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.

“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.

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.)

The internet is a tricky place.  It’s a little like a masquerade, with everyone picking avatars that rarely show their face, the real person hidden in a veil of carefully constructed identity.  The internet being such, it’s easy to forget that there’s a real person on the other side of the ethernet cable.  Because there’s rarely proximity or touch involved, it’s easy to think of people one meets online as not real people, not containing real emotion or full identity.  It’s easy to think of every aspect of their online identity as being concocted.  It’s easy to disregard truth in favor of perception.

It’s easy to be cruel.

In my days on the internet I’ve been a part of a lot of different online communities.  In my early days it was fan sites for favorite bands.  Every once in a while we’d all be told that we had no taste in music or that certain members of bands were not who we thought they were.  There’d be outright lies, misleading half-truths, odd motivations.  As time passed on I joined a few online RPGs, groups in which concocting identities was the norm.  And as such there were a few practical jokes played with multiple personas, some of which went miserably awry.  Even further on there were a few support groups for people dealing with depression.  Let me just say that if you have blade to wrist and someone says “depression is a choice”, it doesn’t help things.  Despite the fact that it’s easy to lash out at an idea, one must always remember that whatever one is lashing out with involves people as well.  Real people with real feelings that can be really hurt.

Mothers forums in which mothers who don’t breastfeed are eviscerated.  Or mothers who choose to go back to work are mocked.  Or mothers who don’t choose to go back to work are accused of taking advantage of their spouses.  Or single mothers are told they are “better off” without having to deal with a spouse.  All of these things that just make it harder on us all.  Make it harder for everyone on every side of the issue.  Because we don’t need to be divided, we need to be united.  Instead of focusing on our differences we should focus on those things which all of us share.

I do not, as a rule, moderate comments on this blog.  I realize that ninety percent of the things I talk about are issues that divide people, and I respect the fact that not everyone who reads my posts will agree with me.  Some people will think I am absolutely and in all ways wrong, and they are entitled to that opinion and entitled to voice it.  Occassionally I do delete a comment.  If someone, for example, refers to a person who is gay as one who (and I quote) “embraces the vile vomit of sodomy”, I will delete that comment.  It serves no purpose other than to be inflamatory.  Someone can believe that gay sex is against God’s plan without using words such as “vile” and “vomit”.

Just remember, commenters, that there are real people on the other side of this issue.  The gays are real people, with emotions, and needs, and desires, and even spirituality.  Just as those who believe homosexuality is a sin are also people, people who are trying to adhere to that which they believe is holy.  That is why I allow comments from all sides- because ninety nine percent of the time I think everyone truly is trying to do what they think is right or necessary.

Just please, please, comment with care.  Be respectful.  Don’t attack.  Wear gloves, if necessary.  Remember that for better or worse God put us all on this planet together and he called us all to each other.  We NEED each other.

Practice compassion.  Live with grace.

And for the love of God, comment with care.

Ever since reading this post on SanityFound’s site I’ve been thinking about if I should address the topic of suicide and suicidal behaviors on my own blog.  Her post keeps getting more comments, so every once in a while it pops back on to my radar, and eventually I simply got worn down enough by my thoughts to start this post.

A lot of people misunderstand the suicidal, and a lot of people also misunderstand the self-abusive.  I seperate those people into two categories because they are not necessarily the same thing.  Not every suicidal person engages in self-abusive behaviors, and not every self-abusive person seriously contemplates suicide.  It’s easy to confuse them because both behaviors can be colored with a lot of the same emotions, but even so it’s an important distinction to make.

In my past I have been both self-abusive and suicidal, but peculiarly those two things occured at different times.  When I was suicidal I was fairly young and despairing, I was at the cusp of adolescence, realing from sexual abuse, absolutely dejected and sure that my life had nothing of value to offer.  I won’t relate the details of that time here because that’s not the main reason I’m writing this, but suffice it to say that my ascension from that dark place has absolutely convinced me that not only does God exist, but he loves me with a love I did nothing to earn.

