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.