If you want to know you have faith, my father says, that means you have to question it.  Faith is only faith when tested.  Otherwise it’s blind trust.  Not faith like that of a child, faith that is complete and whole, but childish faith, faith that happens not because there is reason to have it, but simply because one believes whatever one is told with absolute trust, because one is not wise enough to ask good questions.

Asking questions can lead one to a dark, dark place.  A place where one waits restlessly, is agitated, disturbed, depressed even, where one feels that one’s grip on the world is evaporating.  It is a hard place, a place won with sweat and tears.

A lot of Christians feel regret and remorse when they enter this place.  They ask if they are somehow wrong, if there is a problem with them, if God hates them or doubts their sincerity.  They sometimes feel cheap, like hypocrites.  They ask, “do other Christians go here?”  They ask, “am I the only one?”  They ask, “why would God allow me to go down this road?”

The answer is, “A lot of Christians go there.”  The truth is, most Christians who are strong in their faith are strong because they go there.  So if you’re having a long, dark tea-time of the soul, you aren’t alone.  I’ve been there, as have been my brothers, my husband, my father and mother, my grandfather and grandmother (on both sides).  If you are in that place, that place of late-afternoon restlessness, far from the morning and the evening stars, you are in a room with many others.

The third question is the one I am most loathe to answer, because I know how this answer can sound.  But here it is regardless:  God allows you to go down that path precisely because of how much he loves you. Because of how much he wants you to be assured of your faith.  Because he wants you to be strong and vibrant, and that kind of strength and vibrancy only comes from being tested.  Consider the first blossoms of spring and how they are killed off in a single frost.  Young faith is like that.  It is bright and beautiful and easily smothered.  True faith, the strong faith of a summer rose, the passionate and much envied faith of a tall oak, that faith only comes through time and testing, through surviving many a frost and winter, through harrowing times of drought and still surviving.

Hold on to the memory of the morning of your faith, hold on to the hopes of seeing the evening stars, and remember that all phases of life come to an end and most of them are replaced with something better.  You can bear the restlessness of an afternoon’s doubting, even if it lasts for years.  You can bear it and hold on to hope, hold on the the desire for faith, hold on to the need for love, and rediscover all things in a greater depth on the other side.

Many of us go there.  Most of us end up glad that we did.

So…  On some level I do believe that there is an absolute masculine and feminine, male and female.  But at the same time, I’ve so rarely seen a single person adhere to every bit of what it means to (stereotypically) be male or female.  This is just SUCH a complex issue, I fear I won’t do it justice, but I shall try.

Take my own children, for example.  I have a three year old daughter and one year old son, both on the cusp of birthdays.  My daughter is a princess.  Seriously.  I have even taken to calling her Princess, as she introduces herself as one.  She wears dresses daily.  She fusses about her hair.  She sings songs and dances because that is what Princesses ought to do.  She is also a very creative, tender and caring soul.  If someone starts crying, anyone, my daughter will try to comfort them.  If her attempts to comfort fail, she will probably start crying herself.  She likes to help me in the kitchen.  She likes to sing to babies and give them pacifiers and “help” with their diapers.  This does not keep her from getting into fistfights with boys, climbing jungle gyms, being fascinated by mechanics, or any number of other things which are normally considered the province of men or of the masculine.

My son is not like my daughter.  Yes, he can be gentle and caring.  But he’d normally rather just punch you and ORDER you to be happy.  He likes to demand and command and be in charge.  He always wants to do things himself.  He gets angry when he’s sad, he seems to not be as “in tune” with his emotions as his sister was.  He’s still more or less a baby in a lot of ways, so he still craves affection and hugs and kisses from me, but as the days go by he’s less and less trying to win these with his sweetness and more and more just demanding them when he wants them and shoving me away when he’s not.  He’s amused by farts and poops and FASCINATED with his masculine anatomy in a way my daughter was with her feminine, he’s just… him.  And he’s a boy.  That much is obvious.  But he also likes to help me cook, help me garden, sit with his head in my lap sucking on his fingers.  He’s masculine, but he’s also himself.

There are things that seem to be more true about women and more true about men, but there are always exceptions.  Some women can’t stand small children, are afraid to hold babies, are more fascinated by numbers and less so by dialog.  Some men are horrible with mechanics, prefer to be creative, are better at multitasking and hate being in authority.

It all depends.  It depends on the person.  It depends on both nature and nurture.  I can attest to the fact that I am highly uncomfortable with my son’s combative nature.  While I enjoy the fact that he likes martial arts and is already trying to emulate take-downs and holds and punches, I also never would have chosen to have a son who was as flat out aggressive as him.  I certainly didn’t “nurture” him into it.  And my daughter, my charming princess…  I have no idea what to do with her sometimes.  I told my best friend when I got pregnant that my worst nightmare was a pink bubble gum lipstick princess…  and that is precisely what I ended up with.  And I do love her desperately, I love everything about her, even her most maddening qualities.

