..sick

I would refund this summer if I could. Regret is a feeling that I don't often have  but I would redo this summer if I could.

I am also tired of being sick. The  physical pain/annoyance it causes is tolerable but the fatigue, grumpiness, and temptation of being self-centered is exhausting. I just want to be well and finish the projects that I have started this summer. 

I have been thinking about sickness and how it effects my perception of the world.  Not being able to  taste and  smell makes food a very dull experience. If my sin can be compared to sickness,  how much of reality am I not experiencing because of my limited state? And when things start to improve and I become healthier, the world really doesn't alter that much, just my perception of it.

Visiting the doctor was a huge  blessing  today. I sad there and  was very humbled at the  power that I  had to ask and receive medical treatment. From the most basic terms, I do not understand how this is an option and not a right.

..snail

Rarely do I want to be some other animal than human. I often do not want to be a human, but never a bird or a fish or an insect. Recently though I have had the reoccurring thought of being a snail. The safety of their homes is always present, available at a moments notice. They are small, insignificant to most everything and glide along their way with deliberate slowness. I want to be a snail in a forest that eats delicious leaves, moves 3 feet a day, and then sleeps under a stump that is becoming detritus. I want a brown shell and a slimy body and I want it all wrapped in simplicity. No large network of nerves and veins and thoughts and emotions to wear me out and to keep me down. Just leaves; they are all I will think about.

I don't know how to make myself happy anymore and I am supremely discontent with every solution of escape that I waste my time formulating. They never come into fruition anyways so I suppose they do not really matter in the end. I just look at my life and see a wash of beige, or a great lake of saltine crumbs, or wet newspaper, or astroturf, or egg cartons. Nothing draws me into it. The 'spicy' things that paint smiles on other people's faces blend into the boringness of tomorrow and they are very unappealing to me. I feel like I am a reading a story of my life and the pages are mostly blank, with haphazard scratches around the margins that are of no substance or value. Flipping through the end of this summer chapter and it all looks the same. Boo.

When I am sad I wear more colors. 

I don't know why I smoke. I am quitting.

..agreement/good

I want to write a million things in this blog right now. My 'secrets'... that some people know and  some people don't.  

Whatever. I'm not going to and that's okay.

I want to stop agreeing with people. Sometimes in conversation I am the bobblehead that prompts questions and keeps the string of talking alive by being agreeable. Usually I agree with what others are saying and it is a natural response but I think that it makes some conversations strange. I am interested in hearing what people have to say and discovering what they think about issues and the perspective they hold to help them arrive at that point. My agreement with their statements has very little to do with my interest in their personhood (loonies fall into a different category that is label-less to make it nicer).  Agreement can make things seem conditional, as in: talk, nod, affirm, report back to others that it was a 'good' conversation.  I think that this boils down (indulge my oversimplification) to a desire to be self-perpetuating with thoughts.  Instead of entertaining new ideas as valid and  worth  of exploration, I will nod and prompt you into conversation I desire to be in.  Often times I am extremely passive with my disagreements, formulating them  in my mind and never sharing them. It compounds the problem by projecting a response of agreement when it was never there to being with. Whatever.

I also hate the word 'good'. It is going on the banned word list (Gay, 2005; Retarded, January 2007; Interesting, after I graduate from the sociology department at SPU; Should, July 2008; Good,  July 25, 2008).  It communicates nothing of substance.  When I respond with 'good,' I really mean twenty  other things and so it is simply a prop that I employ out of laziness. I also have a strong aversion to placing people, ideas, or experiences in 'good' and 'bad' categories. Life is infinitely more complex then good, bad, positive, negative, and I should be living into that reality through the way I speak and reflect on  situations.  Waiting for deep conversations to come along to explore the more nuanced aspects of life places far too much importance on the planned interactions of coffee or meetings, when the passing moments that dot my life can be quick little glimpses into something bigger.

Secret: I stole the Seattle section of a newspaper from a bakery today.  I felt guilty at first but then my raspberry buttonhole was expensive/disappointing so I somehow felt okay about it.

Secret: I think I might be lonely.

..scattered

There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die,

A time to plant and a time to uproot,

A time to kill and a time to heal,

A time to tear down and a time to build up,

A time to weep and  a time to laugh,

A time to mourn and a time to dance,

A time to gather stones and a time to scatter them,

A time to embrace and a time to refrain,

A time to search and a time to give up,

A time to keep and a time to throw away,

A time to tear and a time to mend,

A time to be silent and a time to speak,

A time to love and a time to hate,

A time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from their toil? I have seen the burden that God has laid on humans. God has made everything beautiful in Their time. They have also laid eternity in the hearts of humans; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that everything that God does will endure forever,  nothing can be added to it and nothing can be taken away from it. God does it so that humans will revere Them.

