Too Sweet: Don and Penny

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Blue Like Jazz Movie Trailer

If there is ONE thing I need to do before I die, it is to see Blue Like Jazz The Movie in Theaters (April 13). What an excellent Belated Birthday present. I. Can't. Wait. 

Please please please check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpvMAYkHGas&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Time's Torture: Empty Succesiveness

"And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness." -C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The Drill Drills On

"Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren't all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is itching we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn't really matter if you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on." -C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

One Reason Why I Want To Marry Donald Miller

"The specifics seem trivial now, but at the time I was experiencing a great deal of pain trying to figure out the ideas God was expressing. I have always been somewhat obsessive-compulsive in terms of not being able to turn off my mind. I get stuck on ideas and have to understand them. During this difficult time, my sleep was restless." -Donald Miller, Searching For God Knows What

Fall To Pieces by Matt Nathanson

Would you fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Tear it all apart
Till there was nothing left
Fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Spent so long waiting here

So I wear you out
So who would've thought that you'd still be here now
And I swore dear
That I never
Wanted to be
Any better than your weakest moment now

Would you fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Tear it all apart
Till there was nothing left
Fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Spent so long waiting here

This was all sweet once
When I was fingertips and innocence

And too scared to
Let go I had my
Arms thread through
The pretty holes
Of your most romantic line

Would you fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Tear it all apart
Till there was nothing left
Fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Spent so long waiting here

And I've watched them all move through you
Watched them all let you down.

Would you fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Tear it all apart
Till there was nothing left to take
All to pieces and look your best
You know I'm always here

Would you fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Tear it all apart
Till there was nothing left
Fall to pieces
If I never came back?
Spent so long waiting here

Would you fall to pieces?
Never coming back
Would you fall to pieces?
Never coming back,
Never coming back again

It's do you
And don't you
Cause I won't forget you
You filled me with nothing
It felt so good
It'll all come out some day

Drops Like Stars

“THE ACHE IS UNIVERSAL.

The ache reminds us that things aren’t how they’re supposed to be. The ache cuts through all the static, all the ways we avoid having to actually feel things. The ache reassures us that we’re not the only ones who feel this way…

BUT SUFFERING, SUFFERING UNITES.

It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor or black or white or right or left or young or old---if you have the same disease as someone else or if you both have a daughter with an eating disorder or have a brother in jail or had a spouse die or recently were fired…

you have a bond that transcends whatever differences you have.

That’s what suffering does.

THIS IS THE ART OF SOLIDARITY…

The first Christians insisted that when Jesus died on the cross, this wasn’t just another execution by the Roman Empire.

They believed this was the divine, in flesh and blood, hanging there on the cross, bloody, thirsty, suffering.

A god who is not somewhere else—remote, detached, distant—but among us, feeling what we feel, aching how we ache.

SUFFERING LIKE US.

‘It makes all the difference to know there’s someone else screaming alongside you—and that’s the point of the incarnation. I can see that so clearly now. God came into the world and screamed alongside us’ (Starbridge by Susan Howatch).

Is the cross God’s way of saying,

‘I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL?’” –Rob Bell

 

 

Thank you Rob. Thank you. People can say what they want. They can think what they want. They can spin what they want about you and your words and beliefs. But in most of your words I find somewhere that makes sense. Somewhere that feels like home. Somewhere that feels like Truth. And Drops Like Stars is definitely a book I can’t live without. Thank you. God bless.

The Art of Disruption: Existential Horror

“One writer described it like this: ‘Ripped out of the soil of his background, his life could no longer be what it used to be. He now began a journey to deeper communion with God. But it didn’t come without tears, and it didn’t come without what seems to have been a certain existential horror.’” –Rob Bell, From Drops Like Stars, quoting Peggy Noonan’s Pope John Paul II

 

“None get to God but through trouble.” – Catherine of Aragon

 

“a certain existential horror…” I love that line. Even though all I can think of is Kafka and Gregor Samsa, I LOVE that line. That is exactly how it feels.

I mean, am I closer to God when I am suffering, when I am in a type of trouble? Of course I am! Thank God I am! And at the end of the day, do I think the horror and tears and pain, the end of what was and will never be, and the complete fear of the unknown are worth it? Yeah, I do. But does that make me feel any better when it’s 3:00 pm. and I am bored out of my mind because I don’t want anything? No. It doesn’t.

