Procrastination

This has been the story of my life for the past couple of hours. Amazing all the different ways one can find to procrastinate, especially online. I am pretty well caught on my blog-reading, my Facebook-updating, my blog-updating, and my Xanga-browsing. Now what is there left to do? Oh, maybe I should work on that 8-10-page paper that’s due next Tuesday. That might be good.

The Colors of My Dreams

[reposted; see Monday's entry]

From Reading Lolita in Tehran:

“I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses, and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

And I thought, is that part of the reason for the shift from modernism to postmodernism? Have we finally realized that this facade of freedom we’ve created for ourselves is intolerable and bleak, so we have to move beyond obvious reality, beyond what we can see and what we’ve been taught?

dreaming…

[reposted; see Monday's entry]

Hoping, planning, and dreaming are such major components of this stage of life. Plans for next year are constantly being thought about and discussed. There are so many fears, wishes, and hopes. I was thinking yesterday about my little “life plan” – the direction I’d like my life to take and the major things I want it to include. I realized it’s really okay to dream up a life plan, as long as I don’t cling to it too tightly. But it’s okay because it helps me know what kind of person I want to be, so I can choose directions wisely. Even though God is the one doing the controlling and directing, it’s still good for me to have an idea, a “blueprint,” to go by as I build my life under His guidance.

And I want to dream big, for His mission, His glory, His church, His kingdom in my oh-so-small life and sphere. Because when I give my life up to Him, I’ve just begun to live. I want to be firmly rooted in His mission, taken over by Him, and I want to live, eat, sleep, and breathe His death on the cross for me.

I am a dreamer, take me higher
Open the sky up, start a fire
I believe, even if it’s just a dream

I’m Afraid to Tell the Truth

[reposted; see Monday's entry]

I’m afraid to tell the truth.

Not personal truth. For the most part, I know what I want to share, and I know what to be discreet about. I know which people are safe to share with, and which people I’m on less of a personal level with.

And I’m not afraid to tell the big truths, the dogmas, the unshakeables. Jesus died on the cross for my sins. God created the universe. Murder is wrong.

But I’m afraid to tell the little truths, the shadowy ones that disappear around a corner. Women should not be pastors. Living as a Christian and living as a homos*xual are mutually exclusive. Watching R-rated movies filled with gratuitous filth is wrong. In many or most cases, divorce is wrong. Abortion is killing, plain and simple, and it’s wrong no matter which way you twist it.

There are three big reasons why I’m afraid to tell the truth.

1. Even while typing that paragraph, I was struggling to word things in an inoffensive way. And a big reason I’m afraid to tell the truth is because I’m afraid to say that someone else is wrong. Saying that someone is wrong is one of the biggest offenses possible in today’s culture. You can have any opinion you want to, but don’t you dare say that your opinion can’t peacefully coexist with someone else’s – don’t you dare say that you’re right and they’re wrong. But if we believe in truth, and I think most of us do at some level, then some people are right, and others are wrong. There’s no way around it.
2. I’m also afraid to sound closed-minded. I pride myself (yes, it’s pride a lot of the time) on being somewhat intelligent and intellectual. I don’t want to call myself conservative or a Republican because I don’t want to be grouped with a bunch of flag-waving Southern Baptists. I don’t want to say I’m pro-life because then I might sound like a self-righteous, hate-mongering conservative who doesn’t care about women’s rights. I want to sound like I’ve thought about my attitudes and convictions instead of having them spoon-fed to me. And in my idealism, the easy way seems to be to adopt different beliefs than those of my surrounding Christian bubble, even when the Christian ideas are the truth.
3. I’m afraid of being legalistic. I have opinions about “Christian liberty” issues such as modesty and entertainment. And I want to share those opinions, which I believe are based on biblical principles. But I don’t want to lay those opinions down as laws. I don’t want to write out a Christian rulebook that we can all follow and feel better about ourselves, for that is exactly what the Pharisees did. And I live in holy fear of being a Pharisee, because the Pharisees’ religious background was a lot like mine.

