When You're in Love

When you fall in love with Jesus, all you want is to keep falling. You don't want to slow down. You long for it, thirst for it, need it. His love is always present, never-failing, perfect, and pure. There are no butterflies in your stomach; just a light in your heart. When you're in love - really in love - nothing else matters. When you're in love, you can truly cry out, "My soul magnifies the Lord!" (Luke 1:46).

Except sometimes, you're not in love. You love Jesus, deep down, no matter what, but you're not in love with Him. You care, but you're not seeing stars. You thank Him and praise Him, but your words are motivated by guilt or obligation rather than love.

I bounce back between these two poles so often that it drives me crazy. All I want is to be so completely in love with Jesus that I could be perfectly joyful and content with doing nothing but running around and shouting his name to the heavens. I want to be so in love that every single action I take is motivated by His love for me and mine for Him. I want to be so overpowered by His love that I cannot speak, think, or act without doing so in love. Yet, I don't. I fall out of love, like a fickle teenager with a crush. As often as I find myself in this state and wish that I were crazy in love, I also have moments where I don't want that love. It's too much. It's too overwhelming, and I'm too imperfect. And I want the world. The very thing that I am told not to want is my greatest desire, and the Almighty God somehow just gets leftovers.

It happens all the time, but lately, both extremes have been amplified. Yesterday, I felt so in love with God. All I wanted to do was spend time with Him, sing to Him, speak to Him, be in complete awe of Him. But then my love for the world took over. I went to rehearsal and, as per usual these past few weeks, saw the guy I've developed feelings for, and all thoughts of God left my mind. I began wondering whether my makeup was alright, or thinking (with guilty paranoia) that said guy might actually be into my best friend, or berating myself for being unable to win his affection. Only hours later did I realize that I'd left Jesus at the door of the building when I went inside to rehearse.

I've been so wrapped up in the (recently learned) knowledge that the guy I like doesn't feel the same way about me that I've been forgetting about Jesus. Jesus, the Creator, Lover of My Soul, who loves me unconditionally in a way that I cannot begin to describe. Jesus, who loves every single person who was, is, and shall be, knowing full well that such people most likely will not love Him in return. Jesus, who is so in love with me that He let the Father pour out all of His wrath against humanity into His own weak human body. Jesus, who died for me. Jesus, who allowed himself to be abandoned by God for me. This is the Love that Will Not Let Me Go. The farther I run, the farther He follows, beckoning me back into His arms.

I know that I will continue to struggle with this every minute of every day for the rest of my life. He knows it, too, and accepts my repentance for my failings. His love is no less.

And that is why I am able to wake up and not simply face the day, but delight in it.

Tired

Some days, I just get tired of it all. I get tired of my inconstancy in the face of God's never-changing, never-ending love and forgiveness. I get tired of the world. I get tired of the dirty jokes that my friends toss around like candy. I get tired of hateful evangelism. Tired of fighting Satan all the time. My exhaustion does not confine itself to the spiritual or the mental. My heart feels weary, but so does my body. All I really want is to lie in bed and pray that God will help me to throw off all of the negative things I'm feeling.

I want to delight in God's creation; usually, I do. I walk outside in the morning and smile because it's sunny, because Jesus is risen, because I am alive. Yet, sometimes, it's not that easy. On days like today, when it's beautiful outside and my mood remains dour, I am merely exhausted.

The only thing to be done, I guess, is to try to smile. I have to work to move beyond myself and to love everyone around me. It sounds easy. But sometimes, it's not. That is the challenge. When I can quit pitying myself and start moving toward other people, then I am living in the world (although weary of it) but not of it. That is the beauty of Jesus. That's how the light gets in.

No More Tears?

Every time in my life I've cried over a boy, I've sworn that I would never do so again. But I always do. Pain always seems to come with having feelings for someone. It's utterly ridiculous, because I know that real, godly love isn't like that. Relationships are supposed to build up the people in them, not make them suffer. Relationships do not harm; they heal.

