Life of the Living Dead, or the Lazarus Blues

I wrote this as a chapter for a book a while back. I haven't done much else with it, but I thought maybe I'd get some feedback. Hook a brother up.

Life of the Living Dead, or the Lazarus Blues

“Music is my savior/I was maimed by rock’n’roll.” –Wilco, “Sunken Treasue”

Most Sundays as a kid, I’d follow my parents as we made our way into the Catholic church that they had been attending since before I was born. I once heard that Catholic churches are built with the intention of causing their parishoners to look skyward, and to be so moved by the aesthetic grandeur of the place that they cannot help but  imagine a huge God that is worthy of worship. I am not sure if this is true or not, but the church that my parents went to and I, being their firstborn son, went to was very nice. The church was remodeled in my teen years, and so there are only a couple of things that I remember about the sanctuary before the aforementioned remodeling. One was this huge, chandelier style lamp that hung down from the ceiling from various connection points in the shape of an octagon. This large lamp used to enthrall and enrapture my young imagination. I would imagine what it would it be like to run around atop this source of illumination to the church, all the while people were praying “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s. I would imagine the whole lighting fixture shaking as the priest and my parents would yell at me, their voices getting lost as the sound rose and met its demise in the rafters. I would then make a running leap and land gracefully and perfectly in the baptismal tucked away in the back of the sanctuary, resulting in thunderous applause from the congregation, who had just looked up from their prayers to notice my fearless acts of daredevilry.
      The other pre-remodeling aspect of the sanctuary I remember was the baptismal where I landed at the end of my daredevil demonstration. It was essentially a large hole, ornately decorated, with a center column jutting upwards, and at the top was a basin where babies would be baptized in. My brothers and I were all baptized in the holy baby basin, and when my youngest brother was baptized, I stuck my foot in the water in the large hole. The uselessness of this fact can be contradicted by the fact that when I pulled my foot out, it was not wet. I considered it some sort of miracle because had my foot gotten wet, I probably would have gotten in trouble. The baptismal before the remodeling was your run of the mill, Catholic church style baptismal, which makes the fact that they changed it to the shape of a coffin and placed it in the front of the church even more interesting. The beautiful symbolism of following Christ means you are dead to the world and its ways is obvious, but when I was younger, I just found it kind of cool, mainly because I was into horror movies and a coffin was definitely an awesome shape to have the baptismal be in. It made going to church just a tad bit less lame than usual.
      The Catholic Mass is quite a beautiful event, but when I was a kid, it was causing me to miss Sunday morning cartoons, which rivaled Saturday morning cartoons in their quality and overall greatness in my opinion. The Mass consisted of  a lot of sitting, standing, kneeling, recitation of prayers, singing of prayers, communion. Most of the parishoners participated in these aspects; I would do whatever it took to make the Mass go by faster. This included bringing action figures and playing with them, coloring the announcement pages, flipping through the hymnals, which were actually quite boring. As I got older, I would even do whatever it took on Sunday mornings to purposefully prevent our family from getting to the church on time, just so those first fifteen minutes we missed were fifteen minutes we didn’t have to sit through the Mass. And during those times that we did have to go for all of the Mass, I would pass the time by looking around the sanctuary and checking out the girls. My mind was everywhere but in the Mass.  It was only about an hour or so long, but that hour took years off my life. The only message given by the priest I can recall from a Catholic Mass  is actually a Christmas Eve service where the priest read the geneological list of names from Matthew’s Gospel. I didn’t remember it because of Matthew’s beautiful presentation of Christ’s ministry, or the fact that the list of names pointed to His royal lineage; I only remember it because of I could not stop laughing at the funny sounding names like Boaz, Jehosaphat, and Zerubabbel. Never mind the fact that these men were integral to the history of Israel and to the history of Jesus Himself! Their names were just plain ridiculous to me. Not to mention, as soon as the Christmas Eve Mass was over, we’d be heading over to my grandparents’ house for dinner and for presents, and laughing made the service seem to go by at least a little bit faster.
