..scared

I am sitting on the yellow (jell-o) couch that I hate, but I have spent what feels like the last three weeks on this couch that I hate. My relationship to this couch feels a lot like my life. I have kind of hated the place that I have been recently but seem to stay here.

I suppose I could blame it on Camden, but its not Camden. I could blame it on 'unsustainable' Christianity but I don't think that is it either. I could think about changes in social structure or the shift into a new quarter, and search for other things to blame this feeling on. I think that all of these elements play into my current state, but the sum of them is less than the totality of my experience.

I don't know what to do. I feel like I am loosing my faith and so apathetic and heart broken about it at the same time. I am too tired of Christianity to go back to the same rut, the same cyclical guilt, the same standards that I will never reach. I don't want to live a life of Christian cliches or tightly structured Christian activities. I want my faith to mean more than a label I can put in the religion box of surveys or an easy conversation to fall back onto at a Christian conference. I tired of pretending I am perfect, have perfect revolutionary ideas, or how some strangely deep understanding of life. At the end of the day, I know little and tend to love less that I could.

So I have become blunt, and tell people how I actually am. I have noticed that I have more grace for people's humanity and that the fact that life is messy and terrible at times does not paralyze me.

Right now though, I am really really scared to talk about the place that I am in. I don't know, with certainty, things that I hold really true and only realize that they are vital to my existence when the thought of loosing them overwhelms me. I am terrified to talk to most of the people in my life about it because I don't want to be mad if they say something trite and soothing, seeing my current state as an emotional outburst. Antidoting pats on the head and 'I'll be praying for you's' seem to be the worst possible solution to this situation and are the reason that I have shrunk away from so much in my life.

I want God, that is a truth that is undeniable in my life. I am just at a complete loss in how to find him and its starting to kill me.

..answers

Looking back on the last few days and the last month, I have begun to realize that I have not really allowed myself to be effected by the different events that have come into my life. I like to think that learning and growth doesn't come from experiences but from reflection on experiences, but that is so much easier said than done. Life happens and you experience things but the rest of your life doesn't stop, it's just paused and waiting for you to come back to it. So I have been doing that, getting swept up in life without reflection and dreaming of an arbitrary time in the future that will be a haven of debriefing and understanding. This idea is very illusive for me and I guess I am learning what unpacking along side of living life will look like.

I think the place that Camden has brought me to is one of difficult questioning. It's forced me to ask hard questions of myself, ones that reveal decaying parts of my heart, and the underdeveloped limbs of my soul. That is something that I don't really want to spend much time looking at. My lack of maturity can be pitiful and the depth of my arrogance is embarrassing. I think that for me to look for answers to the questions that I am asking right now would be missing the purpose of their existence. I think that they are in my life as a means of motivation, or a way to engage difficult topics and situations. I can't go to places like Camden and not question. All Camden is to me is an eternal pile of questions with very few answers and I think that was a reality that I wasn't expecting.

I am a person who wants answers. I expect them from people in relationships and in my beliefs and understandings of the world. I like to think that every problem has an answer and that its just a matter of finding it. But I don't know if that true. What if questions are the medium of life that we are suppose to remain in, find motivational comfort in, and let us remember our frailty in a world of confusion? I think that this concept of questioning allows God to remain sacred and mysterious and it is through this medium that I can continually pursue him. This attitude keeps me a perpetually naive student and never an expert. It forces me to trust blindly, the people that I love and the people that I fear, because they are often one in the same. And it makes me live in love, because I feel like it is the only medium that is guaranteed by God. Love and answers are different. They are different solutions to different pursuits and answers will leave me arrogant and frustrated, burned out and in despair. Love never fails, it just doesn't because it's not based upon solving problems. That's probably why it's hard.

..review

So 3 out of 4 winter breaks has come and is going and it followed the trends of the previous two, with quite a bit more intensity.

