It's OK, Chick-Fil-A, I didn't want to go to your dumb bowl anyway

Because I'm going to be in Atlanta in two days! I'm going on Passion 2010, and, as David Crowder has been involved with Passion stuffs, I figured I'd post some lyrics which make me feel better.

There’s a darkness in my skin
My cover’s wearing thin, I believe
I’d love to start again, go back to innocent
And never leave

Don’t give up now
A break in the clouds
We could be found

There’s nothing wrong with me
It’s just that I believe things could get better
And there’s nothing wrong with love
I think it’s just enough to believe

Don’t give up now
A break in the clouds
We could be found

Rescue is coming
Rescue is coming
Rescue is coming
Rescue is coming

And there’s nothing wrong with you
And nothing left to do
But believe something bigger
And there’s nothing wrong with love
I know it’s just enough to believe

Don’t give up now
A break in the clouds
We will be found

Rescue is coming
Rescue is coming
Rescue is coming
Rescue is coming now

-Rescue is Coming, David Crowder* Band

With Promises of Future Hopeful Reconsideration

You ever believe in something?

I’m not talking about the big ideals here, like Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love or anything like that, I’m talking about something small. Maybe you believed the Wicked Witch of the West really was real, her and her flying monkeys. Maybe you believed there was sincerely something in the dark, something that you wouldn’t want to meet in the light. Maybe you believed you were really a princess (I hear all girls do this to some degree) and you just waited on the day that Mr. and Mrs. King would drive up and take you to your castle. Or maybe you feel victim to a misconception. Maybe you thought that stars were something you could pick up a handful of, since the Enterprise flies past them so easily (shout out to Sir Patrick Stewart) or maybe you thought that the proximity of Earth to the Sun causes the seasons. Maybe you believed in your brain of brains that library was spelled with one ‘r.’

Maybe you believed something bigger and crazier. Maybe you believed he really loved you, he was just too afraid to say something. Maybe you believed you could make it somewhere big or make a difference in the world. Maybe you believed that this generation is the generation, the one that’s going to make this world a better place. Maybe you believed that, at the core, we’re all good.

Favorite new word of the day: Mythopoeia. It means the making of myths or something like that. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you google it to confirm and contradict. And the truth is, as humanity, we like to make up myths. We like to explain things away with new little lies and we like to put importance where importance isn’t due. Like the New Year, for example. It’s a new beginning, a time to start over, a time to empty your bank accounts so the government doesn’t take the money you haven’t saved for a car you’re not going to get when you fill out your FAFSA, a time for When Harry Met Sally, a time when we pretend like we all have the self will and confidence to keep up with a list resolutions that will somehow make our lives better. New Year’s gets myth status. Anyone else remember Rudolph’s Shiny New Year?

But really, it’s just another day. You can be encouraging and you can say that, in that case, every day is a new chance to be someone better, to renew those resolutions and that determination to improve the world around you (and I mean quite immediately around you) and so every day is New Year’s, just like every day when there’s peace and goodwill towards men (or towards those upon whom His favor rests, I never remember which is the official version) is Christmas. It’s the idea, the spirit behind the thing. In the spirit of honesty, I’d have to say it’s all a lie. But in the spirit of Having Something to Believe In, I’d say it’s worth keeping around.

And I do have to say that I’m a bit biased against New Year’s. It’s a time to think about the year that’s passed and I’d rather not. And it’s a time to think about the year to come, and I’d rather not. I’d rather run up to the mountains and find me a nice cave with a space heater close to a fast food restaurant than think about where I’ve been or where I’m going (or where I am for that matter). I don’t know what resolutions I’d make. I’m inclined to say none. Aren’t I great just as I am? Nope, never good enough. Welcome to my world.

You know, I had this stalker (and I use the term as derisively as possible, because I’m a terrible and heartless person with no intention of repentance on this without a divine edict) who sent me a message on Facebook asking, “How do I get to know you?” No ‘Hi, how are you, I was just wondering what was going on in your world,’ no ease into the conversation and no reason for it at all, just “How do I get to know you?” And because I’m a nice, indulgent person, I sent some witty and guarded reply back, but I was willing to start the pathetic excuse for a friendship that Facebook messaging offers. It turns out that he had been reading my blog (privacy settings updated? I think so) and he wanted to know if I was a ‘Super Christian’, meaning that I believed in heaven and hell. I personally think that there’s a lot more to Christianity beyond heaven and hell, but he asked me a theological question, and, like the sucker I am, I bit. I wrote long replies which he answered with long replies. I became the dumping ground of atheistic logic and lack thereof, coming from someone who had had a close, personal relationship with God and then realized that it’s all a lie. I was tempted to put air quotes around the close, personal relationship so we would all be aware that it’s a lie. A semester with Bennie taught me well.

So I blew him off. He told me that it sounded like I believed what I believed because I had believed it my whole life and because I didn’t like the things he was proposing. (As a side note, What meaning can you possibly find in a Universe completely ruled by random chance and odd happenings? How do you marvel at the beauty of something if you think that we make up beauty? How do you get out of bed in the morning and say, ‘Hey, I think that all my happy feelings are created by chemicals in my body and all of the purpose I put into my day is entirely self-imposed and partially a reflection of the society in which I was raised so I’m just going to breathe another breath because it’s a survival instinct and go about my day’? And I’m not saying that that’s a defense of God, I’m saying that we have a reason to live beyond chemicals and I’m not saying that just because I have a bias against chemists. I do love Sherlock Holmes. End side note.) I tried as politely as I could- OK, that’s a lie, I layered on caustic sarcasm as I told him that I obviously haven’t thought out a thing about what I believe and that I hoped he would find what he was looking for. Then I deleted him from my friends list and blocked him and there’s another Christian unwilling to listen to an atheist out in the world.

And it’s not that I’m unwilling to listen, it’s that I have listened and I have thought, just not enough to have a watertight argument against the first thing that’s thrown at me. How is God any different than New Year’s Eve? He makes you think about where you’ve been and what you want to be better about and He gives you a new beginning. How do I know that God isn’t as made up as the end of the year (and slightly less accurate to boot, which is a lark, considering how terrible our calendars are and the fact that we have to add extra seconds every so many years and a whole day every once in a while, I mean, who thought that up, we should redefine the second so we can live our lives without this confusion, just pick another atom with a different electron transition, geeze)?

I don’t have an answer for that. I have my beliefs and my experiences and my hopes, all of which could be lies. And at the end of the metaphorical day, when humanity has explained everything away, when we have probed the fathoms of the deep and the depths of the soul and compiled it all neatly in a data storage space, in short, when we have lost our curiosity and our humanity, there may not be room for God and the people of the future will shake their heads at our quaint beliefs.

Remember Job? There’s this chunk in there, maybe someone put it in later, maybe the original author really meant for it to be there, but he talks about knowing that his Redeemer lives, someone who will plead his case before God and make God answer for what He’s done and why He’s done it. I don’t want to make ice cream castles in the air of faith, you know? I don’t want to cheapen someone’s faith or take them away from it. But we think, we love, we laugh, we cry, we feel, we are fearfully and wonderfully made and we deserve a Redeemer, we deserve a reason. A reason for this damn doubt, for this painful world, for this irredeemable sin. For believing, for not believing, for creating, for not stopping, for not knowing what He stopped, for living in this haze of a mystery, effing unnamed deity leading us onto confusion.

But I’m going to wake up, God willing. And maybe that’s reason enough for now.

To Be Taken Entirely Seriously, in an Slightly Overly Dramatic Fashion

Can I say that I'm miserable? And it's entirely my own fault. Do you people spent this much time in self-reflection? I am an unmotivated failure who has spent too much time trying to remove the stress in her life to actually be stressed, up until the time when I can no longer keep myself calm. Maybe I should have picked something that was more within my reach, something that I actually have a skill and talent for, but that would have seemed like quitting, like I wasn't good enough to finish the major I'm in. Which I'm not. I don't care enough to devote my every waking moment to it and I'm not smart enough to breeze by without really working and reworking and then working a couple more times the practice problems so I can gain the skill set that is applying physical principles to physics problems. I am not a critical thinker. You tell me to do something, I do it, this is my life. I am the eternal lab tech of life: I run test after test with instructions that were given to me without the thought that one day I might think up an experiment of my own. And it's my fault because I'm lazy. And then I whine because I'm lazy and horrid and apathetic and pathetic and too prideful to admit any of these things to anyone but myself including God who knew them in the first place.