      Growing up Catholic also required you to attend C.C.D. classes, which are classes that help explain to young Catholics what it means to be Catholic. What is interesting that no one ever knew what the acroynm stood for, not even the teachers. We ventured many guesses, many of them ridiculous and with the intention of making our friends laugh, but no one really knew for sure. When I was alone and really wanted to venture a guess, it was usually along the lines of “Catholic Catechism Direction”. When I was with friends and wanted to hear them laugh at my comedic genius, my guess would then be “Crazy Christ’s Dreamatorium”, or some other obviously incorrect name. I’ve since come to learn that it actually stood for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; this name is definitely not as genius as my guesses. The classes normally happened during the week instead of on the weekend, which meant that the tyranny of time spent at the church spread itself into my weekdays, too. I had no problem with God wanting my Sundays; He was God after all, and Sunday was His day. It was in the Bible or something. But when He started butting in the other days of the week, I was never too happy of a camper.
      To be fair, it wasn’t always so bad. Before I explain why, though, I must tell you: I never went through a “girls are gross” phase. For as long as I can remember, I have always found the beauty of women to be intoxicating, and even as a kid, I was no different. Now, the reason it wasn’t so bad was because in first grade, I remember having a really pretty, blonde haired teacher. She had to have been in high school, but she would etch out time in her calender for Monday afternoons to stand in front of a group of gawking first graders, many of whom were confused as to why they were even there. She would stand in the front of the room and teach us stories about men getting eaten by whales (which later I found out was just a large fish), a married couple in a Garden with a pet snake who could talk who caused them to eat an apple that screwed them over, and about a man named Jesus who was God’s Son and who had an untimely death on a cross. Her voice was soft and loving, at least I believe it was, because I only have fond memories of her. What memory I lack is the one that tells me her name, but for our purposes, Pretty Teacher will suffice.
      Pretty Teacher had a boyfriend, let’s call him The Dude (not to be confused with The Dude from The Big Lebowski), who would sometimes come and co-teach the class with her. If my memory serves me correctly, he wore a backwards cap and always had on a leather jacket. He may or may not have called us “little dudes”, or  I may actually be describing a secondary character from the hit late ‘80s/ early ‘90s TV show Full House. Either way, you have to respect that this guy would come spend some of his Monday afternoons with a group of first graders, as well. High school kids in the early ‘90s should have been hanging out at the local arcade, or so I was informed by television at the time. The one clear memory I have of  The Dude was one particularly rousing afternoon where the class was split up and we played some intense rounds of the game Hangman. We stumbled and fought our way through difficult words like “Cat”, “Dog”, and “Book”. But The Dude had one final round that would declare the ultimate winner. He drew ten blank spots on the board, which blew my young mind, because I didn’t realize there could be that many letters in a word. We threw out our guesses, The Dude drawing the man, and his fate was in our hands. His head, his body, his arms, his legs made their appearance on the board. The Dude even added eyes, ears, a nose, hair, anything that would enable us to save the poor man. But, we failed. As we saw the man drawn on the board, our hearts sank. The Dude revealed to us his answer: Guns N Roses. I had never heard of them, but they “totally rocked” The Dude’s world, and also caused the demise of an innocent man. To be fair, fickle music fans finally  caused the demise of Guns N Roses’ music career not too long after that.
      As I got older, the fact that there were Pretty Teachers and eventually lots of beautiful girls in the classes with me was not enough to keep my disdain of attending these classes at bay. I finally discovered that if I had to go to these classes, I could at least make it bearable and offer lots of valuable and insightful commentary to the lessons. By valuable and insightful commentary, I really mean disruptive and hilarious commentary. It was an opportunity for me to take my role as class jokester to a whole new audience, and I took this very seriously. Around middle school, at the beginning of a new year of C.C.D., we were to go around the room and give our name and the name of our favorite song. After we gave that information, we were to name every person that had gone before us and their favorite song as well. I suspect that by attaching one’s name to a song, it enabled us to catch a glimpse of the person’s character, of their hopes and aspirations, of what they wished to accomplish with their life. I, however, envisioned this name game as an opportunity to express how I truly felt to be there. I flawlessly named each person that had come before, and then announced “My name is Chris, and my favorite song is “Eff the Police” by NWA”.  The class stopped in shocked silence, and as the realization of my choice of song flew across the grey matter of their brains, they began to laugh hysterically. After my turn, no one forgot my name, or the song that I had claimed to be my favorite. I had been successful in my desire to the funniest person there. I was also the most humble.

