Finding your true identity

You’ve been told for a long time that being yourself and following Christ lie in two different directions.

After all,taking up your cross and “denying yourself” is a part of the job. You have stuffed down who you are, on a fundamental level, not because you are trying to follow Christ, but because you have been trying to follow what everyone else thinks of Christ.

Without knowing it, you are following the world’s ways instead of the father’s ways.

This is an invitation to cast off the weight of the world and take on the light-minded mentality of the father. His love will carry you through any and every transformation and consecration that you have been afraid of.

Those things about yourself that you have struggled with and dreaded and hated for years are going to become the things he uses to best show his love to you.

He is re-stating his open invitation to have you get to know him on a deep, scary-intimate level through his Word, his voice, and his heart. You cannot remain unchanged through the process, but instead of turning from apples to oranges you will be refined like gold heated and heated again.

You remember all those books that talked about people who gave up so much for the sake of the cause: their families, their loves, their homes, their lives. You have been afraid that becoming one with Christ somehow means losing yourself. And it does.

It means losing the worst parts of you, your creature comforts, the things that keep you mired in a single point of time. You remember all the things these people lost for God; but let me tell you what they gained.

They gained back their purest selves, the parts of them purified through hardship and healing and redrawing of where they thought their boundaries were, and what they thought they were capable of.

When God gave them back the paper on which they had defined themselves they found that the lines had been erased and instead there was a picture of a cross and the knowledge that they couldn’t be defined outside of Christ anymore.

With God, all things- radical healing and restructuring, releasing of all insecurities and anxieties, are all possible, through Christ who laid down his soul, life, and everything he was to be made into the truest form of himself (love) on the Cross.

You’re afraid of losing yourself in this process, in this journey, of releasing your identity to Christ. But let me ask you- do you know who you really are? Do you know how he truly sees you?

Trading a few trinkets and cheap jewelry of your current identity for the crown and cross of who you are established in Christ may seem difficult right now, even excruciating- but it is no sacrifice.

There is nothing taken or lost that compares with what you will gain and find in Christ when you choose to release what you know and trust in his knowledge of you.

Romans 12, John 21:33, Matthew 11:29 Malachi 3:3, 1 Corinthians 2:16, Phillippians 3:8, Hebrews 12: 1-2, 22-24, Revelation 2:10.

The Ordinary God

Flashing lights. Glitter, glitz, and glam. Mountains of potatoes and ham. Decadent trees and shopping sprees.

A scrappy little town, called Bethlehem, where nothing good was found.

A dirty dark descent

From the shining city where dwelt Yahweh’s temple tent.

A frightened teenage mom

Far from her family and home.

A busy bustling street, with no answer for a room, nor seat.

A gold palace on a hill

Raucous laughter, feasts and fury that stilled

The cries of babies’ mouths for their milk.

The stately palace halls would not hear the weeping wails that called.

The false king’s golden rein would not crack

Until Death would cinch its grip around Herod’s neck.

Glory wasn’t found in the city’s light or never-ending sounds

The world’s hope rested in,

Swaddled tightly, a dirty, much-used feeding bin.

This Christmas was the first, and it wasn’t much to look on at the birth

It was the Ordinary God, who came the Ordinary way, to give us extraordinary worth.

Writing is Redemption

Writing is a kind of redemption. It shows that even the darkest events in our lives can be molded into something beautiful, something meaningful, something with structure, purpose. Perhaps that is why writing can be so powerful in our lives to release us from the obligation of a sodden, dirty past, or an uncertain future.

Writing allows us to tell a story the way we would have it told (which, admittedly, may not be the way the true story happened).
But writing can have another ancillary effect– it can reveal to us things that we may not have noticed before. Writing definitely takes focus, brainpower, perseverance– and in this act of writing, things are revealed that may not have been obvious at first.

Writing is reflection.

I think best on paper. Not because I can’t think aloud, or because I just don’t think otherwise, but because writing forces me to focus my thoughts, to choose which ones deserve best to be heard and given attention. My mind is a crowd of voices, all whispering, shouting, bemoaning, declaring different things concurrently, creating a cacophony that is difficult to streamline into something coherent oftentimes. Writing helps me do this in a way that nothing else does.

Right now, I am hoping, praying for another redemption; well, actually, I am praying for a whole host of reclamations. The past few weeks have been full of experiences that I have never… well, experienced before, and it’s been confusing, exhilarating, anguishing, and frustrating, not all at the same time thankfully– at least, not consistently at the same time.
I am reminded of a line from Harry Potter– I think from the Order of the Phoenix, where Hermione explains to Ron what a character must be feeling [link].