I can't help but thinking that, if it is God's will for me to marry someday, I'll have wasted time on so many crushes that I won't have enough heart left to give my husband. I realize that this isn't true, that most women (and men) have tons of crushes before getting married and still end up in healthy relationships. The paranoid side of me (which is rather strong), thinks that I'm somehow breaking my own heart a little more all the time. My hope lies in God's ability to mend hearts. He gave me the feelings that I have, so I know that he's going to protect me from them when they get out of hand.

I mentioned in my last post that having feelings for someone makes me weird. It also makes me unsure of myself. I'm comfortable with my personality and my body most of the time. It was a long road, and there are always things that I can improve, but I've made it to a place where I'm truly happy with myself. When I get a crush on someone, though, all I can think about is whether I'm laughing too much or coming across as too geeky, or whether my hips are too wide and my tummy isn't tiny enough. It's terrible. I get to be so self-conscious that my insecurity makes me more miserable than my aching heart does. I always recall a line from The Crucible, a play that's very dear to me:

"I counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to me. Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my love."

I've always identified with Elizabeth Proctor. I struggled with self-image issues from the time I started going through puberty at age 10 until halfway through college. I'm pretty new to this whole "loving yourself" thing. Thus, whenever those old feelings of insecurity start creeping back, I get scared. And then I feel awful because I've lost control of even the feelings that I thought I had tied down years ago.

I have to believe that, if I am to marry, when I meet my future husband, I'll be able to have butterflies in my tummy without wondering if my tummy is too big. I won't feel ridiculous about the things that I'm interested in or what I laugh at, because he'll be the kind of person that sees me as a child of God rather than a flawed and sometimes-awkward girl. And my heart won't have to ache, because God will have sent someone who's actually going to be around for the long haul.

Unequally Yoked

I've had a lot of crushes in my time. Not all of them have been "major," as it were, but they've all had certain things in common: the ol' butterflies in the stomach, daydreams, increased social awkwardness...and pain.

My first and only boyfriend came into my life when I was 11. I know, I know. I was just a kid. Let me start by saying that I was a very mature 11-year-old who had been through quite a bit in her time. By the time I was 11, I was having panic attacks about reaching age 40 and not having gotten anywhere in life. When I was 13, I was manning a garage sale and had a woman ask if "my husband" and I were having the sale because we were moving or if we just wanted to get rid of a few things. I blinked at her and, not wanting to embarrass her, replied, "Yes, we're moving." Right. I would go on a month later to begin eighth grade. But I digress. I met Wyatt at Pokemon League (laugh all you want - it was super fun), which met every Saturday and Sunday at Toys 'R Us. After being friends with him for a year, I was crushing on him so badly it was ridiculous. You know, crying at night because he didn't love me, etc., etc.

Well, he eventually came to like me, too, and we started "dating." We kissed a lot, which, of course, I thought was awesome and very mature of us. The problem - besides my being very young - was that I saw Wyatt more as a mission field who happened to come in cute boy form than an actual "boyfriend." You see, he wasn't a Christian. In fact, he'd never even heard the story of the birth of Christ when I met him. I'd never met anyone who hadn't been at least raised in the church. I felt like I had a duty to God and to him to convert him.

Actually, it was more self-serving than that. My grandmother reminded me at one point that I shouldn't be "unequally yoked" (2 Corinthians 6:14). But I really liked Wyatt. I figured if I got him to become a Christian then we could go on "dating" and everything would be fine. I would like to remind you at this point that I was eleven. Anyway, it ended badly. I broke things off, and, because he was an earnest and mature twelve-year-old kid, he was absolutely heartbroken. That, my friends, is pretty much the extent of my experience in the world of dating.

There is an epilogue to that story, but I'm not going to get into it here. Just know that it ended happily and hearts were mended many years later. What I do want to talk about is what my relationship with Wyatt taught me about the way I handle things now. So let's get back to the issue of "crushes." I bring this up because it's something I'm dealing with right now. There's a guy, and he's fantastic. He's a "good person," and he just might be interested in me. Not having had much experience in the world of dating, however, I really don't know. He may find me utterly repulsive. I'm not great at reading these things. But I digress.

