..coincidence//closure

I was walking on campus today and overheard a student describe her process of switching into a different art class.  She stated quite a few rational reasons to transfer to the other class and I congratulated her in my mind for figuring out the obscure matrix of SPU-land so successfully. But then she ruined it for me. She said that the fact that the wait-list opened up with an extra spot and she was able to register was evidence that God wanted her to be in the class and that God was blessing the major that she had chosen. Immediately my theological-self started shaking its head back and forth with disapproval. As it is in my life always, I disagreed with this logic on instinct and then went back and figured out just why I had such a strong reaction.

This is what I came up with:

• I have a hard time discerning what is 'from God'.  I feel ill-prepared and inadequate to wade through my life with labels that have the words 'God's Will' printed on them, adhering them to events or experiences where I feel God was present. God is confusing.
• Somehow this rational seems to be disproportionally positive. Meaning most of the great things in my life happen because God is good and therefore God wants to make me happy. True: God is good and God desires happiness for his children, I am just a little reluctant to say that these things are in a cause/effect relationship with each other. People also attribute pain or grief to God. I think that this is to find purpose, which seems to be essential to the human experience, but I just don't know sometimes...
  
• I just don't know if this is how I want to view God's involvement in my life. I think that God is subtle and intimately concerned with stupid things, like class wait-lists and the whistling biker behind me today. I am reluctant to reduce the God of the Universe to a label that I place on my happiness and convenience and positive coincidence. I want to gasp a little when I experience the mystery of God meddling in my ordinary, not simply thank them for being an accommodating bell-hop. 

I am person who craves closure. Not the forced good-bye parties of years spent together on staffs or exit interviews. The kind of closure I want is bows on the boxes of different experiences in my life. I want things to feel complete and properly discovered. It bothers me when they aren't. But right now I have a lot of boxes of experiences overflowing with content, with no bows in sight. Wrapping things up for me means talking and writing and thinking and telling the story of the boxes' content. I don't know if this is a very mature thing to be doing though. Somewhere inside of myself I am starting to feel uneasy about putting the rubber stamp of done on my experiences and then moving on. It might be nice for my mental organization but it just isn't true to real life. So I am thinking about what it means to be involved in experiences while grieving their changed circumstances without sadness. If you don't understand, it's okay, neither do I. I just want to be able to process through things in a way that is true to my current relationship to them and not as a falsified reality of complete in an effort to be done.

To be honest, my life scares me a little bit right now. Don't tell though, it's important that people think I am strong.  <  This is obviously bullshit but it's a surprisingly present little green beast in the back of my mind.

There is freedom in honesty and strength in fragility. I just need God to prove it to me because  sometimes I don't believe it.

Pedro the Lion will serenade me tonight. They just understand quite a lot and they are the only friends from high school I still hang out with.  

..okay

On Sunday at Scum I had my "Oh shit." moment. In the past it has normally been about the volume of things that I have to do and the business it will bring into my life. This time I think I just felt the weight of responsibility that I am stepping into. If I stand in the center of my life and take a 360 degree look at the things that I am invested in, it just seems that they have beady eyes that aren't as much interested in what I do, but in who I am. So I feel the weight of responsibility to be fully functioning. I still don't know what that means or looks like but that is what has been getting stuck in my mental dialog a lot recently. 

It's okay though.

Relationships... I feel strange about those too. I have a lot on my plate and it was come and will leave soon but I feel the space and distance in a lot of my friendship. In the past I would have felt l remarkably guilty about this. That guilt would then manifest itself in a nasty web of bullshit and I would either be friends with people out of obligation or avoid them.

The place I find myself at now is slightly different because for the first time (in my whole life... not to be epic) I don't feel guilty. I feel healthy. I feel like I am being a productive person who can assess her life and make wise, intelligent decisions about what balance looks like in my life.

Something else.

I think that I am learning to listen to myself more. Selflessness is not silencing my voice, it's controlling it through the power of the Holy Spirit. My desires and reactions are for a legitimate reason in my life and they should not be dismissed as foolishness. A huge part of this is being strong enough to absorb the reactions of others when your voice and theirs contradict. 

Okay. Sleep. 

..stream

of consciousness.

• Tonight my mom was telling me about Steven Curtis Chapman's young daughter who was killed in a tragic car a few month's back. It makes me sad. What makes me mad is when Christians care more about tragedy that happens to fellow Christians than tragedy that happens to 'non'-Christians. It baffles me but it happens quite frequently.
  