He replies, “One person can’t feel all that at once, they’d explode.” While I share Ron’s sentiment, I would have to disagree. Because we do all feel all these things, and often all at once– and yet I have found that very few people spontaneously combust [haha].

One thing that I have chosen to believe– and that has shaped my life considerably– is that feelings are merely feelings. What I mean is that feelings are neither good nor bad– what we do with those feelings, how we decide to let them affect us is what changes them from neutral phenomena to good or bad events in our lives.

I have also recently discovered that many people do not share this philosophy about feelings. They believe that good, dopamine-infused, warm-and-fuzzy feelings must mean something is good, and antagonistic, negative feelings must mean something is bad.

To be honest, right now I am not sure how I feel about feelings right now (hardy har har), and their respective good-ness or bad-ness. Humans are endowed with both the gifts of reason and emotion, and to laud one or the other as superior is a dangerous thing. And yet it is so easy to do.

Which brings me back to writing.
Sometimes writing is easy, and feels like the rush that comes with a good roller-coaster ride: everything blurs into one incredible feeling, and the writer is being pushed and pulled on at an incredible pace by the weight of inspiration.

There are other times when writing feels horrible. It is a painful struggle, the progress of which seems to only testify to one’s own inadequacies as a writer; every word that you write is another block laid to form a building of blunders and bad prose, and every word you don’t write is a testament to your laziness and lack of motivation.

From what I’ve heard from other (real) writers, the latter state is far more frequent than the former.

Which brings me back to redemption in writing. If writers really do spend more time in the state of feeling inadequate, lousy, and lacking in solid prose or steady metre, then one should ask how we get our fair share of Khaled Hosseini’s and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s. It is because bad writing can be turned into good writing. It is because after the first, intolerable, abhorrent first draft comes the second, third, fourth and fifth drafts. It is because writers– the ones whom we read– do not give up after one rejection letter, or after twenty, or after one disappointing, fruitless day of writing, or even after a thousand.

My writing professor, in my senior workshop last year told us that as a fledgling writer he gave himself two years to write something that would be published in a notable journal or magazine.

Ten years later, he had finally become a moderately recognized writer, landing in a journal of wide repute.

He also told us that writing saved his life.

Ten years of failure, disappointment, and trying once more saved his life. And for that he now has several published books of beautiful, refined prose (fiction and nonfiction) to show for it.

Writing isn’t about being successful. Writing is about testifying to our failures, to our learning process, to our growth.

Writing is about redeeming the dark, deep nasty pits of our lives that appear so large when they are in front of us that we can never scale them. But writing is about building bridges with our words, words that come slowly at first and then maybe (if we’re lucky) with a steady rhythm that blocks out the naysayers and the discouraging voices in our lives. Because writing is reclamation of those dark places, a flooding of those pits and crevices with light to show the world– and more importantly, ourselves– that there are some things worth redeeming.

When You Don’t Know

…How to deal with life. And people. And people screwing you over.
Right now, I feel like an incendiary waterfall, spewing invisible torrents of fury. You wouldn’t be able to figure that out from just looking at me; at least, I kind of doubt it.

My mom is finally starting to believe that I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety, and I don’t know how I feel about that. (That’s not what I’m angry about; it is merely the thing I’ve thrown up to distract my mind from what I’m angry about). She is actually asking me how I am, like. asking how I am, not merely throwing out a precursory, society-benchmarked-inquiry of my well-being. And that is nice. I do like that. But other times I feel the aroma of wounded-dog sympathy flowing in, and I can’t stand that, even though I do it all the time to other people. The Curse of the empathetic person– To feel compassion and sympathy (and yes, pity), and to not be able to show it– because the person who is sympathized with will take it the wrong way and shut down and close you off. Because to be honest, most people don’t want help. Most people want to fight their own way out of their problems, and once in a while, they succeed.

But Most of the time, they don’t.

We need help. All of us. I have been a loner my whole life, and I’m only now discovering… Life is better when you let other people inside your problems. Yes, you may do a whole lot more crying, and you may blow a whole lot more snot bubbles than you want to… But Life is not life if it is spent alone. And right now, I’m trying to get myself to see that. Because at the same time of me saying this, I have also had some very notable violations of trust, and people who I’ve given a glimpse into who I am and they abuse that access. And it hurts. And it sucks. Hence the raging tornado of fire.

But I’ve done it to others, too.

I recently went up the mountains near my home– there have been many fires up on their peaks, and the effects are still very much evident: hills blanketed by black, charred spikes, jabbing through the dead, frozen vegetation and snow that sits in dirty, meagre piles along the north slopes.

I always go up these mountains when I don’t know what to do, when I feel trapped, uncertain of the course I should take. These mountains have heard a lot of desperate prayers of mine.