I like him. When I first came to this realization several weeks ago, I panicked. You see, I relate perfectly well to guys if I don't have feelings for them. When I do, however, all of my social deftness decides to run away. As quickly as possible. I become either defensive and sarcastically mean or girlish and princess-y. Neither of these is part of my personality normally, so I usually end up regretting everything I say and do when I'm around guys for whom I have feelings. It's happening right now, in spite of all my attempts to suppress it. That's not the big issue, though.

The real problem here is that he isn't a Christian. I could come up with a million reasons not to get involved with a guy right now, including the fact that I'm graduating and moving in two months and that I don't know if it would even be appropriate for me to pursue a romantic relationship. Singleness has been going pretty well, particularly in how I relate to God. I don't know if He would give me the go-ahead on a relationship right now no matter what the other circumstances were. I haven't really been thinking about those other things, though. I have to keep reminding myself that no matter what I feel for him or he might feel for me, I absolutely cannot pursue a relationship with him because he doesn't love Jesus.

The modern, wordly part of me keeps saying, "It's fine! He's a good guy! And it's not like you're going to marry him! You're young! Maybe casually dating would help to cure you of your weird social awkwardness around guys you like!" This kind of rationalization presents all sorts of problems, though. First of all, I believe that dating is a precursor to marriage and that it cannot exist on its own. God has not laid down rules for "dating" in the modern sense. He laid down rules for marriage. Thus, casually dating is not appealing to me on the whole, and I'm not sure that it's even obedient to God to do it. Second, I don't feel like being "young" is a justification for any of my actions. Third, I'm an emotionally serious person. I really don't think I could date someone without giving part of my heart away. Some people can, and that's wonderful. I just can't. I get far too invested in my relationships with people to look at romance flippantly.

More than anything, though, I know that God commands us to do and not to do certain things for very specific reasons. In this particular instance, dating a non-Christian would be damaging to my relationship and my partner's relationship with God. I would be missing out on the godly part of romance, which, for Christians, should be most of it. My significant other would be getting less from me than he would expect because I would continue to give most of myself to God (ideally). If the relationship evolved into something serious, I would have to break things off for religious reasons. That could lead only to heartbreak and, most likely, a really negative attitude toward God on the guy's part. It would basically boil down to me using someone.

So, after going over all of this and understanding how much is at stake, I've realized that it just can't happen. I've been asking God to guard my heart and to help me to treat my romantic interest in a friendly, not flirtatious, manner. It seems like it should be so easy, and yet...it isn't.

Lonely Planet

I spent my first two years of college at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Getting accepted and having the opportunity to go to Georgetown was my dream. Those two years, though, were very difficult. For many reasons, I did not end up staying at Georgetown.

Washington, D.C., is a peculiar sort of place. It's huge, and yet very, very tiny. There are a great many people packed into a very small space, and most of those people see themselves as wildly different from the other inhabitants of the city. There are three reasons that one lives in D.C.: you were born and raised there, you work for a government (American or foreign), or you work for a non-profit organization. The college students in the city (and there are a lot of them) are there usually because they want to go into politics. In fact, politics shape every aspect of life in the District. I remember walking down the street and being amazed by the people I saw. The Americans - at least the Americans that weren't tourists - did everything with purpose. There were meetings to go to, rallies to attend, people to call, metro trains to catch, opinions to disseminate. There was never, I quickly realized, time for, well, life. Being in D.C. means being of D.C. Being of D.C. usually means interacting with a plethora of people, but never really knowing them or caring to know them. A political constituent is a faceless American whose vote can be won or lost depending upon the way a campaign is run. A neighbor is someone who is probably just as busy as you are and wants to get to know you about as little as you want to get to know him. The cashier at the grocery store is someone working a minimum-wage job, someone who needs, not a friend, but a political representative. This is how D.C. operates.

It is the loneliest place I have ever been.