But I didn’t proscribe gender roles for my children, and I would have loved them had they been absolutely the opposite of everything they are now.  We live in an odd and complex world, full of souls who run the gambit of masculine to feminine, and sometimes those souls seem totally at odds with the bodies they are in.

I’m okay with that.

The only person you control is yourself.  This seems like a fairly simple concept to grasp.  Your brain is in your body, it sends impulses, your body reacts.  The chemicals that inspire emotion run between your synapses.  The thoughts, the hopes, the spirit, they are all in your temple.  So of course you are you and you are in control of yourself, ultimately.

And no one else.

But yet we so often act as if we have divine power over others.  There are phases of life in which this becomes stronger.  Any young pregnant lady can attest to the fact that even random strangers on the street act as if they should have some sort of control over her.  They ask personal questions, are offended if rebuffed.  They do not say “have you considered…?” but instead word things as, “you must [do this]” and “you certainly have to [do that]“- as if a random stranger has earned the right to make commands.

Parents in the public square with their children also face it.  A child talks back, a stranger reprimands them.  A child starts to cry, all eyes turn.  Strangers offer up advice.

But it is not always strangers who attempt to exert power.  Ever seen a group of people examining a car engine?  Person 1 says to person 2, “it’ll be the belt.”  Person three says, “Oh, what a noob, it’ll be the hose.”  They then order around whichever person is actually getting their hands dirty.  They wager, they bicker, they threaten.  Eventually the problem is sussed out (generally neither a belt or a hose) and everyone states how had their (wrong) opinion been respected, things would have gone better.

Now let’s get very serious.  Look at relationships.  Everyone is very free with advice about how to make relationships work, myself included.  But when it comes to close friendships, dating and marriage, it’s always down to two people.  And eventually, one.  It’s all about one person’s choices, and how that one person feels about them.  Yet the larger world just LOVES to give advice and loves to mock, harangue, and belittle when said advice isn’t taken.  It’s very easy as an outsider to say, “but she’s controlling and manipulative!  Leave!” but an outsider doesn’t know what goes on behind closed doors or the real truth of their relationship.  It’s easy for an outsider to say, “but when he does that he’s being abusive!”, and perhaps it’s true, he is being abusive.  But we have no real power to make someone else leave when they don’t want to.

And you certainly can’t make someone just change.  If someone did come up with a method to snap their fingers and invoke change, they’d become a millionaire in a millisecond.  We all have things about each other we want to change.  We all have patterns in other people we want erased.  We all want our opinion, our advice, our knowledge verified by someone else respecting it.  We all spend such ridiculous amounts of time focused on trying to get our little fingers into other people’s business.

And somewhere along the way, we forget that we control ourselves.  We forget that we do things that are stupid, too.  We make bad choices about our bodies, our children, our relationships.  We forget that when the engine grease is on our own fingers sometimes our instincts are bad.  We forget that we sometimes behave in the most childish of ways, or the most hopelessly romantic, or the most foolishly submissive.  We forget that like all other people, we can control ourselves but we so often forget to.

This world is a crazy place.  It’s nice to feel as if we’ve got some power over our immediate surroundings, people included.  But we must remember the fact that it’s all of those people asserting their own power that makes it such a crazy world.  So embrace the insanity around you, if you will, and just control your self.

I hate the fact that time has turned things like keeping house, cooking for the family, and tending to the yard into things that are by their nature somehow demeaning to women.  I find a lot of pleasure in knowing that my family is well cared for.  I LIKE a clean house, a tidy and often used kitchen, the smell of a meal cooking on the stove.  I prefer spending my evenings in the garden than to sitting around watching television.

I sometimes think about having a career, but I don’t know that it would be more fulfilling than domesticity.  I don’t think that being a housewife is my highest or most important calling, I don’t think that it is the extent of all that I’m made for, but it is usefull.

And, hey, if there ever IS a zombie apocalypse, my family won’t have to worry about being well fed.  I also am fairly good at going without electricity.  Long power outages in snowstorms have sort of prepped me for the end of all things.

I just think that while women’s suffrage was a good and necessary thing, the backlash against being pigeonholed as women has cost us a lot as well.  Breastfeeding your child isn’t demeaning, it’s healthy and natural.  Caring for your family isn’t a torment, it’s a gift to both family and caregiver.  Domesticity has it’s joys and importance.  It may not be as “important” as being president, but…  How big of a price tag does a happy, well fed and well loved child carry?  I’d gladly trade my own dreams for the future for the dreams of my kids.

Not because I’m forced to.  Because I want to.