And let's just talk about God for a second. I swear, He let me pick this absurd choice in life just so I would know that I can make sadly low grades and still breathe, that I can fail and fail and fail again and so I would know what it was like to be unable and unprepared to do something that I set out to do but never put my mind to. Don't get me wrong- somewhere deep in the recesses of my exhausted and pained brain, I do like physics, a little. Not enough to date, you understand, but just enough to have the occasional vaguely pleasant conversation so I'd remember why we weren't spending the rest of our lives together. I really think that this is one of the ways we can get to know more about the Person who put all this together and the ways we mess it up. I love it when people talk about atoms and subatomic particles and quarks and quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space-time in the inflationary epoch which might have lead to the large scale structure we see in the universe today. I love thinking about the way particles communicate with each other, never having to open tiny mouths and say words that might confuse others in order to change the temperature of a system or the concentration of a solution or the density of a gas cloud that may collapse in order to put new pinpricks of light in our night sky far in our future or deep in their past. It's epic, how it was all built up, so skillfully, so perfectly, so that we can look out and wonder.

And ignore.

How wretched I am! I was walking down Franklin the other day and I saw a homeless man in his wheelchair and I was looking so intensely at the ground that he said, "Look up, girl, it's going to be all right." And I smiled and said thanks and walked by and bought my Christmas presents and walked back by and never said another word. Cold callous heart. But I don't know that it would help. I don't know what to do to help and so I just shut down, I just bow my head and shut off and never do anything to help anyone. And then I sit in church on Sunday and I can't think of anything to say to my Lord because I ignored Him before so why should He listen to me now? What right do I have to stand before Him, to sit sadly on a white wooden pew and pretend like this is the most important thing to me? He may have been beating down my pride this semester, but other things took its place and they weren't His and then there's no point. It's like cleaning out a fridge, getting rid of the milk that's going to go bad and the salsa that's been bad, only to shove a pizza box and embezzled cheese back inside. Man, good thing I had to defrost my fridge, otherwise I'd been stuck with that stuff.

Well, I say good thing. Me and my roommate complained about it for weeks and didn't want to do it and waited until the last possible second to get rid of everything. Then I sat down with the Clorox wipes and set to wiping everything out, but because it's been so cold, the skin on my fingers is all cracked and bleeding and it wasn't exactly pleasant to rid the fridge and freezer of its grossness. It's never a pleasant job anyway but this turned it into a slightly painful unpleasant job. Funny thing, though, we didn't change anything on the outside- the Cinderella magnets, campus health magnet, football (arg) magnet and NASA magnet all stayed in place. Even Galileo and his tiny stuffed telescope could keep their home while a major overhaul occurred on the inside. But it'll smell a lot better in there and now it's open to better keep more desirable things safe from ruination by the outside world.

We were also talking about how we should probably clean out the fridge more often, like every time we vacuumed or something like that, just so it never got this bad again. How true. If we'd go through more often and make sure that old pieces of cake, outdated containers of yogurt or moldy macaroni and cheese (of which there was none in my fridge, I'm happy to say) got thrown out before they started stinking up the place and if we wiped down the inside every once in a while, it'd never be this bad. It's just when you ignore it and put other things in the way [like exams, you know, things that in no way determine your future life despite their detrimental effects on an already ailing grade point average (3.5 math and physics GPA to write an honors thesis, no wonder there's only been one in the past ten years -insert hysterical giggle here-)] that life gets messy.

And I'm trying to decide how sad it is that the perfect metaphor for my spiritual life (and my real world life, let's be honest) is a mini-fridge.

Happy snow day, all. May we remember, amidst the exciting potential of the first white Christmas of my life and all the craziness that we put upon ourselves this time of year, that the little baby whose birth we celebrate came to fix His world which we broke. Thank God He comes every year.

What Would I Give

What would I give to be pure in heart
To be pure in flesh and bone
What would I give to be pure in heart
I’d give everything that I own
I’d rid my whole house of its demons of lust
And open the windows of trust
And out of those windows all fear will have flown
I’d give everything that I own

What would I give for the words of God
To come tumbling from the throne
What would I give for the words of God
I’d give everything that I own
I’d open my head and they’d roll right in
When I opened my mouth they’d roll out again
And uproot the weeds of the deeds I have sown
I’d give everything that I own

Now what would I give for my children’s strength
On the day that they stand alone
I mean what would I give for their strength to stand firm
I’d give everything that I own
I’ve wasted my life in accomplishing things
Ignoring the giver of wings
So Lord teach them to fly to the foot of your throne
I’ll give everything that I own

All I’ve accomplished, the titles I hold
My passions, position, possessions and gold
To God they must look like a thimble of foam
And it’s everything that I own
Dirty rags are all that I own

So I stand before God with my stubble and hay
He just laughs, but says there’s still a way
Because “Father, Forgive” are the words Jesus moaned
When He gave everything that He owned

So what would I give to be pure in heart
For the known to be made unknown?

-Jason Gray

And the funny thing is, out of all of the things that could occupy my head and probably should be occupying my head, all the self-righteous anger I adopt in protest at others' pain, this is what He shoves in, this song that I grudgingly put onto my MP-3 player that I reluctantly put on shuffle as I sat down to grade papers. This prayer has just been sitting here, waiting on me to come to it. It's advent is over. And though mine shouldn't be just starting, it is. Excitedly waiting, not just bewailing the hours until I can trudge away again. Oh, the things I could have been! Oh, the things that could be still. What would I give, to really mean the things I say and the things I pray, to be the person that I hoped I could be instead of the person I've settled on being? As a good friend of mine told me, never settle.

I want to fly. And I'm leaving the things that are weighing me down. One. By. One.

Quote of the Minute

One of my fav quotes from Love Actually, just thought I'd share.

Daniel: [laughs] Aren't you a bit young to be in love?
Sam: No.
Daniel: Oh, well, okay... right. Well, I mean, I'm a little relieved.
Sam: Why?
Daniel: Well, because I thought it would be something worse.
Sam: [incredulous] Worse than the total agony of being in love?
Daniel: Oh. No, you're right. Yeah, total agony.

Also, Daniel is played by Liam Neeson, who is also the voice of Aslan, who's really just a stand in for Jesus, therefore, it's true. And now I'm going to go cross myself and head off to confession for blasphemy. Have a lovely evening, everyone.

Two Points

Welcome to basketball season.

Can I tell you what a miserable day it is outside today? It's rainy and cold but not cold enough to deliver the promised snow. I haven't seen the sun since yesterday and the trees shake bony fingers at me as I watch the wind push their bare branches around. It's miserable, borderline depressing. Any day that makes you grateful for artificial lighting and an allergy-inducing heating system has to be miserable.

Now Tuesday, that was a fine night. The moon was full and high in the sky with a lovely ring decorating it as we walked out of the Smith Center, warmed by friends and a pretty great game. It was still cold, but it wasn't miserable. And of course, it helped that we won.

But you know, I'm not as upset about today's game as I could be. I mean, we're a young team and Kentucky's in the top 5 for a reason. Excuses aside (because we're not as bad as we played in the first half, as Roy said), I'm glad because it was just a 2-point loss. I'm glad because they fought back and they worked and even if they didn't get all the way there, they tried. The effort wasn't the best in the first half, but they came back from that. We didn't lose by 19. And that's my point.

Just in case you thought I was only going to talk about basketball, I'll throw in a little bit of a life lesson at the end, just to prove that I can tear myself away from our boys on the hardwood. Life can be compared to a lot of things, but my recent life was like that basketball game: it started out decent, fell completely to pieces while somebody beat me at my own game, and came back together towards the end. And, like my poor Heels, I just can't seem to win this game. No matter how I try, the attempts aren't falling the way they should and I walk away slightly dejected. But only slightly. Because I tried and because I learned. Because I fight and because I come back and because I'm not going to let this get me down forever. That makes the difference between losing and being a loser.

So, in a couple of games, if they still haven't figured out the whole turnover thing and the whole let's-make-a-gosh-durn-free-throw thing, I'm going to point back to what Roy said after the game: "This is North Carolina. We're supposed to come back. There are no moral victories in this." And there's not. But there's the chance to be better and there's the knowledge that they can come back. It's not a hopeless cause. And as everything reminds me that exams are around the corner, I need to know that life, even beyond exams, isn't a hopeless cause.

Because My Blog was Feeling Lonely

I'm a terribly inconsistent blogger. If it makes you feel any better, you're mentioned in the novel I wrote this past month. I spoke to my dear readers quite often when I couldn't for the life of me think of anything else to say. You served to be my outlet of literary analysis. Unfortunately, I feel like all my intelligence went into writing this thing (which is hardly worth reading, much less printing, though if you want a laugh bad writing and a nonsensical story line you're welcome to it- I'll fix it up one day) and so my everyday thoughts were much stupider. Some of my favorites:

Where is my notebook?

I should really give up Facebook. Right about now. Nope, not happening.

I wonder if I could give up basketball for Lent. Hahahaha.

Why do I do my best writing between 11-2 at night/morning?

Why is my best writing so terrible?

No, seriously, where is my notebook? Ahhhhhhh....

Why do I consistently fail at English?

Why is occasionally so hard to spell?

Haha. Lettuce. Haha.

