she la fuit.

This is how it happens.

Someone finds something beautiful. Or useful. Or both. The thing they find is good in itself, but the person who finds it soon thinks the thing was found on their own merit, because they did something right to find it. But even though the person thinks the thing is theirs, someone else comes along and wants it too, because that other person is jealous of the first person who found the good or beautiful thing and wants it for himself. Or herself. I'm not being biased here. So the second person tries to take the thing from the first person, because he (or she) is convinced that the thing will make him (or her) happier. Or more _________________. (Insert appropriate adjective; e.g. smart, powerful, rich, valuable.) The second person does whatever he can to get the thing from the first person. He lies. He is violent. He is hateful. He is spiteful. He is lustful, gluttonous, avaricious, slothful, wrathful, envious, and prideful. (Count those adjectives).

He gets the good and beautiful thing. Only now it's stained with blood (not his). Because of the thing, he is more powerful. He wants more of the thing so he can be more powerful. Or wealthy. Or valuable to society. You decide. He thinks about how he can get more of the thing. He doesn't want to get it himself. He's too powerful, wealthy, and valuable to do that. So he goes back to the first person. He threatens the first person with his power, wealth, and sense of status, and the first person gets more of the good and valuable thing for the second person, who grows more and more powerful, wealthy, and important.

Until.

A bigger person, or body of people, sees the growth of the second person and doesn't like it. So the third person(s) decide to stop the second person. That happens these ways.
A) The third person is crafty. He wants to stop the second person, but without the second person knowing. So he goes back to the first person and pays off the first person to help the third person get whatever good and beautiful thing it is the second person wants. The third person may even go to the second person and give him a second thing, just to keep the suspicion away. Until the second person finds out what the third person is doing with the first. But because the third person is still more powerful than the second, the second person decides to take it out on the first person by being more of one of the above seven adjectives. So logically, the first person wants the seven adjectives to stop being against him, so he goes back to giving the second person more of the first thing. The third person doesn't like this very much, because it means his position and power is threatened, so a war breaks out over who can control the first person faster, and get more of the first thing.
B) The third person goes to the second person and starts a fight to see who is really stronger. The stronger person must deserve the first thing, of course. Except now that the second person is almost as strong as the third, it's a really long fight. And both the second person and the third person are beating up the first person to get more of the first thing to help them win the fight. A war breaks out over who can control the first person faster, and get more of the first thing.

Either way, the first person doesn't really want to be in the war.

Until.

The second convinces some of the first people (there's been some cellular division and regeneration) that their side is right, and promises them the good things if the first person will help them in their part of the war. In counteraction, the third person goes to the rest of the first people, and tells them that their side is right, and that they should help them instead. More promises are made for good things. The war gets bigger.

But nobody ever really sees any of the good things, except the leaders of the second and third people.

At first, the war was just in one place, but then, the second (or third; you pick, it doesn't matter) realizes that fourth or fifth or sixth peoples might want some of the good things, and that they can sell the good things to the other people and get other good things in return. Only the second (or third) person knows that if the other people know about the exploitation of the first person involved in getting the first good thing, the other people won't want it, so they don't talk about the exploitation, and sell it anyway. Only they don't sell all of it at once, because if there's not a lot of it, it will be seen as valuable, and people will want it more and more, so much so that even once they hear about the exploitation and seven deadly adjectives, they'll be so hungry with desire that they don't really care and want it anyway. And all the movies and songs and t-shirts and campaigns and projects in the world won't make a difference.

Until.

Someone really decides that it's got to stop.

And really decides that it's got to stop. Decides so much that they don't support the buying or selling of anything involved in what started the war(s) in the first place. Decides that someone else's life is not worth comfort, or utility, or functionality, or chic newness. Or cool points. Or wealth. Or power. Or status. And they give it up. And they love the first person. And the second. And the third. And the fourth and fifth and sixth and they keep on loving until they can't stand it anymore.

And they don't run away. They don't flee or hide or pretend it's not there and they aren't comfortable.

They just love. And hurt.

Thoughts on Being

My friend Charlotte wrote a line once that I really liked. She's a better writer than I am, a freshman at Smith. She'll share an alma mater with Sylvia Plath so I already feel like she's got something going for her. Anyway. She wrote this line about instead of liking poetry, she is poetry--I am a poem, my hips are commas carving out a space in the air--I liked that line, and the rest of the poem was good, too, it made me jealous of her ability to command words to do something for her, to speak to people.

My creative writing professor told me once that I could make a living out of writing, he's told me several times that I'm good at it. I don't really know what that means. In a conference once I told him that writing was coming easier to me than I expected it would but I think I lied. Writing is hard. It scares the hell out of me because it means always putting yourself out there to be judged. And people are assholes, they judge, and it's usually not nice.

Any kind of writing is hard; academic papers are hard and short stories are hard. Plays are worse and don't even start on poetry. And the thing about creative writing is that it's big. How do you define "creative writing?" I think even the most scholarly of papers require some degree of creativity, and a lot of the smut at Borders has nothing creative about it. Then how do you define the writer? You've got the serious writer, who produces piece after piece that really means something, and then you've got the asshat who thinks his 14 lines of free verse will really capture the world. Sometimes it does. It's just so hard to talk about writing.

But...

Writing means the very real probability of someone reading your work who's smarter than you and not liking it. Or saying it's wrong. At least if it's an academic paper and they don't like it you can always say you misread the sources, or were offering a different interpretation of a common idea.

But if it's your work--your heart and mind on the page--Christ, that's a terrible thing to have shot down. Because if they don't like it, or they think it's wrong or--worse--bad. Well, what are you going to do? That's you on the page-not someone else's review of a larger piece, but you. Little bits of your psyche thrown up on the page for the world to see.

It's worse than being naked.

It's like being naked while having eggs chucked at you by people who probably can't write any better than you can, or worse, they can.

I am not a poet, a playwright, and I'm certainly not a novelist or even anyone "creative" or "talented." I just put words on a page that I hope make sense, that mean something to me and pray to God that I'm not suddenly naked covered in egg yolks by the time the thing's done.

I want so badly for my "work" to be good--but what is good? Good gets in the way, approval gets in the way right there along with trying too hard. I think that as a writer, I'm screwed. I haven't an idea in my head that hasn't been tried a thousand times. The emotions I feel are the same as yours, and how am I supposed to capture the way you experience your life? Who am I to think my life's trials are worthy of putting on a page and calling them literature? I'm not dark enough to be a poet's fool, witty enough to be a cynic's comrade, and certainly not brave enough to not give a damn.

When I was young(er) I had dreams of being the next great somebody, tough and resilient, with a John Wayne stagger and a stoic's heart. Only I realize I'm a sell-out. I'll write what people want to read, I'll write what people tell me is good, I'll push aside those pieces that don't go over well and people can laugh at the manuscripts when I'm too dead to care.

My flaw in writing is that I want to be the best when there isn't one. There's not a best--there's a talented, a prolific, a versatile, or captivating, and a lot of other basically meaningless adjectives, but I don't want to be an adjective, I want to be a noun.
I am a poem.
My hips are commas carving...

I am a writer.
Lips sketching.... sketching what? How should I know? I have no answers. Sometimes I don't even have a decent conclusionary paragraph.