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean escaping earthly consequences”, my father says, “you can forgive a man on death row, but he still serves out the penalty accorded by the courts.”

This particular blog isn’t about my personal life, and thus personal details are often left out.  The very, very observant readers may sense themes and put one and two together, but, anyway…  Forgiveness is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  What does it mean to forgive someone?  Certainly it can’t mean acting as if the deed forgiven never occurred.  One should forgive a priest who molests an altar boy but one shouldn’t act as if it never happened.  So what DOES forgiveness mean?

For me it means choosing to love past something.  Choosing to release anger and judgment and allow God to be the authority, instead of my own taste for vengeance.  Forgiveness sometimes means not seeking justice, it sometimes means releasing one’s own need for satisfaction, and it sometimes means finding comfort in God rather than in justification.

There is nothing harder than forgiveness, nothing harder than grace, nothing harder than loving through a cloud of pain.  But there is nothing better, as well.  Justice can be lonely, justification can be cold, consequence can be cruel.  Forgiveness itself can be bloody at times, but there’s a kind of warmth and comfort that comes from the stripped nakedness of one asking for forgiveness and the sudden contact of the other consenting that brings out this kind of intimacy that cannot be found anywhere else.

Because the truth is that real, total intimacy comes not from trust but from figuratively being seen naked in all of one’s human, flawed, and sinful reality and finding that love still endures.  True romance is not in loving someone because of their perfection, but loving them while knowing just exactly how imperfect they are.  It’s sad that as Christians we seem to want perfection all the time, to the point where people are ashamed to admit their shortcomings.  This creates a syndrome that prevents real intimacy.  The intimacy of saying, “I love you, knowing who you truly are.”

And isn’t that God?  “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  THAT should be our flagship verse.  John 3:16 is sweet, but 1st John 4 is honest.

Sorry my thoughts are so scattered.  Ironic that in a post discussing total intimacy I’m forced to be withholding, but life is strange.

listen to what you say when countering in an argument.  Then, ask yourself “have I heard this (my) argument elsewhere before?”  If the answer is yes, honestly ask yourself if it’s truly your own thoughts and argument, or if you are just acting as an echo chamber.

Dichotomies.

Is it either-or or is it both-and?

Leonard Sweet describes it as the swing affect.  When you hit the apex of the swing on the playground, you have to simultaneously kick forward and lean back.  You reach this moment of pure balance where you’re trying to both kick into the future while remaining in the past.

It’s impossible to maintain, though.  Eventually everything reverses itself.

My relationship with the Church and religion has always been a strained one.  Needless to say I’m largely unhappy with the church in America today.  I want it to change, I want this desperately.  I want to move into the future.  But at the same time I find myself remaining in the past.  Why?  Because two thousand years ago our faith was reformed by the one person who best understood what it ought to be.  I believe that the early church had to have some wisdom because the founders actually knew Christ.  But, at the same time, the wisdom that led them through the founding of our faith may not have any application to today’s society.

The past, the future, that one moment of pure balance lost in the downswing.

I believe there is something inherently good about tradition because it connects us to the millions of years of history that our world has gone through.  We need to learn from generations past if we don’t want to have to make all of the mistakes that they made to gain that wisdom in the first place.  Yet, at the same time, one must acknowledge that tradition for tradition’s own sake becomes useless.  Have you heard the one about the woman that always cut the ham in half because her grandma did?  Then grandma says, “I only did that because my roaster was small.”  Without knowledge of the “what for” tradition is empty, a meaningless gesture, without any real value but a massively huge cost.

The future, the past, blurred in the upswing.

At the end of the day, all I know is that I know nothing.  I thrive off intuition.

I often get things wrong.

My grandmothers have a lot of sayings that aren’t heard very often any more, but most of them are really good.  “Never bake angry” is one of my personal favorites because it seems odd, but it is so very true.  They would say that the anger gets into the food, and I’m not sure if that’s really the truth.  Perhaps it’s just that when you’re angry you don’t have the gentle touch necessary to make a pie crust fluff or a meringue stay stiff- but whatever it is the lesson is still good.  Anger and baking don’t mix.  “Never argue when you’re angry” is another classic in the same vein- because when you’re angry an argument is a fight, but when you’re calm it’s just a discussion.  Another classic is “stretch it thin, wear it out or do without”- it’s like “waste not, want not”, but a little more detailed.  The lesson being that if you can’t make it last it’s not worth having.  One most people have heard is “happy wife, happy life”, that usually being interpreted as if you’re wife is unhappy she’ll make you miserable.  That’s not the way I learned it, though.  What I’ve always felt it to mean is if you keep your wife happy she will make your life better for you.  A happy wife is a worthy investment.

