reflecting

It’s not that I don’t have enough thoughts about Havenplace. It’s that there are too many, and I’m worried I’ll accidentally write a book and then where would we be? I’m worried I’ll misrepresent myself or other people; I’m worried I won’t make sense.

Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that everything is too complicated. People talk about poverty, abuse, evangelism and love like they are simple things but they are not. They occur in patterns, cycles, probabilities, it’s true, but no one who proves the rule is not also an exception to it. These are not problems or solutions, they are people – beautiful shattered people whose strength I’ll never know because I’ve never felt their pain. All unique, all valuable, all absolutely infinite and so how could I presume to fill their needs?

I can’t. It is a thing too wonderful for me when the Spirit translates my pitiful efforts into the spark I sometimes see – the light of recognition: this is love. Too often I look into the eyes of the neglected, the forgotten, the scarred, and I worry they’ve lost the ability to recognize grace where it’s found. And so the glancing connection of spirit to Spirit to spirit in that moment makes me able to trudge back again even when the weight of unrecognized sacrifice reminds me how unworthy I am to carry my Savior’s cross. I suppose on that road, step after step, he remembered the laughter of his brothers amidst the breaking of bread, but also the tear-lined face mirroring the fissured heart of one begging only that her story be heard. These are the things worth dying for; this road the crucible where life is truly lived. Left foot, joy – a joke, a hug, the begrudgingly-offered friendship of a longtime pool competitor. Right foot, pain – drugs. incest. the twins are in state care and their father’s up on drug charges. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, but not like a magic hat takes away your quarter. Like your grandmother takes away your hunger, trapping it inside herself and hiding it as it grows. Eat your bread and go play.

And yet somehow I feel richer, fuller than I was before I started losing every Tuesday to eat Little Debbies for dinner. It was a good bet, on the whole, the smaller version of how mothering is a good investment. I could never say they had nothing to give me, nothing to teach me, that they didn’t change me gallons more than I changed them. These are my friends and I love them and they love me in their ways. They are my mirror, poverty the magnifying glass to blow up sin writ large, and yet they shame me with their generosity, their strength and the ease with which they tell me who they are. In a room full of food stamp recipients, paranoid schizophrenics, felons and sex abuse victims, artifice is the most laughable fault of all; and so my precious friends remind me: the pretense of perfection is the most idiotic of upper-middle-class luxuries, a damn expensive waste of all our time.

So here is the grace in it all: that I could have set out on a noble course toward Service or Justice and found myself, in the end, blessed beyond measure, served and justified by those the world would abuse and judge. That I could blithely go about “changing the world” when all along I alone was being changed; that somehow I will only begin to become set apart if I burrow down deep into the middle of the darkness.That love is not a shining deed done at the play’s crisis but the mundane repetition of putting out snacks and yielding a thousandfold harvest of trash strewn about and then I wonder what gifts I, too, have diligently ignored and yet my Father still gives, always gives. The grace in it all is that the command was the gift all along, that the faith and obedience by which I thought I offered so much were only the instruments by which God blessed me. That the anger I once felt at the stubbornly gluttonous church has burned away, leaving only an ardent longing that she would behold with me the face of our King hidden there in the ashes.

As the world fills up with words and soundbites and opinions

Maybe a certain quietness is demanded if we are to be heard.

Steady still confidence and integrity are their own apologists in a crowded frantic pixelated bustle.

Living different means sharing space and time and food, because we know those are sacred things

And this world longs to be consecrated.

dear preston yancey

dear preston yancey.

i am writing to you to confess some sins i have sinned against you. You don't know me and i don't know you, so it will probably be awkward if you ever read this, but we both know that the blogosphere is a strange strange place where people routinely spill their secrets across the world wide web of strangers. it's the hip new thing, like planking and feeling vaguely concerned about africa.

So anyway, i thought you should know that i am extremely jealous of you, especially since you rejected my submission for your guest post series. Here is what you said: "At 49 posts in 25 days, I had to draw the line somewhere". This made me feel as bad as i felt in ninth grade when only three people put me in their myspace top eight, because you literally just told me i wasn't in your top 49.

Maybe next time, you could send me an email that just says,

NO.

-preston yancey.

But i'm not angry. it's really not your fault that i have an extreme sensitivity to rejection. i think i have a chemical imbalance. i read about it in a book one time.

