words to keep in the front of your mind.

I recently read this great peace of wisdom as someone's status update on facebook (of all places!). Despite the medium, the wisdom remains. I have kept these words at the forefront of my mind for a week now and have returned to them more times than I can count. In just a week. They are:

"People will disappoint you. Love them anyway."

They seem simple, and perhaps, even at first a little pessimistic. But the truth is that God created us to be our frail, disappointing (at times), human selves. It is a guarantee that we will be disappointed in life by the ones we love, and equally guaranteed that we will at some point disappoint the ones we love. But despite our humanity, despite mine and yours and the humanity of those who have disappointed us most recently, we are called to love anyway.

I have been experiencing this firsthand as I have been feeling majorly let down by someone who has never really let me down before. I've been struggling to be patient with this person, and I've been confused by my own disappointment (not confused by the fact that I was disappointed, but by the fact that this particular person was responsible and because this particular person seems not to be able to control the cause of my disappointment). I feel as though I have only just begun to react-- finally my patience wore down and I began to feel a response aside from confusion and sadness. I have begun to feel bitter, cynical even towards a person that I love. And that deep hurt has taken it's toll: I've recently grown exhausted of my own roller coaster emotions in this situation and have begun to yearn to be able to dismiss. To dismiss the thing that causes me to hurt, the situation that is ongoing and exhausting, and most seriously, to dismiss the person who causes me to feel hurt and exhausted. And that is a scary place to be, ready to dismiss someone. A person.

People aren't disposable. We can't dismiss them. We shouldn't erase them from our lives, move on and away and fill their places with new people. The least of which is because, hello, new people will also fail us in some way or another. It's guaranteed. It's our human inheritance.

This is not to say that we are all so flawed that we all will fail and that we should give up. Nor is this an excuse for said failure. It is only an honest attempt at reconciling our imperfection with our imperfect expectations of one another.

But what we are called to do, is to look beyond that flaw, that which hurts us. To see aside from the disappointment, the value of the person, and to continue to love. We will be disappointed. We will get angry. We may even grow dismissive. But what makes them human also makes us human. And the holiest thing I can be, is the flawed human thing that God made me to be. And I still deserve love. So does the one who let you down.

These should not be words of imprisonment. They should not be utilized to keep someone in an abusive relationship, or chain someone to a situation that is unhealthy. It is okay, sometimes, to love from afar. But when we let our feelings towards someone take control; when we become a bitter person instead of just tasting bitterness; perhaps it is wise to just remember that people will disappoint us. And that we should love them anyway.

This week those words of wisdom are helping ME to be the holiest I can be, and to move on from my own disappointments to remember that I too am an imperfect disappoint-er (aiming for holy and not holier-than-thou, mind you). It's so much easier to forgive and dismiss a situation than become bitter and try to dismiss a person. God doesn't throw people away, and neither should we.

burnt.out

My mama used to tell me that I overbooked myself to the point that I was burning both ends of the candle. Which sounds like it could almost be cool, except that it means the candle burns up twice as fast—and then the show’s over, because nothing’s left. Well, she was right. I’ve been burning both ends for so long that I feel as though there’s almost nothing left of me.

It’s pointless and I’m tired of outlining the ways in which I overextend myself. Suffice it to say that I’ve never had a true vacation and I’m in my fourth year of part time graduate school and full time work and my immune system is so compromised I’ve been sick six or seven times in the past nine months. It’s unhealthy.

I’ve completely lost my desire to attend to the regular responsibilities of my daily life. I no longer care about being a student, no longer care about learning, and am tied only to completion and grade-reporting. In my work, I operate on autopilot.

And when I’m home, I wander back and forth between the two rooms of my home and feel untethered and idle. Clearly there are tasks on my task list. But I ignore them and search for something else I can’t name, bypassing the extracurricular activities that once brought me joy, finally settling on the numbing and un-interactive experience of watching. I watch television online, I watch movies. I watch other people live through their blogging. All the while I envy their ability to engage, to create, to interact. I watch and feel I cannot act, cannot do, myself. So I stay up late doing nothing. I am withdrawn. I am constantly exhausted. I am too frequently alone. And I am too tired to set my own agenda—or else I can’t see the point in doing more than lying there, when there is no one here to witness.

I know that there are seasons and that this season of life will pass. I know that this season will be short, and that the next season is already hot on the heels of my season of darkness. But I feel, in this season, that I am shut down to really living. It’s the winter in so many ways. Cold and somewhat dead.

I live in the presence of others. I live on the weekends. I live at dinner with friends. I even live on the road to Mark. But during my week, I am a zombie, moving between obligations and doing what must be done, pushing through to the weekend, to the next opportunity to live.

Part of this experience is tied to a sense of loss of community. I am as responsible for this loss as are the members of my community who have left it. I withdrew as they excused themselves, I let go as they left. And what I am left with is a shell of my experience of what robust community feels like. This is why I live on the weekends, with Mark, this is why I panic when he goes home. In many ways he is my most real tie to life.

I don’t know what the point was in writing this. I don’t want sympathy. I don’t want to be encouraged. I don’t believe that this season can be prematurely brought to light. I know that I have to continue, and yes, to try, but more than anything merely to persevere until the season of darkness yields to the season of light and life. I guess I just wanted to exercise my frustrations, articulate my angst over what might otherwise just appear to be laziness and lack of motivation. Those are present, but it’s deeper than that. It’s tied to the wellness of my soul. It’s being alone in Indonesia again. It’s the feeling you get toward the end of a journey, when you know it’s time to move on to some other challenge, some other place, some other part of life; but you can’t get the pieces to work out right when you feel yourself ready. You have to wait, and be patient. Kind of like being ready before your time. Kind of like the surge of the flame before the candle is blown out—you’re ready to keep burning, but you’re at the end of your wick. The light’s burnt out and there’s darkness now, but I’m holding fast until the next candle of my life is lit.