*      *     *

One of my favorite stories about Jesus is found in the Gospel of John, and it has to do with His friend Lazarus. I’m sure you know the story:  Lazarus is sick, and Jesus postpones His coming to see him in order to let him die and be dead for a couple of days. Jesus finally arrives, and everyone is still in mourning, and Lazarus’s sisters are a bit upset with Jesus because they knew if He had been there, He could have saved Lazarus from death. Jesus, however, knew exactly what He was doing, and why all the pain and anguish of death was necessary. One of the reasons this is one of my favorite stories is because John writes that Jesus wept, because He was moved by the pain and hurt of everyone mourning the death of Lazarus. It is such a monument to the humanity of Jesus. Jesus then tells Martha and Mary to roll back the stone that covered Lazarus’ grave, because He had some business to attend to.
      We must give the oddity of the request an opportunity to sink in our minds. If this were to happen today, this is what the scenario would look like: the funeral is over, the body is interred, and we are still in mourning, and a late comer shows up and asks if it’d be ok to dig up the dirt and open the casket. I realize that people built tombs into the side of mountains in Jesus’ time, and sealed them with a large stone, but the principle is the same. In fact, Martha balks at Jesus’ request, and reminds Him that once she rolls back that stone, the stench of Lazarus’ rotting corpse will hit their noses. Embalming fluid was centuries away from being invented. But Jesus keeps prodding her, reminding her that if she believes, she will see the glory of God.
      So finally, Martha pushes back the stone. I imagine she convinced some of the men there to help her, and they all probably thought that both she and Jesus were completely out of their minds to want to roll back the covering to Lazarus’ tomb. Maybe they figured this was part of her grieving process, or that her weird friend Jesus needed to see the body of Lazarus to help Him in His grieving process. Finally, the stone was rolled away, and I’m sure it smelt like death (pun completely and totally intended). Jesus then, I’m sure in a powerful voice, said these words:
 “Lazarus, come out.”
      When Jesus said this, something unbelievable happened: Lazarus came back to life. The blood in his body, which I would imagine had begun to congeal, slowly began to liquify, warm, and flow throughout his veins, bringing life back to where death had set. In order for even this to occur, his heart, which had not beat for many days, slowly began to work. One small, quick beat, then another, and another, until finally it began to pump like it had before his death, sending the blood to all the appropiate places in his body. Imagine the engine of car slowly sputtering, and then roaring to life. And even prior to this, Lazarus’ brain, which had, a moment prior, been dead, slowly came back to life. The cortexes of his mind began to hum and buzz, and what could be called lightining began to hit the sides of his brain, in the the luminiscence reserved for mad scientists in old horror movies. Jesus’ voice probably sounded like it was coming from far away, like Lazarus was underwater, or the way that voices in the real world sometimes invade our dreams. His eyes slowly began to open, and after a few moments, he took stock of his situation: he was back from the dead. He threw his legs over the side of the table in his tomb, and began to hop towards the entrance.
      As Lazarus appeared, Jesus directed some of the people to remove the bandages that tied his legs and arms and covered his head. Their trembling hands began to remove the garments that symbolized death, removing cloth upon cloth until, right before them, stood Lazarus, previously dead, and now, alive. The tension of the moment would probably be too much to handle, the silence oppresive as the crowd stared with wide mouthed fascination at Lazarus. Before them stood something that only happened in ancient tales of old: the dead come back to life.

*      *     *

Despite growing up in the Church, my soul, wretched and black from the day of my conception, could not find its rest in any of the places I had attempted to place it. Like I mentioned earlier, the most obvious indication of this soul restlessness came in the form of the constant questioning of my existence, of the purpose of it and why it all mattered. So even though you could say I was essentially a church going person, my soul was as far from any of the truth and beauty that is found in Christ alone, who is the Head and Groom of His Bride, the Church.
      One of the reasons that I love Christianity is that it speaks so much truth about the human soul, and its sad and broken condition. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon speaks of how eternity is set in the hearts of men and after the Fall, we’ve inherited that brokenness from Adam and Eve,  so we constantly try to find rest for our souls everywhere but in Christ. As I grew older, one of the main places I attempted to set my soul to rest was in the identity of a “hipster”, a “scenester”, as one who was constantly “in the know”. There are hipsters and scenesters of varying degree, but my focus was specifically the music scene. When I hit 6^th grade, my eyes were open to the wondrous world of music, specifically “alternative” music, that I have since come to realize, wasn’t really all that alternative. There was a local station called The Edge (not to be confused with the guitarist for U2) that I religiously listened to, learning about bands I had never heard of, expanding the sonic pallete of my life, since before it all I listened to were Top 40 songs and whatever 70s bands my parents liked. Very quickly, I found myself drawn to the more independent music scene, eschewing whatever was hot and popular on the radio for whatever bands were flying under the radar. This phase of my life coincided with the advent of online peer-to-peer sharing, so I was able to download songs of my favorite bands I had never heard of yet. I quickly became known as somewhat of a music snob, with the help and guidance of a few friends who had metamorphized into snobs before me.
      My music snobbery came to a head in 10^th grade, when it seemed that every band/artist that I thoroughly enjoyed was suddenly becoming very hot and popular amongst my fellow high schoolers who thoroughly loved the Top 40, or as I called it, the music toilet. Bands like Saves the Day, Jimmy Eat World, Brand New, Thursday, and Dashboard Confessional were all of a sudden now on the local rock station and MTV, and my fellow snobs and I beat our chests and tore our clothes and rolled around in sackcloth and ashes, begging the indie scene gods to send down some wrath upon these sellouts, but mainly on those who suddenly loved “our bands”. Eventually, you grow up and realize that these guys are trying to make a living doing what they love. If you are holding this book and reading this sentence, then you could say that I am attempting to do the same thing, so I totally support and love it when bands that are indie now hit some spotlight in places outside their circles.
      As these bands and their songs became part of my identity, I would find the fulfillment I was so desperately seeking, but only for a while. The excitement of discovering a new band no one ever heard of, connecting to their songs, telling my friends about said band, and getting angry at their success only satisfied temporarily; my soul was still starved. After a particularly nasty breakup with a girl in 10^th grade, the music became my solace and comfort, but it couldn’t go as deep as to heal the real hurting in the core of my soul. Like the idol of my life at the time Christopher Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional wrote in one of the songs I loved , “Standard Lines”: This new diet’s liquid/ and dulling to the senses/and its crude/ but it will do. Music was my alcohol. I was trying to numb and dull the pain of something deep in me, beyond my organs and ribcage, something that I couldn’t see but I could definitely feel. Music would numb and dull it for a while, but it would always return. I needed something true and beautiful to not just numb or dull it, but to remove it.

