Ember.

Knowledge and Wisdom seem so very different the more attempts I make at each. They are not interchangeable.  One serves the other.  You can gain knowledge without gaining wisdom, and it seems that you can possess wisdom in spite of lacking knowledge.  The wise put knowledge to good use.  The knowledgeable are only interested in knowledge.  How can we be so smart and yet perceive nothing?
 
Mark 8. Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? ¹⁸ Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?

There was a time when I tried very hard to separate the things in my heart from mingling with the things in my head.  When I felt like it, I pursued my heart and declared that creative passions were all that mattered.  And when that was tiresome, I called myself an intellect, yet I only pursued things that fell in line with what I already wanted to be true.  I wasn't much of an intellect, closed minded and self serving.  I've quoted this often as I think back on those years of searching for something meaningful: 

“Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.” G.K. Chesterton   
 
There comes a point, once you've accepted that life is meaningless and love is an illusion, that you know you have to do something about it.  You can't just go on half-assing your own destruction.  You need to make a move to fully extract yourself from those people whose "love" you can't shake.  From here some people go off, in fact, to productive lives, sterile logical and clean.  Some go off to their end, take the last exit, seeing the end and not waiting for it they take matters into their own hands.  The meaninglessness is too real and too much of a disappointment. Some add fuel to their own fire, engaging their own passions, because why not?  These people, like Solomon, deny themselves nothing. 
 
Ecclesiastes 2. 
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
    I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
    and this was the reward for all my toil.
¹¹ Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
    and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
    nothing was gained under the sun.
 
 There is a naiveté in the people who think themselves wise and worldly.  There is an absence of humility that is almost embarrassing.  When we think of the earlier versions of ourselves, we can feel this embarrassment.  The skeptics , I suppose, would say the same of those that have Faith in the unseen. Those who mock and who are careless with the concepts of good and evil, can never really be good and give great power to evil and as Chesterton says, they cannot see things how they really are: "things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate".  That was me, making a joke of my very ruin.

Some, like me, after attempting little bits of each of these, find that nothing will suffice.  The dissatisfaction that prompted me to leave, now brought me back.  When I found that I was most empty and had shunned all things "good" as a sham, yet I could not help but to still ache for it.  What was it then that persisted, this want of good? 

"The shame that sent me off from the God I once loved, was the one that sent me into your arms." Mumford and Sons   

Here in the empty unsatisfying pit of my own existence, some dim ember was found. In the cold empty space I begged for God to be real and if he was, I needed him.  The door to the cold room of my heart cracked open and the ember caught fire from the rush of fresh air.  From that moment on I began, so very slowly, to see the world as it really was.  Full of fear and real evil, but also joy and beauty.  God began to reclaim all the senses and gifts that I had previously used for gimmicks. They were now becoming super sensitive and being sharpened to be put too proper use. Love is real and so is truth.  Both are unshakable no matter what means we may try to remove them.  Christ found me.  Before he did, I was a fully functioning human on the outside, but crumbling and hopeless on the inside.  He made me new, and all that was good in me from before remained.  This good was nurtured and was given new life by his power.  All that was rotten has been torn out and burned clean (though I still try to bring old garbage back into this new being from time to time)

A house rehabber sometimes has to take a home down to it's barest of bones, foundations and frames.  But it is still a home and still has a purpose.  Sometimes God uses life and our own destructive tendencies, our hideous strength, to strip us down bare, clearing out the rot and the mold and exposing the blueprint of his intentions.  There is something about us that is not us.  We can try to kill it or claim it but we cannot rid ourselves of it.  God will not relinquish his claim on us, yet it is up to us to surrender this right of ourselves, to him.  For me, this could not happen until I was on the verge of losing everything.  Yet it was a battle that was mostly within me.  I wish I understood it well enough to write something concise and comprehendible, but I cannot.  I guess that is why the simplest of hymns are the best.  "Oh Lord my God, When I In Awesome Wonder, look upon the world thy hands have made..."  Or  "I surrender all!!!"  or simpler yet, "I once was lost, but now am found."