Timeline of my break:
Finished school December 7th, left for Camden, New Jersey on the 8th, came back to Seattle on the 21st, went to visit my grandparents the 22nd-25th, and will be going to Portland for New Years tomorrow.

There has been a lot of movement and traveling but it has been littered with struggle and frustration, fantasies of chain smoking, and censored conversation with my family.

For the sake of brevity I guess I will just run through what the hell has happened over the last month in my life.

Right before I left, we had a semi-good bye party for John. He has decided to travel for the next quarter and so this would be the last time we all had a chance to enjoy his company for the next few months. We spent the night throwing Lunchables bologna at the walls and at some point our kitchen table turned into a tattoo parlor. The joy of freedom from academia and stress was apparent and we stayed up too late to enjoy the last few moments of our lives together. At some point in the night a small group of us gathered in the guest bedroom, where John was repacking his bags, and we decided to pray together. This spontaneous eruption of prayer is probably the most sacred time in our house for me and it was so fitting. In that moment I was overwhelmed with the amount of blessing that had been poured out on us over the last quarter and the amazing blessing of being able to share life with the people in that room. Not to sound clique, but God was really there.

I slept for 2 hours, got up and put my luggage in the car for the airport at freaking 4 in the morning. We said our goodbyes and some where fine, with the promise of familiarity in just a short 3 weeks. The goodbye for John was not really like that though. I had been wondering what that moment would be like since his announcement of traveling was made in our living room a month before. I hugged his little torso, with a fresh tattoo of 'HOPE' from the night before and left for the airport. I let myself cry awake.

But I got to the airport and I had to shift gears, preparing mentally for two weeks of a SPRINT group and a new place, with new challenges and problems and people. The flight was good, filled with excitement and my journey to Camden began with a prayer in the airport. We arrived in Philadelphia 7 hours later and Matt picked us up, drove us over the Ben Franklin Bridge, through Pennsaken, and to our home.

I worked in a 7th grade class room in the mornings with Mrs. Richards, a 50-something white teacher from the suburbs and 18 beautiful kids. Ador, AB, Shane, Ricky, Cierra, LeShawn, Alexsandra, Joel, Edwardo, Natalie, and others where the energy filled potential that sat in the seats and where bustled around the school by raised voices for the two weeks I was there. To be completely honest, the classroom was really difficult for me. I wasn't really integrated into the course. Mrs. Richard's was reaching the end of the quarter and exhausted so I did what I could and graded papers, imputed scores into the computer, and explained the Holocaust. It was exhausting to watch her yell and after a week I was frustrated to the point of tears, watching a good 40% of the class day rot away in a struggle for silence and stillness, objectives that seem futile and pointless to me, a simple diversion to creative engagement and positive re-enforcement on the teacher's part. The best part of the two weeks that I was there was the hour I was left alone with the class, to monitor 'free time'. After about 20 minutes of knitting and other various activities, boredom entered the classroom and the volume rose, indicating a need for some direction. So Shane came up to the front of the class and shared a poem that he had written about a love just out of reach of his clammy, prematurely aged hands. And the class was quiet and then they erupted in clapping and began to clamor for their chance at classroom fame. Cierra came up and shared a poem about her life in Camden and then the class snapped with reverence at her accurate depiction of marginalized hope in a 'place like Camden'. It was this moment that Mrs. Richard's returned to the class of civilized poets. In my pride and self-righteousness I felt like it was my middle finger to her two of screaming demands.

I would leave, have lunch with my team and then scrounge up a ride to the downtown after school camp. I worked with 12 kids there, between the 3 and 5th grade. They were noticeably more intense than the kids at Camden Forward and the experience was much more confrontational and brash. I found it much easier to love these kids, in all of their cursing and song-singing that in the artificially forced silence of the private school. I worked with Jacob on his social studies homework, Shaniya on her reading, Tanequah on a crayon rendition sun bathing rabbits, and Robert on basic phonics. Robert is in 3rd grade, has a learning disability, and can't read. He can also plaster this ears to the side of his head which is pretty funny. His nickname for me was Squidward and it kind of made me sad. Haha. After school was great. We left with the grand finale of roller skating. The is something neutralizing about a common activity where screaming is okay and everyone is on the edge of failure. It was the deepest sense of settledness I experienced in Camden, rolling around in circles with my lonely hand filled with the love and trust of learning roller skaters.