• I didn't realize how large of a shift it would be to walk back into UI after a summer of hyper-liberalism with the maverick, John Fox. After having my metaphorical fists up all summer working in 'advocacy', diplomacy and Christian ministry seems so passive and neutered. 
• I have found myself yawning and just wanting to curl up into a ball of sleep over the last few days because I have been exhausted. Thoughts: 1. I have been watching my language and the topicality of my comments. It's rather exhausting trying to watch my conversations and I am beginning to resent it. 2. There are millions of people in my office. Well, maybe like 30 but that's 29 more than my entire summer. The highlight of my internship would be the fieldtrip days. John and I would engage in pleasant car conversation, driving to meet with a low-incoming housing resident or a politico, whom we would talk shit about on the ride back to the office. The adjustment to a solo operation was difficult and not something I prefer in a work environment but the shift back is proving rather prickly as well.
• Today, I was getting dressed in my room and I was struck with an overwhelming feeling. I starting look at my things and had an drenching desire to make sure they were all being actively utilized in my life. My desk is the object that makes me feel most uncomfortable in this context. Desks are probably the most underutilized piece of furniture in existence (or maybe just my existence). Sometimes I think I can do homework in my bed. This is not true, I just sleep. Usually desks collect dust and bank statements. I will use my desk this year, even if it is just to use it. Otherwise I am burning it in the backyard, along with my typewriter and this purse I got from my grandma that I have toted around for 6 year and never used.
• Lifestyle expectations. Seriously. My brain is insulted with the fact that it must navigate these waters for another year. I simply have other, more pressing issues of education to wrestle with over the next year. 
• That leads to being a senior. I am tickled I am a senior. After spending a few days this summer working with a professor outside of SPU-land, the lackluster requirements of the sociology department are slightly nauseating. By the end of the year I think I will be extremely done. It's been a great run, but the time is almost here.
• PMS is okay. PMS during the most stressful week of my life: crying. All I want to do is cry. Today my dad asked me about the economy/bank/sub-prime crisis (with explicit intent to rattle off his soapbox rant) and I just started crying. Mostly because of the dynamics of the conversation but a little because of the economy. When I am crying about AIG going under, I know that I am stressed and slightly emotionally unstable.
• I am sacrilegious. This is not my intent and it does not reflect the way that I think about 'the sacred' or God. I am just disenchanted by religious delicacy in my vocabulary and want the times when I care and am indifferent to be distinct  in the ways I refer to them.
• I have probably eaten 9 Chips Ahoy! real chocolate chip cookies tonight and they taste like buttered shoe insoles. They are just created in the most perfect, appealing size that makes you feel like you are eating nothing.
• Tomorrow is the end of an era. I will no longer be the only collegiate Beach, my parents will have a shit-filled empty nest, and my brother will be learning to play his acoustic guitar on his twin extra-long bed in the city of Ellensburg, Washington. I'm proud of him and excited to come back for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Maybe it's just a vain hope that some shift in circumstances will cure the difficulties I have with my family. Whatever. I think that he will be fine and WILL EXCEL AT EVERYTHING, EVER.  I am very excited for him and proud of him. 
• My room is finished. I like decorating. I don't like that I had to think about gender roles when I was decorating my room. It just makes me happy, regardless of my sex.
• All of this is meaningless. Haha. I'm not even chasing after the wind. I am sitting on a couch eating carbohydrates.

Favorite quote of the novel that I am reading right now (and the first novel that I have read in three years. No, I don't really want to talk to you about it.)

"Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone." Jose Saramago, Blindness

..100

With this post, there will be one-hundred. Two of which were eloquent, eight that were rants, and eighty that where awkwardly caught in between. For all of them, I am grateful.

Independent of this post, I was thinking about what it will be like to be old today. To have time bleach my hair, dig large valleys into my skin, and give gravity the space to work its toil. It will all come in time. What I was most excited when I thought about getting old today (my 'most' on this topic changes frequently) was how laughing will be different. I think that it will come from my overly-sugared belly more often and that it will probably make my time-softened fat shake. I will still laugh for no reason and I will still laugh a few seconds before most people, but hopefully the tinge of panic that I feel sometimes when people ask me about it will go away. I think that I will laugh because I know. I will know how so many of my mile-high question marks worked out and I will know how all of the seemingly paralyzing mistakes make beautiful sense in the tapestry of my life. I will smile because I no longer have to convince myself of proper theology and correct behavior. My bones will be a playing a vibrating symphony of freedom, and it will be from this resounding assurance that I will know that I am following God. I will be strong and won't have to pep-talk or debrief around conversations because my strength will precede and follow me. I am excited to experience a healthy and alivening sense of chaos from the grounded perch of age that I will rest on. I am excited to relearn everything I know, reframe everything that I think makes me who I am, and experience life through other people, in other times.