We watched Smash tonight. Debra Messing’s character is working with the other musical writer and they are trying to write a song for Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, and they are stuck. They can’t find the words. So she asks the most important question a writer could ask in the beginning: “What do they want?”

You can’t have a story if the characters don’t want anything. And I am stuck on the freaking couch, staring into corners, at walls, at ceilings, at ceiling fans, asking myself that question every single day, and it is an existential horror.

Is it up to me? Do I have to pick what I want? Should I? I picked before and I got it all wrong? I picked for me, not for God. Can God pick for me? Will God pick for me? Will He pick something I love? Will His will interlock with mine? ….It goes on and on like this. Ever day.

 

What do I want?!

 

I remember that poem, A Love Song For J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot:

“Do I dare?

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Do I dare eat a peach?”

 

When I was in high school reading these things, I never thought I would be able to directly associate myself with them. I could think of a number of people stuck in existential horror, but me? No. Not me. I knew what I wanted and how to get it and I was willing to do almost anything to make it all come true…and that was the problem.

Donald Miller says, “Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.”

I agree. Is it an absolute? Of course not. But I guarantee you that what I wanted then, when I had it ALL figured out—ha!—it would have killed me. Spiritually. And literally. And I might have lost God for good.

I know, mentally, this path is my path. This is the better path. I am in a deeper communion with God. I wouldn’t change anything. But…But, what now?

W h a t   n o w ? !

Memento Mori

G------ passed yesterday morning. My mom told me when I woke up around 12:00. She said she cried a little, but more is to come. I haven't cried, but I didn't cry until my grandma's funeral service when she passed, and she was one of my best friends. 

Every time I left for college I said goodbye to both of them like I may never see them again. That was a lot of closure back then that I have carried with me.

I've been so close to death also...I don't know...I'm just so fully aware of its reality all the time. I can't ever escape it. I think about death every day....

I try to tell people how much I love them as often as I can. I think people think I'm a little crazy for always saying it, like maybe I dont really mean it because I say it so often, as if they were just words I recited out of habit. But they aren't. Not after what I've been through and am still going through. The words have never meant more to me.....

You never know what could happen. And out of anyone, I truly know that to be true. 

I feel a big cry coming, because of everything going on in life in general, but it hasn't come yet. Not yet.

I find myself staring into nothing in silence a lot more lately. I mean it's something I do anyway, all the time really, but I think a harsh dose of the reality of our mortality and finitude has completely increased it...it's like I can't stop....staring into silence, breathing it in, as if that will somehow make sense of everything.

I havent had a decent nights sleep in over a week. I've been very irritable because of it. The last few posts feel like they were pure emotion. But logically, I know there has to be truth, even just a little, in them as well. At least that's what I keep telling myself. 

The following is a poem by Billy Collins:

Memento Mori

There is no need for me to keep a skull on my desk,

to stand with one foot up on the ruins of Rome,

or wear a locket with a sliver of a saint's bone.

It is enough to realize that every common object

in this sunny little room will outlive me--

the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker--

Not one of these things will attend my burial,

not even this dented gooseneck lamp

with its steady benediction of light,

though I could put worse things in my mind

than the image of it waddling across the cemetery

like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord,

the small circle of mourners parting to make room.

I tweeted this last night: 

"Good night. Be thankful you are alive. Breathe it in. Get lost in life. Be in it. Be a part of it. Be it. Just...be. And love it."

G------ I love you. I hope your tribulation ceased as soon as God knew you were remade. I hope you have pure unconditional love and light and joy. Amen (So be it truly)

who do YOU think I am?

Veronica Mars: Does it ever bother me what people say? Ok, maybe every once in a while. Depends who's listening. (referring to all the gossip about her family's reputation)

Veronica Mars: Thoughts On Meddling

Veronica: So I guess I'm grounded.

Keith: I'm gonna let you slide on this one.

Veronica: But can I let myself slide? Sure, the real tragedy happened long before I came along. I just brought it to the surface. But are some things better left buried?

