We Remain

the daydreaming mind

what a dangerous thing

bringing us to tangents and forks

in the already twisted roads

forced to a decision:

good or bad

chosen is the one

that points to fulfillment

all the while

its curves get sharp and wide

"dreadful, dreadful" we say

"how did i mistake this?" we ask

lonely and unaccompanied we began

and as lonely and unaccompanied

we begin to leave

the road seems longer than taken

but the distance feels lighter

we know only that the trek must be made

soles rubbed thin

souls feeling the last drip of water

we arrive

moonlit shadows fading

contradicting air we begin to breath

the new soul begins to gasp

spared we feel

lonely and unaccompanied we began

wholly filled and guided we remain

Chris showed me this band and their video on Vimeo the other day. Quite creative and toe tapping. I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved it.


Mt Desolation - Departure from BABANUKI films on Vimeo.

Coffee shops and unpurchased books

It is still in the chaos of absolute nothing-ness that I find myself sitting in a Borders and reading one of their books that I have not purchased, and I do not plan on purchasing, drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying the silence of their coffee shop. Though, I have had better coffee. My unpurchased book and I share a world together for about two hours and I finish in order to go home to a dinner. I return the next day to finish the same unpurchased book. I find it in its place and begin where I left off.

The Fates Will Find Their Way truly was a great novel. Quite raunchy at some parts, but great writing nonetheless. The review I did read on the novel revealed its similarity to The Virgin Suicides, which now ignites my curiosity of this novel. However, I have already started the 700 page The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb... but it seems to be losing me in the first one hundred pages. I read his two other novels, which were strange, yet nice, so I suppose I can't give up on him too soon.

As one can see, my "free" time (which is all the time at this point) is wrapped warmly into novels that take me to other worlds and charge the battery of my imagination. Great novels give my mind something new to think about, and it refreshes me. The novel, if written well, makes me think in metaphors and makes me articulate my words and sentences even better. It is the strangest of things. I begin to look at clouds and make up stories of how the weather man lied and now we are sitting here with clouds that tease their audience.

What the heck is wrong with me? I'm not Mary Shelley. But maybe there are some days that I wish I was. I wish I was this writer who wrote out of experience from passing street signs and from the beauty of what is around me. I wish I wrote pages and pages of these things, and these pages turned into novels and these novels would end up in someones hand at a bookstore, at a table with coffee and classical music, and it is being felt and it is being read. Purchased or unpurchased, it is read.

This dream is full of spandex, such a stretch, so until then, I will continue to be the reader; the other mover to this dance and live in other worlds of fictionalized characters.

Habba... no.. Habakuk.. no... Habakkuk.

"I am jobless and in 22 days, I will be 22. Wait, is it 22? I don't know. I hate the subject of Math and, well, I haven't been in school in two semesters, so two semesters without Math is almost the equivalent of a year to doing nothing, zero, nada in relation to Math. I should get back into school. Elgin Community College. I still need to research it. Guess I'm taking summer classes. But first, a job... continue to submit my resume like it is on fire in my hands and in my hard drive."

This seems to be my mindset on, at least, an every-other-daily basis. I mean, it is this mindset that is driving more and more of my Bible reading, talking and listening to God more, so I guess it is not so bad. It is the mindset that leads me to different coffee shops around the area of my house and makes me realize that Starbucks is not all it is cracked up to be - Caribou Coffee blows them out of the water - and that "[i]roning out faithless creases is toilsome." (Quote taken from Donald Miller's "Through Painted Deserts").

I am coming to see the reason why this season is taking place. God is speaking and He is ever-moving around me and in me. Just the other day, I had this feeling that I just needed to spend time with Him, because it had been a neglect on my part. I got off of the phone with Chris, turned on worship music and let the darkness of my room envelope me. I closed my eyes and just listened... something I had not done in a long time, and by the grace of God, it came through Olivia as a reminder.

