Are blog posts allowed to be vague?

Because this one will be.  My thoughts are vague, my feelings are vague...

All I can think is that I love Shane & Shane.  They are happy music for me.  Not to mention that it has been due to many of their songs that my life has changed drastically. 

I miss the people from my old life sometimes.  They were pretty awesome, and I still hold onto the fact that I was happy back then (not that I'm unhappy now).  I just wish I wasn't emotionally stunted, because the more I think about, that's what I'm pretty sure I am.

No worries though.  Obviously I'd say that.  I can't be unhappy, just as I can't say everything on my mind.  Being unhappy just reflects poorly on me, and that can't be.  I'm not unhappy though, really.  I am in love, because... even now, we love you, Jesus :).


Maybe this is one bit of writing that should have stayed in my personal journal.  It's not really a huge problem though, because I am certain that my readership is fairly low.  I only occasionally get the weird automatically generated advertisement comment.  I don't delete them because I'm not sure than it matters.  Maybe I like thinking that someone is reading--even if it's a robot.  Hey, robots are people too!  My story will make a difference in their life.

Oh, but for real, you should all read the book Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?  It's pretty cool, if you're a nerd like me, interested in the way that postmodernism interacts with faith and the church.  I love it, personally.  Also, though, it really goes along with the idea that "They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony" (Rev. 12:11).  Ha!  Po-Mo fun.

Paz, amor.

I'm trying...

to be healed.

I think after all this past year, I've realized that I've been broken.  But it's okay, because I will recover.

I have to acknowledge that I'm not alright.  I'm not perfectly okay.  My dad, my church, and many other things have destroyed my confidence, but I'm slowly gaining it back.  I wrote yesterday in my journal "Why do I not believe that God in me is as great as God in someone else?" and I think I'm beginning to process the answer.  Oddly enough, question I asked can also function to answer my fear: God in me is as great as God in someone else.  It's just true.

So I'm working on knowing who I am, and knowing how to live that way.  Even though I don't always feel like I have the permission I want to attempt to do something great or worthwhile, I know that God in me is no less God than He is in those people that I have looked up to. 

“A person can receive only what is given them from heaven.  You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him.’  The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.  He must become greater; I must become less.” -John 3:27-30


Yep.

Post-Grad

I have a lot of thoughts, but I never take the time to sit down and write anymore.

Looking back at my blogs over the years, I wish I still wrote consistently.  Even my personal journal is lacking.  I have several old journals, filled with thoughts from over the years.  Many of those pages are embarrassing; many of my old ideas were very limited, immature.  Regardless, though, I have them.  I know who I was, and I know where I came from, and that's nice to see.

People have never read my blog, really, but I don't really care much at all.  It's still here.  It still lives on, beyond me.  I've thought about changing blogs so often--moving to tumblr, or somewhere else interesting and more popular, but I feel some sort of loyalty to this old one.  It's nothing fancy, and I only rarely make it look fancier... but I can't abandon it.

It's almost like how I can't abandon an old bible, with old notes. 

So I've had this blog since 2007.  In 2007, I started this blog with the question: "How does prayer change and unchangeable God?"  I think it's almost odd to look back at the situation in which I was writing, and think of how much it changed me.  I wrote that post after meeting a 8 year-old girl, who was dying.  It became a big debate about whether or not it would make a difference that people were in her house praying for her 24/7.  My friend's dad said no, Joel said yes--who would I choose to believe?

Little did I know--being 16, being young, foolish, and way too trusting--that this was a debate Christians have long entertained.  This semester I wrote about Chaucer's struggle with the issue.  And wouldn't you know, 5 years later, I'm still unsure.  But hey, I'm in good company.

I do know one thing--"Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them." -Mark 11:23


I asked God about this verse long ago, and He answered.  It was a crazy experience, but life-changing.  I guess that's when it all started.


I remember I used to listen to Brooke Fraser's song "Arithmetic" all the time.  It goes like this:

I've been staring at the sky tonight
Marveling and passing time
Wondering what to do with daylight
Until I can make you mine
You are the one I want, you are the one I want

I've been thinking of changing my mind
It never stays the same for long
But of all the things I know for sure
You're the only certain one
You are the one I want, you are the one I want

I've been counting up all my wrongs
One sorry for each star
See I'd apologize my way to you
If the heavens stretched that far
You are the one I want, you are the one I want

[Chorus]
I won't find what I am looking for
If I only "see" by keeping score
'Cos I know now you are so much more than arithmetic

'Cos if I add, if I subtract
If I give it all, try to take some back
I've forgotten the freedom that comes from the fact
That you are the sum
So you are the one
I want

When the years are showing on my face
And my strongest days are gone
When my heart and flesh depart this place
From a life that sung your song
You'll still be the one I want 

I remember how much I used to want to feel this way.  I used to sit in bed and wish that I felt this, completely.  It was as if everything I had wanted to be given up, but I still couldn't make it happen.


