in transit

oh simone

2008-07-08T10:23:00.001-05:00

If one could imagine any possibility of error in God, I should think that it all happened to me by mistake. But perhaps God likes to use castaway objects, waste, rejects…It sometimes seems to me that when I am treated in so merciful a way, every sin on my part must be a mortal sin. And I am constantly committing them.

— Simone Weil, Waiting for God

"leave behind someone else's face"

2008-07-05T19:54:00.004-05:00

Thinking a lot about control. Thinking about how life unfolds, how in moments of high stress i start to think that life happens to me instead of believing that i create life. It gets to this fever pitch and then, after midnight conversations and some weak coffee, i realize how fragile life is. Too much for this, i've been through too much. Seen too much, lived through all these crisis points. Really, this is the one to take me down? boredom?

No idea what kind of changes to make, how to focus, but i know that when i focus on the global i realize how small i am. That somehow makes me feel more centered.

It could have been me releasing my last breath to a stray bullet, feeling the last moment of sensation, making amends in my head with everyone i know. It could have been me born to a teenage mother, or the mother herself for that matter. Life is fluid, fragile, imperfect.

And the longer i spend capitalizing the i and raising my verbal position, elevating my worth, deifying and humanizing opposites, i feel more and more displaced. i was born to dirt.

dear god remove my rhetoric. i want to believe more than a text, i want to be more than a text.

deleted

2008-07-04T19:30:00.002-05:00

I deleted his comments and erased his text messages, all the i love yous.

I can still see them in my head.

I realized that I can read the majority of messages in my mind long after I erase them and try to pretend like words mean nothing.

I'm not claiming that love is always deep and eternal; sometimes there's just enough there to make a life change. Until now I've been uncomfortable admitting that.

This week I realized that I am most lonely when I'm bored. The semester starts in a month, but I feel antzy and impulsive. I think I might plan to move, or at least give myself some options. Something new.

Where I am

2008-06-24T08:02:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it's not healthy to make choices for other people's benefit. In fact I'm coming to a point where I believe it's not healthy at all. There should be some kind of mutual give and take, a mutual desire that make things beautiful for both parties.

I'm tired of being weighed down, feeling guilty over things that because of stubbornness won't change, and carrying with me through the day the clips of depressing statements from midnight conversations. I don't want it. I don't have to have it.

It's been a long time coming. One weekend wasn't the reason, it was the suspended animation, the feeling of knowing myself and being known in a real and transparent way that finalized the decision I should have always made. Makes me believe: it's just there or it's not. The chemistry, the intensity.

I remember Luke talking me through my dead engagement and telling me that it was the wrong kind of passion I shared then, that the kind of passion I described was destructive. I think whatever passion I saw these last months was very similar, a self destructive passion. And I'm not a life boat for a sinking ship. Renewal is a choice. Life is a choice. And sinking is a choice too.

In the midst of all the chaos of difficult decisions and hard situations, phone calls that I know won't be well received and thought out explanations that I know will be twisted, it's nice to have inspiring people around me. The kind of people who fight through the sticky jumble of compromised truths and shitty life experiences and find something worth believing in, even if it's not the truth parents smile at or lifestyle choices others praise. I admire their strength and take it in a little.

I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to find the kind of inspiration that heals and creates. In the mean time I'm going to work on becoming it- breathing it, speaking it.

On risk

2008-06-19T10:48:00.002-05:00

I don't maintain a belief because it's convienient or makes sense or puts everything in order. I believe because the world is absurd and chaotic. I believe because I am a member of a global community that suffers, much more than I do, and to be a just part of it I have to somehow break my own selfish internal atheism.

I believe because there's beauty in thinking about individual dignity. I believe because I have to push myself outside of thinking the world is about me. I believe because there has to be a greater point than personal gain, especially when personal gain leaves me so cold. When I believe something that isn't a part of me comes out and somehow makes my life meaningful to others. I won't die without making a moment of peace.

Risk is beautiful and risk is hard. But internal death is worse. I choose life.

it dawns on me

2008-06-14T00:51:00.002-05:00

All of a sudden while talking about my Greek and Hebrew from college, I realized something significant. Greek is the most expressive ancient human language and I heard all the time about how providential it was that the New Testament was written in Greek to in exact detail explain and defend the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. But isn't it interesting that Greek wasn't chosen to write the Torah, the Law, the very thing that I would think exact detail would facilitate the best. So why did God choose a language that for every word there seems to be eighteen, sometimes contradicting, meanings to verbalize the Law? And then in contrast use the most expressive language with a word for every nuance to expound the Gospels and letters?

Humankind didn't need precision in being legalistic-- we needed it in liberty.

Christ called His law the "Law of Liberty."

God chose Hebrew to explain the Torah to show that fulfilling the Law can only be about the heart- if it were about the head He would have explained every jot and tittle of every command in Greek, so there would be no confusion on how to perform. But the Sovereign isn't about dry action and robotic movements. He loves peace, justice, mercy. He loves the grey areas where the character of a real person shows through.