Blue Like Jazz The Movie

I'm SO excited!!!!!

My Impression Of Job

From last night's Body Of Proof:

Peter is telling Dr. Megan Hunt he got pushed into finding his birth Father. He is blaming his girlfriend.

Peter: Then why does it feel like a mistake?

Megan: Because you did something really hard. That doesn't make it a mistake.

I've had to make a lot of hard decisions because of Still's Disease, and I second guess them all the time. People's doubts, be it family, friends, Dr.s, whether they out right say it, or say it with a look on their face, I know they doubt whether I'm really this sick. If I really needed to quit my dream job. If I really will never be able to play softball or sports in general again. If I really am too sick to go to school of any kind. If I really need to live at home; if I really need someone watching over me all the time. Even my parents doubt me.

And I often blame everyone's doubts for why I doubt what I've done, for why I second guess if this is really the way my life has to be, but the truth is, it's easier to doubt it, isn't it? To like to think we made a mistake. To believe our lives could be better if only this and if only that.

We are beings who spend 99% of our lives avoiding the hard times, avoiding conflict, avoiding pain. It's easier to blame it on a wrong decision than to accept this really is the way life has to be.

Everyone's so busy trying fix me that they aren't here for me. At all. All anyone does is feed my doubts, is feed me lies about a better life. Life isn't supposed to be easy. It never will be either. It's full of trial, tribulation, conflict, suffering, pain....how we react to all of that is what matters.

On Veronica Mars she was talking about what happens when a tornado swoops in and destroys your home, your very foundation. She gave three options for people when tornados swoop into our lives and destroy everything.

Veronica: [voiceover] Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm. (pause) The problem with chasing the storm is that it wears you down, breaks your spirit. Even the experts agree, a girl needs closure.

By doubting if this is really the way my life has to be you are all pretending I'm still the mansion you remember. Well, I'm not. I'm not who I was, nor will I ever be. Nor do I want to be the old me. Stop illuding yourselves, and stop planting seeds of doubt in my mind. I don't want to go back. I want to rebuild. But the remodel will not look like original, so stop expecting it to. Ok?

Ive had to make some ridiculously hard decsions at an extremely young age, but I know, logically I did the best I could, and I made the best decisions I could at the time. And just because they were hard decisions, that DOES NOT make them a mistake.

Logically I know if I hadn't quit Athletic Training I would have lost decades of my life. If I hadn't moved back home...well, honestly I had no where else to go. If I hadn't dropped out of school I would have lost another decade or so. Steroids are quite evil.

And just because these were the hardest decisions I've ever had to make, and just because they almost destroyed me while I had to make them and just because they are such tough decisions you don't think I could have made them correctly because I was so young or because you are projecting your fears onto me because you don't think you could have made them at all, that does not make them a mistake.

I faced the truth; I faced reality. You are all running from it. You've been running from my disease from day one, trying to trick yourselves into believing it's not this bad, because that's easier than facing the truth. Well, I'm tired of it. It's killing me. All your doubts. Your misinformation. Your complete lack of information about Stills. It hurts me more than the disease itself.

I have not made a mistake with this disease. I have faced it rationally and prudently and carefully based on my personal experience with it. What is your personal experience with it? Do you know what it is like for this disease to be so bad you wish it would just kill you already so you could be in heaven with God? Because that is exactly what it is like. I am fighting. Every single day. I am making harder decisions at my young age than any of you. Stop making me feel like I'm making a mistake and help me face the truth. Help me rebuild, to move on, not to keep looking back. Please.

Gotta Find You

Dear Lord, 

Every time I think I'm closer to the heart
What it means to know just who I am
I think I finally found a better place to start
No one ever seems to understand
I need to try to get to where you are
Could it be you're not that far?

You're the voice I hear inside my head 
The reason that im singing
I need to find you
Gotta find you
You're the missing piece I need 
The song inside of me
I need to find you
I gotta find you
Oh yeah
Yeah

You're the remedy im searching hard to find
To fix the puzzle that I see inside
Painting all my dreams the color of your smile
When I find you it will be alright
I need to try to get to where you are
Could it be you're not that far?