But seriously, lettuce? It doesn't even look like...

Notebook? Notebook notebook notebook?

Screw physics. I'm going to drop out of college and... well, drop out of college at any rate.

Also, screw boys. They're jerks.

PS- Love of my life, you're not a jerk. You're just very confusing. Please don't walk out of my life again. Love, Addie Jo.

I hate football. And bowl games. I hate the football team. Eff eff eff. Gee.. eye...

How do you say H phonetically? ache? ... incorrect.

Maybe I left my notebook in Phillips? In Hill? At the Planetarium?

How have I never seen a complete Bond movie?

Sometimes I think people just cut their hair for attention. But mine bounces now!

Taking apart your TV is fun!

Studying for exams is not!

I always feel so productive when I write out my schedule.

And now I don't, because I haven't done a thing on it.

Blogging isn't on my schedule. Maybe I should write that down.

How does your building not have a lost and found? I need my notebook!!!!

Also, snow? Haha snow. Snow and lettuce and icicles. And two cool points for those people who are laughing right now. And two innocent points for those of you not.

And, sadly, I probs won't be blogging much until... well, when life gets less busy. So we're shooting for late April. Don't hate me. I'll probably procrastinate, so that's four posts in the next two weeks alone. Bon courage, mes amis! The time is at hand! Happy Advent, kids!


A random sign from my first group of kids over the summer. Enjoy the random.

Fitting

This has been the year of fitting into black dresses that weren't bought for me.

I first encountered this problem earlier this semester, right around my awesome and wonderful birthday, when Christine, Pam and I went to the opera. Having never been to an opera that wasn't put on by the opera class at UNC, I had nothing, I felt, that was appropriate to wear. Christine had been Target shopping online but one of the dresses she had bought didn't suit her the way she wanted. I tried it on and through much effort and lack of breath, I got into it and looked pretty good in it. I wore it to the opera and it sits in my closet as my current little black dress.


I had to once again go dress hunting this week because I needed a formal dress for the Jupiter Ball at the Planetarium. Miranda and I wandered down to Time After Time, the thrift shop down Franklin. I had gotten my Halloween costume for last year from there and that had been a nice dress, so I figured I'd try my luck. Fifty bright pink, purple, green and yellow dresses and about three million and two sequins later, I found a formal length black dress. It looked like it might could fit, so I walked back into the dressing room and proceeded to try it on. That was an adventure in itself and there were many moments were I was sure that I was going to get stuck like that forever and have to ask someone to come in and cut me out of the dress, but I got it on. And I looked pretty good in it. I wore it for six hours last night and it's hanging up in my closet as my back-up formal dress.

And after all, why shouldn't I be able to wear those dresses and look good in them? It's what I've been doing my whole life.

I swear, my whole life I've been looking for something to put on that'll make me look nice and fit the world I'm stepping into and my whole life I've found something that was never mine but that I looked pretty good in. I've paid for my black dresses and smiled at the compliments, all the while knowing that I can't really breathe or be functional in them, and those things were made to be looked at in, not to pick up programs around the Star Theater in, tell me you. All my life, I've been looking to see how I fit into the clothes that someone else has worn.

And the annoying thing is, I fit. OK, maybe it's not easy to get into it, but I'm close enough, you know? And the people around me think that I'm great in what I've been in. Imagine, then, what I could look like in a dress that was actually made for me, tailored so well that I'm not sure that I wasn't made for the dress instead of the dress being made for me. Imagine what each of us would look like in clothes like that.

Now you all know that I'm not talking about dresses anymore. Maybe you're one of those people who follows my life with intense anticipation... OK, since those people don't exist, maybe you know that I went to Exploration a week ago yesterday and maybe you've been wondering what I learned, if I decided anything. I hope you haven't been impatiently awaiting a blog post on it(since apparently I can only express myself in writing mass distributed across the internets) because then I would have to use the excuse that I needed time to reflect on it. Really, I don't think I did. I don't think I even needed to go to discern what I was supposed to do. I'm pretty sure I've known for longer than I want to admit that I was going to end up settling on ordination and living my life out in the church (don't judge). But let me 'splain.

See, I'm kinda angry at the church at times, like a lot of my friends are, because it's not living up to what it's supposed to be. OK, my friends are generally angry at her because she's full of hypocrites and judgmental liars and because she has a long history of hate and violence. And in some sense, I am too. But I have no room to talk; to quote one of the speakers at Exploration, "The church is not perfect but I am the church too." Man, I needed to go just to hear that (and to get an exorbitantly large amount of free bags and pens and to have my nice new blanket given to me and taken away from me and you know how attached I get to things I sleep with [yeah, I went there {anyway}]). The speaker before that, and really the speakers the whole weekend, talked about how we can change the church by the way we live our lives and the way we lead, regardless of whether you end up ordained or as a lay leader. I was watching the NOOMA we're going to watch in Double-C tomorrow and Rob Bell says that you have to own up to your name, to your past, good and bad because it's yours. We as the church have to own up to our collective past, good and bad, and work to make our future better, to help heal wounds and loosen the grip that history has on us. We are the church. "Church, choose to do something different."

Which I can do. Listen, kids, we can change the world. Listen, everyone, we can change the world. We can be better. We can help build the church into what she was meant to be, we can help the kingdom come on Earth, we can be a force for good, might for right, as TH White's King Arthur might say. We don't have to sit still and let a load of good organization, good connections and good people go to waste. We have such potential. Don't let anyone tell you different. "When the wind blows, things move." Things are moving, my friends, and I'm excited.

Because I know where it's coming from. It's the same place that hope and wonder and bushes that are not consumed come from. It's where love comes from. It's where this crazy, stupid, heartfelt, wonderful idealism comes from. It's from this deep, deep well of living water and we have to tell some people about it. How bad I am at this! How inadequate! There has to be someone better. You know, there always is.

But I'm thankful. At least I know my dress fits.

Break in the Action

I'm promising myself that I'll get to that darn E&M soon enough (midterm on Tuesday, entire lack of studying, in way over my head, 30% of my grade, panic, panic, panic), but there's a lot on my mind and so I'll get back to studying when there's room for it.

I've felt a little bit of vicarious pain this week. A friend's grandfather died and she was really close to him and her step-grandmother is being rather unkind throughout the whole ordeal. One of those times when you really just want to make it better, but you can't. Another friend's aunt is in the ICU and I don't even know this woman, but I know that in this accident there's pain for another family that doesn't need it. Other friends are stressed out about school work, job work, auditions, concerts, papers, midterms part two, just life and you want to sit back and say that God is good and life is wonderful, but that sounds a bit hollow considering that you're jittery from coffee and complaining about the same stuff. Some friends are looking at life after graduation and some are just looking at life and it's not the bright frontier we always wanted it to be. Life's tough. And I'm not going to fix that today.

Hmm, but I've also felt some joy. My friends, I wish I could explain to you how wonderful it is to come out of that darkness that is doubt. Did you know that most of the psalms are songs of community lament? So says my Hebrew Bible teacher. In any case, they're not all happy, like Psalm 42, which I always thought was.

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?
My tears have been my food
day and night, while people say
to me continually,
"Where is your God?"

But you can't just stop there, or a few lines from there. Read all the way to the end and you get the gist of my life. "Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God." The psalmist isn't over everything, he hasn't just been gloriously blessed, his problems solved and his dreams exceeded by the good that has just flooded into his life. Where is your God, people ask? And the psalmist doesn't know. He even asks God where He is, but it's not like God comes out of the clouds, surprise. Hmm, but "deep calls to deep," and God loves, my friends. God loves deeply. And it's so good to have that answer. No, it doesn't stop genocide. No, it doesn't heal all the sick. No, it doesn't stop the pain. But it helps me live through it. It carries us through so that when people ask where our God is, we can say that He's right here. He's been with me all along and now, with His help, I'm going to be a part of His making it better. Through me, He's going to fix the world. And if the world doesn't get fixed, that's not Him. That's the flaw of humanity, but humanity, even with its flaws, is worth fighting for.

I was walking back to my dorm after a meeting tonight and a friend was carrying my backpack because I'm lame (and so, so punny). We were talking about life and she said something like, 'There's no one thing that's making my life stupendous right now, but there are a lot of little things that are going right, getting me through the day.' And it's so true. Most of the time, we don't have the sun, but we do have wonderful stars, that are much farther away but much brighter, in and of themselves.

We kept on walking and we got to talking about my current position in our fraternity and she said, 'You're doing fine. Everything comes easy for you,' or 'You're good at everything.' And I'm sitting here thinking, What? I am an epic fail at existence. OK, maybe not epic fail, but there are so many things that I want to be better at. I don't think that anything I do is worth having done, which is crazy frustrating. It amazes me, every day, how much people can believe in you so much more than you believe in yourself. Eventually, though, you're going to have to shoulder that load yourself and know that you can do all things through Him who gives you strength.