*     *     *

I have to admit that it bums me out that John’s Gospel, nor any other book of our Scriptures, never tells us anything else about Lazarus’ story. I mean, obviously, the Gospels are about Jesus and His ministry, but we do get to see some other folks more than once. Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters, are mentioned more than once in John’s Gospel, but Lazarus only in his dying and resurrection. (Before I continue on this train of thought, let me stress this: I am not trying to make the Scriptures seem insufficient in their story; they are God’s very words, inspired, infallible, and inerrant. They are perfect in their completion, and besides, the Scriptures are not about Lazarus, they are about Jesus.) Maybe it is because I was created to be a heavy thinker, but I cannot help but think and wonder about what life must have been like for Lazarus after his resurrection from the dead. And not just him, but all the other people throughout the Gospels that Jesus raised. In Jewish thought, being alive meant being in the presence of the Lord, and death meant existence in Sheol, or the land of the dead (not to confused with the George Romero zombie movie). When the psalmists talk about God rescuing them from Sheol, it means rescuing them from death, because in death they are away from God, until the final resurrection. Without getting too much more into Jewish thoughts on the afterlife and the end times, we must understand that Jesus resurrecting people from the dead in a Jewish context was huge; only God could do that. I imagine he was probably a celebrity for a while, getting interviews with all the local media in Bethany, appearing on “Good Morning Bethany!” and talking about how he was dead, and then suddenly was back alive, and what it was like having Jesus as a friend who could raise things from the dead. I can see him getting invited to all the parties, and when he’d walk in, people would cheer, and someone would give him a drink, while the host would hush the crowd and beg him to tell the story of what it was like to have been dead and what its like to now be alive. Lazarus probably smiled sadly, sipped his drink, and recounted for the millionth time what had happened, or at least what he could remember.
      My guess is that Lazarus, despite all the glory and fame, was prone to singing the blues after his resurrection. He had been sick, probably painfully sick, and when he died, the old adage “he’s no longer in pain” applied very directly to him. He was finally at peace, and then suddenly, like someone grabbing him by the bellybutton with a fishhook, he was dragged back into his mortal body. He was suddenly bound in his funeral cloths, the stench from his own decaying body making him gag. I feel confident in saying that he was singing the blues after his journey back to life, and not only because he was taken away from some place great to come back; I say it because he eventually had to die again, he had to go through all the pain of continuing to live life. He lived the rest of his life in the tension of here and there, of an earthly existence and an eternal one, and in his darkest moments, he had to have faith in the coming peace and joy that would outweigh his present struggles. Lazarus had tasted and seen, but I am also confident in saying that there would be moments in his life when he didn’t do the God-glorifying act, that he instead gratified the flesh, and then repented and moved on. And after this, a part of him would long for that time when that struggle to follow Christ was gone, and he was in paradise. He had perfection, but had to come back to an imperfect rest of his life. If Lazarus had been alive in the early part of the 20^th century, he would have picked up a guitar and strummed and sang the Lazarus Blues, about the love he had fully, but was now distorted, and about the day coming when it would be his again. Leadbelly wouldn’t have anything on him.