During my two years in the nation's capitol, I longed for every smile, every handshake that I received. They were few and far between, but they had the power to change my attitude for the rest of the week. I strove to make conversation with anyone that I could. Most people found that to be very strange. I'm not a terribly social person; I love being able to relax by myself and read, play video games, write letters, or what have you. Yet, being in Washington taught me that I need people. Not just my family and friends, but people. My experience in D.C., coupled with my growing conviction that Christ calls me to love every single person with whom I come into contact, has changed the way I look at the other people walking around this lonely planet.

We are lonely. People are lonely. And it's only getting worse. We send a Facebook message when we could send an email. We send an email when we could call. We call when we could take an hour out of our weeks to have lunch with a friend. We take an hour for lunch when we should be pouring all of our time into developing relationships with people. The Christian life is not a solitary one.

I still have trouble with this, of course. Some days, I don't want to look at people, much less love them. But we're not really given that choice, are we? Jesus died for us to live, and we must - must - tell others about His amazing sacrifice.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I love poetry. It moves me in a way that few other art forms do. Today, I came across a Walt Whitman poem called "To You." If you've not read Whitman, you really ought to try. He is certainly the most accessible poet I've ever read, and he knows how to use words in an incredible way. But here's my discovery from today:

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
    should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

That's it. It's so simple, but so relevant. I must not isolate myself. I must speak. This is my challenge to myself.

"Because I Do Not Hope to Turn"

I'm not very well-acquainted with the prophets, so I've been reading Jeremiah lately. The going is slow, but that's a good thing: I am constantly re-reading passages. I have been thinking a great deal about repentance and forgiveness lately, probably because of Lent, and I'm starting to better understand what true penitence looks like. Jeremiah is, thus far, all about returning to God. At first glance, it seems that God spoke through Jeremiah in order to make Israel and Judah realize just how angry He was:


"'Therefore I bring charges against you again,' declares the Lord. 'And I will bring charges against your children's children.'" (2:9). 


God's wrath is incredible. So much so that we can never really know it. He is terrifying, and His power is fearful. His anger, too, is righteous; we have no excuse for what we've done. When I was younger, I was frightened of our angry God; that, I think, is why I always shied away from books like Jeremiah. As I've gotten to know God more intimately, though, I've realized something. His anger is not only righteous; it is spurred by concern for our well-being. At the beginning of Jeremiah, God tells how the Israelites have turned from Him and begun to make their own gods out of rocks and wood or have adopted the false gods of other peoples. He is not angry just for the sake of being angry; He is angry because His people are shooting themselves in the feet, if you will. It's as though God's saying, "Please, just let me save you. I love you. You absolutely cannot do this alone. It is killing you":


"They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’
   and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’
They have turned their backs to me
   and not their faces;
yet when they are in trouble, they say,
   ‘Come and save us!’
Where then are the gods you made for yourselves?
   Let them come if they can save you
   when you are in trouble!
For you, Judah, have as many gods
   as you have towns." (2:27-28)


As always, God's words are very poignant. The verse that struck me the most, however, was this:


"They have forsaken me,
   the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
   broken cisterns that cannot hold water." (2:13)


God is great with metaphors; He is always trying to make Himself understood to His people (as far as humans are capable of understanding God, that is). I read this verse and realized how many cisterns I have dug and continue to dig. I'm always looking for ways to fill myself, be it with school, hobbies, other people, or what have you. It works for a time, but then the water leaks out and I have to refill with something else. Sometimes, I try to fill it with God. But that's the problem: I'm trying to put God into this little well that I've dug for myself. A little well that fits my way of doing things, runs on my time, and doesn't impede other activities. I take some Living Water, but not too much - I don't want it to get in the way of my secular life.


God doesn't really give us that option, though. He does not offer just enough of Himself to sate our appetites for a time. He offers ALL of Himself. If we want a relationship with Him - a real, meaningful, transformative relationship - we cannot do it on our own terms. We have to abandon the broken cistern and immerse ourselves in the "spring of living water." God doesn't do lukewarm. We can't dip our toes in to test the spring out. It's all or nothing. And He allows us, unholy and sinful as we are, to wash ourselves in His spring. 


T.S. Eliot wrote a wonderful poem called "Ash Wednesday" in which he struggles with the grace of God and his own shallow desires. The complete poem is quite long, but it begins with this stanza:


"Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?"