Because the world's going to need that someday. From each of us.

Man, I take a midterm on Tuesday and turn in a problem set, take another one on Thursday and turn a problem set and a paper in early so I can get on a plane Friday to go to Dallas to settle this whole calling thing. Psh, and then there's a life after this weekend- I have another midterm on Monday, the Children's Radio-thon on Thursday, a concert the next Monday and then -breathe in- Thanksgiving -breathe out-.

But there's always another corner to turn and I'm hoping that it's coming this weekend. And if not, and if I'm setting way too much store on these few days, then the corner will be just down the block from that. It's always there. Such is life. Sweet, sweet life.

Marching

So I'm sitting on Clifford (that's the name of the futon when it has a blue cover on- I'm big on irony) because I pulled a muscle in my back at or after the basketball game last night (I honestly think it was after that epic block- half the game, I know, right?- I did this weird jump for joy kick thing and felt something pop) and now I can't walk down the hall without looking like an 80 year old who's lost their walker. Sad but true. So I figured, before I started studying to forget my pretty deep sadness at missing not only this halftime show but my last pregame of the season and what promises to be a game, I'd search youtube for some fun UNC Marching Band clips. Enjoy, especially the drum show.

And the bowl game last year.

And Sebastian catching the football. I was right in front of him.

And just our regular pregame festivities.

Realized Love From Down the Hall

He's tugging. Can you feel it?

Here is a testimony to God loving you in your lives, my friends. Or a testimony of God loving me in my life when He knows, when He knows that I don't deserve it. What kind of wonderful miracle is He working when He chooses now, when I am fully and occasionally painfully aware of how what I'm doing is so very wrong, He chooses now to pull me back to Him?

One of these days, I'll find a way to say what I'm feeling right now. And I wonder where do these dreams go, when the world gets in your way? The love of my life just waltzed in for a day yesterday and I could have floated through my day, but I have a friend who has a story that just kills that joy. I have no right to be happy. And so I'm not.

But this, friends, this is more than a boy paying me attention that I never thought I'd get again. That's gone so fast. But this, this is a pull, this is a tug, this is an Almighty storm come down to bring me back to Him. Because it doesn't matter about everything that my head put in my way. My heart came home, my heart searched better than anything my head could ever have done. My heart listened. And it's hard to ignore a hurricane, but we're so good at it, aren't we? My friends, God is good. And maybe it doesn't seem like that right now, and maybe it doesn't seem like He loves you, but believe me, He's working on you. He's working. He's working.



David Crowder Band, How He Loves (courtesy of Pam, who lives down the hall)

He is jealous for me,
Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden,
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.

And oh, how He loves us so,
Oh how He loves us,
How He loves us all

Yeah, He loves us,
Oh! how He loves us,
Oh! how He loves us,
Oh! how He loves.

We are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
And Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way…

A Raft

[Disclaimer for Rachel, should she end up reading this: He's all yours, once I forget that I've read this book. And you're more than welcome to beat me down if I've read a moral into something that had no moral value at all. Just sayin'.]

I am in love with another captain of the guard.

Due to the wonderfulness that is fall break, my homework and required reading has gathered the most minute amount of dust possible as I spent my evenings, or what was left of my evenings after work took its toll, reading a book. Not to plug Terry Pratchett or anything, but I adore the Discworld and its characters, most of all Death, the anthropomorphic personification of, well, death, and Sam Vimes, captain of the Night Watch. I love Death for his weird humanity and I love Vimes just because. Maybe because I'm a sucker for a guy in uniform, maybe because he's a cynic or maybe just because he's adorable to me in a million ways I can't precisely explain. I love to dive into stuff like this, just escape from everything in a way that's more mentally stimulating than TV but a lot less mentally strenuous than the problem sets that I should probably be doing this very instant. And the Disc is quirky and amusing, but it's got a soul, somewhere in there, and morality and odd physics-y magic and superb characters. I listen to Vimes' optimistic cynicism and I smile and know that the lesson is hidden somewhere deep and if it had been said out loud, it would have been mocked. And so I love it.

But it's dangerous at the same time. Reading and made-up worlds are not safe grounds for my brain to live in. I could almost be there, running with the watch to the palace or climbing deeper into the depths of the Library with the Librarian. And it makes me think and that is a dangerous pastime as well. It's much safer to immerse myself in whatever subtlety is involved in whatever weird math I'm supposed to understand to finish my E&M homework than to let my mind swim unsupervised in the ocean that is creative, fantastic thought. I can't muse on the nature of humanity any more safely than I can spend hours imagining a castle far away surrounded by distant blue mountains and a clear river. My heart's much too invested in either topic and the brain goes astray when the heart takes the wheel.

Oh, but should it be that way? Should I have to limit my dreaming because eventually it'll take me places I don't want to go? I know it's like flying-- there's always that risk that you'll come crashing back down to the earth. But I'm not Icarus, I'm not dumb. I know my limits and I know when the wax will start to melt. At the same time, my limits are so low to the ground that I feel like it's not even worth the effort to take off at all. And then the familiar cycle of accusations come around again, mostly directed at the ceiling. Why would I even have the ability to think and to dream like this if I wasn't allowed to use it to its full potential? Why give me a mind that can think like this and visualize and imagine if that's the worst thing I can do? And believe me, it's not a good thing for me to be too romantic. It's much worse than having my head in the clouds. It's more like building ice cream castles in the air and then insisting that I be allowed to live in them. It's not safe. But building the castles is such a gift. Maybe I'm supposed to use it for something else? Oh, what else? What am I supposed to do with my life?

Man, two years ago I had it figured out. Four years of undergrad (and I could totally take this physics major on) and then a couple of years of grad school and doctorate work and then I'd have a PhD in astrophysics and I'd be doing research and life would be grand. It'd be hard, sure, but everything in life is hard, you just have to try harder and you'll win. Follow your dreams, people. You just have to be determined.

Can I just say that those are all lies? I mean, not the 'everything in life is hard' bit, I'm sure that's good across the board, but you can't do whatever you want. Or maybe you can do what you want, but you definitely can't do what you thought you wanted. And so here I sit, a couple of classes away from a degree that I honestly have no intention of using but was so sure was right for me and I have no clue what I'm going to do with my life. I've had this awkward and uncomfortable conversation with a lot of people recently because I keep on meeting new people and everyone wants to know what your major is and the most natural response to physics, after a sympathetic groan, is 'What are you going to do with that?' Me, I'm going to frame it up as exhibit A for proof of the stubbornness of my pride and then move on. But to what? There's so much you can do through the church. It's not all being a pastor or a chaplain, there's tons of options out there. See, when God calls you, He doesn't send down a nice little post-it with a profession and a list of goals and He doesn't defend Himself or try to convince you to come, He just says Follow Me. I mean, what are you supposed to say to that? 'No, I can't speak well.' 'But I am just a child.' 'You can't mean me, Lord.' 'But how do I know it's really You? How do I know that this isn't some cosmic joke or twist of fate or weird chemical imbalance that causes me to think that there's really a higher power out there that gives an expletive about what I'm doing? How do I know?'

I mean, it's almost painful, talking about this call stuff. I guess I invite it, because I tell people I'm going to Dallas, but I don't explain why and of course they ask and then I have to explain that it's a conference for young people interested in ministry in the United Methodist church and that's met with a much different response than physics is. There's the 'Oh, that's wonderful!' or the judging silence where people reevaluate me and decide if they really want to be around me anymore or the surprise. That's my favorite, the surprise. I guess I look and sound like a God-hater because I'm a thinker. And it legitimately breaks my heart when I have to tell a little kid who came to a planetarium show and asks me how the planets were created that they were formed out of a protoplanetary disk when the Sun was very young because it can rock your little world when you find out that the universe didn't pop into existence fully formed, but I can't lie. You can't sit back and say we don't know when we do and say it's God when we can see a cause. I don't like the god of the gaps. That's not who I plan on serving. Now, I know that in the Planck time at the beginning of the universe, the laws of physics that we have right now can't explain what's going on, but I'm not going to say that that's God because one day people might get it, God might let us in on a couple of things and we'd understand how awesome He is by what He's made, but that doesn't mean that God is the answer to the question today. And He's bigger than our science, you know? Happy International Year of Astronomy- it's the 400th anniversary of the first time that Galileo turned his telescope to the sky and started to see things that caused a verifiable uproar. But the thing is, he needn't have. Caused an uproar, I mean. If God's existence is called into question by a couple of rocks orbiting a bunch of gas super far away, maybe He's too small. And maybe we'll forever have to be rethinking Him because I don't think we can understand Him. I mean, He's not a superhuman, He's not some mirror for us to reflect the best parts of us onto. He's God. He's holy. He's set apart. He is apart. I know that, for a fact. But if He's loving and He made us all to be loving, where did we go so very wrong?

