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.