Passive Christians in a Culture of Violence

This girl I never knew. If it weren’t for the photos and the notes, the journal entries and copies of thoughts, I would never have known she existed.

I walk where she walked, where she would still be walking, surrounded by her friends, not mine. A life that still looks the same a week later only with a missing smile, an absent joke, a hollow wind where a comment would be.

Selfish. I recognize the right to waste your own life, but this ignorant and self-seeking free radical breaks into the healthy and rips out the soul of the machine. We consider life so insignificant, fragile, inconsequential. Take community so lightly that selfish hate can push a bullet through someone’s heart, through the heart of a family, through the soul of a friend. What selfishness do we cultivate that could allow one so closely connected with our churches to manipulate our faithfulness, love, passivism? America, I hold you at the stake with blame mounting around your attitudes and individualism.

I can’t help but think this should change the way church is practiced, life is carried from thought to reality, and faith is made active. I don’t want to remain unchanged.

Passivism is not the same as passivity.

Everything, a grain of Salt

So I was supposed to be in Oregon, but life events changed me, left me with different plans for school and life and purpose. Now I'm moving again, chasing the dream of fulfillment, feeling closer with every transition.

Thinking that I'd be in Portland pushed me to make a halfway adjustment, trying to ensure I'd move well in the end of the summer. Having a dream pushed me to Tennessee for the summer; I wouldn't have been there otherwise. Chance enounter. There is no chance. Fate restructured my life; if I had been asked I would have refused the beauty that dissolved dreams birthed. In the whirl of Southern Baptist red tape and confined teenage emotions hissing under the weight of summer structure, I was given something big. Undeserved and much to huge for my fractured and reset little heart to contain.

It's not because I am whole and secure and untarnished that love means so much. It's because I'm totally incapable not only of earning it, but of maintaining it. Love cannot be a finite gift without strings attached or it would end. This time I think I'm ready to accept the real thing, the love that requires everything, obligates, redefines--it's the only kind that lasts. Those strings, the confines I hated for so long, those are precisely the methods by which infinity steps in and maintains its own gift. Only Love can keep up with love, if found. I am too unloving, uncaring, insensitive to just need grace. I need constant upkeep, the kind that I cannot initiate. I need love.

And out of the blue I have it. A gift. Three months untarnished.

I still don't know how to feel.

Quilt Pieces

At every point I am a composition of others' investments in me. The music I listen to, the books I read, my progression through college, even my beliefs are results of other people in such extreme ways. Every event leaves me changed and, most beautifully, each new conflict dulls the past. Even negative forces seem to result in eventual good, how biblical.

Affections

I wonder what the difference between admiration and affection are for me; it seems the same energies that draw me to people in general cause attraction when in higher doses. But I never recognize anything right off. Makes me feel dense and unaware, and then confused- am I supposed to feel something? Allow myself to feel something? Is there some method to test these thoughts to make sure they're worth having in the first place? Or is it all left up to chance, power completely in the hands of that person to make a move, say a word, disclose what I would never say out loud? Silence kills it. And then I'm left with wasted time, a wasted blog. And still no answers.

Never finished...

At every point life seems to take me by surprise. Transitioning from one area of life to the next, I never feel more prepared; and I'm not who I expected to be. I'm not disappointed though- I'm not dissatisfied. I have become who I never expected I wanted to be. Grace is a funny thing, and all the while I thought I knew- I thought I knew what grace looked like, felt like. My perspective was so painfully small. But grace proves itself in that while I was still selfish and small-minded and folding in on myself with conceit, it changed me without telling me so. And in the end of one process in many, I have somehow become much better than I ever planned to be. I have no idea how that happened, and what's more, I don't care to know.