A Little Wisdom from the Avetts

A Gift for Melody Anne

I want to get back
I want to get square
I want to get back on the hopes
and dreams that I have
that the good Lord above us can spare

I just want my life to be true
just want my heart to be true
just want my words to be true
want my soul to feel brand new
I just want my words to be true
I want my soul to feel brand brand new
like a fresh coat of paint, we can make it anything but blue, anything but blue

Like that actor said
I don’t wanna lose heart
I don’t wanna get beat beat down
By the big big world
Or quit
Before I even start

Lord, I just want me life to be true
Yeah, and I just want me heart to be true
Yeah, and I just want my words to be true
I want my soul to feel brand new

I wanna hold hands
Yeah, and I wanna make love
And I wanna keep running all day
And all night even when my mind tells my body that’s enough

And I wanna stand up
Yeah, and I wanna stand tall
If I ever have a son, if I ever have a daughter
I don’t wanna tell ‘em that I didn’t give my all

And, I just want me life to be true
Yeah, and I just want me heart to be true
Yeah, and I just want my words to be true
I want my soul to feel brand brand new
Like a fresh coat of paint
We can make it anything but blue
Anything but blue

Now when your dreams start saying, I can’t come true
You’d be better off without me
Don’t let ‘em go
Don’t let ‘em go
I don’t wanna go broke
Not from one bad deal
I don’t wanna be up all night
Crying in my hands
For a girl that isn’t even real

Lord, I just want me life to be true
Yeah, and I just want me heart to be true
And, I just want my words to be true
Yeah, and I just want my song to be true
Yeah, and I just want my heart to be true
Yeah, and I just want my life to be true
Yeah, and I just want my words to be true
And, I just want my heart to be true
Yeah, and I just want my life to be true
And, I just want my song to be true
And, I just want my life to be true
I want my soul to feel brand new
I want my soul to feel brand new

-The Avett Brothers

But Then I Remember that I Know Better

You know who's aggravating? God. God, because He keeps on blessing everything I do, in spite of me. He keeps on doing these wonderful things through me and the people I'm around and it doesn't matter to Him that I'm a doubtful unfaithful collection of atoms and dust. He's going to accomplish His good work anyway. Here I am, jumping up and down or stomping my foot or crossing my arms saying, "I'm mad at You," and He just shrugs and tells me that His kingdom is not going to wait on me.

I guess it's so aggravating because it reminds me of the tiny pebble person I am in the wake of God's unstoppable force. And I don't choose to be better. Sometimes I think that the human heart is an immovable object.

Churches

One of my favorite buildings (up there with the Smith Center and the planetarium) is the old sanctuary from my church back home. It's not around anymore, not since we tore it down to build the new sanctuary back when I was in elementary school or middle school, but I love it in my brain. I love the ugly green carpet and the dark wood paneling and I especially love the way the stained glass windows would light up the room on Wednesday afternoons when I was a kid in kid's choir crawling around on the pews. I loved the way I could sneak out of my pew at the end of the last hymn and run over to the nursery to provide what I saw as a vital service to my mother, to tell her the service was ending and to pack up the kids. I love the memory of feeling small in the choir loft, and being too short to look over the divider between the congregation and the choir loft. I loved standing in the very front of the chancel when I was in kindergarten to deliver my one line in the kid's choir musical: "I wouldn't miss it for the world!" I don't remember what I wouldn't have missed, but I'm pretty sure I was precious and adorable, so just smile and laugh at kindergarten me. I hear she was a good kid.

I also remember sitting in the pews and Ron teaching us the words to Handel's Messiah, the kid version, and I was convinced the angels were singing about Oreos in egg shells, day-o, and I was really confused as to why the angels got oreos and why they were in egg shells, but ours is not to question why. I mean, I also thought that the flying monkeys sang about Oreos. Or orioles. Anyway. Beyond all of that, I remember time and again being told to be kind to the pews because they were furniture in God's house. The church is God's house, the adults in charge of us would say. You wouldn't put your feet up on your sofa, so don't put your muddy, mulchy shoes up on the backs of the pews. This problem was, of course, handily solved by leaving your shoes somewhere else, but somehow, I don't think that made anyone any happier.

God's house. I think one of the problems with growing up in the same place with the same church is that I was convinced that God only had one house. If I'm being honest, if you asked me where God lives, He lives in the old sanctuary at St. Luke's. He's got a penchant for green carpet and wood paneling and he loves colors in the afternoons. He's also got other sections of His house he can go chill in, though I'm pretty sure He stays away from the office. I mean, if you were the deity, wouldn't you avoid paperwork at all costs? But He definitely stopped over in the children's building all the time, and in the fellowship hall. He also chills in the courtyard a ton, everyone needs some sun. All in all, if I was God, I wouldn't mind having my house there.