This is the word of the LORD. 

Thanks, trust, and praise be to God.

..blessings

God has had impeccable timing with me this week. A friend visited and it was a burst of refreshing newness, I went on a bike ride with Greg that was long and slow, I have had valuable conversations and valuable reflections on my communication, I have been given a renewed appreciation for the people in my life.

Sometimes (always) I get tired of people that rant on Bush. Cheesy countdown clocks that are made in China, probably take pounds of petroleum to produce and are very ironic to me. Mostly what I am irritated about is that fact that people whine endlessly when there are other more productive and creative things that they could be doing with their time. Less complaining, more action.

But I do this too. Not with Bush but with other chosen issues in my life. Complaining is a very sad state of affairs because I realize that something is wrong and instead of doing anything about it, I shoot myself in the foot, all the while feeling productive for identifying the problem. I have been thinking a lot about the beauty in silence and simplicity. Sometimes I very thankful that I don't understand why God is doing something in my life. Maybe I just don't need to know and I find peace in knowing that he is very active but very quite. I don't want to talk about change or how I want to live differently, I just want to live into a better way silently and simply. Like a cat. Or Jesus.

\\I really appreciate my dad. Seeing him with my friends today, I was very proud of who he is and the way that he loves me and my life. I admire his life-choices profoundly and am very thankful that I consider him a true friend and an amazing father.

..suffocating

The sun shines and leaves blow and my hope like autumn is turning brown. And I know that it seems likes I'm always falling down. But it does not matter to me although it seems like should. It's because I know I am understood when I hear them say, "Rest in us little David and dry all your tears. You can lay down your armor and have no fear, cause we're always here when your tired of running and we're all the strength that you need." Its uphill, both ways, tomorrow I swear I won't act this way. I know it seems like is what I always say. You know I want to be like Jesus but it seems so very far away. When will I learn to obey, obey?


Morality will never salve/solve my problems. There is always a deeper condition of my soul and faith that remain unexplored when moral solutions are offered as the quick and painless remedies to my sickness and human cancer. My brokenness is blatant and very fragrant in my life, creating a basket of failures that can be overwhelmingly huge and impossible to ignore. Experiencing God as Grace and experiencing God as Love has been a struggle ever since I gave my life away. They take my basket away, composting my loss at the cost of their Son's death and I tremble when it happens. I find myself desiring to be able to give away my decay more quickly, keeping the pile of shit to a minimum and moving on to a better and healthier me. I fail at this too. I keep my failure because I find a twisted form of comfort in my disease, in the reminders of inadequacy. This is my plight and honestly, I barely survive it most of the time, getting through because of the life support of forgiveness given by God/Spirit/Son. The place where I do not know how to navigate is when morality is offered as a band-aid by others. When the people I share life with submit remedies of fixes and moral placebos that will never come to fruition but will rot away under the banner of hope. If I am not holding myself to a standard of morality as the measure of my life in Christ how am I suppose to navigate a community that is? If morality and its gilded lies quicken my demise as a believer how do I convey this to the people who drag me back into rules and regulation?

I want to live a moral life in Their kingdom.

I could give a fuck about being a moral person. The injection of pride that I get when I create laws to live by is an addictive fix but causes my soul to blacken and harden into a robotic and calculated machine. In my sickness I am looking for a doctor. Someone to heal me not give me a pill. I don't trust prescriptions of 'try harder,' 'communicate more,' 'you should _____ more.' Thank you, but I desire a healer that can reach into my chest and remove my death in its fullness and anecdotal reminders of an improved lifestyle will never cut it. My cancer will not vanish under a routine of morality, that treatment will just lull me into the hollow comfort of false remission. Healthy life, the joy of salvation and being owned and redeemed by a God of Grace and Love is the only cure that will survive my relapses of failure. It is in this confusing and delicate miracle that I place the totality of hope for a well-lived life. Keep your morality to yourself please. Your solutions to problems may work for you but they lead me death. I cannot keep myself to my standards and yours are far too heavy to bear.

In Them, this bazaar and beautiful chaos of Love, Forgiveness, and Grace that is called the Trinity, is where I find abundant life. Please take your offering of effort and cyclical moral piety somewhere else because I am crushed and suffocating under their endless weight.