Now, let’s talk about self-abuse.  Do not think that every person who cuts or engages in similar activities is over-acting or crying out for attention.  Do not assume that the things they are feeling are things that are easily coped with.  Do not make the grievous mistake that so many people do, and assume that it is a phase or can be ignored.  When I went through my self-abusive stage it was because I felt a great deal of disgust with myself, I thoroughly hated myself, and I could not think of any way in which to cope with the emotions that I was feeling other than taking it out on my body.  I’ve seen other kids struggle with the same thing.  Sometimes it is because they are in a highly abusive and manipulative relationship that they feel they can’t leave.  Maybe it is a parent, or a sibling, or a pastor.  For whatever reason they start to feel a build up of emotional bile.  And rather than attack the source of the problem, they exorcise that bile by taking it out on themselves.  Some people do this with cutting or bruising themselves.  Some starve themselves.  Some over-eat.  Some engage in risky activities like unprotected sex or drunk driving.  Some do drugs.  For whatever reason, the self becomes the enemy.

Perhaps the situation that causes the internal focus ends, or perhaps the relationship ceases.  Perhaps that is the way that the self finds freedom.  Or perhaps there is an intervention, and a new way of exorcising emotion is found.  Or perhaps the cycle of self-hatred continues until recognizable damage is done.  A young girl who is having unprotected sex may find herself pregnant, a boy who is cutting may land in emergency care, a teen who is doing drugs may be caught…

Often something happens that the period of self-abuse comes to an end, but that doesn’t mean that one can portray it as having been a phase.

What is important, here, is that we appreciate the depth of emotion that causes self-abuse, that we respect the reality of the internal struggle, that we do not attack someone who has already made thier self the enemy.  What we need to do is blanket the self-abusive in love, find them practical help and relief, and treat them with gentle hands.

If you are the parent, close friend, or loved one of someone who is exhibiting self-abusive behaviors and you are reading this:  please, contact a professional who can help them.  Do not try to deal with it independently.  Try to avoid an aggressive confrontation.  But, most of all:  tell them that you love them and that they are WORTH loving.  Embrace them.  Cry with them.

Try to let them know that you don’t see their self as the enemy.

Love them.

As has recently been pointed out to me, half of my blog roll is “Christian Gays”.  And I love you guys, I do, I do!

I’d like to have a word with you all.  Two words, actually.

Thank You.

Thank you for reminding us that the world isn’t always black and white.  Thank you for reminding us that we are all sinners, all broken, all lost, and all in need of Christ in equal measures.  Thank you for teaching us grace, tolerance, and mercy.  Thank you for being willing to be open about who and what you are, and why you are that way.  Thank you for putting your sexuality out there in a way that heterosexuals such as myself will NEVER be required to.  Thank you for risking condemnation every day.

I realize the tremendous amount of faith and trust in God it takes to live, every day, opening yourself up to both his love and conviction, realizing that most other Christians expect, at some point, that you will feel called away from your relationships.  It must take an incredible amount of love for God to continue to follow him, wondering in your heart if at some point he will tell you that you are wrong.

And yet you continue to live your lives with such grace, such compassion, such sympathy, such simpleness, and in doing so you show the rest of the Christian world just how much we have to learn about love.

So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.  Thank you.

~L

Small note on comments:  I DO NOT WANT this thread to become an opportunity to tell these women that they are sinners.  Anyone who does so will have their comment immediately deleted.  Wait a few days, and we will have another opportunity to discuss homosexuality in those terms.  Please simply note the tone of this post, and if you must disagree hold your tongue until later.  Thank you for respecting me and my readers in that way.

“I’m telling you that you’re going to burn in hell because I care about you.”

“You feel conflicted because Satan is fighting for your mind.”
“You are depressed because you are living in sin and God is convicting you.”

Those are all lines that might be believable if uttered by a close and trusted friend.  But all too often I see language like that being hurled not by friends and close family, but by total strangers in blog comments.  I see people callously judging the choices of total strangers, saying that they do so not out of distaste or hatred but motivated by God and God’s love.