Old Testament Hebrews thought that God had a home, too. He lived in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, and it was quite a blow when the Temple was destroyed. Ezekiel talks about His glory leaving the Temple stage by stage, and then leaving Jerusalem so that the invading forces could come and break everything down. God has a home, He has a land, He has a building, and if He's gone, so is His grace and so is His protection. You can mess up and you can make God angry, and God's going to peace out of His house and then, my friends, it sucks to be you. Or so my Intro to the Hebrew Bible class taught me.

Now, of course I don't actually believe that God lives in one place. He doesn't have one house that He lives in. I mean, it's not like God needs a place for an afternoon nap or anything like that. He doesn't need a kitchen and He certainly doesn't need a TV with all the comedy that my life provides for Him. But, you know, I always put my feet down off the pews when someone reminded me that the sanctuary was God's. I love to be in sanctuaries by myself because God's there. And when you say that God's everywhere it takes away from the feel of the building. If God's everywhere, why do you need a church? And we have an awfully large number of churches.

I know that a church is more than a building, but what about these buildings? What about these huge houses we have laid out for God? Is it limiting? I mean, you can never build a ceiling high enough for Him. The Ark of the Covenant was God's footstool, for crying out loud. You can't hold him in a church. Do we just use them to gather? Maybe God can just peek in when He's interested in what's going on, one giant eye staring in through a window. Is it just for the music? Maybe we just intended these spaces to amplify the sounds of our songs, so that God will hear our worship and forget our acts.

I spent the last week staring at 324 churches, narrowing them down one by one to put them into a proposal to go to Europe next summer to study sacred space. Did you know that churches are patterned after the Jerusalem Temple? In the temple, you had an outer courtyard for the Jews visiting the temple, then an inner holy space where the priests could go and finally the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest could go once a year. (Point of reference- I always thought that janitors could go anywhere, or repairmen, or people like that and it made me laugh to think that a cleaning lady dusting could go into a place that even the High Priest couldn't. Oh, the things you don't understand when you're a kid.) We put our altar or our pulpit in the place of the ark in the Holy of Holies and we've torn down the curtain (though we still keep a mini-one, if we have a chancel rail) and especially in Protestant churches, anyone can go up to the altar- there's no inbetween space where only the priests can be. After that basic pattern, we added on columns when we mixed in basilicas and the temple and later we added the horizontal hall to make our churches shaped like a cross, and then afterwords, we threw out these designs to make our sanctuaries functional for the kinds of modern churches we wanted to have. But traditionally, liturgically, this is where we've come from.

Of course, it's all more complex than that, because it always is. You have to add in nuance, and I hoping (fingers crossed) that I'll get the funding to see the nuance first-hand. But you know, I never once looked at a cathedral and thought, "That, that has to be God's house. Just look at it! If I were God, that'd be my place." You know what I think, though? I think we have these buildings to remind us. To remind us of the beauty of God, of the grandeur of God, of the power of God, of the ancientness of God, of the practicality of God and of the diversity of God's designs. I think the buildings remind us. I think we bring God in with us. 

Or maybe God was always there, just waiting on us to notice. Did you ever notice?

Not Right Yet

I have to remember that I am still a work in progress.

I have to remember that I am not yet a perfect tool, finely tuned and worked for the task at hand.

I don't already know all the answers.

There is still work to be done.

I can't solve every situation right yet, try as I might.

The killer thing about Carolina is that we're so sure that we already know everything and we're already prepared to change the world, because the professors and the administration, they all think we can do it so we think we can do it and we don't remember that there's still work to be done on ourselves before we can work on others in the perfect way we envision.



But, God, we're going to be wonderful one day.

Application Humor

So I'm applying to go to Europe next summer and the application requires consideration of an applicant’s "sense of humor." Please read below my responses to the request to "Describe why you believe you have this characteristic."

I mean, have you seen my nose? Walk around with this sucker on your face and you have to have a sense of humor. 

I’m in the band. Have you seen what I have to wear for eight hours on game days?

I have this great joke involving the constellation of Pegasus and baseball.

Link to blog.

Do inside jokes count as humor?

I grew up in Caldwell County, in a town that was too cheap to pay for the extra side to the town square, so we had a town triangle. Apparently the county was broke too, because we lost the l and the d in our name.

I watch The Office.

Your mom?

That’s what she said. Last night. Ooooooh! (OK, that’s really what she said.)