My God was specific when it came to love, and beautifully grey when it came to legality. The Torah is intricate and ornate, full of meaning and substance-- very much more than the strict sounding English translation or the Christianized version of Jewish practice. Point-- the Only is about life, lived and breathed, not only talked about or intentionalized.

I appreciate that, being flawed.

Thoughts and Pieces

2008-06-09T09:58:00.004-05:00

I've been questioning a lot lately and mostly writing when I'm on my break at work in the insane cold of a sterile and bleach-smelling corner room. For some reason it's the place I think about issues clearly. Right now I wish I could right something profound about current events, about how a 14 year old died with a steak knife in his heart yesterday one street over from this room, about how all the kids are on edge today, about how fragile life is. I wish I could piece words together in a way that made sense and expressed my emotions.

But even though I'm trying to think deeply and feel deeply about the state of this neighborhood and my role somehow on the fringes of it, I still feel trapped in my own questions from this weekend. See, I've been trying to figure out with I want- I feel like I used to know and somehow lost sight of the clarity along the way. My relationship ended terribly. The only two I've ever had have ended, ended in ways that make people tense when they ask and hear, clenched because no one wants to believe love can fold and morph and die sometimes. So in the midst of all my married friends and the bliss of their lives making sense, I find myself lost but trying to celebrate. My life just seems so separate.

And then I remember, I live. And mourn for the walking dead, the 12 year old who will forever have the memory of murder over him. How do I even begin to pray? What does it sound like for me right now?

Reincarnation

2008-06-03T11:40:00.002-05:00

In a past life I was a poet. And a painter. And a mother of four.

In a past life I was a warrior. And a hero. And a victim.

I feel the lives in me that either once were or could have been, the ends of the choices I had the opportunity to make but didn't.

All these lives argue over what the outcome of this one will be, interjecting comments and dreams and memories from lives my religion doesn't allow me to believe, stirring up feelings and affections and directing me through life almost completely on touch. I feel my way through.

Finding the good

2008-06-02T10:11:00.002-05:00

Still in the same place. Literally. It's been a year and in many ways I feel like I'm exactly the same. I was looking forward to a change in surroundings, maybe at times using that as a crutch, as a replacement for actually moving on. Forced to take into account all the truths from the past gosh, eight years, I have to admit somethings to myself: first loves don't die, time doesn't heal without intention, and the structure of my life is second to the person I choose to become.

Even though the externals look dramatically different, sometimes opposing, who I have become was chosen. I would have evolved much the same if the location was different, the faces changed. People are people, though, and community is consistent. My goals have been refined but they haven't shifted: I want to experience peace.

If my high school dreams had come out the way I had planned, I would have still wanted peace. I choose to believe that life goes according to the best--it's harder to believe now, but if I lose that tenderness, I will lose too much of the things that I like about myself.

In flux

2008-05-28T09:58:00.002-05:00

I'm about to make some life choices and I don't know which way I should lean. In the Fall the structure will change, my community will evolve and spread across the nation even more, and I will begin to stretch my mind again in a formal setting. I'm excited.

At the same time, though, I feel like I need to wait until then to make my path solid and clear. The negative side of community: choices impact everyone. There are times when I sincerely think I should weed out the destructive parts of my communal garden and completely replant. How much suffering should one person undergo because of the missteps of someone else? How long must I wait for a partnership that does service to my goals and ambitions? Dreams were not made to be abandoned--they were given to achieve.

While I wait I have painted myself into a sanctuary. My room has tree limbs and organic shapes to remind me that at any time I can enter the personal place of peace inside and escape the issues that make me feel overwhelmed. Internally there is a hush, a calm, that gives me confidence that with enough effort and self awareness I can bring the inner garden outward. That is the essence of peace, to first make my life a cultivated sanctuary where I can enter and experience true acceptance and love and then extend that calm. World peace starts with my everyday.

What I was made for

2008-05-09T10:04:00.002-05:00

I wasn't made to be God. Although there's the expectation for that, I am not good enough and truthfully don't want to be. I want to be content being what I was created for: life. The gritty, dirty, confusing stuff. The stuff that is solidly imperfect and definitely me. I can't claim that anyone made it but me, the conflicts, the messes. But they're mine, I made them, and without them I would have nothing to offer Providence as a gift on an old alter. Well worn but never dusty, I use that place to get it out, all the truth and all the inward material no one wants to see or believe. All the confusion. I used to expect things to be solved there, loose ends to be tied and puzzles to find their exact place. But that's not the point- the point is for me to realize that I am the puzzle, the pieces, the process. I am not seeking to find a way out of the struggle, but the realize that my place is in it. Because it's what I was made to be.