He presents a very common problem that I have. I sin, and sin, and sin; and then I repent, and repent, and repent. After a while, I tire of it. My own imperfection makes me feel entirely hopeless. In other words, I "do not hope to turn again." Instead, I desire worldly things; those are easier to pursue. It's much more comfortable drinking out of my own little cistern. Yet, even as I feel these things, God calls out to me. He is always waiting for us to turn, even though he knows that we will wander away from Him again. The stream of living water never runs dry; Christ has filled it eternally. All we have to do is drink.

Remember That You Are Dust

As is my yearly ritual, I walked into a local Catholic church this morning to begin celebrating Lent. In the Catholic tradition, the palm leaves used on Palm Sunday are burnt to ash. That ash is used for Ash Wednesday of the next year. During the rite, the priest blesses the ashes and sprinkles them with holy water. The priest (or liturgist) then dips his thumb into the bowl of ashes and uses them to make a cross on the forehead of each worshiper. He may say one of two things: "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel" or "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." More often than not, I hear the former phrase. Today, however, when I stepped forward to receive my ashes in the silence of the sanctuary, the liturgist whispered the latter.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I have heard that phrase so frequently, and yet it has, until lately, meant so little. In fact, I wasn't even sure where those words could be found in the Bible. The source, I discovered, is the story of The Fall in Genesis. Just after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, God spoke to the serpent, then to Eve, and then to his first human creation:

"By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen. 3:19)

Bleak; and yet necessary. Humans tend to think about death frequently, whether they consider it seriously or not, but Adam did not know what death was. He had never seen someone die. It was an abstract concept that suddenly became incredibly real. God was explaining his fate to him in terms that Adam, specifically, could understand. He had, after all, been molded from dust. God was telling him in no uncertain terms that he had been, was, and forever would be insignificant. That isn't to say that God didn't infinitely love Adam. But this, God was saying to Adam - and says to us - is what happens when humans forget themselves. When we forget who we are in the big picture: that is, creations of God meant for his joy. Our only purpose, really, is to glorify God. We may ask no questions and make no excuses. For our sins, we should have nothing to look forward to but dust. To dust we shall return.

Of course, because of Jesus, we are so much more than dust. God has breathed life into us, given our meaningless lives purpose, and promised that those who love him may return to dust physically but will be spiritually eternal. How often do we praise Him for this, though? How often are we so proud as to question the Almighty God?

Last night, I began Francis Chan's Crazy Love. The second chapter of the book, aptly entitled, "You Might Not Finish This Chapter," deals with the issue of our perceived invincibility. I realized that, while I think about death quite a lot in general terms (a character in a movie dies; I drive by a funeral home; I see an ambulance speeding toward an emergency), I rarely consider my own death in any meaningful way. Each day, I work through my to-do list - classes, rehearsal, homework, grocery shopping - and schedule in time for God. Wait. What? Schedule time for God? I wonder lately how it is that I don't spend my days praising Him and, if I can, pencil in time for the things that normally clog up my to-do list. In reality, it isn't that easy, of course. Isn't it?

It should be. We have so little time to make our lives meaningful. Every fraction of every second, we are living on borrowed time - God's time, to be exact - and yet we squander it as though we're somehow more important than He.

So, while I tend to think of life as a celebration and the Kingdom of God as a giant party, sobering reminders are important. When Roman generals returned triumphant from war, they would parade around the city in a chariot among thousands of Roman citizens. It was a huge party - they usually got a marble triumphal arch carved in their honor - a celebration that Rome was victorious. But as the war heroes rode around, they always had a slave sharing the chariot with them. Throughout the entirety of the parade, the slave would whisper into the hero's ear, "Memento mori." This is most popularly translated as, "Remember you will die." In George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, the poignant equivalent is "Valar morghulis" : "All men must die."

What a perfect example for Christians. We celebrate Jesus, His goodness, and life eternal, and we are expected to share that celebration with others. Lest we begin to think that our victories are our own, however, God reminds us: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."