You're the voice I hear inside my head
The reason that im singing
I need to find you
Gotta find you
You're the missing piece I need
The song inside of me
I need to find you
Gotta find you

Been feeling lost
Can't find the words to say
Spending all my time stuck in yesterday
Where you are is where I wanna be
Next to you, you next to me
Oh 
I need to find you
Yeah

You're the voice I hear inside my head
The reason that im singing
I need to find you (need to find you)
Gotta find you (yeah)
You're the missing piece I need
The song inside of me
I need to find you
Gotta find you (I gotta find you)

You're the voice I hear inside my head
The reason that im singing
I need to find you (need to find you)
Gotta find you (gotta find you)
You're the missing piece I need
The song inside of me
I need to find you
Gotta find you
Yeah
Gotta find you

(From Camp Rock, performed by Joe Jonas)

A Buffy Spin: Why We Fight is Why We Write

I don't write to become published. I don't write to become famous. I don't write to validate myself.

I write because there's something worth writing about.

Burned

Seven years is a long time to be unhealthy, and for it to only get worse each year... I wouldn't know how to be healthy even if I were. I've unlearned the healthy life, and I worry what it would be like to suddenly be healthy. That sounds pretty crazy, even as I type it, knowing full well it's something I think about all the time. 

Even if I have a "good day" where maybe I could get out of the house for an hour, I don't even know what to do. It's actually something I am supposed to be figuring out for therapy. Where to go if I do feel well enough to go somewhere. We discussed how I would either go to Borders or Target. Well, Borders is gone and i dont want to go to the mall to go to Barnes And Noble, and, well, I easily spend money I don't have on things I don't need when I go to Target, and frankly, other than more deodorant and face wash and mouth wash, I need nothing. I don't even remember what it is like to need nothing. But it's true. 

I lived like that after I read Blue Like Jazz and Through Painted Deserts for the first time. Oh, to be able to go back and read your favorite books for the first time....that would be perfect. Is it sad that's what I would use a Time Machine for? ;) But Don and Paul taught me so much about money. 

There is part of Blue Like Jazz when I think Don is supposed to be writing, but he wanders into the living room or somewhere and realizes the room needs Feng Shuid. How dare they not Feng Shui the house! Haha. So he rearrages a lamp. He moves it to a more balanced spot in the room, but realizes it won't reach an outlet. Well, darn, now they won't be able to use the lamp, and to think the room had such a great energy now. Oh wait, Don realizes, an extension cord! Now he is well aware there is probably an old one in the basement, but who wants that? He wants a new extension cord, with a timer! Well, he will just have to go to Home Depot tomorrow to look for one. 

A while after this whole insane, yet very sadly familiar incident, he realizes they don't need any of that. The room did not need to be Feng Shuid. The lamp could easily use the old extension cord, and they did not need a timer for crying out loud. He had orchestrated this whole crazy scenario simply so he would have a reason to go to Home Depot and buy a bunch of stuff he didn't know he didn't need but definitely wanted simply as a way of feeling something different about himself and lighting up some of the pleasure centers of his brain.

Now, this where you all should be laughing because you have all done something similar. Come on, go ahead. Just admit it. I've done it. I still do it. But after reading this whole story a few times and reading Through Painted Deserts where they live, Paul and Don, on less than $5.00 a day between both of them, I couldn't be at Target anymore, and when I was, I started doing what Don told me to do: ask yourself if you really need a fifth pair of jeans, or if you are just doing it to feel different about yourself and to light up the pleasure center in your brain. 

It was awful. I would have so much cool and fun stuff in my cart, and five minutes later, in another department of the store, I would be staring at those jeans, going, "crap." and I would pull them out of my cart and leave them in the cereal aisle. I felt so bad for leaving the jeans there, but I felt good I didn't buy something I didn't need. And if I didn't get it out of my cart right then and there I would have talked myself out of putting them back. It was self defense giving them more work, I swear. They must have been upset, but I had to do it. I wish they knew that.

And I had forgotten this concept for a few years now. Buying what I wanted and not just what I needed just to make myself feel better for about five minutes. And I got sick of it and begged God to help me with my spending money on crap. Well, now I want for pretty much nothing. It's...I don't know what it is. It's odd. And empty and satisfying at the same time. I want to want things, but I know I shouldn't. But yet, I should. And now I just lost you all for good.