..entrance

One time in 7th grade I had my cd's stolen from the locker room while I was in PE class. I was really mad for a while, for far too long actually, but in the end prayed for the salvation of the thief, since they were all Christian music. Last week I had my bike light stolen outside of my internship. Whatever. I guess not too much has been taken from me in my life and the feeling of violation is not something that I experience a lot.

Transition: I woke up at around 4:39 today to fairly loud voices in the kitchen. One was obviously Cory and another man with a broken African accent talking about Gatorade and omelets. I was rather confused as to what was going on, eventually just concluding that it was a refugee from his internship... over for early morning breakfast... which doesn't make any sense. After about 10 minutes of confused ease-dropping I fell back into sleep only to get woken up a few minutes later but Cory asking to talk.

Apparently I was wrong, the Rastafarian man from the Ivory Coast was not a displaced refugee looking for breakfast but a man looking for musical instruments (it turned out that he was both). Cory woke up when he was exiting our house; banjo, autoharp, and electric guitar in tow. He woke up and invited him in, asking if he was hungry and they made a meal together. They were able to have a good conversation on the porch over breakfast while the loot still waited on the sidewalk, evidence of the infraction. The man left, apologizing about the situation and without the objects.

Interpretation: I am very very proud of Cory. I think that his behavior and response shows the depth of his love and character. I am very happy that a hungry man was fed, even though we didn't have cheese. I am thankful that we had food for him to eat. I am thankful that there was a conversation to be had. I am thankful that even if all of the objects had been taken, it would have still been okay. I am thankful that Cory woke up.

I am also really confused because someone walked into our house this morning and wanted to take things. There is a part of me underneath the happiness of the ending that is angry, violated, and slightly nervous. It is great that Cory is amazing and that Mr. Rastafarian was docile and compliant. Knowing both of those things post factum is great and reassuring. Still a big part of my understanding of the story is confusion: how do we respond as a house filled with valuable people, not just valuable things? is it alright to feel violated when really, at the end of the day, it's only things and they are meaningless? how do we respond in faith as a house, knowing that God is sovereign and in control? is it okay to feel scared?

..humility/information/secrets

1. The more I learn about myself the more I realize that humility is not optional in my life. Humility is not an attitude or a demeanor that I have, it's a state of reality. Over the last week I have been discovering more of who I am, not who I want to be or think I am when I am trying. My propensity to do things that are selfish or wrong or unwise is usually overwhelming, but a state that I often intentionally overlook so I that I can focus on my successes instead of my failures. In the past, my life was metered by morality and performance failure was unacceptable and would push me into a state of flagellation and torment. Over time I have been introduced to grace but it has remained a largely abstract concept in my life. Right now, I feel like I am looking at the pile of shit that is my life, with all of its beauty and decay, and don’t feel paralyzed by my inadequacies. Grace is what allows me to look honestly at what my personhood is composed of in reality and not want to look away with disgust. It just pushes me into forced humility. When I keep on going, making choices and living life, I can do it with hope, knowing that my diseased existence is redeemed through Christ. This all may be fundamental or elementary, but grace is not a place that I go very much and I usually have no fucking idea how I am suppose to receive it from God. The pastor at Grace Church (probably not ironic...) said that if reality were fully understood then happiness would never be achievable. I have to believe that he is wrong. Nothing makes me happier than knowing the reality of my life and knowing that Jesus chooses to love me despite of it.

2. Information is strange. We all want to know information about each other. Gossip is nice because it is an exchange of valued information about others. It can often have terrible effects on relationships, but I think that it is ultimately done in a desire to know other people. I have noticed that people have been talking a lot recently about finding out about engagements over Facebook. They are usually pissed and rightly so. An exchange of information between friends is what intimacy and value is often based upon. I find that I am often evaluating the worth of relationships upon the amount of information know between myself and the other person. I feel honored when people choose to tell me things and feel loved when they ask about me. Today I had an experience where I was offered substantial information about 4 people, two of which I really just met tonight. The information was heavy and overwhelming and I feel like the structure of the relationships are not developed enough to support it. I realized tonight that I am at a loss at how to manage it and properly show support and concern for them.

3. I think that I am moving to a new place in my faith. After a year of communal understanding and emphasis in my relationship with God, I am a little burnt out. I want to want God for myself. I have wanted a secret and very personal relationship with him recently, one that is not accessed by others for a while. This desire has been seeping into my other relationships and has caused me to desire intimacy in friendships that I cannot always navigate very well. It causes me to want people to know me in ways that they can’t and makes me irritated at them when they don’t. I want to be able to appreciate people for who they are and rest in the fact that I am known regardless of their ignorance.