When your heart is split open by sleep deprivation...
And the sweet inconsolable craving for what is to come, for what is not attainable, or for what may not even exist in this world yet... drives you mad
Sometimes... all you can do is watch K-drama
#confessions #fallingforinnocence
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Lost boys: Lost cause
I've my soulmate song
Lost Boys
I will always love Peter Pan
I will never fit in
I will always be running from reality
Also, I listen to this song on repeat while doing an exegetical study on Hebrews 3 and unbelief... terrified that I will be lost forever
Unbelief (by strong's expanded exhaustive concordance): apeitheia: disbelief (obstinate and rebellious). The word literally means "the condition of being unpersuadable" and denotes "obstinancy, obstinate rejection of the will of God"
Written response in my journal:
I am terrified that I will be judged under [God] as rebellious or an unbeliever... because I an unpersuadable that you [God] are more powerful, or more interesting, or able to compare to my fantasies, my dreams of happiness... marriage, being adored, making a difference, being a leader. And that this is slowly killing me... making me unsaveable.
Thoughts now:
How can you be more? Than the siren song of safety, adoration, importance? How can you be the adventure I'm looking for? How can you fill all of my desires? They seem so vast. C. S. Lewis claims our desires are not great enough... but I feel that mine walk among the stars. I am not satisfied with this reality. I want kings to rise. Nobility to return. I want things to be restored to their original glory. I want to lead the charge screaming. And trample the lies, the injustice, the corruption, the vanity, the evil under my feet.
Oh that you would be Enough. Persuade me. Or I will be a lost boy. A lost cause. An empty whisper on the running stream.
Lost Boys
I will always love Peter Pan
I will never fit in
I will always be running from reality
Also, I listen to this song on repeat while doing an exegetical study on Hebrews 3 and unbelief... terrified that I will be lost forever
Unbelief (by strong's expanded exhaustive concordance): apeitheia: disbelief (obstinate and rebellious). The word literally means "the condition of being unpersuadable" and denotes "obstinancy, obstinate rejection of the will of God"
Written response in my journal:
I am terrified that I will be judged under [God] as rebellious or an unbeliever... because I an unpersuadable that you [God] are more powerful, or more interesting, or able to compare to my fantasies, my dreams of happiness... marriage, being adored, making a difference, being a leader. And that this is slowly killing me... making me unsaveable.
Thoughts now:
How can you be more? Than the siren song of safety, adoration, importance? How can you be the adventure I'm looking for? How can you fill all of my desires? They seem so vast. C. S. Lewis claims our desires are not great enough... but I feel that mine walk among the stars. I am not satisfied with this reality. I want kings to rise. Nobility to return. I want things to be restored to their original glory. I want to lead the charge screaming. And trample the lies, the injustice, the corruption, the vanity, the evil under my feet.
Oh that you would be Enough. Persuade me. Or I will be a lost boy. A lost cause. An empty whisper on the running stream.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Pulling it all together
It's funny when you take a class on mental health care and realize that everything you've been doing for your friends' mental health is actually certifiably researched and called therapy.
Sometimes I think that I will never find my niche. I feel it is my generation's greatest fear (yes that would be... we the millenials) that we will always be searching for something that we cannot obtain. I guess it's the great human experience. Most people don't realize it consciously of course - nor do they associate it properly with spirituality. But of course, most people have not read enough C. S. Lewis.
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” C. S. Lewis - "Weight of Glory"
Anyway, I've always imagined my niche would come through Emily Dickinson:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Hmmmm, I'm very quoty today. But it seems to me that the insatiable desire for the mother country... the home country I have not yet visited... causes me long for bigger, better, greater! It cannot be just one heart... it must be every heart!!!!! Then again, perhaps that is not the noble desire for what is yet to come, but simply a misplaced grandiose psychological problem.
Then again, (shoves some more Lewis in)
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” C. S. Lewis "The Weight of Glory"
I've been thinking perhaps that I just haven't wanted it strongly enough. I haven't actually been brave enough to want something desperately - to sell everything for it. In my quest to make a home, a safety net for those I love, a place of hospitality, a xenodochium... I have not yet overturned every stone. I have not yet cried tears of blood. I have not yet prayed every day unceasingly.
So this Lent (ahhhh Lent). I am determined to begin searching as the woman looking for her coin, as the man who sold everything for the field. Watch out world! The whirlwind is coming.
(Mom would say this is all very melodramatic of me...) Touche mom, touche. :)
Liz
Sometimes I think that I will never find my niche. I feel it is my generation's greatest fear (yes that would be... we the millenials) that we will always be searching for something that we cannot obtain. I guess it's the great human experience. Most people don't realize it consciously of course - nor do they associate it properly with spirituality. But of course, most people have not read enough C. S. Lewis.
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” C. S. Lewis - "Weight of Glory"
Anyway, I've always imagined my niche would come through Emily Dickinson:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Hmmmm, I'm very quoty today. But it seems to me that the insatiable desire for the mother country... the home country I have not yet visited... causes me long for bigger, better, greater! It cannot be just one heart... it must be every heart!!!!! Then again, perhaps that is not the noble desire for what is yet to come, but simply a misplaced grandiose psychological problem.
Then again, (shoves some more Lewis in)
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” C. S. Lewis "The Weight of Glory"
I've been thinking perhaps that I just haven't wanted it strongly enough. I haven't actually been brave enough to want something desperately - to sell everything for it. In my quest to make a home, a safety net for those I love, a place of hospitality, a xenodochium... I have not yet overturned every stone. I have not yet cried tears of blood. I have not yet prayed every day unceasingly.
So this Lent (ahhhh Lent). I am determined to begin searching as the woman looking for her coin, as the man who sold everything for the field. Watch out world! The whirlwind is coming.
(Mom would say this is all very melodramatic of me...) Touche mom, touche. :)
Liz
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