I’m learning to live in the paradox of truth and fear. This is why I embrace the concept of humble orthodoxy - living in the truth faithfully and humbly, as broken people who may be wrong, but who have made the best, most prayerful effort possible to remain faithful to biblical truth, even when it’s hard.

The Scent of a Flower We Have Not Found

 

[continuing the revisit entries; see yesterday's post]

Do you ever feel homesick for a place and time you’ve never known?

Growing up, I spent so much time reading books about faraway places and times past. I love history. I long for a simpler time, a culture I identify with more than I do with my own. I want to be part of the high class social circles in Jane Austen’s England. I want to teach former slave children in Philadelphia after the end of the Civil War. I want to be a housewife in the 1950s, when the most complicated part of my day would be how to fix a broken carpet sweeper.

We thought we could have everything, didn’t we? So we chose feminism, equality, free love, drugs, utter selfishness. And now we’re left with a meaningless culture in which societal and family norms have been destroyed, and we can feel aimless in our search for meaning.

But it’s more than that, so much more. I could delude myself into thinking that my innate homesickness is a result of the deconstruction of social norms, the family, and gender roles. Yet if I lived in Jane Austen’s England, or in post-Civil War Philadelphia, or in small-town 1950s America, I know that I would still feel this same undefined longing.

---

I read this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday, and I think he says what so many of us feel.”In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you–the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things–the beauty, the memory of our own past–are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

Welcome to the real world, little girl.

This week, I’m not going to be writing any new entries. I have three tests and a ten-page paper due coming up next week, and I need to invest my time in homework and in hanging out with mi familia during fall break (which officially begins in 46 hours!!!). However, I want to use this opportunity to re-post some of my Xanga entries from the past, because I had a pretty different readership then. My apologies to those of you who have read these before, but you’re definitely in the minority, so here goes.

From March 3, 2007. It’s fiction. I wrote it for my Creative Writing class last semester (before I read Feeling for Bones, lest you think I was too “inspired” ). It had to be about a homecoming and include the words belch, Buddha, and loveseat.

 

It seems like it again, the same old same old, always watching that pavement turn into memory, the yellow lines merging with my thoughts. “Go ahead and sleep, Cassie,” Cliff says. His eyes dart off the road for a minute so he can smile at me. “I know you’re tired.” I lean my cheek against the cold window and close my eyes, but I’m not sleeping. My heart is beating too quickly for that.

 

It’s been an autumn of beginnings, turning my failure into success away from home for the first time. Success not for some, maybe, not the 4.0 or the partying or the boyfriend, but success for me. Success is subtraction, watching the digits on the scale slip down and down and down. Each one lost

is a dance around the bathroom.

 

My god isn’t Jesus or Buddha or Allah. It’s Starvation, and I am her slave.

The passing cars outside the window disappear into my memories. I was the five-year-old who didn’t fit into the “first day of school outfit” my mom picked out for me. I was the eight-year-old on a diet, the ten-year-old who had to go to gymnastics and hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing more than to watch the substance of my flesh fade into nothingness. And I finally did it this semester. Cigarettes and Diet Coke are my sustenance now; I’ve eaten my fill of emptiness.

 

And I feel old. This homecoming is the first time for college, but I’ve come home before, wanting to be new – from camp, from road trips, from soccer games. I always soak up the rhythm of the miles, longing for a change. And here I am again, going home to that same old family, the one I was never good enough for.

 

I am now, though. They could count my ribs if they wanted to. I’ll show my mom that I can fit into her precious skinny jeans. I’ll show her that I can fit into her precious little life, too. Not that I want to. But I could.

 

I could, I could, I could, I think, and I lose track of the difference between thinking and dreaming, until Cliff says, “This is it, right?” and we’re pulling into my driveway.

 

The house looks the same. It’s brown brick, nothing too special. Nothing like the mansion my mother would have if she could. Cliff helps me carry my bags to the front door, and then he’s off to see his own family, who lives across town. I watch him drive away, and I’m still standing outside my own front door, too scared to go in. But I want to. I want to see mother’s reaction to my quest for perfection.