These thoughts always interrupt my paper writing

So, it's here. That dreaded season for retail employees everywhere: Christmas. I realized today that I haven't always hated the Christmas season, just since I worked at Hallmark. (Digression: how is it that Hallmark is perhaps THE Christmas store, but ever since I've been an employee there, I've never gotten a real Christmas with my family? I'm not bitter or anything, but it seems that if corporate Hallmark is going to try to make Christmas perfect for everyone, they might consider their employees in that. I'm so getting fired.) Okay, that was a larger digression than I'd planned. So it's Christmas-time, even though Thanksgiving isn't until this Thursday, it's Christmas. I've even started buying gifts already, which is something I NEVER do until at least 4 days before. I've been thinking (about everything but my history paper) about the commercialism of Christmas, and at the risk of sounding like one of those "damn college hippies" I'm going to say I don't like it. I guess being behind the scenes for the so-called magic of Christmas (a bonafide Hallmark employee-motivation slogan, there, folks) I'm disillusioned. I see how marketed everything is, how pre-packaged Christmas has begun. I'll really try not to get into the trite CHRIST-mas argument, because I know I hate it as much as everyone else does, but even the church markets Christmas. No better time to get back into church! Let's make our Christmas service enjoyable so they'll come back for more! If we can sell them on Christmas, we can sell them on Easter, and then on church membership! et cetera and so on. (Father, forgive my cyn-icism.) So it's true, I'm a bitter, jaded soul, who probably needs to quit hanging out with the Grinch to bake some sugar cookies.

I'm not doing Christmas this year. Well, I am doing Christmas, for other people. But not for me. If you're family, or if I like you, you might get a present from me. But I'm going to say this, and I want everyone to take me seriously when I do: I don't want any presents. If you insist on spending money on me at all, I insist as much as possible without being rude, that you put that money towards a charitable donation. Something in my soul doesn't rest easy on Christmas morning when I sit in a comfortable 76* living room under a Christmas tree decorated with electric lights drinking English imported Lady Grey tea wearing comfy pj's opening presents that are yet more things I've convinced myself I need and really don't. In short, less dramatic prose: I feel guilty knowing there are impoverished kids all over the world (and in America, too, my friends) who not only don't have presents Christmas morning, they may or may not even have food to eat that day.

I realize I should be doing more than just requesting that my potential gifts be replaced with charitable donations, but consider this step one. Step two: Who likes working at soup kitchens? A better question, Who wants to go with me to the soup kitchen?

After already posing this proposition at work today, and it a) not being received very well by those that had already bought/planned my gift and b)not being received very well by those that really enjoy giving tangible 'just for you and not Malaysian kids' gifts I realize that some of you guys are not comfortable with this idea. And I respect that, I understand, I feel I'm being terribly rude just by suggesting it. But let me say in my (ever so humble) defense, that I will appreciate you guys giving money to charity just as much as I appreciate foil-wrapped gifts. And even better, whatever people you're helping out appreciate it, too.

Go with me on this one. Considert it a "damn college hippie" experiment. My immediate family did a "charity swap" with my uncle's immediate family last Christmas, and as a collective, we'd never felt so good about gift-giving before. That sounds cheesy, I know, but realizing that our financial gift increased two-fold over what it would have bought here was just an amazing thought. $20 buys clean water for a village for a month in Africa. In America, $20 buys a CD and some string. If you're comfortable and willing to give up the normal American Christmas tradition of swapping wrapping paper and whatszits, please do it. It will mean so much.

Please?

Need some help picking a charity?

International (look for links titled "Gift Catalog"):

• World Vision (probably my favorite organization, they do a lot of really good work)
• Samaritan's Purse

National

• Habitat for Humanity
• Girls, Inc.

Local

• Golden Harvest / Soup Kitchen
• Augusta Urban Ministries
• Ronald McDonald House (I've worked with these guys doing some copy-editing stuff, they're really nice!)

Okay, most of these have international, national, AND local chapters. Do some research, pick one out that you connect to, that you think I (or whoever else you're donating for!) would appreciate, and go for it! It's really a good feeling.

and still the dead have voices

I'm reading the speeches of MLK for a term paper, and in going through them, I think there's a lot we still haven't learned.

The following is an excerpt from "Paul's Letter to American Christians," which Dr. King gave as a sermon to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He basically wrote a letter, from Paul (of the Bible) to Americans in then contemporary 1956 America. All emphasis is mine.

"Let me rush on to say something about the church. Americans, I must remind you, as I have said to so many others, that the church is the Body of Christ. So when the church is true to its nature it knows neither division nor disunity. But I am disturbed about what you are doing to the Body of Christ. They tell me that in America you have written within Protestantism more than two hundred and fifty six denominations. The tragedy is not so much that you have such a multiplicity of denominations, but that most of them are warring against each other with a claim to absolute truth. This narrow sectarianism is destroying the unity of the Body of Christ. You must come to see that God is neither a Baptist nor a Methodist; He is neither a Presbyterian nor an Episcopalian. God is bigger than all our denominations. If you are to be true witnesses for Christ, you must come to see that in America.

"But I must not stop with a criticism of Protestantism. I am disturbed about Roman Catholicism. This church stands before the world with its pomp and power, insisting that is possesses the only truth. It incorporates an arrogance that becomes a dangerous spiritual arrogance. It stands with its noble Pope who somehow rises to the miraculous heights of infallibility when he speaks "ex cathedra." But I am disturbed about a person or an institution that claims infallibility in this world. I am disturbed about any church that refuses to cooperate with other churches under the pretense that it is the only true church. I must emphasize the fact that God is not Roman Catholic, and that the boundless sweep of his revelation cannot be limited to the Vatican. Roman Catholicism must do a great deal to mend its ways.

"There is another thing that disturbs me to no end about the American church. You have a white church and you have a Negro church. You have allowed segregation to creep into the doors of the church. How can such a division exist in the true Body of Christ? You must face the tragic fact that when you stand at 11:00 on Sunday Morning to sing "All Hail the Power of Jesus Name" and "Dear Lord and Father of All Mankind," you stand in the most segregated hour of Christian America. They tell me that there is more integration in the entertaining world and other secular agencies than there is in the Christian church. How appalling that is."

This was November 4, 1956. How is it that almost exactly 50 years later we've still the same faults?

I'm obviously not in it for the Benjamins.

I was thinking just now about how nice it would be to have a lot of money. It seems that with a lot of money, you can do a lot of things, fix a lot of problems, and when I think about my financial situation (poor, in college, and in debt), having a lot of money is really, really desirable. If I had a lot of money, I could pay off my credit card debt, and not worry about next month's electric bill. If I had a lot of money, I could study abroad and pay for grad school. If I had a lot of money I could go out and buy a lot of superfluous things that I don't really need, like every album Letters to Cleo ever released, and new jeans, and a good translation of Neruda. If I had a lot of money, I could fly to Europe to stand in front of the Louvre and meet a banjo playing Zeppelin fan and his Gardener girlfriend, and I could have curtains for my living room and I could afford to eat out on my lunch breaks.

I'll be starting a new job soon, and they'll be paying me more than I'm making now. I don't know how much more yet, but more, and even a little bit of an increase gets me thinking about how much easier my life will be because my checking account is a little further away from overdraw.
And my life may, in fact, get a little better when I've got more to live off of every two weeks than a few pence and some pocket lint. But will my life truly be better? Better because I can finally afford a comfy pair of matching pajamas, or a cute shirt to go out in, or new sticky note flags, or even a large pepperoni pizza for delivery?

If there's one thing working and making my own money has taught me, it's that the more I have, the more I want. It's easy to swipe my credit card when I already have a big bill to pay. It's easy to keep adding five more dollars here and ten there when I've got to go to the store anyway. If I'm buying a gift, it's so easy to throw in a little something extra for myself.
I'm so ready to make sure I am taken care of; how often am I that generous with other people?
I sponsor a Hope Child that lives in near-poverty in a village in India. He gets $30 a month from me, and sometimes, World Vision sends me a request to send a little extra to help out his village. I throw away the letter telling myself that I can't afford any extras that week. That Friday, I'll go to Roly Poly on my 30, buy a top on sale after work, and go to the bar with friends that night. In seven hours, I've spent the $30 that might have helped feed Seigin Khongsai for a whole month.