I struggled immensely in Camden. Poverty is fucking horrible. It watch children be neglected and an entire section of society ignored is infuriating and I don't really know what to think/do about it at the end of the day. I found myself looking at my skin color with confusion, realizing how little I know about myself and how awkward I feel in my caucasian suit. I am excited about this awkwardness and excited to stumble into learning something new about the world and myself.

God was in Camden and he was there in little ways and in big ones too. The people that are there are brimming with God. I have much more to learn about this and I feel like it will come with more reflection and time and conversation with God.

Coming home. Haha. The same. Nothing changes but I change and then this become an intense disconnect because I have the same face and the same laugh, but my brain is different and my heart is different and my understanding of myself and God and this world are all different. So I get asked how it was working with inner city black kids and don't know what to say and I get talked at about how many people in poverty would not choose to leave because of a lack of moral fiber and sit in shock and I get told that hating rich people is a sin and that I comprise 1/4 of the perfect American family. I am at the point where I don't know how to engage my father. I don't know what loving him looks like because I feel loved by him but entirely misunderstood, which leaves me confused and frustrated as hell.

I don't know how to be the quintessential daughter in a lilly-white, suburban landscape when I don't think about family like that anymore and I experience God in community. So I cry because they don't know me and its hard to love people who are so close but who don't understand. I fear that I come across as an arrogant bitch and I don't how to be and how to love.

So its good to be back in my house, where laughter comes easily and God is here in life and not just in verbiage. I am really excited for this next quarter. I am excited to learn, so much! I am excited to love with abandon and get hurt and get up and be okay. I am excited to fall asleep talking with God and wake up dreaming about foreign relations with China and laugh at how fucking ridiculous I am.

It should be a great quarter.

..failure

Sometime I feel like I fail at all of my relationships at the same time.

I think that this might go in cycles and it something that I need to pay attention to.

I don't think that I have a place to fall that is soft, relationally, and at the end of a exhausting quarter, its all I want.


God is good, he provides. He is perspective and he is the greatest sociologist. (Damn sociology. I hate you right now)

..imagination

About month ago I was struck with the lack of imagination around me. I think I was in the midst of planning another program that had been done annually before, and therefore tradition was enough motivation to keep me going. It wasn't really. I also found myself in afew forums and advocacy discussions and inevidibly a hand would raise up at the end and ask the disheartening question of 'So what do we do now...?' I found myself gathering data on social issues, gathering theories in which to frame them, rooting them in theological reasoning without any imagination for something different that what I was seeing already done.

So for a while I championed this cute new idea of having a Christian imagination. I let it rest in my brain and I let it sit there until I felt smart and wise. For a while I felt nice because Shane Claiborne talked about these ideas in his book and I liked thinking like Shane. The problem with it was that I didn't really know what a Christian imagination was, I just knew what not having one looked like.

Over the course of the last week or so I have been struggling with the realities of a few of my current life situations. I didn't think that they had much to do with Christian imagination and put my pet passion to the side for a while. I began to learn that much of my tensions came down to the role of expectations in a group setting. I personally have so many expectations in most situations. I have expectations for myself, my morality, and my behaviors around other people. I have expectations of the group as a whole and the direction we are going. I also have expectations for each person within the group. For a group of four there are 25 different expectations and for a group of six, there are 30. I think that the tension I am feeling in these situations is the collision of idealism and reality. Idealism, to me, is based in the future, in the non-existent and I am beginning to realize that it is often based in ignorance, however blissful it may be. Living in a world of idealism is comfortable and happy. The world looks rosy and ideas become more important than people, making personal relationship contingent on the agreement of ideas rather than deeply abiding, sacrificial love across divides. The tension comes when this problematic idealism steps into reality and is met with busy schedules, limited resources, and the cold facts of a difficult life. This tension, if not quickly evaluated causes unmet expectations to fester and this leads to frustration. A wise friend once said that frustration is unmet expectation and his words haven’t failed me yet.