Perhaps on some level that is true.  But the picture it paints for the world is not one of a vibrant bride of Christ wooing the world, but of a hard-hearted people offering up cups full of bitter condemnation.  There is a very simple truth here:  You have to have people’s trust if you want them to believe you.  A horrible truth uttered by a stranger is immediately mistrusted.  You know in those movies, where the big muscled man tells the frail scared woman that she has to trust him?  You know how she always does?  That’s not reality.  People don’t trust strangers, no matter how frightened those people are and how right the stranger is.

People trust friends.

The backhand to that truth is that friends don’t tell friends they are going to burn in Hell.  You may tell a friend you are concerned for them, you may tell them you think they are making bad choices, you may tell them that you think they are hurting themselves…  But the callous language generally used by Christians with strangers is not the kind of language you use with people you care about.

Christians:  ask yourself this question-

When was the last time you heard someone in the Church tell someone else in the Church that Satan was messing with their head?  That they would burn in Hell?  That they were flouting God’s salvation?

You may have heard it, from time to time, especially in Bible Belt land…  But that isn’t the normative language because it is hurtful. That…  and if someone is in the church, we don’t use the “us and them” language.  Saying you are going to burn in hell, you need salvation, you are in a war for your soul implicitly implies that I am not, thus drawing a line between speaker and hearer.

That line, that thin black line, makes it almost impossible to truly win people over to love.  Why?  Because it destroys trust, it creates a deep division between hearts.  The true way to show people love is not by drawing lines but by crossing borders, sitting with them, listening to them, offering them the same trust that we hope they will offer us.

Someone has to trust first, love first, offer forgiveness first.  So often Christians seem to think that it’s the “unsaved masses” that need to do so.  Why?  There is no prerequisite to salvation.

Thoughts, additions, disagreement?  Log it in the comments, please. 

A recent comment sent me on a bunny trail of thought that I just had to share with everyone here.  Because I’m a giver!  (Read that last sentence with cheesy self-mocking smirk, please…)

What, exactly, is “normal?”  As a parent I find myself constantly asking if my children’s development is “normal”, and what I’ve also discovered through parenthood is that the spectrum of what is considered “normal” is almost unbelievably broad.  A normal child may be rolling and scooting at three or four months, or six months, they may crawl at six months or wait to start crawling until after they start walking, they may pull up and “cruise” at nine months or twelve months, they may way ten pounds or twenty, they may babble or be almost completely nonverbal…  they may be any number of variations and still be totally “normal”, because “normal” in that sense simply means healthy development.

But when we talk about what is normal or natural when it comes to sexuality, we almost always mean “average”.  How boring would life be if everyone adhered to averages?  How little would we grow?  What is normal for me and normal for my husband doesn’t always match up (I mean in the bedroom and far beyond when I say that) and I ENJOY that fact, because the friction of being unequally paired forces both of us to grow.  If we were identical, we’d fall into a rut and it would take an act of God to move us.  So not being average is good- even though I think we’re both normal.

Is it normal for a woman to want children, to want to keep house, to want to wear pumps and pearls and make a mean roast?  Sure, but it’s also normal for a woman to be a little weirded out by infants, to not know how to relate to children, to be hopeless in the kitchen but great at making bookshelves.  Either of those fictitious women can be considered normal (albeit not average) and neither one of them has to be gay or straight just because of stereotypes, either.

Gather a hundred people in a room, and just look at them.  Some are tall, some are short- they come in all skin tones- they come with curly and straight hair- they come with dyed and natural hair- they come with tattoos, they come with clean skin, they come in all weights, they come in all styles of sexuality…  Some have babies on their laps, some have designer handbags, some have bluetooth headsets and some can’t figure out how to work their GPS.  And what is normal?  Well, all of it is.  Not a bit of it is totally average, as who could really average out humanity?

Yet we are all still in this together.  And we need our differences, we have to have them!  We need to learn from each other and bear with each other and embrace all which makes us separate and makes us equal.

One thing we don’t need?  Normal.

This will be my final post on the subject for a little while, I think.  I’ve already laid the basis for this post, explaining a little of my own journey and some observational “wisdom” if one can call it such.  Now I’d like to try to lay things out very, very clearly.