Buying things for yourself isn't bad, but people in our own country are starving, children are violated and abused, the homeless are forgotten, the lonely neglected, and the lost ignored. Should I not help those people at least as much as I help myself?

I'm in college, I work retail, and I have no great skill to speak of. I don't make much, but should I not be willing to share what I have? If I say I love people, and that I want to be compassionate towards humanity, shouldn't that be followed with some action? Some giving of myself and gifts to people who need it more than I?

Just some thoughts, but I think I might actually want that good translation of Neruda.

"Much is required from those whom much is given,
and much more is required from those to whom much more is given."
Luke 12:48b

"To those who use well what they have been given,
even more will be given,
and they will have an abundance.
But from those that are unfaithful,
even what little they have will be taken away."
Matthew 25:29

Beholding

So it's obvious that I have something to procrastinate, because I'm thinking about everything else, and even have at least a few things that relate to something else because I'm here...

Although I admit that those "100 Shocking, Cosmo-tested Sex Tips" are just too intriguing to pass by(seriously, guys, how many ways can you reinvent sex?), I generally stay away from fashion mags. Actually, all magazines, with the exception of National Geographic and some of the more amatuer arts mags that are entirely too expensive for people to buy. I'm not hating on magazines, I'd just rather buy a book and not have some high-paid editor's opinion shoved down my throat in a glossy-paged format. Recently, the store in which I work (proper grammar sometimes sounds ridiculously stodgy) issued their own magazine, and although it's not quite as bad as a lot of the fluff passing for publication now, it's still the same old manage your house, cook pretty meals, decorate for the season, be a good friend, love your kids, pretend you're not absolutely exhausted from trying to be perfect kind of stuff.

I was flipping through it one day while NOT helping mean customers, and I saw a quote they pulled from Jessica Alba, who is pretty darn gorgeous. Anyway, the quote was something like this: "People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you're the beholder." Or something. Granted, she's absolutely stunning, so it's easier for her to say that than the woman who constantly struggles with weight, hormones, or 3 kids. But still. I have to agree.

We spend so much time making ourselves beautiful--talking to the ladies mostly here, but you gents do it, too--that we've become obsessed with how we look. Are we skinny enough, is our hair styled well, are our clothes cool, et cetera and so on. I'm starting to go down a lecturing path I'm sure I've been on at least once before, saying that we need to consider where we get our standards of beauty, and that we need to be cautious of how much stock we put in the opinions of others, but that's really not what I meant to say. (So shut up and say it already, Ashley.)

Why do we spend so much time on trying to be beautiful, rather than spend our time on trying to see beauty? I would hazard a guess that we expend far too much energy in trying to be beautiful, in trying to make sure that everyone around us sees just how darn beautiful we are. We're exhausted with all of that. We're always trying to be better at something, usually because we want people to think better of us, and that's not always bad, but it does leave us lacking. And tired. And blind to all the other beauty in the world. Think about it--the last thing you want when you're tired and irritated and frustrated with the world is somebody hanging on your shoulder saying "Look. Just look at how beautiful that is. Just look." If we're always so busy trying to be beautiful, and so tired because there is no way we can possibly do it, we're going to miss so much of the beauty that is already there, waiting for us to see it.

Beauty is easy; it doesn't have to be holed up in the Louvre, or in a 5-minute sunset (that I always seem to miss), or in a heavy volume poety that doesn't make sense until the 17th time you read it. Beauty is everywhere, in things, in people, in a moment in time, it's in you, ready to be seen. Seeing beauty is simple, it's refreshing, and it reminds me how absolutely small I am. It's also terrifying. Because seeing true beauty reminds us that we're small, it makes us feel so ugly in comparison. But I think it's worth it, not because I'm a masochist for self-loathing, but because seeing just how beautiful everything else is, we see the things that are beautiful in ourselves. Yes, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so behold, without hesitation, behold.

or, as someone much smarter than I said,

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."

--Anne Frank, from her diary

knock first, and wipe your feet

As of late, I've been doing a lot of this growing up thing I've heard so much about. It's strange really, realizing that I'm technically competent enough to live on my own. Moving out wasn't as tough as I thought it was going to be. The actual physical process of hauling my stuff around was valiantly handled by my dad, brother, and brawny friends. Unpacking and setting up my own place wasn't that difficult either. The bills haven't started rolling in yet, but I don't think I'm being too bold as to say that I've got that fairly well managed either.

I've been out on my own for a week and half now, it feels like hours. I've cooked and cleaned and organized and done all the domestic things. (I'm a terrible cook, a decent cleaner, and I'll organize a sock drawer if I've time enough.) But I wonder what's up next? I suppose that the grandiose dream of being on your own isn't all that grand after all. What does one do when she has a 570 sq. feet apartment all to herself? This girl alphabetizes cds and kicks back a Killians in her pajamas.

I was worried about feeling completely helpless on my own, but I also worried about the opposite extreme--feeling so self-confident that I don't see my mistakes and faults. Strangely, it seems I've found my middle ground. I won't say that I'm perfectly comfortable in my hobbit hole off Walton Way, but I'm definitely enjoying it. I no longer feel like too much for one space. I don't feel like I'm getting in anyone's way, and I don't feel cramped and run over by other people. I've got room to breathe (even if I haven't totally gotten that "other person" smell out of my closets).

Stop by sometime. You'll probably walk in on me in my underwear, wondering just what I should do with myself now that I'm on my own. I think I'll start with that gallon of milk that expires tomorrow.

knock first, and wipe your feet

As of late, I've been doing a lot of this growing up thing I've heard so much about. It's strange really, realizing that I'm technically competent enough to live on my own. Moving out wasn't as tough as I thought it was going to be. The actual physical process of hauling my stuff around was valiantly handled by my dad, brother, and brawny friends. Unpacking and setting up my own place wasn't that difficult either. The bills haven't started rolling in yet, but I don't think I'm being too bold as to say that I've got that fairly well managed either.

I've been out on my own for a week and half now, it feels like hours. I've cooked and cleaned and organized and done all the domestic things. (I'm a terrible cook, a decent cleaner, and I'll organize a sock drawer if I've time enough.) But I wonder what's up next? I suppose that the grandiose dream of being on your own isn't all that grand after all. What does one do when she has a 570 sq. feet apartment all to herself? This girl alphabetizes cds and kicks back a Killians in her pajamas.

I was worried about feeling completely helpless on my own, but I also worried about the opposite extreme--feeling so self-confident that I don't see my mistakes and faults. Strangely, it seems I've found my middle ground. I won't say that I'm perfectly comfortable in my hobbit hole off Walton Way, but I'm definitely enjoying it. I no longer feel like too much for one space. I don't feel like I'm getting in anyone's way, and I don't feel cramped and run over by other people. I've got room to breathe (even if I haven't totally gotten that "other person" smell out of my closets).

Stop by sometime. You'll probably walk in on me in my underwear, wondering just what I should do with myself now that I'm on my own. I think I'll start with that gallon of milk that expires tomorrow.

love as thy wish to be loved

Sometimes I feel that I am insufficient for other people. This is by no means a permanent feeling, but I do sometimes slip into moments of mild self-loathing and feel so completely "less" than everyone else. I look at where people are going to school, who they are interning with, what awards and scholarships and degrees they've received, how much weight they've lost, how happy they are in their relationships with their parents, boyfriends, siblings, how satisfied they are in their salaries and workplace, and I just think "I don't have that. I'm not good enough for that." When people share with me the hurts and stresses in their life, I don't know what to say, I don't know how to offer comfort to them, I feel wholly insufficient to be there for them. When people tell me about the wonderful things happening to them, I don't know how to be excited with them, I feel, again, insufficient.