A character has to want something in order for there to be a story. Everything I want I don't believe I have to have. To drive cross country for a year. To live illegally in a forest in Oregon with a bunch of hippies who go to NYU, one of which is an epic poet. To move to the PAC NW, and I can't tell you why I shouldn't ask for that for a while....

The every day stuff, to go to the mall, to go to the grocery store--I don't remember the last time I went grocery shopping! To go...I don't know. I don't know where! I don't know what I want!

I've lost everything I ever wanted within about two years of being diagnosed with Stills Disease:

An education/college experience

My dream job

Living in the PAC NW

Independence

Friends/family 

My health

A lifetime to figure life out

Everything I ever wanted....gone. How does anyone dare to expect me to want for something else! Only to lose that too. My heart can't take much more loss. It truly can't. 

If you touch the stove and burn yourself you realize its hot and you dont do it again, right? Well, my emotional self has learned that hoping for a better future is like touching a hot burner over and over and over and burning myself worse each time. And that burn scar wont go away. It hasnt completely healed. Im so afraid it never will. 

How can you ask me to touch the burner again just to find out if it is hot or not? How? Would you touch it for me? You can't, can you? Even if you loved me enough to try, you just can't. I'm the only one who has to put my hand on the burner and wait for what happens next.

I've spent the last seven years teaching and demanding myself to stop caring about wants. I've demanded I only focus on my needs. Which God has already provided and always will. I often feel, like...how dare I ask Him for anything else, especially something I don't need. How dare I? 

And yet, I know that's not an absolute. I know exactly what I am supposed to do...

As I learned on Project Runway: Always hope. Never expect.

And yet. I'm scared as hell that burner is going to be even hotter this time. I'm so scared.

Light's True Brightness

"I read an interview he [Rick Fields] did for a Bhuddhist quarterly recently, in which he said that he's so savoring the moments of his life right now, so acutely aware of love and small pleasures that he no longer feels that he has a life-threatening disease: he now says he's leading a disease-threatening life." -Anne Lamott

This next line came to me as my plane was landing in Spokane, back when I was still barely healthy enough to go to school. But I was so afraid I would forget it, and it meant too much to me, that literally as we were decending and feet from the ground I rifled through my backpack under the seat of the person in from of me for a pen or pencil and anything I could write on. all I could reach was the book I was reading: Night Fall by Nelson DeMille. (A little helpful advice, do not read that book while on or near a plane. Or any Nelson DeMille really. It will only scare you into trusting absolutely no one and almost having a panic attack.) But I grabbed the book and wrote this in the back of it as quickly as possible, all the while seriously concerning the person next to me by my actions.

 Now I know why a writer should never be without a pen and pad. 

Only in the solitary pitch-blackness of the dark can you experience Light's true brightness.

When life is that bad, that dark, that broken, those moments of Light will be brighter than they ever were when life was more or less going your way. You will finally appreciate them for what they are: pure Light, pure joy, pure goodness. 

It's so hard for me to imagine being healthy. A part of me would do almost anything to be healthy again. But the other part realizes I could so easily get caught up in life going well, these moments would lose some of their brightness, and that saddens me. May there be a way for life to get better, and for these moments to never stop shining so brightly.

The Sentient Life

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life-the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child-he will take endless trouble-and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less." -C. S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain

Buffy: Why We Fight

From Season Three: Gingerbread

[Angel finds Buffy during patrol.]

Buffy: Hey. How are you?

Angel: I'm all right. I think I'm better than you right now. [indicates playground shrine] I heard about this. People are talking. People are even talking to me.

Buffy: It's strange. People die in Sunnydale all the time. I've never seen anything like this.

Angel: They were children. Innocent. It makes a difference.

Buffy: And Mr. Sanderson from the bank had it coming? My mom said some things to me about being the Slayer. That it's fruitless. No fruit for Buffy.

Angel: She's wrong.

Buffy: Is she? Is Sunnydale any better than when I first came here? Okay, so I battle evil. But I don't really win. The bad just keeps coming back... and getting stronger. Like the kid in the story, the boy that stuck his finger in the duck.