What's strange now... is that... I do feel this way.  In the last verse, I used to worry that I wouldn't be able to say the same thing--that somehow my love for God would die away, and that my life wouldn't have lived His song... but now, I don't worry about that.  I don't know how, or when, but I know that I'm not the same person that used to worry about such things.  I don't cry thinking about how that might not be me, because that is me.  


As I am now graduated from college and looking for a job, this is becoming my greatest struggle.  I've realized that no matter how many songs we can sing about how we want God to be the center or our lives, the only thing we live for, our greatest obsession, etc., there's something in life that desperately fights against that being a reality.  And I can't do it!  I need for my life to be for something meaningful--not just something, but I need my life to be lived for God.  I need to be doing something that He wants me to do, or else there's no point!  I can't be purposeless, because there's so much that needs to be done.  I just have to find out where my place is.


So here's the deal.  I want to be a personal assistant.  I want to help someone do something meaningful.  I want to assist someone with what they can't do as they accomplish the dream that God has given them.  That's my dream job.  That's my desire.

Ready. Set. Go.

An Attempt to Stop Containing the Uncontainable

I wrote this essay this semester. It is almost entirely reflective of who I am, so I decided to throw it up on my blog. I hope you'll enjoy it. The past few years of my education have been spattered with various English classes that have played with the ideas of the intersection of faith and discipline. The idea that the two subjects could mesh quite well was originally brought up in my Introduction to English Studies class, but it was not until I took British Novel that I began to explore how literature in particular could respond to or shed light on the faith that I profess as a Christian. This revelation stemmed from my professor’s inclusion of a quote from Georg Lukács in his introduction on the first day of class. Lukács’ quote said that the novel is “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” From that day forward, this quote has stuck with me. If I was indeed in a discipline that studies the works from a world that has been abandoned by God, then my faith as a Christian was futile in this major. Fortunately, I now disagree with Lukács. While many novels may record a world that does not explicitly deal with the workings of God, I have come to see English studies in a new light. One of the unique strengths of the English discipline is that it is unrestricted in its subject matter. I have found that this strength often contradicts with the values of the Christian community that I have been raised in—in my conservative, evangelical upbringing, God was anything but unrestrained. Yes, I have seen people “dancing in their freedom in Christ,” but when it comes to exploring the unknown or asking the difficult questions of my faith and my God, there was no freedom. English studies, on the other hand, permitted me the opportunity for exploration. It is in this major that I have seen the freedom to entertain a multitude of possibilities for meaning and truth, and in doing so I have seen that this discipline does work hand-in-hand with my faith. In entertaining the possibilities, English studies seems to allow God to be greater than humanity can possess or understand, which fits completely into my view of God.


As I have opened myself to the possibility of finding truth in different areas and in various works of literature, I have discovered that English studies allows the room for doubt to lead to greater faith. As I read for Capstone this semester, I found this idea emphasized by Flannery O’Connor in her letter to Alfred Corn. She writes,

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter said, ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’ This is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith. (542)

Just as O’Connor emphasizes, I believe that quite frequently my faith has been possible only because of my doubt. As I study English literature, I have found myself often questioning the basic faith principles that I have learned. English allows the opportunity for doubt. In this major, I have found that as I look to see God, and feel that I have not found him, it is simply a time of waiting. This is the idea that N.T. Wright comments as he is describing his process of reading the Bible. He says,

I take it as a method in my biblical studies that if I turn a corner and find myself saying, ‘Well, in that case, that verse is wrong’ that I must have turned a wrong corner somewhere. But that does not mean that I impose what I think is right on to that bit of the Bible. It means, instead, that I am forced to live with that text uncomfortably, sometimes literally for years […], until suddenly I come round a different corner and that verse makes a lot of sense; sense that I wouldn’t have got if I had insisted on imposing my initial view on it from day one. (9)

This allowing for doubt, instead of insisting on our wrong ideas (as I see happen so often in the church), allows God to be more than we can understand immediately. There is humility in admitting our humanity, and not thrusting out ideas unto God. As O’Connor also says to Corn, “You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories” (543). I believe that we as humans must always limit God, as we are limited ourselves, but English at least attempts to acknowledge our limitations instead of insisting dogmatically that God is just so.