Some more classics are “A woman’s tools are her hands and her brains”, “feed your guests first”, “the world is a man’s domain but women rule the home”, “idle hands lead to destruction”, “kindness breeds in kind”, and “squirrels are evil.”  The last one isn’t really conventional wisdom, it’s more just grandma’s opinion.  Squirrels always ruin her garden and she hates them with a passion.  Especially the black ones.  They bring walnuts into her yard and just cause the biggest problems.

Sometimes I wonder if the lack of connections to family, history, and tradition truly are ruining society.  All I know is that I learned a lot more baking with my grandma’s than I ever did in school.  Well, more worth knowing.  Maybe not more in a quantative sense. Oh, and you can clean anything with vinegar and baking soda.  Bottled cleaners are for wimps. 

It’s interesting to listen to kids in the first blush of love talk about what they want from their relationships.  They say things like “wouldn’t it be great to be together all the time?” or “I just can’t wait to talk to him/her every time anything happens to me” or “I just feel like I’m dying when we’re not touching”.

Some things change over time, some things don’t.  I would hope that after ten years of marriage (currently on year six) that I still want to spend the majority of the time with my husband and I certainly can’t wait to talk to him any time something exciting happens.  As for the “dying when we’re not touching”, well, after several months of marriage and almost constant contact that particular thing died away.  Then, two years later and after baby one it certainly came back for a while.  But that’s a different topic, isn’t it?

The point is that marriage is and isn’t all we expect it to be.  At first it is (or was, in my case) everything a girl could hope for.  It was an orgy of togetherness (take that literally or figuratively), it was a communion of intellect and emotion and entertainment.  It was an endless dance of what he wants and she wants, it was massively intense.  And then the shine wore off, as it had to.  Two people can only maintain so much closeness before things start to get rubbed raw.  Humans do crave togetherness, but they also need aloneness.  Two can become one to a point that neither one remembers who they are when apart, and while that may seem magical it’s also hurtful.  We need to be united, yes, but we also need to be who God created us to be.  And the union can become twisted to the point where one person sacrifices their being and calling for the happiness of the other- which kills the union.

Yes, it’s a cliche, but the honeymoon always ends.  The sad truth is that the miracle of togetherness is often overshadowed by memories of the first knock-down drag-out fight.  Distractions of work or family mar the union and sometimes the union itself is forgotten or failed to be maintained.  And then a girl (or guy) is left to figure out what marriage really is.

Here’s the truth:  it’s not about you.  It can’t be, or it will end.  Marriage is not about me being adored, me being desired, me being fulfilled, my needs being met.  It would be nice if it was, but it’s not.  It’s about me loving someone else.  That means that I make sacrifices, I sometimes go ignored or neglected for long periods of time.  Not because it’s okay to do that to someone or to have it done to you, but because life happens and in the midst of life happening people get hurt.  But marriage isn’t about the hurt.  It’s about the hope, the faith, the commitment, the vows, the forsaking of all others for the sake of the union.  It’s about learning how to truly love someone unconditionally.  It’s about learning to put yourself second.

Oh, and then if you have kids…  wow.  It’s about learning to put yourself third or fourth (or fifth, or sixth, or seventh).  It’s about learning real, real patience.  It’s about learning to swallow anger and only let it out in appropriate circumstances.  It’s about learning to live without so that your kids don’t have to.  It’s about hours, days, months, years spent waiting for a chance to pursue a dream.  Often there are only enough hours in the day for one person to get needs met or pursue dreams above and beyond thier nine-to-five job.

In order for a marriage to work sometimes it seems like one person involved has to practically transcend humanity.  But, that being said, marriage is also about two people.  It doesn’t matter how holy and how perfect one person is, if the other person never commits it will end.  Rarely is one met halfway, but so long as both keep meeting things always seem to work themselves out.  In a perfect world you have two people so wholly devoted to each other’s fulfillment that neither go wanting, but this world isn’t perfect.  No, it’s far from perfect.  But it’s perfect enough.

That is what matters.

Not perfection, but having enough.  Having enough isn’t even about the amounts one has, it’s about learning to be grateful for what is there.  The moments of togetherness eclipsing the moments of solitude, the love expressed covering the wounds of anger, the tender platitudes taking the place of epic love poems that are wished for.  And in learning to love what is there, we learn about God.  We understand why God would send Christ for us, a broken people.  And we learn to be like him.  For me, that’s what marriage really is.

Romance is for fools.

(Okay, I take that back- romance is wonderful.  But it’s more wonderful six years in.  Trust me on that.)

I’m back!  I’m relatively sane as well, which always feels like a small miracle after a day of car rides, plane rides, and fast food (with two little bitty kids).

I find surprisingly little to write about the trip, probably because the majority of it was spent in my parent’s living room or chasing the kids around, and the latter thing has me still feeling pretty tired.

But I AM back, and today is my “catch up on the internets” day.  So hopefully I’ll post at some point.