*     *     *

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, a friend of mine invited me to go to her youth group with her. The church was located right behind the high school we went to, and I knew that a lot of our mutual friends all attended the church as well. At this point in my life, I was still looking and hungering for something to remove the ache deep in me, but the last place I ever thought about of was church, or about Jesus or God or anything in that regard. At that point in my life I considered myself an agnostic; I was not sure if we could even know if there was truly a God or not. I believed that as long as people believed in something earnestly enough, they would go to heaven, assuming there was even anything after we died. When my mom and I talk about this time in my life, she tells me tells me there was a moment where I told her that I was pretty sure that God did not exist. So when I asked her if I could go visit a church, she was more than willing to let me go. I always explain to people that being Catholic is a lot like being Jewish; its role in your culture and family life supercedes any spiritual aspect of it. I don’t mean that to mean that there aren’t any deeply spiritual Jews or Catholics; just that in my experience, we were all more worried about the cultural impact than anything else. All this to be said because the church I had been invited to was a Baptist one, which totally tripped my parents out. They were worried about what my family would say, especially my grandparents, if they knew that I had gone to a Baptist church. At one point in their life, they referred to Baptists as being a cult.
      That night I will forever, literally, consider the turning point of my entire existence. I agreed to go so I could see some of my school friends, and also to check out the local Baptist babe scene. As the youth service began, however, I noticed something very odd about my friends and all their church friends: they were in love with Jesus. The band at the front of the stage began to play some music, and unlike the organ and piano  I had grown up singing and listening to, the music sounded like a band  that I would have loved. It was weird to me that the lyrics were about Jesus, though. I thought it was a waste of perfectly good pop rock music. But I noticed in the faces and postures of my friends that there was something much deeper going on here, that they were interacting with some unseen prescence that they had committed their entire lives to. I had to admit that I was intrigued.
      That night was, for me, the beginning of hearing Jesus say to me, “Chris, come out.” My entire life I had been asleep in the grave, just awaiting the call of Christ to  wake me up from the dead. Like Lazarus, I slowly and more clearly began to hear Jesus calling my name, calling me out of the tomb and into life. That ache, that pain deep inside of me, was like the stench from my rotting corpse. There came a day in November of 2002 when, for all intents and purposes, a metaphysical event happened to me. I was sitting in the sanctuary at the same Catholic church, not too far from the coffin-shaped baptismal, and I was waiting for the Mass to start. The months between July and November I had found myself suddenly between these two different churches, one Catholic and the other Baptist. I had gotten involved in a discipleship group , I had made lots of friends, and was really enjoying my time at the Baptist church. However, I was teaching Sunday School to first graders at the Catholic church at the time, hence why I was sitting there that Sunday morning. I had begun to read my Bible pretty consistently, and carried it with me pretty much everywhere. As I sat in the sanctuary before the Mass, I suddenly felt the sudden urge to be alone and in a quiet room and to read the Bible. I found a little study room away from the sanctuary at the church, and went in and locked the door. I opened up the Bible and began reading in the Gospel of Matthew. It was at the very same church years earlier that I had spent Christmas Eve Mass laughing at the hilarious names in this Gospel, and now here I stood, completely intrigued by the same Gospel. Throughout the months between July and November, like Lazarus, my brain began to operate, allowing my heart to begin to pump, and the blood began to flow to all the proper places that would enable me to live. As I read the Gospel of Matthew, I stumbled across Jesus teaching a crowd that they were the light of the world, much like a city on a hill. He compared them to lamps that people lit and did not put under a lampshade, but on a stand that the whole house would have light. They were to live life in such a way that people around them would see something different and glorify their Father. It was this moment when I sat up from my grave, and began to hop to the entrance. I had heard Jesus’ clear call, and I was now back from the dead. After I read these words, I uttered a simple prayer that went along the lines of “God, I want this to be me. If you want me, I’m yours.” The metaphysical aspect of this day was that, like a beam from heaven, I felt the Holy Spirit pour into me, slamming into my soul, and changing my eternal destiny. I know it may sound weird or crazy, but that it was happened. My funeral cloths had been removed, and I was now one of the living dead.

*     *     *

Much like Lazarus’ stench reminded him that he had been dead and was now alive, that ache that resided deep in me reminded me that I too, had been dead and was now alive. As the years have gone by since that day, that ache for something true and beautiful has been replaced with an ache for Christ, for heaven, for living my life in such a way that people would want to know Him. He has infused life with meaning and purpose, the deeper dimensions of its impact are clearer to me. I don’t want it to seem that Jesus is some sort of panacea, because life hasn’t gotten any easier. In fact, I would say that it has gotten a lot harder, but, much sweeter.
      This is what living a life of the living dead is all about. I’m singing the Lazarus blues, because I was dead but now I’m alive, and I’m longing for the day that the struggle to love Christ above all else will be removed. Death, who once terrified me and intimidated me, will now be a servant, ushering me into the place where I will see Christ in all His glory, and all I will be able to do is worship Him. Life is seen a lot different because of this reality. Every conversation, every movie, every person I meet all have an eternal dimension, and all things beautiful and true can be reclaimed for the glory and praise of Christ.
      Lord, I’m singing the Lazarus blues.