So I sat there and then Kim Walker's version of "How He Loves" came on. I almost got up to turn it, when God said, "No. I need to to hear this. I need you to understand how much I love you." So I closed my eyes again, quite afraid of what would happen and the next thing I knew, I was crying. I felt like a child. I felt all of the holes that had been making their way inside of me start to peel away and heal again. I felt Him loving me. It was the most beautiful, most amazing feeling one could ever encounter and He was letting me, the impatient, imperfect human being feel just a part of His heart for me.

Slowly, there were a lot of things that were starting to make perfect sense. I understood why He told me "Not yet" for missions in this season and why He took me away from everyone I love. I won't go into great detail, but I will say that I know for sure that this is a season of change and I am so excited for what He has in store along the way. I kept thinking of this great revelation I had and the word "revelation" kept replaying in my head. I wrote down the things He told me and tacked them to my board to serve as reminders. I then wanted to open the Bible for a second to get a scripture when it just fell open to Habakkuk. Now, I have never actually read the book of Habakkuk and I don't even know how to pronounce it. In fact, I just spelled it wrong until I Googled the correct spelling. But I was drawn to chapter 2. I then read these words:

"Then the LORD replied:

“Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay."

"UM!" That was my initial reaction. I felt myself finally breathe and it felt like the wall of guilt and shame was broken down. He truly loves us and wants to see us succeed in this life under His will. What a beautiful, kind and loving God He is, and what a season of change this will be. Who knows what he is up to now. I have seen what He has done thus far in my almost 22 years of life -through my own redemption and through my high schoolers own redemptions.

I know that I have written a lot, so kudos to the one who actually reads this or any of my blogging rants. I truly hope you know and come to realize how much you're loved, how much listening is just as important to reading your Bible or praying, and how Caribou Coffee is so much better than Starbucks.

Roots

I'm standing in the shuttle back to the parking lot, holding on for dear life to the strap that binds itself to a metal bar, making me friends with gravity on this insanely fast shuttle. There is an older couple in front of me, who seem to have just come back from some time in Cancun or Madrid; I can't decipher through his "I <3 Madrid" and "I <3 Cancun" keychains that dangle from his backpack.

I start to ponder their life. Married for more than a century, retired, always dreamt of traveling and now they're living that very dream. Wherever they're from, I have this increasing jealousy running through my bones. It is because they are together and they are doing these things together. What a rush. Well, who knows, maybe they just got back from Uncle Bob's funeral in Utah.

What ever it is, they're not in my point of life. The point in my life where I packed up my 21 years of living into boxes and began... again. I began again in a new state, beginning with new little roots and new pages to a new book. Sure, exciting and exhilarating as it may seem, I feel the hole eating at me. The hole where my friends used to be, the hole where my kids were, the hole where Little Road connected Spring Hill and Trinity together - the incredibly, unnecessary hole that hurts at the thought of anything pertaining to "home". Strange, I never thought that I would call New Port Nowhere "home". It seems that it has come to that, though.

I am not complaining. I would feel selfish and wrong for complaining, because God wants me here. I know for sure He does, and who knows why, but He does. I don't want to question His ability to turn holes and nothingness into something-ness. Because He can. So, I am sitting here with these little micro-holes in my chest (how Dashboard Confessional of me) just trusting and waiting on His timing and His surprise to bring that new community that I am so antsy for. He knows how much I need it.

I mean, my gosh,  what would I have done without Chelsea? Holly? Olivia? Andrea? Liz? Natalie? Nicollette? I do not know. They were my best cheerleaders and still are. So, I am trusting Him in that.

God, it's just hard. It's hard because I am not the age of the travelers I see; the ones who wear their travels on their backpacks. I am merely 21, following your will for my life and I am finding out that taking up my cross and following you daily is sometimes going to require sacrifice, heartache and leaving people I love. My travels will be marked through blogging and through pages of my journal that Chelsea bought me. While I know I am not those travelers, I am on a journey that is far more exciting than the beaches of Cancun and the mountains in Madrid. I trust in You, and that is all I know to do at this point. Bring it on.