Angel: Dike. [Buffy looks at him.] It's another word for dam.

Buffy: Oh. Okay, that story makes a lot more sense now.

Angel: Buffy, you know there's still things I'm trying to figure out. There's a lot I don't understand. But I do know it's important to keep fighting. I learned that from you.

Buffy: But we never...

Angel: We never win.

Buffy: Not completely.

Angel: Never will. That's not why we fight. We do it because there's things worth fighting for.

Man I love this show. Nothing like Buffy wisdom in the morning.

Why God Invented Writing

Dear G------,

I may not be able to be there in person with you, but I can write this to tell you how I feel. I mean, isn't that why God invented writing in the first place?

I love you.

Love Always, 

Me

The Dark of 3:00 am

Do you ever stop to wonder how things--life, family, friends, health, everything--got so screwed up, and wonder if it will ever get much better? If you really are capable of putting all the broken pieces into a mosaic? I mean, living is hard. It literally can't be easy if we want free will. And if we want a great story, there has to be conflict, there has to be pain. It's hard in the dark night of the soul not to feel overwhelmed. I mean, just because I know God is going to make sure our story is beautiful, and it will end with a feast and a celebration and a wedding, that doesn't make the hard work of the middle any easier. Especially at 3:00 am. 

My Greatest Fear

"Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That's what makes a story good." -Donald Miller, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years

I fear not living a good story. And now I have to face that with courage...I need to fight for my story. 

A Story Is A Story Is A Story Is A Story

What if my story is the fact that I want a story? 

A character.

A character who wants something.

A character who wants something and overcomes conflict.

A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

I want a story.

I want a beautiful and meaningful story. A memorable story.

I want a purpose.

I want to be different at the end of my story than I was at the beginning. 

It sounds so complicated, and yet...and yet I feel calmer. I feel a little more hopeful. But I stress a little. I just hope I'm not tricking myself into thinking I'm living a story when I'm really not.

See what I mean about lies and truth. I can barely tell the difference anymore, if at all.

Battle For Truth

Why do I read? Why should you read, and never stop? To find the Truth. Why is the Truth important? So you stop believing the lies. 

When I read I am filling myself up with the Truth. God's Truth. Life's Truth. How do you know how to live, if you don't know the Truth?

And simply by reading the Truth I am shutting up all the lies. Turning the Truth up so loud I can't hear or remember a single lie.

The world's lies. The American Dream's lies. Western Christianity's lies.  Teachers, coaches, bosses, family, the media-they have all lied to you. Did all of them mean to? Of course not. They just never stopped to question what was taught to them. They just believed all these people and things because we aren't told to question anything. But you need to! You need to. 

Every moment of every day the Devil is using something, someone, anything, anyone to trick you. And we have been tricked. I mean, come on, that was his first offensive against the Kingdom of God: a lie, a trick. It worked then, and it is still working now. It's his best weapon. 

"It wasn't just my faith that was being shaken. I began to wonder what personal ideas I believed that weren't true. I believed I was not athletic enough; too stupid, I believed I had to go to college; I believed the Astros were a more important team than the Mets; I believed jeans that cost fifty dollars were better than jeans that cost thirty; I believed living in a certain part of town made you more important than living in another. I looked up at the cosmos and it had no scientific proof that any of this was true...the cosmos was just spinning around up there, as if to create beauty for beauty's sake, paying no attention to the frivolity of mankind. And I liked the cosmos. I liked the cosmos very much. It seemed to understand something, perhaps, humanity did not understand." -Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

We see or hear or are exposed to, on average, three thousand commercials a day. Every one of them promising something that isn't true: buy this product and your life will be complete; it will be perfect. All lies. Every single one of them. We are trained to believe lies, and we can't tell the difference between truth and lies at all anymore. We don't even take the time to question them. Not really anyway.

Find something that can drown out the lies with something that whispers or yells the Truth, God's Eternal Truth, into your body, spirit, mind, and heart, and do it on a regular basis. For me, it is reading. For me it is music. For me it is art. It is nature. It is unconditional love. Learn to recognize the lies, and to ignore them, and learn to replace them with the Truth.