The Girl Across the Sea

It is really a funny thing, the way this life thing goes, and even more so, the way it ends. I am not even sure as to how long it has been since her demise, because from that point forward, my seconds turned to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days, days to weeks, weeks to months, months to years, years to decades, decades to centuries, centures into millenia. Everyone around me has wept with me, they've made me meals, they've sat and listened to me drone on and on about the million little things about her that I love(d). Sometimes they'd come over and begin to make a pot of coffee. The hiss and the drip of the coffee pot even reminds me of her. Those things press against my chest more than anything else, to be honest with you. When I hear my visitors dropping two teaspoons of sugar into the coffee mug, it reminds me of the first time she and I sat across from each other, and I watched her delicate, pale hands prepare coffee the way she loved it: one cream, two sugars. It reminds me of watching her hands encase the mug and bring it up to her lips, those red lips that rarely were visited by lipstick but were capable of telling stories that enraptued their listeners. It was all these little things that rooted themselves deeply into me, moving their way past my ribcage and my heart, and ending up wherever it is the soul resides in the body. Not to spend too much time on the lips, but the way they would look as I told a funny story, or the sound that protruded as I told a joke. Her eyes were indecisive about their color, but I loved them nonetheless. She enjoyed looking me square in the eye when we spoke; I would sometimes have to to dart my gaze because I could not take their intensity. I was no match for her.
Those same people who come and drip the coffee also coming dripping words that encourage me that life goes on, that time heals, and that eventually, that feeling of the lost breath of drowning will be a million miles away, like someone across the sea. Life goes on, yes. Cars still careen down roads, and planes take up their apportioned spot of blue skies; people still walk around grocery stores filling their carts with food and milk, they scour the morning paper for sports scores and diatribes about the state of the economy. Birds continue to build nest, dogs continue to bark at strangers, students continue to learn, the elderly continue to die, and babies keep being born. Even I keep waking up, I shower, brush my teeth, and get along in my day. I talk to people, I write in notebooks, I watch television, I eat meals, and all the while, I dread the night because whatever momentary moments of freedom from the oppression of the yearning for her to be around, the night removes them. Life goes on, yes, but I am just making my way through it. I am just kind of limping along trying to find the next moment of respite, the next moment where I won't break down in the shower or while driving, the next moment where a story will actually cause me happiness before I remember that I cannot share it with her.
It feels like she is a girl across the sea, a foreign woman who can't speak my language and I can't speak hers. It feels the way that it feels to realize that right now, there are people in Japan or in London who are doing what I'm doing, just living their lives, writing things down, falling in love, smoking cigarettes and appreciating beautiful music, yet I will never meet them. There is a tragedy in this reality. We may be hindered by language, funds, or just sheer distance; but the aims are the same. She is like a girl across the sea, and I want nothing more to write a letter and place it in a bottle and throw it in the Pacific and hope that she gets it. Or I would want to construct a bridge from the Atlantic Coast to where she was at. Starting in the shallow end during summer, I would build it upwards and curve back down towards where she was at. But of course, there are bills to pay, jobs to do, degrees to finish, other people to love and care about. That moment of sickness hits me at this realization, and it does so every morning when I open my eyes and realize she is not here, but across the great Sea, somewhere out there where cartographers have not been able to map and where explorers could only hope to dream of. I had a dream where I was following her through all these rooms, and she was always just two steps ahead of me. She would stop, turn around, and smile, and I would stop and smile back and reach out, but as I did this, she would begin to move yet again. I never caught her. I never will. If this is my destiny, hers is to be across the Sea. All I can do is keep moving, and hope my letter gets to her someday.

This Is The Gloaming.

I am grateful for the incessant hunting by Christ for my soul, for His never ending conquest to subdue all the regions in my soul until they are under His reign and authority. He is what Spurgeon called "The Hound of Heaven", the relentless Hunter of His beloved Bride, pursuing us with intensity of an infinite number of suns and the love of an infinite number of young, starry-eyed lovers. This Jesus I speak of is the one revealed to John in Revelation, with a sword protruding out of His mouth, His robe dipped in the blood of His enemies, His brilliance too much for the gray matter between our ears to comprehend. He is the One who created and sustains existence; He is the one who is not bound by limited conceptions of such ideas as "time" and "dimension". He is the Holy One of Israel, a God who, out of love for His infinite glory, created beings with the capacity to share in the joy of knowing Him. And even after our federal father Adam contracted sin and sent it into the very DNA of existence, this God pursued a Bride that would be His own for all eternity.
His love knows no bounds, including the bounds of our culture's very limited and primitive understanding of love. When a person hears that God's love has no bounds, our first, culture-satured idea is that God loves to make much of us, that He sits in heaven and thinks of us and gets butterflies in His stomach and can't wait to think of ways to make us feel happy and joyful. His boundless love means He is free to trample such selfish and childish notions of love, and work in us to give us His love, a covenantal love by a being whose very definition is love. Love is not being made much of; love is experiencing the fullness of God unadulterated and unhindered by anything. When we say we love someone, as Christ followers, we must mean that we will do whatever it takes to help them gain more of Jesus.
And because the love of God knows no bounds, this includes such false notions as "God would not hurt me to have His will accomplished in my life". The destitutions of our souls become our loves, and when God brings upon their demise, it is often a painful tearing, because an aspect of love is the slow bonding of our souls to the object of our affection. This has been for me very recently, a glorious and beautiful friendship that was heading west when east was calling our names. She had become one that I opened my soul to quite easily, and she did likewise. It happened so subtly, because the foolish and unwise are not aware of these things because they are easy to do; those things that are wise are difficult and require much time and pain as we live and learn and figure out why the unwise action is unwise. What I believe to be wise is that the opening up of souls between male and female friends must be kept minimal, unless the Lord has positioned these two hearts to beat one for the other. This was not the case between my friend and I. Wisdom triumphed, and this splintering of the tiniest parts of our souls shared began, resulting in a pain much more deeply rooted than either of us imagined. It was a shock, the sheer amount of tears shed, the days going by as years, the hours as days, the minutes as hours, the darkness descending from the sky earlier causing even more painful introspection. The intensity of the pain was a surprise, because the unwise are unaware of how easy it is to link together, but of how difficult it is to separate.
But Christ has been sufficient through it all, because He is the one our souls hunger and thirst for. When the day comes that He places the persons before us whose hearts beat for us and ours for theirs, this time of pain, this time of aging, of weeping and crying out, will be sweet. It is sweet now, but it is like wine and gall; eventually, it will just be wine. Christ is the ruthless murderer of sin, because as He breaks these things within us, there is more of Him to be gained. His boundless love does not necessitate painless living; may we be broken free from such preposterous lies birthed from the lips of our Enemy. May we not be fools, for the foolish are the most despised in the Scriptures; they are the ones who think their own way is best, that this Eternal Lover cares nothing for us and we are left to our own devices to survive. This pain has resulted in wisdom; we are gold in His furnance, being purified for His rearrival to Earth. How glorious is He!