I don't know what to say, I don't know how to act, I don't know how to be smarter, I don't know how to get a better job or get into grad school, I don't know how to be a better person. There is so much that I am not. There is so much in myself that I draw comparisons with other people, and it almost always leaves me feeling a heavy sense of inadequacy. No one wants to be inadequate.

When did I learn to compare myself to others? When did I learn that I need to be as good or better as someone else to have value and worth? Who taught me that?

I know that as a whole, our society is highly comparative. Women are bombarded with ads featuring sexy, skinny, flawless underwear models just as men are thrust into a world of hyper-masculine, muscled, sexually charged jean guys. Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are role models, the janitors that clean their offices are not. Yale is better than Georgia State is better than ASU is better than Aiken Tech. Size 2 is better than size 16; normal is better than abnormal. But amid the conclusions being drawn about people in the mass of people called society, where in all of that did I learn to make those conclusions applicable to myself? I have no conscious memory of saying to myself, "this is the time to start realizing that the blond haired skinny girl is better than you," but it happened around 6th grade or so. I realized quite gradually that I was a "dork" and "fat" and "unstylish" and "unpopular." And in middle school, when you are those things, it means you are unloved. But I'm not in middle school anymore. I don't have people whispering behind my back, pointing at my shoes. I'm not even in high school anymore, with boys looking right through me to the girl with a prettier profile.

And yet I'm still drawing conclusions. I still feel that I need to be more of something, and less of something else to be considered worthy of the love that other people can give to me. Why do I and countless scores of other people feel that the evaluations other people hold of us carries any substantial weight at all? I'm not saying that the opinions of other people are devoid of value, I'm saying that they shouldn't be the foundation of my own sense of self-worth. When I see that someone is doing better at a better university than I am, I shouldn't feel like my own personal value has decreased at all. I shouldn't feel like less of a person when someone more beautiful walks by. I shouldn't feel like I should have to change at all when I talk with someone who has a better paying job than I have.

You would think that when I am feeling so completely inadequate for the world that an otherworldly, indiscriminatory, complete love would be undeniably attractive to me. But instead I've found that when I can't love myself, I can't accept the love that others offer me, even the overwhelming love that Christ offers me. How illogical is it that I should disregard the warmth of love that people offer to me daily in favor of lonely hours of self-doubt? The proverbial "Golden Rule" (also Matthew 7:12) says that we should treat other people as we wish to be treated; I see that also as we should love as we wish to be loved. I also see that as a rule of reciprocity--I can only be loved as well as I love. The first step in finding a pure, holy kind of love is to love people without filters. Love them wholly, for who they are. Love myself, for who I am, not what I am not.

if I had wide angle eyes

I didn't have to work today, and so I stayed home and packed and thought about how wonderful it was to not have to work. Before I knew it, I was mentally complaining about my job in all the worst kind of ways, and I'd gotten myself into a grumpy depression, dreading the workday I've got to face tomorrow. Luckily for me, I do sometimes posess the ability to be smart and snap myself out of it. Today, it was remembering something I'd written almost a year ago, after a particularly different kind of day at work. Here's a (rather long) excerpt:

"Working in retail, you meet some special people. I suppose last night, I was just asking for it, but it seemed like everyone that came in had something to offer me if I just looked for it. But really, I suppose that is the case all of the time.
There was a woman buying her daugher a gift because someone had broken into her checking account. She bragged for a solid 20 minutes about her daughter... Rarely is it good things that are shared with me from customers. The mother's husband came in having just bought some sort of random computer-related cable, and although his wife was blabbing to a random sales associate about their daughter, and running around trying to put together a gift bag, go to the bathroom, and show him a card all at the same time, he just laughed and smiled, and said "i love you...
'There were 3 15-ish girls that wanted to share with me their excitement over their upcoming Homecoming. I could care less about that stuff, but just seeing how giggly they got about some unnamed yet ever-present boy, and how big their smiles got when I asked them about their dresses made me almost wish I was 15 again, just so I could remember what it feels like to think dresses and boys are the most important things.
'And I love those sheepishly mischevious looks girls give when they think I can't see them pinch their boyfriends on the rear. I love the looks the boys give when they realize that their girlfriends hand is grazing (and staying) a little south of their belt.
' And I can't forget the laughter of the little old man who just wanted to talk. He didn't need a card for this, that, or the other, he was just lonely, and wanted to let someone hear about his days in France during WWII. That's where he met his wife. She died about a year ago."

I don't know why that day should have felt any different from the scores of other days I have at work; I certainly didn't enter it in any better mood than I usually do, and I still had a lot of the same rude or tired or irritable customers I always have, just like I had the same happy, easy to please, kind customers I get. What made my perspective shift to see the good in people?

Knowing myself as only I can know myself, I'm aware that I'm a pretty not-nice person. I'm cynical, halfway bitter, sarcastic, and I get irritated really easily. And all of my bad qualities are amplified at work. I don't have a bad job, it's just not what I want to be doing. It's retail, it's angry customers and corporate rules. But it's a job, and it will be helping me pay my electric bill in 10 days, so I'm keeping it. I just wish I could keep my good moods as easily.

I have little faith in myself to put myself in a good mood. I know people who can force themselves to smile, to be happy, and I'm jealous. Seriously, insanely jealous. Because I have never been able to do that and probably never will. So I guess that's one of the reasons I love it so much when I am able to see things in a better light, because I know it's not me changing my perspective. It's got to be something bigger, putting those ridiculous happy thoughts in my head, creating better stories about people that may or may not be true, but the point is that I'm happy, instead of feeling irritated with the human population. I don't know why, but I am almost fully convinced that it's God changing my perspective; not because I've done anything to deserve that, I didn't even pray before clocking on to feel better about things (because why would I want to feel better about my job? Why would I want to be in better moods, seeing people as good? Yeah, did I mention I'm sarcastic?), but I think that sometimes God really does laugh at me, and changes things up a bit, just to see if I'll notice how much better the world can be.

I don't really know, but I think sometimes God wants to show me how much happier I could be if I were just more like Him. He's not doing that to show off, or make a world of little clone-Gods, but I think that He really, genuinely wants us to love each other. It's pretty hard to love someone if I don't even see them as being more than a mean customer. So He shows me the good people. He shows me the bad people's whole stories. He shows me when I'm being a jerk, and I can kind of appreciate that, because it makes the day go by faster and sometimes I even have dates planned after my shift.

It all depends on how you look at it, I guess; perspective is one of those things that is annoyingly eye-opening. It makes things new for you, and the newness of things is indeed something to enjoy.

things are best said over chocolate pie

I am notorious for loosing things. I'm also notorious for finding them again, in silly places (like right where I left said lost item, for instance). I went shopping today, to get more stuff for my apartment, and after getting home a few hours later, I realized I'd lost my debit card. I had a little bit of a panic-moment. Okay, I had a lot of a panic-moment. I was freaking out, calling the stores I'd been into, obsessively checking my online banking, making sure no one had been using my card, digging through my laundry, purse, car, all to realize that I wasn't going to find my debit card in a cute little forgotten pocket of my wallet. So after a bit more freaking out, I got on the phone with my bank to cancel my card. Of course, I was put on hold. I got my card cancelled, and new one is being mailed tomorrow for me, so everything is worked out.

