Just Like Jimmy

It is amazing to me how much admitting that I am angry heals the anger. I was always taught that anger should be outside of the Christian experience. Verses like "turn the other cheek" are often taught as if you should allow yourself to be smacked and then say, "Thank you" with so much smile that you actually feel grateful for the abuse. I find comfort in the fact that the Bible has other verses like "pray for your enemies" and "in your anger do not sin." They comfort me because it means that I did not necessarily do anything wrong if I have acquired some enemies in my life. I am only asked to treat my enemies well. I do not need to pretend that they are actually friends or even nice people.

Moreover, I have found it easier to pray for people after I admit that they have wronged me. Once that self-denial and keeping of pretense is gone, I can ask that they would learn to be better wholeheartedly. Likewise, once I admit that I am angry, I can focus on figuring out what to do with my anger.

I have read a lot of stories about failure followed by triumph. So many of them include ironic thank yous to those who hurt and rejected them because they used the hurt and rejection to dig down deep inside of themselves and find the will power to keep going until they succeeded. I am not that kind of person. Decidedly.

I can with Joseph in Genesis 50:19 echo forgiveness and even acceptance that what one person meant for evil, God often uses for good. I can thank God for acting on my behalf, for choosing to use even my enemies to bless me. But that is where that ends. I will not thank my enemy. I can, like Joseph, put the past behind us and choose to bless my enemy. But I will not appreciate the evil. Maybe this is an issue of maturity. If so, it is still where I find myself and I will not pretend otherwise. For now, I think it is enough that I could shake hands with my enemy, work for his or her benefit and blessing, and sleep well. I am not yet able to say of evil things that they were anything but evil. I say that simply and without malice or regret. Yes, it is even without the fire of the old anger.

And this is the same way that I expect to be judged. That no matter how God uses my ignorance, my selfish blundering, and my evil...it is still going to be called by its proper name. Sure, I can rest in the forgiveness of Jesus, but that does not protect from the vocabulary of what happened and why. Nor does it save me from certain natural consequences pertaining to one's identity. See, now I am a woman who has enemies. If I had chosen differently, I could have also been their enemy. I could have woken up with the motivation to harm them, to make their lives difficult, to inflict suffering. And maybe, I was their enemy. When I was kind to them, it was always in the most malicious way. Romans 12:20 was my theme verse when I stepped across the threshold of those doors, , "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Proverbs 25:22 says the same thing but adds, "and the Lord will reward you."  

There were some days where I walked into work and lasted maybe an hour before I started praying that this verse would be true. You know something though? It was. My enemies were tortured when I smiled and wished them well. It was weird. But Jimmy became my mascot. It was not really "winning" so much as refusing to play the game, refusing to justify my enemies hatred, and refusing to be as miserable as they intended. It gave me freedom from their seemingly all-encompassing power. And it made me appreciate the relevancy of the Bible in a whole new way.
http://www.systemcomic.com/comics/2008-12-05.gif

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.

And then it was June.

Life has a new rhythm.

It is a good one too, despite the apprehensions that try to persuade me otherwise. Leaving my apartment was more... emotional(?) than I thought it would be.

It was my first apartment all unsupervised and pretending to be grown up. My first time not living with a stranger in some capacity in over a decade or so. It was the healthiest living situation I have ever had. I guess it makes sense that I would be attached, but the depth of that surprised me.

For nine months, I built life and living and home with my roommates and they are family. We did not just live together and occupy the same space. We shared our dreaming, our loving, and our growing. It is weird to me to think of that apartment as it was after they left and I was moving

out...devoid of all the fondness I had attached to it. And I knew I did not belong there anymore. I could look out the windows and see the same things I always did, but it was not my home anymore.

It is exceedingly strange to me that we should spend so much time pouring hope into a place. (I swear the walls and carpet are saturated with it.) Hope for where we would go and who we would be and what we would do. And then we outgrow it.

We leave to build new hope. To be those people that we hoped we would be or even those people we did not quite dare to be while in that former place or possibly those people we always hoped

to escape.

Whatever it is that we do after, we are forced to build or rebuild hope, because you cannot keep old hope alive in the face of change. At least, not as it was. Hope has to grow with you. Or else, it begins to stifle your own growth. By its very nature, it must elude your present abilities.

Perhaps that is what it means when Romans says that "hope that is seen is no hope at all". This frustrates me because it seems to negate any idea of rest or peace. Is that really life? To always be running and never arriving? I think so.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is not without its triumphs. My discomfort comes from my continual battle to appreciate and respect things (especially myself) in process. Just because I know where I should be does not mean that I am yet equipped to be there. It is often far more acceptable to take time in transit than I make it seem.

Yep, still learning how to be a balanced, holistic person which apparently means moving slower than I think is reasonable and going about things the long way. It is a good thing. It makes hope less harsh though the striving and elusiveness continue.