There is a beauty to their desolation.
In the summer, the mountains are verdant, thriving, cool, refreshing. Right now… They are cold, depressing, grey, unwelcoming.

I love winter. I love real winter, when the ice bites through your socks and shoes, and when the wind slips its chill fingers in your ears and down your throat.
I love winter, because it externalizes the struggle: the struggle to stay warm, welcoming, despite the barrenness of nature; the struggle to stay open, to believe that a new season is coming, even when one has never felt it, or not felt it in a long time.

I choose to believe that spring is coming. A resuscitation within my heart of green, growth, warmth. I do not have evidence of that; not within myself. But I believe that winter is almost over, and that spring will come, with tiny white flowers pushing up through the barren earth, then comes the death of death. Because if all things must end, so must Death.

In Which I Give My Nebulous Thoughts on Graduation

Because putting them on Facebook seems a little…. Bleh.
As I write this I am sitting on the couch, looking out the living room glass doors to the ocean churning with an unusual fury as the surf comes in. It goes without saying that this is a good and appropriate metaphor for how I feel inside.
Okay. I’ll cut the crap (and crappy metaphors; I mean, really; that’s been said about a billion times over; though what’s said below has been said many times over, too).

Nothing.
I didn’t realize that I would feel so hollow when I graduated. The sense of accomplishment faded about 28 hours after I turned in my last paper. I’m trying to be all clinical and stoic but inside my throat and heart are melting into a viscous mass of goo that just can’t find a shape to adhere to.

I didn’t realize how big a sphere school created in my life, and how my gravity would be radically adjusted with the loss of that orbit around school. I feel so pitiful and pathetic, but I did (do) really love school, so much that this is looking a heckuva lot like a love letter rather than a farewell to academic pursuits for a while.

But honestly, this shouldn’t surprise me much. I knew I loved school before this– loved it probably a little too much. Hence why I am adamant about taking a year off from school, despite the fact that every time an e-mail comes in talking about a graduate program I want to run off and apply for it (I still need to take the GRE and all that jazz, I suppose).

I know that when I read this in a few months, I’ll think “wow, I was really…. WOW.” and laugh, but I don’t want myself to do that. I want myself to remember how much it mattered to me, because I don’t really want to get in this position again. Academic pursuits are alright, and school is awesome, but I shouldn’t feel like I constantly have to be excelling in that field to have self worth or find worth in life. Life is about relationships– God, people, myself, and then with learning science-y stuff.

Recently I was thinking (big surprise there), and I think I realized that some things… you just have to live. You can’t have these concise answers ready to pull out of your back pocket; you have to go through things, live things in order to know the answers… And even then, you may not know that answers, you just may feel more comfortable with the questions.

1 (the scariest number)

The freight train rolls up my ribs, its inexorable progression through my lungs making air too heavy to suck up. They would only feed the fire. The slow rotation grows in repetition, over and over, fighting the slope, finding purchase in my throat. I can’t breathe at all, and the roar of the wind in my ears feels like the scream of the engine car rolling over my outflung hair. It can’t reach my mind, my head, or I’m dead, I think—no—I feel, for such orderly progressions such as thought are too far out, like a bridge to safety in the hazy horizon.

My body is still, ruffled by the wind, goose-bumps too ingrained and subconscious to be gouged out; it feels like a storm is coming, but in reality, it’s only the tumult I feel inside. It’s strange to be aware of a dual reality, the girl inside the terror, and the awareness of the terror as only a part, as if I am both on the tracks and riding down them.

Okay, well, that was fun. Ever feel so overwhelmed that you couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak? Well. That’s what I’m trying to avoid again.

This past Sunday I went to a friend’s church, and the pastor talked about vulnerability. I love and loathe this word—it fills me with a palpable sense of dread and revulsion, and yet I am so attracted to it. Its steady use of liquids to break up the train of affricates and stops… there’s just something about it. That’s where this crap-a-dingle comes in.

I know that being open (too open) is all the rage nowadays, especially in circles of shall we say, younger (whether chronologically or developmentally) peoples… But this isn’t really that (I devoutly hope). It’s more of… an experiment. Can being more open be better? Can I avoid the hard casing of protection that I feel even now advancing against the soft tissues of my heart? Can Jesus love a weak, struggling college student such as myself? Can people I love love me, even after reading this?

Until Easter (the lent season, minus the already gone days) I plan on writing on here—it can be a full blown rant, or just a sentence—or even a word. All of it is meant to be open (as I possibly can; sorry, no Freudian-type interview transcriptions). I believe that vulnerability takes great courage—and I hope to encourage it in myself, and others.

So yes—the above isn’t a random mash up of ideas—it was just the best way I knew to describe how I felt last Thursday afternoon. And saying that scares me. But I know… I choose to know… that I am not the only one.