Every once and a while, impatient, short-sighted people like me curse time and damn it to hell unless it will instantly reproduce to 800 times its current state. On my more long-sighted days I love the process that it creates in life. I love that I will have lived through, in, and with time and I think that it will make my gray hairs worth every minute of the wait.

..us

Over the last few years I have become increasingly aware people's use of language. How people refer to 'the homeless', 'the poor', whether or not they include themselves in classifications of people groups, their use of possessive pronouns when talking about their belongings. Personally, the use of language often reflects where I am in relation to some sort of other.

Currently I am in a state of confusion about my pronouns. Mostly the terms 'us', 'our', and 'we'. As much as the culture I was raised in has instilled in my psyche that my worth and maturity depend on the strength of the 'mine', 'I', and 'me's that I exercise, there is little comfort to be had in these terms and states. At times there is sanity, but rarely comfort. I find comfort in the communal language I am blessed enough to use. But I no longer know what to call so much of my life right now. All of the pronouns seem awkwardly misplaced on my tongue when they slip out in reference to my living situation.

Being in college, displacement and transition are a medium that comes with the territory. I will have grossed six residences once I walk down the isle at graduation, possibly a seventh soon after. Each moving experience requires cardboard and time, but also includes a shift in my language. I have a new 'us' to manage, to engage, to represent, and to ruminate upon. Over the  last few years, the liquidity that seemed to mark all of these transitions startled me and I began to ache for a sense of belonging that was more difficult to enter, navigate, and exit. I was hungry for ties that where more robust and characterized by commitment and devotion. The process into this new way of living is a story independent of this little catharsis but it can be summed up as a lot of me, a lot of others, and more of God. So all of us walked into this year together, surrounded by a sometimes suffocating cloud of witnesses, to see if this risky 'us' lived up to its radical sex appeal.

Thinking back on my naively blind ambition and hope-filled idealism, I grin at the innocence and faith that it radiated. Now my grin turns into a chuckle and I feel far away from that sugar-coated fantasy that propelled me into the new over a year ago. I deeply respect it for what it was and am proud that it welled up inside on my ribcage, pushing me into the unfamiliar. My idea and understanding of 'us' has radically morphed over the year, being shaped under the fury of my emotions and ideas. The validity of my every evolving thoughts remain to be tested by time and I can hardly evaluate them. 

I would like to think that the unrelenting flame inside of me that led me into this 'us' is leading me out of it, into a larger, deeper understanding of my belonging and relationship to the others that I am blessed to be with. Sometimes my hope takes a vacations and I feel as though I am pacifying my selfishness and bullshitting my way out of an understandably difficult commitment. Time, one of  the most just judges, will illuminate this; I am forced to remain in a state of musing for a while longer. Moving on.

Since I have been processing this year I have learned that much of my understanding of belonging is marked by fear. Fear of being known, fear of asking for what I want, fear of being hurt, fear of being rejected, fear of not getting my needs met, fear of not being able to handle the weight of relationship and the task of loving another. There is something so basic and primitively human about the desire to be in relationship with others, and when I found out how deeply this desire penetrated, it became my biggest fear because it was my biggest hope. 

There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out all fear, because fear has to do with punishment.

After a year of intentionality, learning, and growth, some roots of  fear have been extinguished, while some others live on to be tackled at a later time. Right now I fear being lonely. I fear leaving and forgetting and loosening my grip on profoundly formational relationships. I fear replacing my longing for connection with a numbing cocktail of American independence. But I also fear becoming satisfied with the falsely mature sense of community that I hold now. Just as my preliminary understanding of 'us' was sweetly simple, so too is my present understanding of the complex realities of lives lived together.  As I walk away from an 'us' over the next few months, I am shedding my present understanding to step into something else. Some of the previously employed formula is being reused, mixing the influence of God, personal motivation, and the grace of other people in my life; making me think that this is really the way that all substantive development occurs. It makes me realized that I believe in a gospel of slow, purposely inefficient transformation and the fumbling of my language gives voice to that reality in my life.

