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I've been unable to write. But I have much to say, and that means this entry had half a dozen great titles to choose from. You'll be reading about my Week of Lament, Fasting from Color, my new take on 'maturity', my heart that's broke, and a call I'm interpreting as a non-vocational call to the pulpit. See? It's been a busy week.
So first. Without going into details, I've just realized my emotional issues of the past week can all be summed up by the words, 'broken heart.' This did not come to me until today, when my friend Erica used her index fingers and thumbs to make the shape of a heart and then cracked it in half like an egg. I am experiencing a broken heart. It's an entirely new sensation. I've experienced disappointment, dashed hopes, been really let down or depressed before, but this is a new level of 'down'. The (of course entirely appropriate) irony is that the object of my broken heart has no idea. That is the story of my life-- passing under others' radar because I'm too AFRAID to disturb the waters.
The heartbreak has inspired a truly interesting week for me, whence I've decided to embrace feeling low in a Week of Lament. The Bible is pretty full of both exaltation AND lament-- so it makes no sense to me why as Christians we are always focusing on the exaltation. SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED TO LAMENT. And not feel guilty about NOT being happy, or feeling fine, or that you just want to go back to bed when you wake up in the morning. I have decided that God allowed humanity to experience both the highs and the lows-- we have the capabilities to feel great sorrow and pain as well as joy, and I find it difficult to believe that we would feel the former just to appreciate the latter. Surely feeling crummy has merit on it's own? I should throw in here that I have no biblical basis whatsoever for what I'm doing, but it somehow still makes sense to me.
In order not to become actually clinically depressed and the mopey friend no one wants to be around, I've set a cap on my season of Lament. So I'm giving myself one week to be down, to give in and tell people who carelessly ask, "How are you?" that I'm UNWELL. One week to beg out of social engagements I just can't fake my way through-- without guilt. One week to not care what I look like, to be late (within reason), and to not have to smile when I pass people on the sidewalk (though this is hard with people I know because I don't want to be RUDE). In addition to these things, I'm fasting from color. It seems doubly appropriate: color brings me great joy, it's probably the sole reason I enjoy photography and painting (neither of which I have any measurable talent). So by fasting from color (which means I am not wearing any, only black), it is a kind of symbolic gesture of my Week of Lament. Additionally, lament, which is about grief, despair, and mourning seems perfectly associated with the color black. Lamentations are songs, poems, or music expressing grief, mourning, or sorrow. I'm proficient in none of those things (songs, poems, or music), but I reason that life is itself an artistic expression not unlike poetry or music. So living is my art.
In keeping with that theme, I have finally reached a plateau in my week, when this whole mess has finally reached it's height, and after climbing the mountain blind now as I can finally see from the top, things are beginning to make a little sense. 'Experience Wrought' is a suitably appropriate title for this blog, a phrase stolen from another song by The Cobalt Season (called Help Me Out Here, check out the lyrics and then use the media player on the right to hear the song). This week is all about a first experience, and the fruits of experience wrought. The word, 'wrought' (adjective form) itself means worked into shape by artistry or effort. See how things are coming 'round?
My pastor's sermon on Sunday was all about the fear that paralyzes. How faith is sometimes wading through that fear to follow where we are led, regardless of how high the waters. She used the story of Moses parting the Red Sea to illustrate her point: it turns out that scholars and translators have a different take on this parting of the waters thing than we laypeople understand from movies like The Prince of Egypt. As it turns out, the waters probably didn't part so Moses and crew could see clear to the other side. But they probably had to start walking through the waters hip-deep, before they cleared fully. Like God, there was water before and behind them, all around them, and what an act of faith that must have been! To begin walking into the sea believing God would make a way but having no proof of that act, as the waters slapped around your waist and soaked you, skin-deep.
Her sermon on fear instigated my own thoughts on fear and the ways it has paralyzed me in the past. I found myself thinking that maturity-- growing up-- is about conquering that paralyzing fear and doing something new. Maturity is about experience. Fear keeps us from experience. If like Moses, we can be more faithful than fearful, the experience wrought from fighting that paralysis is maturity. And the greater the fear and the further distance we travel in our act of faith, the more experience wrought, the more mature we will be. Standing on the banks of another land, with a sea teeming between who we were and who we have become by making faith more important than fear, we'll finally understand. Experience wrought.
So how does this tie in? Well. My paralyzing fear has been being NOTICED. How sad is it that I would rather hide than stand out? I have restrained myself from acting, speaking, and living into the gifts God has given me, the potential I have, because I don't want people to see me. And people haven't. And that is part of why my heart is broken; because I have hidden and then expected people to see me anyway. This week has proven that, beyond a shadow of a doubt (if someone you know starts consistently wearing solid black and not smiling and actually telling people that she's UNWELL-- well, at least have a discussion about it). I'm not going to hide myself anymore. I want to learn to preach. I have been feeling drawn to the pulpit for some time, but always afraid that I would say something wrong, or that I have a problem speaking in front of people, or that I could never be so obviously seen. I've finally caught up with what I've been thinking: that I don't care what people think of me. I am ready to be seen.