But that wasn't the original point. The original point was Sam Vimes. Sam Vimes, who claims the city for his own and attempts to impose some order on the chaos and tries wonderfully hard at being a hero despite his insistence that he's not hero material. And maybe he's not, you know, maybe he's just a literary vessel for the idea that whenever the common good man tries to save the day chance and a little messed up dragon must come and save it for him. But he has such faith in good, such idealism that is protected by the cynicism, that you can't help but hope that he's right at the end of the day, that the good in people and in the world will really float on the sea of evil and not be consumed.

And I like that.

Falling

The nature in Chapel Hill wishes us a happy fall. It's been freezing some mornings, but the trees are pretty, when the sun decides to show his face. And of course you know it's only this cold because we don't have a football game this weekend. We'll have a heat wave come Thursday. But for now, the cold that tends to seep into your bones, only banished by hot coffee and warm blankets makes me want to write.

I'm a sucker for fall, I'll admit it. I fall back in love with the world in this season. I live in the summer, but I love in the fall. That's probably what stirs up what is most likely an unfortunate desire. I want to tell stories again as the leaves change. I want to gather around a camp fire and let the ghosts that hide in my mind run free. I want to sit under a tree and watch her leaves fall as my pencil records the stories in my head. I want to give voice to the wind and life to the characters waiting in the wings. I want to be poetic, sarcastic, creative, effective, amusing, intelligent, true. I have a story that I think should be told, because it's too good to be sacrificed to the whims of my inhibitions. I have a story that I know should be told, that's been told thousands of times and hopefully will be told thousands more. And there's so much else to distract a person!

There's my religious studies class, for example, Intro to the Hebrew Bible. Did I mention that my professor, who has spent the entire semester so far convincing us that every word of the Bible cannot be historically accurate and who references Harry Potter at least once a week, is an ordained Baptist minister? Did I also mention how much hope this gives me? I mean, he said, "I'm a Baptist," not, 'I was a Baptist but now I've seen the light.' I just needed to know that it's possible to sit in light of all of these difficult issues that intense study of the bible brings up and still have a faith. It gives me hope.

Or how about Carolina basketball? Late Night this year was pretty expletively fun, I must say. It's about that time. Time for me to try to hide the fact that I adore Carolina basketball montages and their sappy music and time for me to attempt to once again keep my sports-related temper on the DL (which is going a lot better during football-- I haven't thrown my hat once). Also, I had a friend who Patrick Moody said hey to after Late Night. And I looked up at the stars as I walked up from the Dean Dome with a couple of friends and I gloried in the night and wondered what I had done to be happy again.

There's fun times with Christine and Pam, there's an awesome, awesome Birthday, there's Wesley lunch on Mondays, there's SAI (and then some more SAI and then after that I might have some more SAI), there's House, there's band, there's football, there's the planetarium and laser shows and observing next Saturday night at Jordan Lake you should totally come it'll be tons of fun and hopefully not super super cold, there's Caribou coffee and classes. All these wonderfully positive things in my world are such fantastic distractions from that fleeting urge in my soul to soar invisibly through time and the world I see to the places it will be from.

Oh, but then there's doubt. Then there's the deep questions, the Traveler Unknown that I wrestle with until the break of day, the One whose name I know is Love but I can't seem to make real. I don't understand, I don't see why when I call out through the desert, I only hear my echo. I don't see why when I seek, I don't find and I don't find and I don't find and I can't live my life like this. If I immerse myself in the night sky, will You be there? If I sing all those songs that twist my heart into pieces, that used to mean You were standing right beside me, will You be there? If I force myself back into Your words with a heart open to everything, will You find me here, speak to me, take my breath away? Will You tell me if I'm right? Will You fix me if I'm wrong? Will You love me and let me see it and show me how I can know that You really love every
one
else
too?
Will You show me how to fight for You and for justice and how to be righteous? Will You explain to me why You saved me? Will You come back to me? Will You bring me back to You? Because I've got to know if this is real, or I've got to at least find the faith to be able to live it until I know it's real. God, Lord, I've wanted to shout with joy for such a long time. Do my chains fly off, too?



Life is a tragedy full of joy.
Bernard Malamud

A Little Bit of Physics

One of the things we physics students are told to do when coming up with an equation to describe a certain physical situation is to test the equation and see how it behaves at the limits, as the independent variable goes to infinity or to zero. Some things blow up- they get infinitely big at infinity or at zero and that's apparently unacceptable in most cases. Some don't behave the way you want them to- if the strength of an electric field goes to infinity at an infinite distance away, there's a small problem.



Now I'm not saying you should, I'm saying you could apply the same kind of idea to theories about God (sometimes called theology). Say that God is constant, good, over all ranges of human suffering. It works pretty well for everyday life, given certain constraints like suffering is here to help form us and we can't know the will of God and His plans are better than our plans. At zero, though, it doesn't make any sense, given the constraints just mentioned. If we are formed by suffering, and being formed into a stronger human being is good, how can God be good if good isn't happening? Maybe that's why there's never a lack of pain in the world. But then we head over towards infinity and though I don't pretend to know what infinite suffering is like, I can see large amounts of suffering and I can't say that God is good there. And if He is just a constant good, then that constant has to be large (infinitely large, in fact) for it to overcome infinite suffering.

Maybe it's the observational data that's wrong. I mean, the theory tells us that God is good, infinitely good, over the entire domain, zero to infinity. Perhaps the instruments are limited in their measurements. Maybe they break when pain gets too large. But then we just have to trust the theory.

And you know physicists. They're never happy unless they get to test (read: blow up)something. So that could be why I want so badly to see God, regardless of that pesky Old Testament consequence of death. Of course, we're completely forgetting the necessity of bravery on the part of the experimenter, a quality which the experimenter seems to lack. So we'll work on building better instruments and hope that one day the experimenter will have the courage to press the big red button and live. For once.

God Save the People

From Godspell, of course, but the original hymn lyrics, attributed at bottom.

When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people,
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they;
let them not pass like weeds away
Their heritage a sunless day
God save the people

Shall crime bring crime forever,
Strength aiding still the strong?
Is it thy will, O Father,
that men shall toil for wrong?
No, say thy mountains; No, say thy skies;
man's clouded sun shall brightly rise,
and songs be heard, instead of sighs,
God save the people!

When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
God save the people; thine they are,
thy children as thy angels fair;
from vice, oppression and despair,
God save the people!

Words: Ebenezer Elliott, 1850

Rings

I went to a debate this evening between Bart Ehrman, an agnostic religious studies professor here, and Dinesh D'Souza, an author who was presenting 'the' Christian perspective. The title of the was 'God and the Problem of Suffering.' I have to say, the agnostic clearly won. I liked his points better, he had better (and unanswered) questions and he seemed much more open. Ehrman doesn't believe in the God of the Bible, the one who intervenes so often in the Old and New Testaments. He said that he couldn't know if there was or wasn't some bigger power up there and while D'Souza said something about science proving the existence of a creator and made one of his few nice points by mentioning his idea of the 'hiddeness of God,' which has apparently increased since Adam and Eve, D'Souza never flat out said that there must be a God and that God must be the one talked about in the Bible. I hated that he didn't say that. I mean, I don't know how the God of today that doesn't stop genocides and earthquakes lines up with the God of the Old Testament who talks to people, brings Israel out of Egypt and heals the sick.

But at the same time all this debate was going on, this little story was waiting for me to read it:

http://news.aol.com/article/california-nasa-telescope-sees-giant/706628?icid=mainhtmlws-maindl1link3http://news.aol.com/article/california-nasa-telescope-sees-giant/706628

There is a giant ring around Saturn and it is glorious when viewed in the infrared. Now, I'm not saying that this proves that there is a God and I'm not saying that this somehow undermines the problem of suffering, because that's a big deal to us confined to this Earth with the people we're confined with, but doesn't that make you wonder? I mean, I can see galaxies and maps of the universe, but they're all just big numbers to me. I've stopped seeing them as huge and just started seeing them. But this... makes me small. Makes us small. A billion Earths would be needed to fill in the space inside that ring. A billion copies of our planet. One billion.


From JPL (NASA)

The point is, my friends, that we are tiny and we should be thanking God for every nonsensical second of our existences that He decides to care for us, because He doesn't have to. Does He answer prayer? Does He work in our lives? Did He step down out of His heavens to bring us to Him? I mean, I don't know, but I do know that the One who sees things on scales much bigger than this and can control it is not the Person I want against me. I am so glad that by His grace, He's for me.

Lessons from a Fountain

I'm sitting by the fountain in Bynum circle, watching the leaves float by and catching them before they get stuck in another loop in the fountain's current. It's late and it's kinda cold. The stars don't reflect this far down. I'm surrounded by the earth bound arcs of the stone benches that surround the fountain. The trees lean over the benches, protecting them but blocking the light from me.