No, i'm not angry, but envious. terribly envious. i want what you have and i don't want you to have it. i am jealous of your ability to invent poetic compound hyphen-words to express exactly what you are feeling. i am jealous of your friends who like to cook with you. i am even jealous of your giant thesis paper because you will come out of your undergraduate career feeling like you accomplished something.

Clearly, i am insane. No one envies other people's homework.

Anyway, now that i've gotten that off my chest, i hope you will forgive me so we can get back to our normal non-relationship without any bad feelings between us. And i will try not to be jealous of you any more, because what you have isn't actually any better than what i have. You only wish you were the Spades champion of Lee University. You only wish you had a cool improv team to hang out with. You only wish you had something better to do than google your own name.

(don't worry. we all do it from time to time.)

And good luck with all your things. I will continue to read your beautiful blog, and you are welcome to continue reading my vindictive-sounding, fragmented one.

But i took you off my top eight.

a hard thing.

a hard thing is when you can't remember why you believed some things. you wait and you try to sort it out but the answers you would've given someone else don't make sense any more. you thought they would, you didn't mean them to be silly and small answers, you expected they'd be real and comforting and true and wide enough. but things you thought impossible keep happening, and you wonder if grace is any more impossible or any bigger than everything hurtful in this impossible big world. sometimes the beauty is only barely staving off a lot of ugliness, like when your jacket's too thin for the cold and no one offers you theirs.

frustration: take it out on people you don't know

"Blessing never ceases to follow obedience". Actually, random high school facebook friend, it does. Unless you have some weird definition of "blessing" that i don't want to hear about. Sometimes, obedience leads to crappiness and not much else. Is it ok if we all agree on that? Can we stop with the platitudes?

Who decided "platitude" was a good word? It always distracts me from my self-righteous indignation when i think of this word because it sounds like "platypus" and "attitude" stuck together, but obviously it has nothing to do with those.

Someone should tell God that he is seriously messing with my theodicy right now, because he doesn't appear to be listening to me.

[ok, God, that was a potshot, and you're not even a person i don't know... but, well, i'm whining, and there's a long tradition of that in the Bible, so there. THERE.

maybe you should come in a thundercloud and yell at me like you did to Job. i would definitely deserve that.

one time my new testament teacher declared that Jesus should have just magically made the widow of Nain happier instead of actually raising her son from the dead. if you're not going to fix things, you could just make everyone magically happy.

oh, that's one of the stupidest things you've ever heard? i thought so too.]

unmoored

Honesty has something to do with faith. I don't know what.

I am tired of answers. Most of the answers I ever had have failed me, and I am young and lucky. These days I simply live between near-despair and wild-flying hope, holding both inside me as a prayer for the world and also for me. I think that hope wins out where there is laughter.

Faith is a thing you do one day at a time, I do know this, but when I say it to myself it is hollow and the child inside me cries and rails against the thought. It is especially when I find myself unexpectedly alone, and fear settles in the deep pit between my stomach and my spine. No one will love you, says fear, and grace seems a distant happening for other people.

Something like faith continues out of habit, and I hope it is something like good enough.

"It seemed like you sort of found your identity in him."

My friend's words nearly knocked the wind out of me. I had worked hard, for two and a half years, to keep my identity separate from his, to do what I wanted and not to get subsumed into the relationship bubble that has sucked friend after friend out of my life. I have always had my own identity, thank you.

And yet, now that I've left, where have I gone?

There's something about knowing someone else finds you beautiful to the core, something that makes it easy to believe. But then it's not your own faith.

It turns out there is surprisingly little I know about myself. I'm an idealist and a cynic; I have no patience for small talk; I take charge of things because I can't stand to see them done "wrong". I like gummy bears and chicken fingers of all kinds, but only the best chocolate and coffee will do. I want the best from myself, every day and at all times; I'm awfully self-conscious and I think that's silly. I depend on my friends more than most people do and I am terrified, absolutely terrified, to leave them and make new ones, then leave them and make new ones.

I want to take big risks and I'm passionate about too many things to "just do it". Just do what? Travel the whole entire world or stay in Cleveland, at Havenplace? Start teaching improv to inner city teenagers or open a vintage clothing store? Peace Corps? Or one of a thousand really neat nonprofits that will let me work for them if I'll just do them the favor of begging my own airfare and living costs off of my friends and family?

For right now, exams and papers and responsibilities galore, plenty to do while the back half of my brain fills itself with a million little fears and doubts, possibilities and impossible desires, always whispering six months to May...