15 Minute Empathy

They all seem to be the same. Proudly toting guns like toys and toting ideas that are just as venomous. They blend into the melting pot of society, just waiting to go off. When the blast finally takes place, those affected seem to multiply. Soon enough, we are one mass-blob of comfort in all the chaos. It is as if the blast set off every empathy button in every human being across one nation.

And I think that is the idea that buries itself deep into my skin and has an irritable itch. The idea that it takes a person who is a ticking time bomb to finally let lose their rage in some massacre and then, and only then, can people feel something for other people. And you know those people; they're the unknown faces across the nation that, even if you don't know them personally, you somehow feel connected to them because you saw what happened on the news or read their story in the paper. But once the news is done with the story and the story itself is done with its 15 minutes of unintentional-fame, the empathy button is no longer clicked to its "On" position.

So I wonder... I wonder why it takes earthquakes in Haiti or Spain, hijacked planes, deranged human beings, or any other of Mother Nature's pains to awaken the compassion within us.  None can deny that it's truly there, because without it we would be soulless. I'm not kidding. If you go to onto Thesaurus.com and put in "Empathy" a synonym shown is "soul". So does that mean when the breaking news of the week has faded and our monotonous routine of life continues on - we have all become soulless... again? I don't know.

However, I do know that I cannot jump the bandwagon of 15 minute empathy, because the bandwagon always comes to a stopping point. If it takes these great calamities to unite us for a brief moment and that's when we realize we are not alone, then there is a lot of work to be done. Work that is not going to involve the flash of breaking news bulletins. It has to be every single day, even for the things that go unseen or unheard. I can't tell you what horrible tragedy will happen next, but I can say that my soul has already been awakened to the compassion within me. Surely, it is not of me at all and I take no credit, but I do say that if we can understand that there is wrong in this world, then we can unite every single day; not once-every-tragedy.

Categorical Christianity

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand it, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”

–Soren Kierkegaard

More than I would like to lately, I have been thinking about the type of Christian I am. Am I the lax one? The comfortable one? The "don't pull me out of my bubble" one? The "I'll do anything for you, God" one? I feel that there may be even more categories to fall into - and that alone is scary enough to think about. It also makes me wonder how God looks down and sees those who have actually come back to Him and found the redemption and freedom He so lovingly offers, to be doing nothing with their faith. I would imagine it being like someone making a huge investment in some kind of company, with hopes of making some kind of profit or seeing the growth of the company happen, but then nothing happens. The investment that that person made turned around, not be a failure, but abandonment.

That is because it takes two sides in order to see something like that flourish. What does it look like when God hands you everything (Romans 8:11),  and we set it aside like we still have our plans to do and we will get to that stuff later? I even find it incredibly contradictive of myself to act as if I have any say into my life, especially if I have just screamed out in worship, "Where You go, I go. What You say, I say, God. What You pray, I pray." and then turned around and so flippantly continue down the same exact road. Who do I think I am?

If we are saying we want God to take it all, what exactly is our "all?" Is it a few things here and there? Because sometimes I find myself struggling with this, and what it boils down to is that it is a huge pride issue. I cannot let some things go in my life because I think I can do it better. Meanwhile, God begins to build his garden of thornbushes to wall me in (Hosea 2:6) because He knows, oh, He knows, my path is only destructive to myself, and that His plans are beyond my imagination.

I cannot and will not allow myself to become some categorical Christian. I need to challenge myself more in my Christianity. I need to challenge myself in my relationship with God, to break from the mediocrity that the world hands out like flyers. I need to challenge myself in my relationships with my friends. I should make sure that I am a great friend in the sense that I am encouraging and rooting my friends on in their relationship with God. I should even be a great friend to those who don't know Jesus - but not fall into old habits.

It is such a process, but it is so worth it. When Jesus was telling his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." It is a process that is to be done daily, not weekly, not monthly or yearly. God wants every single bit of us, every single day. That is your investment back to God. That is where the flourishing happens. It just takes us to cut off the head of pride - because it is eating us all alive.

C.S. Lewis put pride this way: "If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."