If it is encouraging, let him encourage.

Life has been hard lately. My life has never been without obstacles and challenges and I have not regretted it. I have often had to decide to be happy in the middle of the mess rather than just waiting for the mess to get cleaned up. And I have been happy. But these last few months have been a new kind of hard. That is, they have been some of the most ostensibly discouraging. I was neither the cool kid nor the awkward one who got bullied. Rather I was often if not always the quiet one no one really talked to until they had to. Lately, I have felt like I'm back on the school playground at recess again. I guess that's the working world? Or the industrial world? Or just my world?

The primary means of communication has turned out to be a solid mixture of sarcasm and complaints. When people stop complaining about you, they've stopped caring about you. When they've stopped caring about you, you are about to be fired. Therefore, if you find yourself barraged by unreachable demands and stinging sarcasm, take heart because you are probably doing well. They would not criticize you if you couldn't take it. It's a form of respect to be torn down daily.

I have never been so thirsty for kind words and encouragement in my entire life. I am trying to find the syllables to ask friends for what I need... but I am far away, physically, from everyone. I feel out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, it seems that the people I do find are also experiencing a drought of encouragement. We are brittle and hollow and trying so hard not to break. I keep finding more people who need encouragement.

This is not my gift. I am not known for my kindness and certainly not for my gentleness. The closest I come to being encouraging is praying for and with people and being really willing to share people's grief and believe long after faith seems vain. These attacks, however, require so little faith. They do not speak to grief. They do not in any way engage my strength. Rather, they speak to my false sense of humility that whispers variants of "you are not doing enough" and "you don't know what you are doing" over and over until I am deaf to anything else.

I am resilient and strong. ...but only to a point. At this point, I have to choose if I am going to keep feeling or if I am going to be strong long after I should have broken. And so, I break. A lot. Frequently.  Again and again. It is not quite like bleeding. It is more like letting sand slip through your fingers--a sort of letting go of the quest to be stronger than rock. I crack open and I slip and pieces I cannot identify blow away.

They tell me that I wont make it in this industry if I am so sensitive. They tell me that this is what it is to work in a man's world. They tell me this is the way things are. They tell me I am wrong in at least a thousand ways. And then they laugh at any question of health and how things should be. We are all wiser than those dreams. No one is healthy here, only strong.

It would seem that I am being taught how to be an encourager in the strangest of schools. Everyone I work with is so thirsty for encouragement, but so untrusting too. Like they have been given poisoned water so many times that they are afraid to drink from even the most honest oasis in the middle of the desert. We are all strange creatures.

I have never built something so much out of my own need before and it is exhausting. I think I will like who I am when this is done and that gives me hope. But for now, I am so aware of my own fragility, my brittle edges, my own weapons that I use to cut down when I should build..it is hard to feel like giving when so much is being taken and stripped away. That reminds me of a professor as he spoke on the book of Romans. When he came to chapter 8 where Paul lists peoples gifts and tells people (redundantly) what to do with their gifts, he stopped to explain.

I was surprised, seeing that these verses seemed to me the easiest to interpret of the whole of Scripture. You know, leaders should lead and servers to serve and merciful people should show mercy. Teachers should teach and so on. But he stopped here and I will never forget what he said with genuine weakness in his voice and the beginnings of tears in his eyes. He said these were hard commands to keep because it would seem that we are to do these things regardless of our circumstances. Our gifts are given to us to use and therefore we are obligated to use them. He asked the class, "who encourages the encourager? If the encourager is discouraged, does he or she stop encouraging?" And with all of the pain of the many years of his tired but still encouraging body had, he said, "the encourager is still supposed to encourage even when he or she needs encouragement." In a perfect world, someone would encourage each encourager...but we will never find that world and we will never resemble that world if we wait for eternity's perfection. 

I am afraid. If I am telling the truth, I do not want to encourage because I feel so empty inside some days. (It will be 5 months of verbal attacks next week.) I do not feel strong or equipped or ready. And I do not want to be. I want to be taken care of and healed. It is hard when the most encouraging people are hundreds and thousands of miles away...besides my boyfriend, but he is one man against a torrent (he never was supposed to be my only strength). But these are the walls of the room I live in. These are things that I do not know how to change. I do know how to be honest and hopefully I will learn how to encourage.

Seconds drain too quickly through minutes, straight into hours and back into a single long sentence. One which you do not seem inclined to finish anytime soon. If you want to tell me that you love me, do so now in a hundred lovely actions.

Or just one.

Too much has been said too late...and so much of it behind closed doors. So let us give over speaking, you and I, to those who can afford such overpriced lies. And let us write a new language.

Or not.

Let us go on fighting, but not each other. Not one blow more. You did not know it would end in pieces, but you should have. Every hit hits home and we all live here. And with each small victory, our foundations suffer. We wake and walk each day with lacerations and limps we cannot explain. Truth is a knife edge.

Yours and mine.

There is nothing that cannot be cut; but it never runs you through. We can hold onto our shards or we can build. Neither of us have enough Truth to stand on, just enough to draw blood; but that's ok. We would rather have our altars fallen anyway.

But still...

Sometimes it is just fine to go looking for a fight. "Know your enemy," they say. They understand nothing of Calvary love. And I doubt either of us know much more; or else, we might know our enemy and know where to draw battle lines. And where to look for our fight.

yellow

I have reached a point in my belief in Christianity and faith in God where I have to admit that it's not what it used to be. I still believe the same core things, but the externals are changing, well, have been changing for awhile. I am only now able to attempt to see what they might become. I was brought up on a hot and contradictory mixture of fiery pentecostalism and timid reformed presbyterianism (if I may coin the terms) and both of those juxtaposed the deep New Age of my father's house. It wasn't long before the passion of the pentecostals became my own. I wanted to be radical. I thought I could change the world if I tried hard enough, was righteous enough or something.

High standards are my specialty. I have grace enough for everyone but me. But you can't make a life out of it and that has become my test: Can I build a life on this? Unreachable goals will either be abandoned or else they will destroy some part of you. I had to leave them eventually. I needed healing and I would not find it by always striving for the impossible. I do not want to be a radical Christian anymore. While that sounds horrible, I will stand by it. It is the radicals that my coworkers abhor for their arrogance, hypocrisy, and other flaws. There must be a better way. Can quiet lives shout? How radical was Jesus?

He paid his taxes, went to weddings, drank wine and ate dinner with sinners, he told stories... Yes, he cleansed the temple, calmed storms, and put the pharisees in their place. Still, his life seems markedly different than our modern zealots. In our effort to make him relevant, to communicate how extraordinary he was, we have made him something he never really was and still is not. And I find that comforting because I can't be that anymore. I can love God. I can love people. When I think about it, those were the two greatest commandments anyway. Those are strong enough to build my life on.

I don't want to change the world. There are 6 billion people on this planet and I wont meet them all. Besides, the Bible doesn't preach revolution and revival the way many of today's churches do. It prophesies hardship and a worsening of times...animosity for God and everything, everyone, associated. And we will be known by our love, because that is something that can't be faked, wont go out of style, and will always be needed. Most people don't need to know that they aren't perfect (even when they act like it), they need to know that they are loved.