..today

If I could inhale air until it reaches the bottom of my lungs, close my eyes, and disappear for a few moments I would. Right now. Sometimes the thought of disappearing is overwhelmingly attractive.

I woke up this morning really sad and disturbed because I had a dream about child abuse. I have been having troubling dreams recently, not where I have been injured or attacked but where I am watching others be victimized. They make me feel like I have been chewing on nickels for hours, with the throbbing headaches and a stomach of guilt. In all of the dreams I am trying to help, but always come up short, never quite getting assistance and never quite making the right decision. In my dream last night, I actually made the situation worse by clumsily calling attention to it. The next thing I watched was the little girl being forced across the Safeway parking lot, guided by the strong hand of her tuna eating father (My dream started when I was grocery shopping & I met the two as they were shoveling a mountain of canned tuna into their cart.) Sometimes I feel as though its  hard enough to process through the actual shit that happens in the world.  I do not often read novels or enjoying watching movies highlighting social problems because I can barely sift through what my response should be to the factual problems in  my life. Processing the fiction seems too daunting most of the time. Maybe next time I have a dream where I am given the chance to intervene I will actually learn something. Fingers crossed.

Yesterday night and this morning I have been dealing with things. I took the rain as a symbol of "You actually need to do your to-do list, Lindsey" and wrote emails, purchased books, did things. It was nice but when I am sorting through my mess of chores, it becomes overwhelming when people add other tasks to them. Perhaps this is why they have entire graduate classes on  'The Helping Relationship',  because its confusing.

Most valued helping relationship today: I was riding my bicycle to work and noticed a  poor Golf  driver with his messenger bag on the top of his car. 4 stop lights later I was able to catch him, knock on his window amidst the confusion of traffic and throw the bag in the car. Hope nothing broke. I liked it because it was a mostly silent exchange. There were no strings attached on either end, no public recognition to be had. Just a friendly action with a 20 second life span. If I had powers, I would alter all of my 'random acts of kindness' to be silent and invisible. Sometimes the layers of social exchange are too complex and overwhelming and  I am paralyzed by their magnitude to do anything nice because nice is far to simplistic.

Today I want my internship to be over. My boss man has spent an annoyingly long time stammering out confused instructions about a damn workforce housing report. I think that Jesus filled him with a  desire to deposit the checks at the bank because I was about ready to throw acid on him. Not that I have acid or actually would want to harm him, I was just annoyed.

I love people. I don't mind making decisions. Large groups of people often cannot make decisions. Maybe I want a vacation with someone else where we do things but it doesn't feel like a constant pause... then a passive, vague dialog... then an exchange of indifferences... then one of us getting irritated enough to fling a decision forward just so that we can progress. The absence of decision making sounds like an island vacation (or something relaxing. Think of relaxing imagery and slow breathing.)

..three

• The struggle between individualism and communal life is ever present. I have definitely felt the tension this living situation and social situations this year but have started noticing in many other areas as well. Identifying a person by their race or any other social grouping can be harmful, placing  too much weight on the community one inhabits instead of their individual distinctions and characteristic. The other side of the coin is our desire to belong. We always want to be in the  know, invited, and regarded worthy of inclusion. Finding the delicate balance of these two worlds is difficult enough in my own life but being sensitive to  it in others can often be a daunting task.
• I have been increasingly disturbed by the notion that people want to be like God. I realize that there are hundreds of biblical passages that affirm this longing but I think that it can easily be skewed. My biggest fear is the dichotomy it places in my life. If I am to become more God like I need to decrease in resemblance of myself. I don't know if this is exactly what the bible means when it mandates things such as, "Be holy as your Father in Heaven is holy."  I think all of  this can  happen within a context of self acceptance and love. If my ultimate end is to become a miniature God figurine then I should despise and reject almost all of me. I don't really want to become God or Godlike.  I want to be in  love with God and I want be shaped and purposed by them, but I  do not have aspirations of divinity. I think that they can handle it themselves.
• Having sick friends sucks. > Mostly just because I can't really stand the game of information competition that sometimes happens. It seems as though, when a person has a medical ailment that word gets passed around and people know things  and people where there and people where called. Maybe this isn't something that other people deal with, it may just be a personal quirk,  but I find that I often feel socially displaced and uncomfortable when a friend is sick.  I also feel like sometimes it is a situation where this is an invisible, ideal response that people should have, filled with wisdom, decisiveness, and compassion. I always feel like there some great standard that I should achieve,  but never quite reach. People should just not be sick.