So this leads me to Christian imagination in a practical way. I think that Christian imagination is deeply rooted in reality, not idealism, because Jesus met us where we are and works with us in this world, not just mentally in our thought lives. So expectations are great, but should not be the primary force keeping relationships together because they will usually be unmet and that is dangerous territory to operate in. Ideals are great, but need to be less important that the facts of peoples lives and the difficulties in a lot of relationships. Permission into heaven is not intellectual, it’s relational. Ideals that are second class to people and a hopeful marriage of reality and those ideas is the birthplace of the Christian imagination. It is a difficult marriage it is definitely hard work but I think that this intelligent, relational hope is what God is calling us to. To me, there is so much more practical hope in the marriage of these ideas than in romantic, optimistic idealism that can often become caustic to other people in one’s life. I think that this is why I can have expectations, they are a human experience, and go to school to learn about the difficult realities of this world, and believe that it is suppose to be so much different, and blend them together in a way that is sustainable and lifegiving.

..church

It's a funny thing to me when God calls me away from something. I find that I am usually asking for clarity, for a yes or a now on a major decision, or for assurance in the things that he is telling me to do. This, however, has not been the case for me with 'going to church'. I am finding myself being called away from church and this is unfamiliar territory for me.

Growing up church was always a part of my life. Always. I started to attend Mars Hill in my junior year of high school and God definitely worked through that body to affect me in a really amazing way. I felt a compulsion to go there for several years and grew a lot through the teaching of Mark and the intimacy of my community group. The thought of leaving was never an answer to people who were angry about Mars Hill or the misunderstandings it caused in my life. I am not leaving church because it is a difficult place to be, I just don't feel as though God wants me to be there anymore.

I have tried other churches. They are nice. I think that God wants me to redefine church in my life and right now that means not going to church. I don't know if this is the right thing to do and it honestly scares me. It hurts to think about the misconceptions that will probably come about in regards to my faith. Oh well. I am scared that I won't do it seriously. I am scared that I won't be able to look to my church attendance as a pillar of my faith and that I will be weakened (or have to reexamine exactly what my faith is built on).

But in some ways it’s really liberating. I have the feeling that God and I are doing this together and even though I am scared about it, I know that it will be okay.

I'm excited to watch my vocabulary change too. Church is suppose to be a verb not a noun, I think...

..imagination

I have been in a thinking mood lately. I usually know that I have slipped into one when I stop talking and people begin to ask me if I'm 'doing okay'. I usually just giggle and say yes, because I am doing fine, just thinking...

I am thinking about hope, and imagination, and purpose, and anger, and resistance, and stability, and authenticity, and humility. I think that I am growing into a rooted and settled place in my faith, where God's will is more important than me being extreme or known.

I am learning that authenticity is silent. Humility is silent. I have often thought in the past that authenticity was how other people perceived me. I would project myself onto other people, having them mirror back their interpretation of me, and if that matched up to the person I thought I was, I would declare myself 'authentic'. Much of it had to do with my image or my loud social theology or passion for certain topics, not because they were the essence of what I was but because that is the way I wanted to be perceived. My search for authenticity was really me searching for a way to justify my pride. I think that this deeply rooted, silent authenticity is an expression of humility. Humility is being finding identity and strength through Christ alone, living that out silently but always having words of thanks to Him perched at the edge of my tongue. Humility lets me really listen, without even talking in my brain during a conversation. It also invites people to listen when I talk. My words hold more power when they are enveloped with listening.