But not once did I stop to collect my thoughts, breathe, or even pray. No "Hey, God, can you please help me find my card?" or "Please don't let anyone mean find it." It was just me, freaking out, cursing at myself and at automated phone services and even the size and color of my (very lost) card. It was just me being alone, being frustrated, being stubbornly arrogant in my own searching. So yeah, i got it all sorted out eventually, but I think it would have been much easier had I just been able to calm myself down and handle things the way I'm supposed to.

How often do we all do that? How often do we rely on our own reason instead of reminding ourselves to calm down and just talk to God? It seems to me that if we say that we trust God, and rely on his strength, it would make sense that we don't act like jerks when we lose things. I know that there are a lot of people out there with much larger issues than a lost debit card. My fear is that if I can't even trust Christ enough with all the silly things I do, how can I ever fully trust him when bigger, tougher issues hit me?

We learn to trust with the little things; our dads don't let us go when making us human airplanes, the training wheels don't fall off with his handiwork and we grow into teenagers who believe that he'll pick us up when the movie is over, and we believe he'll be there when boyfriends mess up and when test grades are bad. No one trusts anyone else unless they've been through a lot of little things together. If I want to be able to trust anyone (especially God) with big things, I have to at least give them an opportunity to be trusted through all the little things. How much of a control (read: pride) issue do I have as to not let the God that made me create peace within me when things are shaky? When I'd realized I'd lost my card, it was just me, alone, freaking out. If I'd stopped and invited Christ into the situation, I wouldn't have been freaking out just by myself, and I would have taken at least one step towards letting myself trust my Savior.

anyone up for a sea voyage?

As a preface: these words are nearly completely prompted by a chapter in Don Miller's Searching For God Knows What (you guys are really going to get tired of hearing about him, so go read his stuff, and get a glimpse of what i'm so crazy about) and the presentation of Jesus in the Bible that I've read (that's another thing everyone should go read, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Okay, I'm done providing suggested reading.). So just know that most of these thoughts aren't even mine, but I'm trying to work them out and make them my own. Wish me luck with that. Anyhoo.

I've found myself back in church lately, due to the wonderful influence of a friend very dear to me. It's strange, being back in a community of Christ-followers, because for so long, I've not only been out of that community, but have often been cynical and pessimistic of it. Being caught up with things (as another friend put it, "Jesus is still Lord and the Bible is still the Word of God; consider yourself caught up."), or at least working to understand the spirit of Christ's church, has got me thinking about a lot of things, especially in regards to relationship, both those that people have with each other and those that people have with Christ. As I've tried to make clear in earlier ramblings, I believe that God is fundamentally relational, and that he created people to be relational as well, and that the most beautiful things about Christian spirituality are evident only in relationship. The concept of 'relationship' is an alive and vibrant thing, not entirely tangible, but most people understand what the concept means. Boyfriends are 'in relationship' with their girlfriends. Parents are 'in relationship' with their children. Students are 'in relationship' with their students,' pastors with their congregation, friends with their confidantes, and on and on and on--the limitations of relationship is boundless. The lines overlap and blur and blend into a beautiful cacophony of existence that isn't fully understood but no less cherished.

So what do you do when a relationship feels stress?

I think back to those moments in middle school, okay, not even as far back as middle school. I think back to yesterday, today, an hour ago, and I think about how frequently, and how unintentionally, I looked at someone and drew a comparison. She is prettier than me; he has a nicer car than I do; I look better with that bag than she does; he is smarter than I; she is better at talking to people than I am, she is a more generous person than me; I feel threatened by her; I feel more powerful than him... Most times i don't even notice that I'm drawing comparisons between myself and other people, but I almost always am. If you think about it, all of our society is constantly drawing comparisons. We're always trying to evaluate who is worth more. Who's got the better batting average? Who's got the best GPA? Who's a better candidate for election? Who's more fun to work with? Our question always seems to be "Who is more valuable to me in this moment?"

I cannot come up with a better metaphor than he did, so I'll just use Don Miller's. He said that people are always trying to decide who is worth more, as if we're sitting in a lifeboat together, awaiting rescue, and trying to decide who gets thrown overboard if things get dangerous. In the middle school lifeboat, the people who have the newest clothes and don't have to ride the bus to school are worth more in the lifeboat than the people who have funny teeth or wear shirts from Wal-Mart. In high school, the cheerleaders and jocks are the ones who'll get saved by the rescue team while the dweebs reading anime together are the ones who'll get thrown to the sharks if the boat starts to sink. In college, the sorority girls survive, while the person who belongs to no club and has a mediocre GPA is ignored and disregarded. The "real world" has its own standards of value as well. Nicer cars, bigger houses, vacation homes, high-yielding profit margins--these all earn you seats of honor in the lifeboat. Those struggling on welfare, homeless dudes, drug addicts and criminals are those who are kicked to the edges and are the ones whose fall overboard goes unnoticed or ignored. So who decided the constructs of this unspoken guidebook to lifeboat survival? It certainly wasn't God. I don't know how it started, but I know how it perpetuates: it's our fault. We always try to associate ourself with the 'good guys' in the lifeboat, we want nothing to do with the losers. If we associate ourself with the good guys, we've got a better chance of gaining spots above everyone else, and we're that much closer to surviving. Except God doesn't have a lifeboat.

What's so cool to me about Christianity is that Jesus was never preferential. Now, I know that Walt hasn't been rummaging around in my brain lately, because that would just be creepy, but in both the Sundays he has offered God's word to us, he has spoken a phrase or two that just really captures everything I've been thinking about lately. Last week, he said that Jesus never passed by an opportunity to teach truth to people. Today, he said that even when Jesus overheard people muttering about him behind his back, he was ready to go and used their arrogance as another opportunity to teach truth. This says a few things to me. In addition to Jesus being a really patient guy, it means also that Jesus isn't in our lifeboat. Let me switch it up a bit. If someone had been talking about me, and I heard it, I would do something spiteful or hateful to them. I don't know many people that wouldn't think less of someone else who'd said something hurtful about them, and I know ever fewer people who would be willing to offer truth to them. In our lifeboat, when people are cruel, it means their value to us goes down, and in our minds, they're placed behind nicer people in the "save me, first, line." But Jesus doesn't work that way. When people criticized him, his response was "Okay, fine, you're not too smart when it comes to this God stuff, but okay, here's some truth about God anyway. You'll want to listen because I'm telling you how to spend eternity with me, because I love you and I think you're valuable to me." Jesus said this to everyone: the homeless guys, the prostitutes, the rich bums and Pharisees, everyday joes guys that smelled like fish and dudes who's skin was rotting off. Jesus spoke his truth to everyone. How cool is that? I'm absolutely astounded by that because it means that Jesus' love is impartial. It means that he loves me as much as he loves the chick with a smaller waistline, as much as he loves the alcoholic mother, as much as you. Jesus doesn't even see the same stuff we see, he doesn't care about our lifeboat, he doesn't even understand the concept.

God not having a lifeboat is so amazingly comforting and simulaneously absolutely terrifying. It's awesome because it means he loves me no matter how anyone else has appraised me, and it's crumbling because it means he wants me to give up my lifeboat. I mean, as skewed as it is, my lifeboat is a pretty safe place right now. I may not be in the center of it, holding the binoculars, but I'm certainly not clinging to the edge hoping not to get pushed out. I'm supposed to give up my spot just because the Creator of the entire universe says my theory is null and void? Um, yeah. Giving up my lifeboat means I won't be worth anything in anyone else's. It also means I'm thinking like God, and thinking like God is both scary and impossible. But trying to think like God means that I'll maybe get to see the world illuminated by Christ. I imagine it would be a bit like Eden in that respect, and I can't think of anything more beautiful than trying to understand the world as God meant it to be.

a hippy's thoughts on the occurance of nightfall

I actually wrote this several weeks ago, and felt like posting it after rereading it. Please ignore my blatant disregard of apostrophes. I'm too lazy to add them back in.