I’ve witnessed three kinds of attraction:  Romantic, Physical, and Emotional.  One might be drawn to someone out of simply one of these, or all three.  Some people seem to gravitate towards one kind of attraction and operate off of it alone.  And let me be clear:  I’ve seen women who only care about physical attraction and men who only care about emotional- so it isn’t as set in stone as one might think.  While men do appear, as a whole, to have a much stronger physical pull and women are stereotyped as being romantics, I think that all people operate off of a combination of degrees of all three.

Ask someone, anyone- male or female, gay or straight- what their ideal relationship is, and they will likely offer examples of shared interests, shared dreams, shared experiences, shared family, shared anything.  The point being that we all want to be able to share our lives with someone else, and to do so uninhibited.

Why, you may ask, am I belaboring this point?  Because recently I had an experience where someone kept talking about homosexuality and how sexual it was.  They literally emphasized the “s-e-x” as if that were somehow the most significant thing in the world.

I was a bit put off.

Because all of us share experiences.  I can remember as a young girl, doing the common role-play of “mommy and daddy” with a neighborhood boy, play holding his hand and play kissing his cheek and pretending to have the kind of relationship my parents shared.  And one day, while talking to a gay friend of mine, I discovered that he had not had that experience.  Why?  Because he’d never had any interest in gender-stereotype role-playing, not even as a very small child.  And the fact that he’d never had any emotional interest in girls had always made him feel marginalized and different.  He’d felt like a freak.

And it breaks my heart, because so many people don’t realize the pain and confusion that can come from not only a lack of physical attraction to people of the opposite gender, but from a lack of emotional and romantic interest as well.  A lot of people seem to believe that the physical aspect of attraction is the only way in which gay people are different from straight ones.  They seem to think that people can simply overlook their lack of physical attraction and engage with people of the opposite gender on a romantic and emotional level- and it simply isn’t there.

There is a fundamental difference.

So again, I will call to Christians to think about these issues of sexuality not in legalistic terms, but with compassion.  Think about the many different ways in which our sexuality influences us, from the womb to our death, and be opened up for a real discussion.

We all have a lot to learn from each other.

I can clearly remember the first time I felt attraction towards a boy. I can remember the rush of adrenaline, the sinking feeling in my stomach, the way I couldn’t meet his eyes and my tongue turned into rubber and I went home that night and hid my head under the pillow. How I felt a simultaneous feeling of, “oh, so this is what the poets write about” mixed with, “I don’t ever want to feel this ridiculous again.”

I was just a kid. What I felt was not in the least sexual in nature. I wasn’t thinking about kissing, even, just about holding his hand and talking to him and having him really pay attention to me. It wasn’t physicality, but a young girl’s concept of what a relationship could be. I wanted shared trust and secrets, togetherness, whatever it is that kids think relationships are.

In fact that sexual part of me was pretty crippled. I would end up being eighteen before I ever pursued a relationship, and even then the physical aspects of that relationship would be bribed and forced from me, because what I wanted wasn’t sex. What I wanted was interest, shared reasoning, walks to the store, companionship, someone to call at night just to unwind before bed. Attraction for me still wasn’t based off of physicality, it was based off of emotion. Even my relationship with my husband started out not as romance but as intimate friendship, the romance being an unexpected side effect that rather shocked both of us. Our mutual attraction could not have been further removed from sexuality, it had far more to do with similar goals in life, similar alienations and friendships, shared literary and musical interests, both being obsessed with movies and culture…

I think we underplay the importance of attraction when we portray it as a purely sexual function. We downplay the importance of romantic relationships when we excessively exaggerate the role sex plays in them. Not that sex and sexuality are not fundamental parts of the human experience- but who we are is far, far more than who we have sex with. The true value of attraction is not found in the sexual aspect, but in the emotional and personal components of what attraction mean. Ask the average person what attracts them to a life partner and often times you won’t hear physical features listed, but instead things like “compassion, drive, humor, wit, shared interest, similar life goals”, etc. Because what we want, at the end of the day, is more than a nice bounce on the mattress. We all want someone with whom to share our lives, someone to witness our everyday existence, someone with whom to spend both the good and bad hours of the day, to share with in misery and joy, someone whose hand we can hold and whose butt we can kick when needed.

No one wants to live a life alone.

Sex is just the cherry on top.