reality

when I was little, I used to think that someday we'd use up all the variations you can possibly make out of music notes, and there would be no more new songs. It depressed me to think about because I loved music so much. In a quirky way, I think this fear helped me enjoy all my favorite songs from the point of first-listen fascination and subsequent goose bumps to the complete memorization of every lyric, background harmony, instrumental solo, and key change...


On that note (pun intended), random as this tie in may seem, there is a lot I can say similarly about people. There are a world of combinations that happen in chromosomes between two people when they are making a new person...and those two people were separately created by two people with a bunch of combinations of chromosomes, and so it goes back and back and back. Anyway, that makes me consider the fact that with all these mash-ups we call people, they're beautiful and memorizable, and the person who created them thinks they are It. Then I further continue to think about people I meet who, by the world's standards, are completely messed up and will never be "anything". One of them being myself, the other people usually don't have a home, have drug issues, probably have been in prison a few times, mumble so I can barely hear them, don't realize that nobody over age 17 wears Hollister or Abercrombie shirts (especially not from heaven-forbid a thrift store), and may use 12 packets of sugar in their coffee. And to that person, Jesus says the same thing he says to me and to Obama and to my grandmother and to Ryan Adams, "You are not what you did." I was listening to this pastor (Scott Sauls) today, and his big thing was that we as humans look at people for what they have done in their past, completely dismissing the fact that messy people may actually have a story...that there is a narrative behind whatever horrible that-which-we-don't-speak-of's they did. I really don't need Jesus to look at me for the very worst I've done or thought...


Then that pastor talked about how Jesus comes into places in our hearts that we don't want our parents to see and makes redemption happen. He told a story about a man, Bill, who had been sober for about a month and somehow ended up in his church even though Bill didn't smell like Old Spice, had kids who misbehaved, and had a wife who wasn't in a better place than himself. This guy became a big part of the church, despite his issues. His family kept coming. The point of his story wasn't that Bill made it to the finish line as an associate pastor of that church or started a recovery program for addicts (not that this wouldn't be beautiful)...but that he came to a place in his life where he wanted to be permeated by the Gospel. The thing is, people don't always end up in brown paper packages tied up with strings. If we are going to love people, we can't expect our results. You know those great stories? The ones where drug addicts finally give it up and have a family and start to make money and go to church and then they get their big break in Chicken Soup for the Soul? Unfortunately as great as it is, it doesn't happen that way all the time or even most of the time. The homeless people may always be homeless, the dads who left their families may not come back, the stephanie gilman's who try to have all their ducks in a row may constantly fall on their faces. But when our cities can come around those fellow strugglers and point them to Jesus and ACTUALLY love them, the story is beautiful. It just may not look exactly like the suburban culture would have it look.


So...I'm convinced that Jesus made an infinitesimal amount of music notes, words, and chromosomes, and more and more beautiful combinations are constantly being made. Certainly they all need revision, but what imperfect things don't?

The Giver

"I like the feeling of love," [Jonas] confessed. "I wish we still had that," he whispered. "Of course," he added quickly, "I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live..."

The community of Sameness in The Giver is one that I can identify with, and I'm realizing I've lived most of my life longing for Sameness. This isn't to say I don't enjoy change. If I didn't enjoy change, I wouldn't have gone away to college, studied abroad, or gotten married. But I draw from this inner repertoire of fear...and I think I decide to test out the waters of Change, using my fear as the guinea pig to make sure it's going to be safe. It is an exhausting way to live, I assure you.

One of the ways I see this is through babysitting. When I babysit, I am so concerned with how happy I can make the kids and feel completely inadequate when I can't do it. As a kid, I was afraid of babysitters because sometimes I could tell they didn't like me. I would beg my mom not to call this or that person to babysit, and it occurs to me now that maybe I am that person to other kids. I know they aren't always supposed to be cooing and happy, but when they aren't, I don't know what to do. Something I've realized as I've gone over and over in my mind wondering where in the hell my maternal chromosome went is that a close relative to my general fears is my fear of failure. A baby starts crying, I've failed. Their crying feels like a boss yelling in my ear that I am not good enough and I might as well give up. I look at upset babies like I did pre-algebra. No matter how many times I tried to figure out the problem, it was NEVER EVER the same answer the book wanted. Now perhaps this was due to the fact that I was home schooled and didn't have an actual algebra teacher. The thing is, I DO have good teachers for how to deal with babies. I have two sisters who adore their kids, and their kids adore them. My mom and dad were crazy about me and assured of that on the reg. I'm pretty sure Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so...so now why can't I pour all of that out on little people without fear of rejection...?

I could go on and on about the ways this fear of change manifests itself in my life...ahem, all my friends leaving me, and me about to leave all my friends for D.C....but the big one right now is my job.

Here's the real issue. I am not a Giver by nature. I'm a Receiver. And the big changes in my life all require that I be a Giver. It's super uncomfortable and is breaking me into pieces, and I'm not adjusting well. I don't know how to love people, and I rely too much on my feelings. If I feel frustrated, I assume it's in my nature to be an angry person and that I'm not supposed to feel angry, which makes me more angry. Me, me, me, me, me, me. That Toby Keith song comes to mind, but I dare not sing it.

I'm really just going to have to let somebody else take care of it just like the rest of my issues, because this is too heavy. And I do and will keep failing if it's up to me. Which, most of the time, I make it up to me because I don't exactly know how to give it all up. I mean, with loving being so dangerous, this definitely feels the safest way to live my life in fear fear fear fear.

But I don't think it's healthiest.