Suburban Oddities # 1

Estrogen and Bad Cinema.

I would like to address a bit of a phenomenon that I have come to notice quite lucidly in recent days: the correlation between the female sex and their love of horrible cinema. Now, I am not saying that I don't love some horrible movies (3 Ninjas, 3 Ninjas Strike Back, any movie from the early to mid '90s, etc.), nor am I saying that all women just like horrible movies. However, I have come to see that there is one movie that I have yet to hear a girl say was horrible, but yet it was: The Notebook. Now, perhaps, you, o carrier of ovaries, are now shocked and appalled that out of all the chick flicks in the world, the one that I picked on was The Notebook. It seems that in Femaledom, this film acts as the standard canon by which all love and romance should be based on, and when a male has the testicular fortitude to say something like "This movie is horrible", he should fear for his life. I do not fear for mine.
Allow me to present to you the circumstances under which I finally viewed The Notebook for the first time: I was watching Lars and the Real Girl with a group of friends, primarily of the female variety. Now, this movie is actually an example of good cinema: quirky plot, excellent cinematography, great acting, character development was evident throughout, moving soundtrack. However, my female friends hated the fact that Ryan Gossling, who plays Lars in Lars and the Real Girl and Noah in The Notebook, was sporting what I considered to be, a very fashionable mustache. They believed it was hiding his beautiful face, so, in order to remedy Mr. Gossling in their minds, two of my female friends left to go rent The Notebook.
An hour or so later, after they had traveled to TWO different locations to locate this horrible piece of cinematic waste, my friends arrived and we began to watch. I had never seen this movie, but had heard so many good things (95% from females, 5% from confused males), that I was excited to finally see it. Two hours later, my excitement had turned to disappointment, and subsequently turned into sadness. The sadness came from this reality: every woman I have ever known loves this movie. As I continue to discuss my dislike of this film, women get upset with me. One even called me a "heartless jerk" that hated romance. I then proceeded to tell her of how my grandmother, a real person, had Alzheimer's, how painful it was, and how she couldn't recognize me much as her death approached. That shut that woman up.
You must see, I am forced to make this conclusion: if you have primarily estrogen pumping through your body, you cannot see bad cinema for what it is. You are blinded the unhealthy amount of sappiness that protrudes from this film. I could wipe the screen with pancakes afterwards there was so much sap in that film. As any young, red-blooded male, I love the girliness of girls. I love their petiteness, how they cry easier than men, how you sigh when guys propose to their girls on television and in movies, all that stuff. I love it, I do! But when it blinds you from seeing something so obvious, that a film like The Notebook is actually horrible, I worry. As a man, I love action films. But I know when an action film is bad and when it is good. I would expect the same from women.
I suppose this film is indicative of why Hollywood can rehash the exact same movie about fifteen times a year, every year, with new actors, and they get eaten up by the masses of women who can't see through the sappiness that has placed itself over their eyes. But maybe, just maybe, this shouldn't worry me. Maybe I should add it to my list of things about the girliness of girls that I love. At the same time, maybe I should be worried because these films are building expectations that no real love story can produce. I lack in the looks department, and the guys in these films are all pretty good looking, for example. How can I work with that?
In conclusion, I hope that any woman who reads this knows that I am not trying to degrade women in any way. I'm just placing my observations for the world to see. I also hope that you ladies learn to see through the lovey dovey aspects of cinema for what the film truly is. In the case of The Notebook: horrible.