How do you tie your shoes in space? With an astronaut!

So this guy is walking around his neighborhood and he notices this three legged pig.

Ha! It is funny because the squirrel gets dead!

I have often been described as endearing. I take this to be a good thing, though people may have just been laughing at me. I laugh too! It helps ease the awkwardness.

Take My Feet

I like dusty feet.

I was going to say that I like dirty feet, but that's a little less poetic sounding. It's just as true, I guess. I love looking down at my feet and laughing at my surprise at their color. I love it when my feet are covered in dirt. I love summer, when you can spend your entire day barefoot out in the garden of this Creation and I love the feel of cool bricks in the fall. I mean, I appreciate shoes and I love the way my converses look with my dress pants, but nothing beats standing on grass and feeling the blades stick up between your toes.

I love tired feet, too. I hate the ache, but I love it when I have tired feet. It means that I've been doing something. Right now, I have these awkward blisters from standing all day at a football game (Dinkles, you may be the world's greatest marching shoes, but you have not saved my feet) and all of me aches, but it's an ache that says, "Hey, you accomplished something today. Wear me as a badge of pride and I'll be gone in the morning."

And it might just be this soul that I inherited, but I feel like tired, dirty feet at the end of the day are better than anything else. And sometimes I wonder if my heart got to aching like my feet, would I be more willing to work for  better world around me? Because I can watch the dirt of this world cover my heart and soul with a light dusting as I live and as I love, but I never feel that ache. I never go through the trouble of loving someone the entire day long, until I go to bed with that ache of an overused muscle to accompany my thoughts to sleep. I know I beg for God to create in me a clean heart, to wash the dust off me each day, but maybe I should be asking for a tired heart, a heart that's being used. A living heart. Maybe that's why they sing about hearts of stone.

I don't want to feel guilty, you know? I don't want someone to guilt me into being better, because it's not going to happen. I think I'm pretty awesome right now. I got my senior sticker, I have a job I love, I'm taking classes that are interesting, the football gods have been appeased and have decided to smile down on Chapel Hill and send those pirates and tigers (and bears oh my) back home a little sadder than when they came, the weather has been gorgeous and I've gotten enough sleep. On top of that, my birthday was beautiful (I'm convinced that God allowed Facebook to be invented so that on our birthdays we could all have a mini-reminder of the people who love us), my grandparents and parents came up for the weekend and I had a great show on Friday with awesome friends who came to listen to my Pegasus-baseball joke and a great game on Saturday and an awesome observing session tonight, and this is the second beautiful weekend in a row like this. I got tickets to a talk I wanted to go see, my Europe application is coming together. Life is good. And I feel like I'm getting what I deserve. I'm like Aladdin floating down on the magic carpet. Things are finally starting to turn out right.

So I don't want someone telling me that I can be better. I know that I can, but I don't feel like I need to be. I can only think of one thing that's missing and I am honestly content to just wait and see how life surprises me on the romance front (oh, dear blog readers, I have a story, but I shall have to sneak it in later because if I talk about it, it won't happen). But through all these beautiful things, I have this nagging feeling that my feet aren't tired enough.

I want to make life beautiful for someone else, preferably many someone elses. Now I just need this desire to be strong enough to make me do something about it.

The Church at Auvers

Listen, I know you can't help everyone. But it's kinda driving me crazy that you can't. High school boyfriends? It'll all work out in the end. Grad school applications? You know, God will guide you to the right place, you just gotta trust. Money? The money is always there, and if it's not, you know, God is good, all the time. It'll work out. I promise.

But there are some things I can't promise. I don't know if your family member is going to get better and I know it's hard and I know I can't help. I am, in fact, entirely unencouraging because my former college roommate is going to buy me ice cream if I have cancer, so there's only an upside to that. I don't know how to be an upside for you. I can't make your aunt listen to you and understand you. I can't bring someone beautiful into your life to help you through everything you need right now. I can't pick you up off the street, train you for a job and get you a job and a house. I can't bring anyone back. I can't help. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

And not that everything in my life is a reference to something else, but I was watching Doctor Who and the Doctor had to leave someone and go on and be the Doctor somewhere else and the man said something like, "We've fought monsters together and we've won. I'm not sure I'll do so well on my own." I'm watching the Doctor's face and I think I understand it because your heart breaks, you know, you just want to take them all and protect them all forever and you can't. You can't always be there and you can't fix everything. How do you leave someone when you know you can't help? When you know what they're headed towards? You can't fix everything.

But give me a time machine and a sonic screwdriver and I'll sure as hell try.