Tonight, and lately, my emotions are clouding the Truth. The American Dream is clouding the Truth. I can't tell left from right. Up from down. I am so thirsty for the Truth tonight I don't know what I am going to do. The lies are like an infection in my system and they are trying to take me over. If I don't keep reading God's Truth I am going to break. Because, whether you believe me or not, sooner or later, the lies will break you down to nothing, and you are going to have to start over. And start over with nothing.

So why wait? Take the battle to them. All of them. All three thousand a day.Take the battle to the serpent spinning scripture that will only separate us further from God. Attack him before he attacks you.  Battle for the Truth.

Sentience

C. S. Lewis' honest emotionalism in A Grief Observed disarms me...scares me...breaks me...and yet, I feel more free. I feel less alone. He, of all people, able to give in to his emotions like that makes me feel less crazy, and more human. One minute he knows God's truth, and the next his emotions deceive him of that truth. That's the battle isn't it? Logic verses Emotionalism. What a war. And we are not only the soldiers, but the battlefield. It's bloody awful being sentient sometimes.  It's a bloody mess in here. Literally. 

The Embarrassment Of Loss

"An odd byproduct of my loss is that I'm aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't." - C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The Art of Breaking: Writer's Block

Kate: (Talking to Hanna on the phone) You know, training a horse is an art. You have to work with the animal. Bending its will until it knows your its master. Taking all the fight out of it until it truly is broken. That's how you're going to feel when I'm through with you.

- From Pretty Little Liars

Lately...lately I wonder how much fight the Devil has taken out of me. I don't even know where to begin. I don't even feel like me. I know what a story is. I know what it's made up of, its key elements. But I don't know how to write my story. I don't know what to fight for. I don't know what I want. I don't know how to hope. I don't know how to dream. 

A story has to start with a character who wants something.

What do I want? I mean, really want. I have no idea.

Story. My life is a white blank page. I keep staring at it every single day, every single night. The starkness of it. The emptiness of it. My fingers are poised over the keyboard, and...and nothing. Nothing comes. That's all I have: A white blank page. It's torturing me. It's killing me. It's breaking me. How can I fight when there is nothing to fight for? I know what I am supposed to do, and I want to do it--I just can't. I can't think of anything to write. The irony is ridiculous. Writer's Block, but for my life. I can't write my life story. I'm stuck.

I feel...I feel all too much. 

To Write Love On Her Arms

http://www.twloha.com

Shake The Dust

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qDtHdloK44&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Amends

Ok, look. I'm pretty sure my only audience on here are people who actually know who I am. So, taking that into consideration, I need you to trust me. I know I enjoy playing the "unreliable narrator" bit, but that's only because it's genius and fun. It leaves the truth in the readers' hands: in what you choose to believe is truth instead of believing what everyone else says, which becomes confusingly ironic at times because all I want is to tell you the truth. But I am begging you to read this script. I am begging you to forget all of your opinions and presuppositions and false ideas about the tv show it comes from. I am begging you to read it and look for the truth in it. Because its there. It's right there.

This is honestly one of the most brilliant and profound and relevant scripts, episodes, out there. And trust me, I watch more tv than all of you put together, so I would know.

I connect so heavily to it...it gives me the strength I need to keep fighting every day. It is like a crazy sci-fi version Spin-off of Job written by someone I consider to be one of the best television writers ever: Joss Whedon. It is the script from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season Three, episode 10. The episode is entitled: Amends.

You guys, I would not lead you astray. You need to read this episode's original script. I need you to read it. And trust me, you need you to read it. Forget it's "Buffy"! Read it as a real story, a parable, a sci-fi version Spin-off of Job. Read it at the very least, as literature. Please, please read it. Or, the easier way, but I will take whatever you give me, watch it on Netflix. Season three, episode 10: Amends.

The following are the best two fan-written scripts I could find. Whichever format you like better, go with that one. Thanks.

http://www.buffy-vs-angel.com/buffy_tran_44.shtml

http://www.buffyworld.com/buffy/scripts/044_scri.html

May we all have a Buffy right there fighting to save us, a world trying to tell us life is worth fighting for. We are all worth saving. We can all make amends. Being strong is fighting, and we can do it together. May there always be someone, something, even snow, telling us we belong in this world, and we deserve to make amends.

Hope