I sit and watch my hand's shadow in the dim lamplight as I dip it into the water. It's funny, it looks like a hand before it hits the water and then after it's been in the water a little while, but if you let your fingers skim the surface, you only get the shadows of the distortions your hands cause in the water. I sit here, watching the water make a bracelet around my wrist's shadow, for a little while.

I think what we do in life is like that, sometimes. Right when you jump into something, all you can see are the ripples. It's like you've lost yourself for a second in what you're doing. But after a little bit, life settles down and you can see your imprint again, unless you just sit on the edge, forever disturbing but never jumping in.

Then again, sometimes I think the world that's in the relationship between us and God is like that. We think we're something else, we can even see a distinct shadow out of the water, out of God. And then we think that everything's coming to an end, we're not who we were, we can never get ourselves back, when we start getting into the water. But then the water settles and we come back. And it's not the same, it's different. But it's not wrong either.


Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
--Soren Kierkegaard

A Melody

I met a guy.

Well, maybe 'met' implies too recent of an acquaintance. He's older than me and he's known my family since before I was born, so I guess I've known him my whole life. I didn't think about it like that though. I grew up with him but we never talked all that much until middle school when I found out how awesome he is. He's just... he's so observant of the world around him and so concerned for other people. It's inspiring, really. I love to hear him talk about what he's done. The places he's been! I mean, he's a world traveler and it seems like he's always gotten to know the people where he's been to an absurd degree. He can tell you about an orphanage in South Africa like he grew up there or a church in Scotland like he watched it being built. He's got all these stories and he knows so much about life. Life and death and everything, it seems like. I love talking to him. You should meet his father, too. They're so similar and it's just great to see how well they get along and how much they really love each other. There's so much to learn, but you don't get caught up in that so much. When he talks, you can tell that he really, really cares about people.

So we started talking in middle school, nothing too intense. Middle schoolers, they're an odd bunch of kids. They're like mini-adults seeing the world with a pretty messed up pair of glasses and they're always convinced they're right. I'm sure that everyone who saw me and this guy together sat back and said that it was something that was going to last, but nobody said it to me. It's like Simba and Nala: you know they're going to end up together for the rest of their lives but you kinda cringe when Zazu says so. You'd rather they just found out for themselves. I think the adults in my life just let me find out for myself that this guy was the one.

It came on so gradually. I'd known him as long as I can remember and I'd always loved being around him, but I don't think I can pinpoint the day when I decided that I loved him. I think I acknowledged it once in middle school, maybe more to myself than anyone else, though people saw it. I don't think that was it, though. I don't think that I really loved him then. We had an on-again, off-again relationship in high school. High school is so distracting. There are so many other guys, so many other things to do. The world is your metaphorical oyster in high school, or at least you think it is. So I was concerned with everything that happened in high school during the year and it's hard to say that I knew that I loved him then.

We did work at the same camp for a lot of summers though. That was amazing. It was like everyone else there knew him too, he was our common thread. He's always been around in my life. I could always call him or meet up with him somewhere, but it was wonderful having him around all the time over those summers. And even though there were distractions there, too, one of which I still carry around in my heart, I really felt like that's when I fell in love with this guy. He cared so deeply for all the campers and he was willing to do anything to make their lives better. He was in all the music that I heard. It's amazing how, when you're in love, it seems like every love song is written for you. I remember moments like that, when I'm singing along to a song that seems like it was written for me and him. I miss that so much.

But even then, I didn't say too much about us. I wasn't sure. I mean, I'd said that I loved him to a lot of people, but I don't know if I had realized that I wanted to spend my life with him then. Then college came and I didn't make the time to let him come visit as much as I should have and all that mess. I met some people who straight up hated him and that amazed me. I met some people who said that they'd met him, but they didn't talk about him like I did and that confused me. I still called him pretty often, though, and we talked. And talked. And talked. And I thought a lot about how much he meant to me. Last year, I decided that I wanted a ring- I wanted the world to know that we were together and I wanted to be reminded every second of every day that I was his. I've had twenty million seconds of cold feet in between now and then. What if someone better comes along and I'm devoted to this guy? I don't think that can happen but you never know. What if I'm at the altar, what if I'm already married and I meet my soul mate? These are questions you shouldn't have. You should be so in love that there's no question- you've already met the only one for you.

Some people get love at first sight or they look across a room and that's all they needed to know. Their stories are so much better. Some people figure out through the course of a crisis that the person they hated is really the person they loved more than anything else. I don't have that. I don't have that great love story. I know I love him but I don't know why and I couldn't tell you when it started. Lately, we've been taking a break, it seems like. I didn't see him keeping his promises to me and I've forgotten what is was that made me think that he and his father were so good. And he says that he's saved the world, but it has a Hiro-esque ring to it. Save the cheerleader, save the world. The world is still not saved. I mean, I know he's still working, but I never see him at it anymore. The love songs still ring true, but it's not like it was back then. I feel like I'm reliving some kind of former glory. Son, can you play me a memory? I'm not really sure how it goes. But it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.

People have been asking questions about us. Some one straight up asked me last night, if I had to pick, would I say I was in love. And I said no. But I want to be, so badly. I wanna go back to what I had. But I've grown up. I don't think I can have the same kind of relationship I had in middle school or high school or even my first year here. I want something more, but I'm not willing to commit to it. I'm scared. I'm scared of what he and I can do together. I'm scared of where he'll take me- I won't let him travel alone. There's just so much to think about and it means so much more now, when I know what love means.

We had a good talk last night, though, after I got back from going out. I'm sick of hearing about him from someone else, because you know everyone colors the story their own way when they retell it. I'm going to reread his letters to me. They were so sweet when I first got them. He made me promise to keep them around, probably just for this very time, so I'd remember him even while he's busy in other places. I don't need anyone to tell me to love him. I don't need convincing to do that- goodness, it was so weird when people tried. I'm figuring out how to love him better and then maybe one day I'll be able to shout love from the rooftops instead of whispering confusion in the chapel.

Oh, by the way, his name's Jesus. Just in case you couldn't tell.

A Stance

I need to know what I believe and I need to write that down, for my own benefit more than for others. So even though this is super public and open to the world, it's a much more selfish post (like the other ones haven't been...). Maybe someone will see it and hold me to it.

First off, I am obviously a Christian. I believe everything in the Apostle's Creed and that is the rock basis of my faith. I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Without a real, present God, none of this can happen.
I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord. I do believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Christ, I believe He was the Son of God and I recognize Him as the guiding force in my life. Now, whether I listen to that force all the time or not is irrelevant to this conversation. I'm just trying like everyone else. But I believe that He is something much more than a dead leader.
Now things that aren't totally necessary to my faith, but I still believe: that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. If one day that turns out to be something we've misunderstood, it won't rock my core.
This next bit, however, is quite important. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, He rose again. He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father, from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I remember reading Mere Christianity and CS Lewis saying something like the early Christians were convinced by one fact: the Resurrection. My faith hangs on that too. If Jesus of Nazareth died by crucifixion and stayed dead, then I might as well leave him on my cross because the world was not changed. But if He arose and defeated death and changed the order of the universe and freed me from captivity to sin and death, then I need to live out some thanks for that. The distant God the Father didn't save me until Jesus did.
And finally, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Put a parenthetical note around the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. I'm not sure it means what I always thought it meant and I'm not sure how much the gospels preach it but I'll build up that house over time. I believe in the church universal with all my being and I want to see her on this earth as she was meant to be. The Holy Spirit is the practical result of what happened when Christ came.

So that's the basics. From that, I build a little hesitantly. I am a huge fan of prevenient grace, God through the Holy Spirit working in you even before you know it. I also believe that what Christ did enables us to be delivered from sin and death by justifying grace and I believe that through the Holy Spirit again, He gives us sanctifying grace to make us more holy, to make us better. I mean, what can I say? I'm a Wesleyan sucker. But I will admit that this is all dogma that I like. I like the 'Wesley quadrilateral' too, where you make decisions based on scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Let me unpack that a little for you, as my professors are fond of saying.

Here's where I get a little annoying to other Christians, I think. I'm probably a good bit too liberal but, you know, I was this way even before I went away to college. I think I kinda hid this while I worked at camp because there's no reason to confuse kids and there's no reason to kill a good message. But this is what I think. This is how I read my bible and what other people have to say about it and this is why I get a little annoyed at people sometimes. I believe that the Bible was written by men and men with a purpose in mind. I love what my Hebrew Bible professor said about the Old Testament: It's the story of a people trying their best to worship a holy God. It was complied and edited by men who legitimately thought they were doing good by combining multiple sources and traditions together to help preserve their culture and the worship of their national God who I think is the God who created the universe. But that doesn't mean that it was written with me in mind, this far away. Even Paul's letters weren't written with me in mind. I think it's wonderful how the Holy Spirit can take things that weren't intended for me and show me something that I need to see in order to worship God with my words and my life. But that doesn't mean that I agree with the story of Joshua, which is neither historically accurate nor faithfully comforting. Maybe I'm too much of a pacifist, but I think that do not murder means don't kill, regardless of who the person you're killing is. I'm guilty right now of using the commandments in Exodus without a complete understanding of their placement in the Bible due to the historical and cultural influences at the time, so I'm as bad as the next person, but I see that I'm that bad and I see that, even from a faith perspective, you can't just sit down and say, 'What does this mean for me?' Read the Bible allegorically all you want and maybe that's the meaning that you're supposed to get out of it, but don't dream for a second that it's all about you.