So, from the top of the mountain, I'm jumping into the sea.
It has struck me lately, how often I tend to make mountains out of molehills. I don't think this unfortunate tendency is my habit alone; but I think that we as a thinking community tend to place a lot of emphasis on the details, when perhaps we shouldn't. We over analyze every word, touch, glance. We attribute major feelings and intentions to the barest of efforts. In movies, in books, even in sermons, unraveling the plot of the narrative always seems to ride on the briefest glimpse of subtle action. The villain has been under our noses the entire time, and if we had paid more attention to his lisp, his tell, the fact that he doesn't make eye contact-- we would have known.
Society trains us to pay attention to the details. In magazines, blown-up images of celebrities' minuscule accessories, body language on vacation, loss or gain of 5 pounds-- this is reported as news. We infer from these details who is engaged to whom, sleeping with whom, who has serious eating or health issues. And so we learn to attribute great importance to things that should bear little importance. We lose sight of the big picture for the details. Who cares about these things more than the value of the person in question?
For me, this has translated into a compulsion to read meaning into meaningless things. And regardless of how much I try to logically disregard those meaningless things, I am incapable of letting them go at times. I feel myself becoming one of 'those women,' the kind who repeats every word, trying to extract a deeper meaning from what was spoken. The kind who picks up on a mere coincidental fact and turns it into fate. It's a dangerous place to be.
Even in my spiritual life, I take these coincidences and concurrences as signs from God. I pray about needing direction for my future and my eye falls on a bible verse in Jeremiah saying that God has a hope and a future for me. I start to feel convicted about debt and decide to get a job; the next day I come across a job advertisement. Even when I was coming to DC, I felt called to my church because it had the same name as my home church in Texas, the pastor was also a woman, and her name was the same as my name. Big decisions made on trivial details. (It is important to note that I also stayed because I felt God at work among the congregation and that I also felt at home and called to work there. But the draw to my church in the first place hasn't changed.)
I think it is beneficial to take notice of details. I think it is detrimental to associate more importance to those details than they are worth. It is time to strike a balance between attention and obsession. I understand God to be a God of the bigger picture and of the details also, but that merely means that God has control of it all, and less reason to worry. As I prepare over the course of the next three years for my journey, I hope I can remember to notice the details but not to make decisions on what I infer from them. I hope that I can learn to make fewer mountains out of molehills. Spend more time in conversation about things that deserve conversation and less thought and brainpower in pursuits that in the end, God will bend toward his will anyway. I want to hear beyond the diction and listen to what the speaker is really saying. I want to devote my energy to doing and not to wondering.
Except when wondering leads directly to doing.
Praise the God of inspiration and ideas! After my previous blog it was clear that I was in need of both, and today has not disappointed. I started off slightly dubious as I headed out ridiculously early (in relation to game time) to buy tickets to the Nats/Phillies baseball game. My first baseball game, I was completely waiting to be unsurprised by discovering I had decided to devote my Labor Day holiday to something of little interest unworthy of the driven, die-hard devotion of thousands of baseball fans worldwide. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed myself at the game, both understanding and watching how things work and getting into cheering for the home team (no offense Phillies fans, I don't have any REAL baseball loyalties...). It was also great to be outdoors, in the sun, even sweating (weird, I know). I can see why baseball is the American past time.
But better than that, I got to hear other perspectives on my dry spell. I've decided that perhaps I'm not so boring, after all. Maybe just momentarily feeling bored. But definitely not boring. And my life isn't, either. I want to go everywhere and see everything and get my hands in it. How can someone with a list like that possibly be boring? And so what if I don't run marathons or speak languages and I can't speak with eloquence yet about current world events or politics? I'm learning, and I'll be there one day. In the meantime, I've got some major trips to plan, and tons of people who have no idea about them. I've got a photographer to nail down and 48 communities who are working to change the world to make connections with. A website to build. Details to hammer out. And separate from that, I've got a major part to play in the building of an intentional community and covenant writing and another international trip to plan. Just thinking about how full I forgot life is gives me that anxious-I've-got-to-pee-but-don't feeling. You know?
In addition to that I'm blessed with people who can put it in perspective. People with the perfectly right words to say when I need to hear them, and the ability to be where I need them to be when I least expect it. I'm blessed to be inspired by a friend who is giving selflessly so much of herself to something she feels passionate about that at the end of the day, there's hardly any left. And blessed to be inspired by a friend whose ideas and honesty constantly amaze and motivate me, and leave me in AWE of the person God has created him to be. Through my friendship with both, I am challenged to be a better woman than I am. I strongly desire to be to them a mere fraction of what they both are to me. They are going to deserve their own entries, very soon. Until then, suffice it to say that I am blessed.
And not so boring, after all.