Amid all the things we like to call our lives, sometimes you just need to take off your shoes, lay down in the grass, and forget about all of it. Its good, you know, to just lie in the grass and forget there are a thousand other things you could be doing. Because when you're there on the ground, the rush of its welcome floods back into your memory for the first time since you last collapsed on the earth in exhausted exuberance when you were 12. We like to tell ourselves that there are always things we can be doing to improve ourselves, to be better at our jobs, our families, to be better versions of ourselves. There are self-help books and meditation journals and Bible studies and diet plans, all of which tell us that were not good enough just as ourselves. Most of us have probably accepted that as true, I know that I am always reading more books and trying to boost my GPA, all so I can go to grad school and get a degree and prove to somebody that I am good enough. Were all doing things to prove to someone that we are good enough. But how bad can you feel about yourself and the world when you lie in the grass looking at a half-paled sky and feeling how small you are? When you're on your back before the world, letting the mosquitoes bite you on every exposed bit of skin warmed by sun and moistened by humidity and sweat, your bills are smaller and your worries smaller and everything that preoccupies your mind is smaller--you as yourself is suddenly very small too, but your awareness of the world and its beauty increases tenfold.

I sound like a hippy, I realize, a feel good yuppie-type who thinks watching birds fly under clouds will make her life run more smoothly and her problems dissolve. No, not permanently, anyway. When I walk inside with soil-stained feet I will have to face the evidence of my fleeting life with a tangible brutality. But who can deny, after being silent before the peace a small patch of earth can offer, that there is indeed beauty left in this world? Just being a part of creation--whoever you believe created it--God, evolution, aliens, sea monkeys or the accidental explosion of space dust--is something spiritual. Who can take a pure communion with the ground you walk on and not see it as something holy, intentional, grand? I pushed a beetle from my arm with a stick and thought about the reasons of the universe--why is it here, whom does it glorify, how am I a part of this creation? I heard the crickets buzz unseen in grass around me and I wondered not how they fit in the ecosystem, but why there is even an environment to begin with. We are so small as humans, small even in comparison with the world, smaller still in light of the galaxy and universe, that it seems really inexplicable that we should have a place in the universe at all. What do we offer it, really? Our advancements of technology and thought are replaced every hundred years or so, and sometimes I feel like our advancements in theory and formula are rather violently destroying anything we feel of love and passion, truth and question. And does the universe need our emotion, our thoughts? I hardly think it does, and yet there is something beautiful in them still, in our place here, lying on the grass in the dark, looking up at a half-paled sky and just wondering why.

Number 10, Half, On Wheat, Chips and a Drink, Please.

It's exciting for me to think about passion. Not passion in the Marvin Gaye "Let's Get It On" use of the word, but free, unbridled, contagious, take off your clothes and dance in the street excitement. Now that I think about it, that kind of passion can often lead to the Marvin Gaye passion, especially if one were to take off his clothes and dance in exuberance. Anyway. It's nothing new to know that passion is contagious. That's why political parties and college football are such huge moneymakers; you get a few people on stage acting really excited about something, maybe they'll even have a reason or ideal to be excited about, and all it takes is a few other people to catch on to that excitement, to share that love for that one reason or ideal, and it spreads. It's contagious. Everyone who sees the passion in someone else wants to know where it's going and what it would mean for them to be a part of it. If it's a cool kind of excitement, they want in on it too. When I'm watching someone be really excited about something, genuinely excited, I find myself getting a little bit emotional too. I start feeling enthusiastic, my cheeks get feverish and I get those jumpy shakes in my gut that makes me want to get in the action. Rarely do I consider the purpose of my passion. Let me say that again, for my own sake: Rarely do I consider the purpose of my passion.

When I am excited about something, and it's that just starting out, nervous anticipation excitement, I'm not thinking how this thing I'm excited about is going to impact humanity in the good ways. Nor am I thinking about the implications of my actions, or the long-term results it will bring. I can quite honestly say that when I'm really pumped about something, it doesn't bother me in the least whether or not this excitement is holy or scandalous or even just a whimsical waste of time. I don't care; I'm excited. But isn't that how we all are? We're thrilled because of first apartments, first kisses, last days at bad jobs, last days of school; we yell and scream when little guys on the TV throw balls into hoops, we set aside an hour every Sunday night for the latest installment of the sexiest TV show. We're passionate about our favorite bands, or favorite sports team, motivational speakers and even diets. People are passionate about their gym, their jobs, their hobbies, and their lapsa apsas. These are all good things. These things all help our lives go on in easier, happier ways and without them a lot of us would be totally lost. But do I ever stop and think about why I'm passionate about something?

Time for another poorly drawn parallel: I eat at a little sandwich shop around the corner from where I work called Roly Poly at least once a week, usually 2 or 3 times. I love this restaurant. I really do. If the owner ever decides to close up shop, I would be devastated and would probably send him a rude letter. Every time someone ponders out loud where they should eat their lunch, I always suggest Roly Poly. (And by suggest I mean politely demand.) I know their menu, I know their sides, I know the names of the staff and they know mine. They know my order. They know to take off the mushrooms and spicy Thai sauce even if I forget to ask them to do it. So why am I so passionate about Roly Poly? Why do I actually make room in my budget for them alone? I can list the reasons, I can say that their food is healthy, and always fresh. I can say that I get a huge meal for $6 even. The staff is awesome, and some of the guys are even kind of cute (hot delivery guys, anyone?). It's close to my job. They have fresh cookies. And on. And why? It's really just a sandwich shop with a cute name. It's not like there isn't a plethora of other lunch options around me. Other people have fresh food and cheap food and cute delivery guys. And still I've chosen Roly Poly, however unintentionally, to be MY place, MY passion in the realm of quick lunches.

That's just my example. Think of all the other mundane, actually, think about anything that people make their passion, mundane or not. I kind of forgot where I was going with this (and in doing so, succeeded in making myself hungry), but since there needs to be some kind of point somewhere, I guess I just want to start really evaluating what I'm getting excited about, and more importantly, why I'm getting excited. I think one of the easiest ways to distract people from the "why" of a thing is to get them really passionate about it. Emotions feel better than logic any day, but it's also the emotions that so easily cloud us from understanding what we're really saying. I'll confess that it is much easier to get me pumped up about going to Roly Poly to get my usual than it is to get me out of bed in the morning to go to church. Or to work a soup kitchen. Or to support honest charities. Or to talk to the people I usually wouldn't talk to. Or to be a good friend. Or to listen. Or to... you see my point? It's easier to be passionate about the silly things that don't really matter than it is to be passionate about the things that will rock this hurting world in much bigger ways. For me, at least.

I've got a friend who is absolutely nuts about his church. Without too many of the details, he came from a church that he couldn't fully get passionate about. So he decided to find one where he felt more at home, and when he did, he couldn't stop talking about it. He loves that church like part of himself, and he tells people about it. He invites people to it. He gets involved with it as if the church were his partner in a strange, mysterious, plurality of a relationship. And it's contagious. When people talk with him, and he starts smiling at the thoughts of his church, other people want to experience what he has experienced. They want to go to his church. He's not trying to sell his church to anyone, or earn cool points with the visitors committee; he's excited and wants others to have that excitement too. That's how passion works with anything, I think--that's why people talk about anything they're passionate about, because deep down, intrinsically, we want other people to share in the excitement with us and get the same feelings we get from whatever it is we're excited about. Now, this doesn't explain why women go to the bathroom in groups, but it does make clear to me that whenever I'm gushing about something, I should really stop and consider the relevance of what I'm gushing about. Because people are listening, and chances are, the things I'm most willing to talk about are the things that mean the most to me. I can talk about a sandwich shop easier than I can talk about getting people together to work a soup kitchen. When I step back and look at it, that says I love sandwiches more than I love people, and that's not something I want to live with. I need to consider the purpose of my passion.