I'm big on tradition, too, because it's comforting, but I'm also big on reasoning. There's an agnostic in my learning community who said that he reads Job as the powers that be, whatever they are, sending a message to man, saying, 'How dare you presume to know what I think, what I mean and what I want? Stop with your pathetic little religions. You can't even comprehend who I am.' He takes that a step farther to express his disbelief that any race can claim to have any kind of special relationship with that power that is. This makes reasonable sense to me. If I didn't have proof in the form of Christ that God cares, I might be inclined to believe what he says. I'm big on thinking for yourself, for not taking any doctrine that's shoved at you without comparing it to what makes sense and what's in the Bible, taking into account everything the Bible's got in it. I'm not saying there's layers and layers of interpretive meaning in the Bible, though I do know that you can read something new in it every time you read a passage, something that didn't make sense to you before that's revealed by the Holy Spirit. You just gotta think. God gave you a brain and free will for a reason. Now that reason might be different from what I think it is, but there's always a decent reason with my God.



And then, just to roundly make people mad, I hate altar calls. I'll come up and pray, but I am not going to tell you that every person who ever walked up in front of a congregation understands what they're getting into. There's an ocean to Christianity, to the following of the Christ, that cannot be summed up in 20 seconds praying at an altar. I hate the idea that it's all just about our 'personal relationship with Jesus Christ.' I think it's important, don't get me wrong, but there's so much more to be done for the Christian community and the community at large that gets left out when we're just good out of our personal relationship. We were made for community (arbitrary statement with proof following sometime). So I hate it when religious leaders pray out loud and give someone a single prayer to pray that's going to make everything better because that's not all that it's about. No, I realize that there's a moment, that there was a moment, when I realized that I needed help from God and that God had already made plans for this and carried them out almost 2,000 years ago. But that doesn't coincide with the time that I answered an altar call and I don't think it has to. So I hate the word 'saved.' I'm not as much of a fan of the emphasis on a personal relationship as I used to be. And I am so against forgetting how big God is and how much we don't know about Him yet and how much we presume that we understand, because at the end of the day we're all trying to control things too big for us.

So that's it. Explanation over. I mean, there are logical consequences and there are things that the jury's still out on, but it's a springboard to launch off of, you know. It doesn't mean that I hate Baptists and it doesn't mean that I doubt the validity of your faith if you recognize that your journey started at an altar. We're all different and we've all got different ways of relating to the Creator. I'm not saying that there's not a universal truth, I'm saying that it's not that easy. It's not all mind and it's not all heart. And I'm not judging (as much as you think I am) and I'm not saying I've got it all figured out. But you can't say to me that 'Well, I can't give you a reason why, it's just what my faith tells me.' That is a sidestepping of the real point. Your faith is not your answer without thought. I agree, sometimes there are things that just don't make sense, that are wonderfully nonsensical, like the God of the universe that loves even me. But not every cold, hard fact and implication of your faith can be explained away with warm fuzzies. And that's where I stand.

Peut-être

Is a discovery ruined if you know it's going to happen?

It's certainly not serendipitous if you know that this is the time when you're going to 'find yourself,' whatever that means, but does that mean that you don't find yourself? Is the person you were going to be lost in the gap between what could have been and what happened just because you were expecting a change? Or do you force the change to be a different change than it was planning on being? Because I kinda like the idea that I can mess up change's eternal day planner by just thinking about it.

I think I'm expecting life to be something that it's not. I think life is rebelling a little. Since I want it to be awesome, since I have such high expectations, life is doing its absolute best to prove me wrong because goodness knows the universe would explode if Addie Jo was right about something for once. But maybe it's all for the best.

I was recently told that I seem like a big picture person. I like that. I love the phrase 'at the end of the day.' If, at the end of the day, there really is a God that for some crazy (and I mean legitimately insane) reason loves us, who are so very tiny and insignificant in comparison to Him, then believing in Him now is worth it. It gets me ready for what I'm sure will be the surprise of my existence when I finally get to know Him as He knows me. It helps me put this life in perspective. It inspires me to change to world into something better than what it is. It helps to bring me into relationships with others that I would totally shun if I didn't know that we were all looking for something bigger.

That doesn't explain me, though. In my philosophy class, we were talking about absolute space versus relative space and Leibnitz insists that if space were absolute, if we were all sitting on some big invisible 3-D coordinate grid, God would have to be arbitrary and that just makes everything bad because God is reasonable. Newton says, 'Screw you, Leibnitz, I'm right and you're wrong,' and that's all I got out of philosophy the past three weeks. But, as my professor put it, 'God is the elephant in the room,' and we took Him out of the argument. You ended up with the same result. I kinda want to do this with my life, theoretically. Take God out of it and see if you get the same result.

I mean, He's the elephant in the room in church. Or maybe that's the Holy Spirit. Jesus wasn't this nice, happy kid all the time- he said a ton of stuff just to throw people off balance (ref. placing a kid in the middle of the disciples and telling them to be like the kid). The Holy Spirit is something we're all not really comfortable with believing in. Yes, of course I have God living in me. Doesn't really jive with living with the rest of the world- they don't have God living in them. I am obviously more informed and better than they are. It's all the Holy Spirit's fault for being this big, mysterious thing that we don't get. So take it out. Take out God. Just leave Jesus as this guy who said a lot of good things and started an organization with a couple of good ideas and explain all this worship stuff as traditions and social constructs that make people comfortable and happy.

Minus God, I'm still an overly-vocal and quirky Sunday School teacher. I'm still VP-M of SAI, with all the odd phrases I throw into emails and life. I'm still a dying physics major, with all the disdain and sarcasm that must be piled on top of the unsure and fundamentally shy student who tries to sit in the corner and take notes at 1/10th the speed of light. I'm still in band, I'm still a vocal football fan, I'm still a thinking person, I still breathe. I still miss someone I have no right to miss and who does not miss me back. I'd still watch the puddles gather rain and sing and read and laugh and smile and cry. 'I apply my personality in a paste.' (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). I read Shakespeare, I watch Doctor Who, I listen to Relient K, I stare up at the stars and wish I could be one, watching the millenniums pass by as I slowly burn away and die in a glorious explosion while people an indeterminable distance away stare at my dissipating form and sigh in wonder.

But please explain to me how this little thought experiment works. I've got a bit of an epistemological issue with it. How can I say for sure that I am all those things without God? How can I say I am all those things with God? One of the guys in my learning community maintains that he knows the truth, as a Christian, but he can't prove it to anyone else. Whatever the universal truth is, he says, we can know it, but we can't prove it to someone else. God is everywhere, or He's nowhere, and they're the same thing, just stick a negative sign, by convention, in front of the second one. How can you, a human, say that He's one or the other? How can you say that you know the truth? I don't want to fall back on warm-fuzzies here, I want cold, logical facts. And the cold logical fact is that you can't.

So we get to choose. A, B or C. God exists, He doesn't, maybe. Great thing about this test- no one can tell you you're wrong. Not so great thing about this test- no one can tell you that you're right. Oh, one of them is right, but a long time ago, the test stopped being about whether God exists or not and started being about who had the better argument and was therefore the better person. So I choose to believe that God exists, that there is this eternal, omnipotent entity who for some miraculous reason loves me and cares about the state of my soul not only because you can't prove me wrong but also because I feel it. When logic fails, you have to lean back on the wonderful and terrible things that you feel and somehow the combination of that teaches you.

And I think I am that combination. I know who I am, under the layers of quirks I put on in order to make myself interesting, maybe only to myself. I think, I lean on what learned people can tell me and what makes sense out of what the learned people have told me and I learn about other things so I don't lean too heavily on the words of one agenda. But thinking leaves you alone and then you have to breathe, sit and listen, look up and wonder. You can't leave out one, though. You can't have too much of the other. And I don't think I'm the ideal balance. On any given day, my brain tells my feelings to stop being so pathetic and on another day, my feelings will tell my brain that it gets no choice in the matter. But I'm not leaving either one of the two of them at home and that's the important thing.

Is this a discovery? I think I was expecting it. So maybe I'm wrong. But I may be right.

