The world was some sort of ideal and rational place, at least in my mind. I learned to believe — in a way that isn’t clear to me anymore — that intelligence and hard work were always rewarded. I believed most other people were decent and well-meaning. They shared my values.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed an unspoken promise about life.

If I was intelligent enough and worked hard enough and developed whatever gifts I had, there would be a place for me. The world would value what I had to offer. I would find people who shared my values. I would love and be loved.

I would find where I belonged. Nobody ever stated the promise quite that way. But I believed it.

Living an adult life is nothing like what my childhood led me to expect.

I’ve discovered that high intelligence is often a handicap, not a ticket to success. Shallow hearts and dishonest actions are often rewarded instead. Most of all, I’ve come to see that most people don’t share my values. They’re not much like me.

I see us as a shallow and unhappy culture which has focused so much on material advancement that we’ve overlooked the spiritual and emotional elements which are ultimately more important.

And I have become bitterly disappointed about all of this.

I don’t know where there’s a place left for someone like me. My values and ways of thinking seem to be from an intellectual era which is fading away — and being replaced by something more hateful, more coarse, less intelligent and less humane.

That disappointment didn’t come overnight.

I place my period of working in politics as the dividing line in my life. Before that, I was striving for success in an environment which let me feel as though I was still chasing the things childhood had taught me to expect.

I started several businesses. I experienced a business failure. I got back up from that and went to work for another company, completely confident that I would be back in the game soon.

Instead, I found myself taking a temporary detour into politics.

That detour turned into 20 years.

That’s where I discovered how my world really worked. Dishonest people gained power with money and unethical deeds. Even people who entered politics to “make a difference” typically found they either learned to get along with dishonesty or they were destroyed.

I made a lot of money working in politics, but it destroyed the innocence I had left. Each passing year brought me more money — which made it harder to quit — but it also made it harder to live with myself.

By the time I got out, I thought I could make a difference by exposing how the corrupt systems of power work.

I was wrong.

A few people saw the same things I did and wanted to hear what I had to say, but most simply wanted me to attack their political enemies. It made them happy when I did that, but it missed the entire point of what I was trying to explain.

Eventually, I had to accept that most people didn’t want to hear what I had learned. They didn’t want to question the systems they trusted or reconsider the assumptions on which they had built their lives.

And the more I looked at the world outside politics, the more I saw versions of the same thing.

We live in a culture which teaches us to pursue money and prestige and material goods and ego praise. Even most of those who call themselves Christians seem to have traded much of the notion of spiritual connection with their creator — through love and spiritual seeking — for the shallow rewards of consumer culture.

Our secular god waves a red, white and blue flag. He offers us credit cards and praise. And we worship that false god in shopping malls and sterile neighborhoods where there is little love to be found.

But the older I get, the more I understand that my anger about all of this is covering something else.

I am hurt.

Some part of me is still that child who believed the world was supposed to work differently.

I thought I understood the ideals of the age. I thought the world would love and appreciate the gifts I offered — and reward me for them. I thought this world was full of honest and trustworthy people who wanted to work with me to make it better.

I thought there would be a place for me.

I was wrong about all of that.

There is still a part of me which wants to protest that none of this is how things were supposed to be.

Maybe that’s the child in me.

He thought intelligence would matter. He thought honesty would matter. He thought people would recognize something worthwhile when they saw it. He thought there would be other people waiting for him who understood what he understood and valued what he valued.

He thought there would be a place where he belonged.

I am bitterly disappointed that I haven’t found that place. I am hurt. And I feel more alone than I ever expected to feel.

I can’t see where a man like me fits here. This is what makes me feel so much like an alien. I long for another place — a home — where there are people more like me. Where I can love and be loved in community.

And so I come back to that word again.

Love.

I am often miserable and lonely and angry and I want to scream at the idiocy and shallowness of this fallen world — but something inside me hasn’t lost faith in love.

I don’t entirely understand why.

The evidence of my life doesn’t give me much reason to believe that everything I want is still waiting for me. I can’t prove that the love and belonging I’ve spent my life looking for are going to appear.

But I can’t give up on love.

I don’t have faith in people or in the systems of this world or the material things which we think are so important. I enjoy having nice things when I can, but they have no meaning. They can’t give us what we’re really looking for.

Love is different.

Love somehow bridges the gap between the horrors of the world we have created for ourselves and that spiritual world where there is meaning and hope and joy.

We need loving connection to individuals — partners, family members, children, friends — and we need loving connection to communities of like-minded people. Love is somehow central to the connection we have with our creator, even though we are too materialistic to understand that.

I still believe love can somehow find me — that it can connect me with the right partner, the right people, the right places, the right home.

I have no earthly reason to believe I’ll find these things. I really don’t.

Maybe the child in me was wrong about the world. Maybe he was wrong to believe intelligence and hard work would always be rewarded. Maybe he was wrong to assume people would be good and rational and honest.

But maybe he wasn’t wrong about everything.

Maybe the home I expected to find was never something the world could give me.

Love is the place we come from. A creator of pure love. A creator beyond our understanding.

I have no hope left in the world around me — or in the idealistic hopes I had as a child — but I have faith that love will still find me, even in this mortal life.

And I have faith that love will somehow lead me home to where I belong.