The Difference Between "Ser" and "Estar"

I was thinking the other day about all the emotions people have, and the things we feel not quite in our brains, but in all the tender, hidden places of our body. I was thinking that of all the things humans have explained about themselves, emotions seem to be some of the most mysterious parts of ourselves of all. We know that there are certain chemicals flowing around our brains and bloodstreams that release certain hormones or trigger certain chemical responses in parts of our brains, but no one has been able to explain exactly why they work, or what they’re doing there, or even, completely, how they help in the furtherance of the human species.

I don’t know any Greek or Hebrew words or anything, but when the Bible says that “God is love,” I don’t think that means he resembles loves, or does a lot of loving, or even has a lot of qualities that are like love, I really think it means that God is the manifestation of love itself. I don’t know about anyone else, but that kind of makes me want to hide under a pillow for a few days while I think about it. First off, I don’t even know what love is. I know what the dictionary says, I can even look up its etymological history and see how the word has evolved, but when it comes down to it, a definition is just words, and love is, well, it’s love. Ask a husband what love is, ask a mother about her child, ask the 17 year old with the crush on the basketball center, go out and ask anyone who has had any interaction with another human being at all, and you’ll get what love is to that person. But to actually be love? I can’t wrap my mind around it.

And I think there’s a reason I can’t understand love. To understand love, I’d have to first understand a whole lot about the human experience that I just don’t, and two, I’d have to understand God, and no one can do that. Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he was talking to the disciples and he said that he had so much more he wanted to tell them, but that they couldn’t bear it (John 16:12). Later he said that there will come a time when he doesn’t have to speak to us in parables anymore, but will be able to use plain language (16:25). I’ve always understood this to mean that Jesus, as God, understood so much more about God than we have ever been able to. I think, and this is just me hiding under a pillow and thinking about things, that Jesus has an entirely different language to use with God, because they are, quite literally, as unified as any two beings can be. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” (John 1:1). Okay, so Jesus = God, and if God = love, then therefore, Jesus = love, too. That’s a simplification, but I don’t know how else to look at it.

When I think about people in love, I understand implicitly that they will have a certain language about them. I understand that there will be a certain way they hold hands, walk together, make conversation or kiss goodbye that is entirely theirs. I can see it, but never completely understand what it is they are saying to each other when no words are being said. The closest of lovers understand each other because they have spent time with each other, learning each other, working to understand what it is about the other person that makes them unique and lovely. This language is learned, because no one is born knowing how to communicate that clearly with another person. But I think Adam and Eve were created to have that communication with God, and I think before they broke God’s rules, the communication between God and Adam and Eve was the clearest, most beautiful God-speak ever. Adam and Even enjoyed totally unbroken, uninhibited relationship with God, and God was able to completely reveal himself to them.

So if, at one point in time, humans enjoyed that complete, open relationship with God, it makes sense that we would have understood God’s love-language; we would have known what true love was. It also makes sense, then, to assume that there is some memory of that language left inside us, to make us desire that communication again. I could be wrong, but I think we as broken people are always trying to find something to mimic that relationship with God. I think we are always trying to fall in love, create beauty, or communicate with someone in a way that is holy, in a way that is God’s. I think having understood, a long time ago, perfect communion is what drives us to experience communion today. I think that is why we fall in love, why we understand feelings like guilt and justice, why we are happy at joy and excited at success, why we are lonely for someone, why enjoy the company of people who love us. I think we are all searching for the God that is love, wanting his company again. So how do we find that? How do we love God in that way again? How does a broken person find his way back to the God that echoes inside of his emotion?

Thoughts On Eleven

I went to lunch with my mom today, and as I was devouring my chicken fingers in a most unladylike manner, I noticed I had an audience. She was an 11 year old girl, with sun-freckled cheeks and brand new school sneakers on her feet. She was a cute kid, but despite the ribbon she tied in her ponytail, probably not the kind that would ever make it on to the cheerleading squad or the kind that would have a boy say yes when her best friend asked him out for her. When you're 11, these things are important to you. She sat with her mother in their booth, and stared at me for what was almost the entirety of both my meal and hers. Now, having once been an 11 year old girl, I can imagine that she was thinking very wonderful or either very horrible things about me. Girls of that age almost always think in extremes, and the shift from one to the next is dizzying to even the most well-adapted thought-acrobat. As she wasn't whispering to her mother while shifting her eyes back and forth from me, I'll assume that she wasn't horrified at my outfit.

I remember being 11. I remember being in Claire's, picking out that one blessed pair of earrings my mother was graciously allowing me to buy for picture day, and watching the older girls walk past me and into the stores with the half-nude mannequins and the employees with half-smiles and wondering at all the marvelous things that they must do. I remember thinking that their lives were magically more exciting than mine--that they spent their days shopping for new outfits and their evenings with their boyfriends in all the expensive restaurants. I imagined that they were always approached by the cutest, most popular boys, and that everyone wanted them to be their friend, and that they were always the nicest girls, even though they were beautiful and popular and probably rich. I never in my wildest imagination would have thought that these girls were worrying about their Spanish test, shopping off a failed job interview, getting out of their abusive home, paying their maxed out credit card bill, just getting off a terrible shift at work, or late with their rent payment. I wanted so desperately to talk to these older girls, to have them answer my questions about boys and clothes and periods and kissing, but I never would have wanted the real answers. I never would have wanted to hear that life continues to be difficult ten years after 11.

If this little girl, twirling her ketchup cup under the spout as I had done thirty seconds earlier, had spoken to me, and we'd talked about her life ten years later, she would be quite disappointed with time. Never would she imagine that 21 is not really that old, or that I am still as insecure and doubting as she is. She would never guess that my age has often failed to answer my questions, but has instead given me better questions. If she were to ask, I could not bring myself to tell her that although I'm grown up enough not to need my best friend to ask out a boy for me, the rejection that ensues is still just as horrifying and painful. I could never tell her that those fights she has with her mother about her outfit and curfew will only grow into more hurtful arguments about bigger issues. I couldn't tell her that her best friend won't be her best friend in even 6 months, or that she will probably never stop doubting her reflection in the mirror or whether or not people like her.

But because I couldn't have offered her happy answers, I would have liked to tell her that she is a beautiful girl, and that I liked her shirt, and I bet her boyfriend gave her that necklace. She would have appreciated that, because when you're an 11 year old girl, all you really want is for someone to notice you, think that you are pretty, and want to be your friend. And I think that in a way, time disappoints us all.

So what is this Jesus stuff, anyway?

I've been thinking a lot lately about Christianity. I have a lot of confusion about Christianity--not so much what it is, but more with how it has been jaded. And I think Christianity (and therefore Christ?) has become incredibly distorted, especially in modern American culture. (As an aside, Don Miller's books, especially Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What, but also Through Painted Deserts are the catalyst for much of my thought on this subject, and if anyone is having the same thoughts, I seriously recommend those books. Check out www.donaldmillerwords.com for excerpts.) I'm 21, I've spent practically my whole life inside a church, in Bible studies and Sunday School rooms, youth groups and Christian retreats, and yet only recently have I had the realization that Christianity is so fundamentally relational that it is impossible to understand the things Jesus taught if you don't have a friendship with him. I don't know what that means for anyone else, but it scares the mess out of me. Friends with Jesus? How do you get to be friends with Jesus?