When Your Roots Extend Beyond Your Flowerpot

Small nervous breakdown. Am I allowed to have a minor panic attack right now? I mean, I know it'll all work out, maybe not for the best, but it'll work out. And I can sit back and say I shouldn't have done this or I should have done that, so I'm not asking for sympathy... but I am asking for relief. I know I don't deserve it and I know I haven't come to You and I know that You deserve everything instead of the nothing I've been giving. All the little things are running me over- will You stomp them out for me?

Supplications. Just because I know You can. I am a hypocritical and unfaithful wretch. That's why I need You. That's why I've always needed You. Help me to see this mess as You see it and then I'll stop panicking (because an Awesome and Mighty God is in control) and I'll start to work to make it what You intended it to be, what You told us to make it when you came down to give us a fighting chance.

That's all I want- a fighting chance.

A Day in the Life

Scheduling may just be the bane of my existence.

It's 9 o'clock and get down off of Prometheus (my bed), stepping next on Maxwell (my chair) and landing a little less than solidly on Hades (the floor). I next walk over to my closet, hitting Paul (the shelves) with the door, possibly knocking Maurice (the microwave) and Victor (the refrigerator) a little out of place. I make sure that George (my window- Christine's is Fred) is closed before I change and make my way out the door, laughing a little at Clifford, the futon with a blue cover, whose alternate personality is the Enterprise when the red cover's around. You might say my room has a little bit of personality.

I head out across campus up to UUMC, which is a lot closer than it used to be, so coming in for morning prayer on Wednesday mornings is a lot less of a big deal. Since I don't have class until 2, I contemplate walking over to Hill to get PMA grilled cheese but decide that it's probably better to get back to my room and do some reading. I glance at the random quote of the day as I open my door- it's Beatles week this week. Then, for the next couple of hours, I dive into Joshua and Judges for my Hebrew Bible class, as well as some extra readings that have to be done before I can write my paper that's due Friday.

I start packing in a panic around 1:15, grabbing book after book off of Albert (my bookshelf) and cramming them all into my backpack. Feeling like an unbalanced turtle, I leave my room again and walk out of Grimes, behind Hamilton, behind Lenoir and in between Greenlaw and Bingham, weaving in and out of crowds in front of the UL and down, across the street in front of the Bell Tower, to the Stone Center for Reli 103. After a decently interesting lecture (my professor had on the most awesome coat the other day, so today's normal attire was a slight disappointment) at a whirlwind pace about the history of ancient Israel from the time of the patriarchs to the time of the judges (with a little bit of an overview mentioned these guys named Saul, David and Solomon, whoever they were), I motor out of Stone Center, up past the construction, through the arch in Caudil Labs and into the bottom of Dey Hall. I slow my power walk down in Dey to listen to snippets of French and Spanish as this is the more pleasant part of my marathon from the Stone Center to Phillips. Up, out of Dey, around the back of Gardner, cutting in front of Carrol while admiring the new journalism hangings between the columns and over and up three staircases to make it to the second floor of Phillips.

Ah, Phillips. Who can help but appreciate your exposed pipes and wires, your less-than-bright lighting, your freezing classrooms and your colorful personalities? I drop off my bag in 265 and rush over to the bathroom and am reminded of the kvetch I keep meaning to send in- 'You erased the bathroom graffitti in Phillips! Now where am I going to find amusement and solace in the midst of my physics induced panic attacks?' I was my hands thoroughly, because the sign on the door told me that this would stop me from getting the death plague (also know as swine flu) and walk back into class to collapse between two friends on the front row. After a decently boring lecture on the statistical probabilities involved in thermodynamics at various levels of particles, I dash out of 265 to make it down the hall to 275, where I have my Astro 291 problem solving session. We talk about the differences between frequency and wavelength in the various forms of the Planck function and get hung up on parsecs and AU in an easy question about parallax and then I leave early to speed over to the Kenan music building, walking into Symphony band rehearsal late.

I sigh a small sigh of relief- Symphony band, like bell choir, is what I do for me, the little bit of stress relief and entire lack of pressure for a couple of hours a week. Even though I utterly fail at parts of the Holtz suite in F and mess up large parts of the Esprit de Corps, even though I've played it before, I'm still a little bit happier walking out of symphony band than I was rushing in. If we had had bell choir practice, I would, at this moment, be figuring out my position and learning to read below the bass clef, since I'm (crosses fingers) switching bells. But, since we don't start until next week, I have a second to come here and give the world an excuse for my lack of contemplative thinking. In a world of emails and instant messages and texts and Facebook (and blogs), where am I supposed to sit back for ten seconds and give my heart a rest from the weight that's sitting heavy on it? Where do I go to get away from a hall that is wonderfully social yet never peaceful? Out on campus at night? To a library? To a study lounge? By the time I've got time to stop and breathe and wonder, the sun is far gone and the stars are blocked by the lights that make campus that much safer.

So I stop and I breathe and I wonder at my life. Then I dive back under the water, reading, writing, talking, thinking until there's no point in keeping my eyes open and I crawl back up on Prometheus, who may have just used the day to regrow his liver instead of the night. I think tomorrow I'll let fire burn during the day and find a chance, just some small chance, to think about better gifts to humanity.

Determination (Or, Who I Really Am)

Day 734500 in the desert and I'm still lost. I guess I never left in the first place.

I am not a whole person. I don't have peace (peace: totality, completeness, fulfillment, soundness, wholeness, harmony, security, a freedom from disturbance), I don't have joy, I don't have over flowing love, I can't even make it up to have happiness most of the time. I have the face of a whole person. I shove it in my backpack with my books and my papers and pull it out when I have to talk to friends or acquaintances. Occasionally, I forget it and then people get the full front of the brokenness. Like the Phantom without his mask, I overreact, I rage, and I use many more words than are necessary at the time. I'm busy turning over tables while the blind still need healing and parables that need telling. In other words, my friends, it is never a righteous anger and never what the Spirit wants me to do.

But before you start prescribing Prozac and recommending good therapists, let me explain. No, there's too much. Let me sum up by using an example. I felt I was being ill-used. Whether I was or not is immaterial- it's not my place to say what's just and unjust with respect to me unless it can help someone else stand again- but I thought that I was and so I stood up for myself and, rather vociferously, told my friend that if she still wanted my help, she'd have to treat me in a more respectable manner. I felt justified and I walked away a little different, though not relieved like I wanted to be and not happier like I thought I might be. Just justified, like whatever tiny wrong that had been committed had merited an veritable explosion.

I have words. I use words. I don't always mean what I say. Does this make me a filthy hypocrite? Why, yes. Yes, it does. I complained about people wanted me to change my schedule to fit their needs, yet I've been known to enforce a little bit of my schedule on others. I'm a little too busy- I think 40 days in the literal desert would be a wonderful vacation about now and it's the second week of classes. I also complain about other people not working as hard as I do, but I know that I spend a little too much time harvesting my crops on Farmville and I know that right now I'm wasting a good couple of hours that should be spent reading the myth concerning Ba'al for my Hebrew Bible class. But everyone needs a break, right? And I want everyone to put forth an acceptable effort, but I also know that I don't want to try anymore. I want things to fall into place again, no sweat off my brow. Lazy, slovenly, useless hypocrite.

Ah, you say, don't be so harsh on yourself. Well, who is going to be harsh on me, if not myself? It's not acceptable to waste what you've been given and be less than you can be. I wasn't made to sit on the floor and wonder, I was made to fly. And so were you. If flying takes all that I have and more, I'm OK with that, because there's this infinite repository of things I can't manufacture on my own, like courage and strength and love. Now my own problem is that tiny little, baby little hiccup: I have no clue where my keys are.

I don't know how to find God. I don't know how to pray- everything I think is too brash and everything I say is too formal. And don't give me that mess about there not being a right way to pray- there's certainly a wrong way because goodness knows I haven't been in the right spirit to talk to the Lord in a long time. But I need this. I need the peace, I need the patience, I need the hope, I need the life that comes from knowing God better today than I did yesterday. But I can't get at it- maybe just because I want it for me, because I see what I do and I don't want to be that anymore. But I also see what I can be and how that can help and surely that's not as selfish as it sounds?

Ah, God, I would run to the desert if I knew that You were there. If I knew that the pillar of smoke was going to guide me along, I wouldn't care if you drove me in circles until my children's children rolled their eyes at the idea of a promised land, as long as I knew that You were there, that You were the cloud. I would run away at night, leave the pages to be read behind, and just go stare up at the heavens and be reminded of the sublime, of the holy, of the glorious definition of You that I find written up there, if it would help me find You again. I don't want an image, I don't want an idea, I don't want something flimsy that the world can beat down with logic and 'reality' and a thousand other hope-killing things. I want You.

Come save me. I run to the cathedral, but the door's been locked and all I can do is knock until my fist bleeds and I fall asleep in the rain with my back to a pillar, hoping that it will remind me of why I was willing to run up those stairs in the first place.