No one would believe me

2008-05-05T10:09:00.002-05:00

If you had been a part of the last month, you wouldn't believe me when I talk about peace. You wouldn't buy the whole redemption story or the idea of a speedy and dramatic recovery from selfishness or anger. You wouldn't believe that the blind could see or the lame could walk (or make good jokes). You wouldn't let me finish the story before letting me know that I was being idealistic and setting myself up for deeper or more lasting hurts. You might tell me that changes like that can't happen overnight, or even over a hospitalized weekend, but the light I though had permanently dimmed is somehow brighter than ever.

The story is true. The broken can be made whole in one moment. The persecutor can in one blinding encounter be totally transformed into a person with little resemblance to the former. It turns out the Biblical story has basis in life, real life, not just as a metaphor.

So for the skeptics, cynics, believers, and independents, this is my verbal recognition that I really don't know anything about life, love, godliness, or redemption until someone much greater than me steps in to my grey and paints in some color.

Thank you Brian, for willingly facing humiliation to make things right. It looks very much to me right now like the Cross.

Owning the criticism

2008-04-27T19:38:00.003-05:00

Interesting that constantly I hear about how Peter was so weak, and then "he was the only one to get out of the boat." Always the encouragement to be the person who "steps out on the water in faith." But I'm wondering why we feel the need to constantly focus on pre-Pentecost Peter and not the fierce warrior who provided leadership to the first organize community and ushered her in to an age without a visual Christ. This dynamic, fearless believer who shows no sign in the Bible of remaining in the limbo between the boat and the water.

So why focus on the early disciples, manufacturing stories that sound endearing toward Peter's naive view of faith, limiting his true power? I think if we have to admit that the disciples were chosen out of the world's forever population, we have to admit that we are in fact the small, childish ones. Not only would I not step out of the boat, I wouldn't have boarded in the first place.

We focus on the perceived flaws of the disciples of Christ so we don't have to face the truth: that out of all the people who ever lived, He chose Judas to mentor over me.

Could we have known?

2008-04-25T20:52:00.003-05:00

After reading the post from this summer about love, I see how my ideas about self have matured. It meant a lot to me to be pursued, met some internal need to have a visual for my value. But as I am right now, I have come to a calm, a peace, a self contentedness that really leaves little need for outside redemption.

Coming out of a past I hadn't expected into a present I hadn't dreamed, it seems displacing that I would so quickly change all my plans without fear. And it didn't lead me to great hope--very much the opposite-- the relational risk led me to chaos, drama like I had never seen and still feel really inadequate to handle. I should be bitter. I should be at least remorseful about seeing no beautiful pay off that churchily makes work worth something divine. But you know what, displacement isn't a season--it's life. For a person who believes that the world has woefully come short of love, compassion, and justice, it shouldn't be a surprise when I feel displaced from everything that America taught me to love. If every scripture of every religion is true in saying that something greater can be achieved here, I should feel a disconnect with the present. The present brokenness is only added motivation to be internally just.

I'm not upset about being mistreated. I am fully aware that greater acts of violence occur all over the world. I'm not bitter about being degraded. I acknowledge that women are made commodities globally, bought and traded, in reality or in conversation, for their assets and benefits, as soulless objects. I'm not even angry over the abuses that try to bastardize the truths I know--that life is about action, that every human being has worth by default of breathing, that God showers love without regard. Rather, I am motivated to war for a world of peace. If I can constantly go through the discipline of examining my internal layers for prejudices and hatreds, seeds of violences that could become actions, I have the potential to accomplish world peace, literally. If everyone I come in contact with experiences true and open acceptance, support, and sacrifice, for a moment my whole world can be at peace.

The only war worth fighting is the one inside my own damaged mind, fighting against the gut hate reaction and choosing to attempt something higher. Nothing short of justice could ever make a degraded person feel rightly elevated. There are too many forces in the world fighting to conceal the dignity of life and community; my fight is to return the human spirit to it's rightful place as the expression of God's love.

This is the part where it gets especially difficult: I have to recognize oppressors as human and needing that same dignity. I don't know what to do with that most of the time.

Never Wasted Time

2008-04-25T09:21:00.003-05:00

Do i have regrets? Isn't that a right of passage into some kind of official adulthood? But I can't find any wished outcomes or do-overs, even down deep under layers of mistakes and tears and unfulfilled promises. If regret ushers me into adulthood, maybe that's the meaning of child-like faith-- if I am open with Providence, He renews any wasted time. What could I regret when He is the reauthor of my story? Maybe one day I will stop trying to write the first draft and be content being a character and not the originator. I regret nothing.

I only hope to focus on the reality of my placement, taking joy and pride in my servanthood. I hope for a less edited tomorrow.

Passive Christians in a Culture of Violence

2007-12-17T17:26:00.001-06:00

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

2007-10-29T16:24:00.000-06:00

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

2007-07-08T10:47:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-19T19:27:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-03-18T17:13:00.000-06:00

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.