I think one of the first things I was taught in Sunday School was how to witness to people. I remember that in my 5th grade class, our teachers, a young married couple that owned a big house in the nice part of town and had a 3 year old daughter and a schnauzer, spent about a month or so walking us through all the key verses that would make people Christians. We even had to present an oral delivery of the stuff, showing off how well we'd memorized things, and even then, the whole idea of witnessing made me scared. Over the next 7 or 8 years, the 5th grade project got prettied up a bit, but essentially, all the teachers in the department were teaching us as middle and high schoolers how to memorize a few key statements and present them in a nice package and then pray and those people would be Christians because we'd done so well and all. I'm not saying that my Sunday School teachers didn't have wonderful intentions, I'm sure they were just reiterating the message their corporately published guidebooks urged them to, but does it seem strange to anyone else that Christians of any age should be encouraged to offer people a regiment of salvation. It frightens me a bit that the first thing I remember in my experience of Christianity was not hearing about how much Jesus loves people, but a flowchart pointing to heaven. I don't have the exact quote, but I'm referencing Don Miller when I say that it seems to me, that if the premises of Christianity were as simple as marking 10 verses in the New Testament and being able to recite them, Jesus would have mentioned something about that somewhere.

I don't think you can get to heaven in 3 steps, or 5, or even 17. I don't think heaven is even the true goal. Am I pushing things too far to say that I don't even think Christianity can be explained?

I'm not claiming to understand Jesus, in fact, I understand so little I feel hypocritical by writing these kinds of things, but from what I have read about Jesus in the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (did we just throw those in reverse alphabetical order?)) it looks as though that everything Christ taught, and he taught a lot, originates in relationship with him. Things most associated with Christianity, like having upright morals and tithing and service to other people and being compassionate towards humanity, all came later, after he'd said how much he wanted to be loved by us. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think that all those things are largely impossible without first loving Christ. I think people do those things (purely, without selfish motivation) because they do love Christ, and want to show their love for him. I don't think you can have a true sense of morality without first understanding that pure actions glorify Christ; I don't think you can give an honest tithe without understanding how much power God has to use any kind of offering,; I don't think you can offer your gifts to anyone until you know that it was God who gave you the ability to serve to begin with and that service to humility glorifies the Saviour; and I don't think that people have any power to love other people at all unless we have some sort of deep, ingrained memory of what it was like to love God before things went bad in the Garden of Eden.

I think all of the good things about Christianity--morality, offering, service, love--stem from a Christian's desire to glorify the God that made them. This is an awkward and poorly drawn parallel, but This is an awkward and poorly drawn parallel, but think about the first time you kiss someone. You're excited and nervous about it, and you can't wait for it, because you are so ready and willing to express your affection for him in a deeper way. So when he finally does kiss you, you are excited and happy because you know that he understood, through physical action, that you think of him in that way, and that the way you care for him is different than the way you care for you neighbor, an acquaintance, or your best friend. Just like a lot of people kiss for the wrong reasons, people can do things for reasons not entirely justifiable to Jesus Christ. People have morals because they think they will save them, or give them glory in church. People give service and offerings and charity donations because they want to see their names on sponsor sheets, or because they feel guilty about not going to church enough. People pretend to love other people because they might know someone who is going to be doing some hiring soon, or because the person is cooler than someone else or drives a nicer car or has a Submariner or a Lexus key fob. But just becuase people screw up doesn't mean that those things aren't good things, and it doesn't mean that Jesus is any less legitimate.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I don't think any good thing is fully realized until you have a relationship with Christ. Until you are a Christian. I hesitate to use the word "Christian" because for so long, I have been taught that people are Christians if they have followed the steps to ask Jesus into their hearts and forgive them of their sins and let them into heaven if they promise to stop swearing or drinking or driving too fast. I know that there are a lot of tracts and Bible studies and Sunday School teachers out there swearing up and down that getting to heaven is as easy as 1-2-3 (literally), but I don't agree.

Think about your home. In it, you've got photos of your family, memories of them, stories that you tell to your guests. You don't have a list of things taped to the fridge that will help your neighbors love your brother. When your neighbor asks, you simply talk about him. You share what he's doing in school, how you think his girlfriend is going to dump him, you talk about that time you threw sticks at each other and he ran over you with his bike; you talk about how he's a good 8 inches taller than you, but he still flinches when you pretend to take a swing at him. And after hearing all these stories, and seeing how much you love your brother, your neighbor might want to meet him, and come to love him too. The next time your neighbor sees you in the market picking over the bumpy tomatoes, she might ask you how your brother is doing, and then mention how she might want to meet him if he's ever in town for the weekend. And you're glad to agree, because you love your brother, and want everyone else to love him too. I hardly think it's much different with Christ.

God didn't create people to be simpletons. He created us to love each other, to love him, and essentially, humans are relational and thrive when in relationship. People glow when they're in love, giggle when with their best friend, light up when their child dances into a room. The Bible says we are made in God's image, but I don't think that stops with having 2 legs and toes and a bit of nose hair. I think that means that the essences of our personalities, our being, echoes God's personality, and the relationship we were meant to have with him before the Fall. If God didn't give us the capability to describe how we fell in love with our husbands in 3 easy steps, I doubt very seriously that understanding Christ would be any different. In fact, I think the potential to fall in love with God would be the most difficult, exhausting, mysterious and beautiful thing we as humans can do.

Preliminary Disclaimer

In starting this whole blog thing, I don't really know what I'’m trying to accomplish. I'’d like to think that something I say here would be considered insightful or even incredibly profound, but in all actuality, I doubt very much that it will become anything more than a meager collection of my thoughts and asides about the very small portion of creation that is my existence. I'’m at a time in my life that is dynamic--—things are changing rapidly around me, and I suppose that I am changing, too, but I can'’t point to any single thing that has bloomed within me, or that has even become aware of a greater purpose to blooming in the first place.

I suppose, by way of bullet-point, I could describe myself, my interests, goals, beliefs, likes and dislikes, and if they were clear in my mind I would probably try. As they are not (and as very few are interested that I like peanut butter ice cream and canÂ’t stand the sound of the word "yolk") I'll forgo all that and say instead that I am most beautiful under a night sky, most kind in my silence, most creative at 3 a.m., and most grumpy any time before noon.

I'm usually in college (taking a summer off currently) and I'm always in a book. I'm intrigued by other people's questions, and I find other questions usually answer my own quite accidentally. I love to see the world in perspectives, and I kind of make my own commentary as I go along. In all my observation, I can'’t decide if I am making my world smaller or larger with all that I do. I don'’t know if it has lost its intrigue or if I am making it more mysterious, but I regard the universe, at times, with the same sort of curiosity a woman studies her lover--—she pursues him and learns him, and all the while she knows more of him, the more perplexing he becomes. Understanding of him is just beyond her clasp, and she is more beautiful in her search for him.

I don't know what purpose I'm striving for in this--I don't have a goal to journal, changes to catalog, or difficulties to overcome. I suppose that in a way, this space is just another way for me to gain perspective on my world, as small as it is, and as Don Miller quotes Tom Arnold in Searching for God Knows What, "the reason [I write] is because I wanted something out there so people would tell me they liked me. It's the reason behind almost everything I do" (116).
So ignoring the fact that I halfway did an MLA in-text citation just now, that's about as honest my reasons for writing can be. I'll probably chronicle a lot in here, but basically, the largest part of all of it will be hoping that it makes sense to someone, perhaps even myself, and that somebody will like it.