My Crashing Heart.

I occasionally get hit with this intense feeling of loneliness and pain. I don't mean to be dramatic or anything. From time to time, it feels like my heart is crashing through my chest, breaking my ribs, and the splintered bones pierce it until it stops working. My soul is longing for connection to another soul. I don't mean this to sound that Christ isn't sufficient, because I know He is. But as Bono once sang, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for". I see through a mirror dimly, and this pain is real. It's odd, because I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's a spiritual attack from a demonic force; or perhaps its the bubbling out of the darkness from within my darkened heart. Maybe it's both.
Last week at the Village's college gathering, Matt Younger taught from Matthew 21, where Jesus triumphantly enters into Jerusalem. Messiah fever was a pitch, and the crowds began to yell "Hosanna in the highest!" "Hosanna" literally means "save us". The Jews were wanting to be saved from their current situation, to have the Romans toppled with a Davidic kingship reestablished with Jesus at the head. But Jesus knew that to do this was to take of a symptom, not the core issue of the problem of their diaspora. The Jews had no home because their hearts were far from God. They shouted "Hosanna" for a temporary relief; Jesus gave them an eternal one: Himself.
This is my heart, as well. "Hosanna in the highest!" is my anthem, but why do I declare? I long to be connected to deeply to another soul. I have friends, good ones, and best ones, at that. But Jesus, in His graciousness and sweetness, has pulled back another blackened layer to my soul and it is this: I am scared to allow people in. I am terrified that if they do, they will hate what they see and want to jet. It becomes this vicious cycle where I desire this type of connection, but since I'm scared of it, I don't attempt to try for it. Hence, waves of loneliness wash over me, drowning me in their severity and slowly seeping the air from my lungs.
I don't think I am being whiny or a baby. If I am, I seek your counsel and rebuke. We were made for connection to one another. And not the shallow, surface-level style of connections that permeate our culture like a virus. I write all this for a main reason: it is cathartic for me. And secondly, perhaps this is your struggle too. We are the loneliest people to ever step forth on the earth. Our society and way of life thrusts us into large groups of people but we're horrendously lonely and alone. Maybe I am being dramatic, and my feelings of the fact that people don't care for me aren't real. I watched Lars and the Real Girl this weekend, and Lars believed that no one cared for him. But everyone did. Maybe that's me.

Quiet Revolutions.

We know the cost that comes in revolutions: upheaval, blood, death, pain, suffering. Great injustices lead to a desire to be the reckoner, to fix things, to put our beloved homes in leadership that will love and guide. As the dust settles, and the corpses that litter both sides of the street began to decompose, we truly begin to understand how serious and how costly a revolution truly is. The American and French Revolutions cost the blood of thousands of men, who fought and died for the cause of nationalism. The Communist Revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba took place over the cause of ideological differences. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, which implemented Sharia Law into Iran's political system, took place over religious causes. Our world has been, is currently, and will be marked by revolutions. As we continue to draw invisible lines on physical lands, and people continue to succumb to the darkness of their hearts and to their sense of entitlements, revolutions will continue.
One of the reason that Jews in Jesus' day and today do not believe that He was the promised Messiah is because His revolution did not occur in the same way as those above. He was to be the victorious Warrior-King in the lineage of David. When David was king of Israel, He was a warrior. He rode a stallion and would slay the enemies of Israel as if they were chaff, and would return home victorious. Israel's prominence and stature in those days had long been idolized by the Jews of subsequent generations, and they desired for it be a reality again. The expectation around Christ was great because they were ready for Him to expel the Jews and to reestablish the Davidic Kingdom once more.
But Christ was not a people pleaser.
Jesus came to do the will of His Father, which was to fulfill the Law, die sinless, and resurrect from the dead. This was all done that the Father would be worshiped and glorified. Jesus' revolution did not occur on the streets of Rome nor in the temple of Jerusalem; it occurred where the cause of revolutions being: the dark human heart. Jesus' revolution was not one that took blood; it gave blood. It was not one that took lives for a cause; it is one that gives its own life for the cause.
As Christians, or "little Christs", this same idea is to mark our lives. The Christian life consists of Quiet Revolutions, little, tiny upheavals in our souls that wrought quiet revolutions in our life and in the world around us. The Christian revolution operates in tiny pockets that spread and spread and spread. That is how real change occurs. We have an obsession with desiring big, sweeping changes, because we want a revolution to happen like the rest of the world. We think if we can legislate our values, things will change. But they won't. We'd simply be addressing the symptoms and not the issues. If we outlaw abortion, it will still continue. Instead, we need to love on mothers contemplating the act; we need to be willing to adopt their babies, but most importantly, we need to show them the love of Christ and how He values them and the little life growing inside of them. This is a quiet revolution. This is what the Christian life is about.