Once open to the doubt that helps build faith, we can then begin to understand that God is greater than we, as humans, can encompass. This idea has been reflected in many of the readings from this semester. In Brian McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy, his chapter called “The Seven Jesuses I Have Known” celebrates the fact that humanity cannot contain the entire image of the divine. After giving brief sketches of each of the Jesuses that he has come into contact with over his lifetime (including Conservative Protestant Jesus, Pentecostal/Charismatic Jesus, Roman Catholic Jesus, Eastern Orthodox Jesus, Liberal Protestant Jesus, Anabaptist Jesus, and the Jesus of the Oppressed), McLaren ends the chapter with this thought: “I am a Christian because I believe that the real Jesus is all that these sketches reveal and more. Saying that, a question comes to mind… Why not celebrate them all? […] What if, instead, we saw these various emphases as partial projections that together can create a hologram: a richer, multidimensional vision of Jesus?” This is the strength of English studies; I have been trained to look for meaning in many ways, and in that I have come to see that one individual’s perspective of God is not always entirely perfect. This realization sometimes leads to a time of doubt in the English life of faith, but it is not in doubt that we are destined to stay. Instead, as McLaren suggests, we can move to a place where we can celebrate a more complex Christianity than we knew before. I would argue that Rachel Held Evans would agree with this understanding of faith, as she encourages Christians to let go of “false fundamentals” and embrace the true character of God. This is shown as she reflects on the conflict she felt when trying to communicate the ideas of “biblical womanhood” to a group of young girls. After seeing them broken and oppressed by their understanding of what biblical womanhood is and therefore what they should be, she says, “I would tell them that womanhood, like the Bible, is far too lovely and mysterious and transcendent to systematize or explain” (185). This quote falls into Held Evans memoir at the end of a section in the middle of a chapter, but I feel that it is the most central idea of her book. If we, as Christians, believe we are following a God who truly is too transcendent to systematize and explain, then it is a good thing for English studies to allow Him to be so. The pressure to have all the answers is removed for us, as we look to God instead to show Himself to us. As Wright says, “If we really engage with the Bible in a serious way we will find, I believe, that we will be set free from (among other things) some of the small-scale paranoia which goes on about scripture. […] You’ll be paying attention to it; you won’t be sitting in judgment over it” (8). In the same way that he approaches Scripture, so can we, especially as English majors, approach God. We can really engage with Him and be freed of our paranoias about if we are right or wrong in our understanding of him; in process of coming to understand that God is greater and more complex than we can understand, we are required to accept our limitations.

As we are freed from our paranoias about what Christianity looks like and who God has to be if our understanding of Him is to be right, we discover the freedom to seek the true nature of God and to authentically experience our faith. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes about this experience extensively in the Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. I believe this is the experience that Rilke is talking about when he writes about God’s nature, saying,

You are the deep innerness of all things, the last word that can never be spoken. To each of us you reveal yourself differently: to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship. (“II, 22” 11-14)

In these lines, there is an understanding that God comes to us all in different ways. I believe that this idea is the same one that McLaren is trying to promote in “The Seven Jesuses I Have Known.” Perhaps we will never know all the answers about who God is, but perhaps that is something to be celebrated. Held Evans acknowledges that engaging with faith is risky and challenging and Wright proposes the metaphor that it is our responsibility to act out the fifth act of God’s work in this world by drawing of what we have learned in the first four acts. I think that the only way to do these things is by first owning our human limitations. Held Evans says in her book, “My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am” (195), and I believe that through being an English major, I have been able to admit the same. Once that truth has been owned, we can then work together to discover God in a greater fullness than we could each discover alone.


Perhaps it is simply because this topic was already on my mind, but I have felt like every movie I watch or book I read now reiterates this same idea: the acknowledgement of our human limitations. As a Christian, this realization only intensifies the awe I feel as I am beginning to see God’s greatness that transcends humanity. Although it is not appropriate vocabulary for a senior level English paper, the only adjective that I can think to use to explain what English does to faith is that it allows God to be “big.” This immeasurability of God is necessary for each individual to experience Him authentically; it is only in our conceived limitations of God where we do not allow Him to be who He needs to be in order that all could come to know Him. As Rilke writes poetically, “To each of us you reveal yourself differently: / to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship” (“II, 22” 13-14), I have come to learn that God’s vastness is important. As our many Christian interpretations of God differ, as English majors, we can learn that just because one person perceives God to be one way, doesn’t mean that their perspective is completely sufficient to explain who God is. Our faith requires much more humility than that. Through this humility, we can learn and understand more of God’s nature in a continual process, for he truly is more than we can encompass. As Rilke writes in another of his poems, “There is no image that I could invent / that your presence would not eclipse” (“I, 60” 10-11). In English studies we can stop trying to know everything, and instead be content with contributing our understanding of Him to the conversation and learning from what others see that we do not. The novel does not have to be “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,” but instead can contain partial glimpses of the coastline toward which we sail.