 

I leave my bags on the porch and reach for the door handle. I’m inside, through the entryway, into the den, and I stop to look at the family pictures hanging over the fireplace. No more fat Cassandra, never again.

 

There are footsteps on the stairs, and I’m enveloped in my mother’s hug. It’s polite and perfect, just like she is. She steps back, and I notice her lipstick is smeared a little. Somehow that makes me feel better.

 

“Cassandra!” She holds me at arm’s length and looks me up and down. “What has happened to you? So much for the freshman fifteen! Why, you look beautiful!”

 

Beautiful. She called me beautiful. The word echoes in my ears and slams around in my head as she leads me to the loveseat and we sit down. She strokes my hair, smiles at me, asks me questions about school and my social life, but I don’t hear any of it, just the word beautiful.

 

It’s the same thing at dinner, when my dad and brothers are home. I pick at my food, chicken and rice and asparagus, but they don’t seem to notice. All they can talk about is how much I’ve changed at college. They, too, ask me questions about school and friends. Everything but me is the same. My brothers chow down on their food as quickly as they can. Dad lets out a small belch after the meal is over, and Mom shakes her head at him, as usual. Then she starts clearing the dishes. I’m not expected to help, so I go to my room to be alone for awhile.

 

Everything’s the same there, too, except a lot cleaner than usual. It’s nice to be back on my soft bed, with my collection of stuffed animals and my old cassette player and my pictures of high school friends, and my tears. My tears were always with me then, and they’re with me now, too. Except I’m angry at myself – why am I crying? My mother called me beautiful.

 

Now I don’t have to go through my days wishing to be invisible, but I feel invisible anyway, insubstantial, and fragile. I don’t have to hide, but I’m hidden. I hate this goddess Starvation that I’m chained to, but I can’t escape.

I think I’ve lost my soul to her, though. If I leave her, I’ll be fat Cassandra again, and I’ll never ever go back to being that. But I am a failure. I’ve had my fill of emptiness, and I’m still hungry. This skin and bones isn’t enough.

Confession #17

Yesterday I bought my roommates candy at Meijer. Today, Sarah left the rest of her Sprees in the package on top of the fridge. Last night she said I could eat some of them. I couldn’t resist – I just finished them. Which means I need to buy her more. (Of course I’ll tell her!) She loves me in spite of my devious ways.

The Beauty Idol

In case you haven’t noticed lately, we live in the midst of a culture obsessed with physical beauty. This obsession is sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle, but no matter what, it is powerful and inescapable.

The world has always been particularly cognisant of female beauty or the lack thereof, but in this day and age that awareness has plunged to lower and lower depths. Dress and attitudes that used to be regarded as suitable only for a woman of questionable reputation, are now considered mainstream.

And we women as a gender are being exploited in ways our forebears could never have dreamed possible, especially because of the advent of the Internet and other media. It is impossible to go very long without being confronted with the image of a “perfect” female body masquerading on a billboard, a Facebook advertisement, or a television commercial. And those are the innocent images, comparably.

Yet not only are we being exploited, this generation of women has taken exhibitionism to a whole new level. It is as if we find it necessary to broadcast our so-called self-acceptance and feminine empowerment by being as carefree and open with our bodies as possible. Things 19th-century women would have shuddered at are considered matter-of-fact today.

It only takes a brief glance over statistics on eating disorders to realize what this cultural obsession is doing to the women of our generation, and what we are doing to ourselves. My heart is to show girls a better way. There is worth to be found in Christ, regardless of whether you look like Mandy Moore or not. He wants our hearts to be beautiful, and He’s willing to make them that way.

Compared to the extreme obsession with beauty rampant in our culture, though, sometimes it’s easy for me to excuse a seemingly innocent obsession with beauty in myself. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to look feminine or even pretty, or enjoying fashion. But we should be far, far more concerned with the adorning of our hearts than with the adorning of our outer appearances. And it is so easy to cross the line into a prideful obsession with looking perfect that can lead to putting other women down, objectifying and stereotyping men, or on the other end of the spectrum, harming ourselves in a variety of ways because we don’t meet our own or society’s standards.

What’s really important here? It’s our hearts. When my heart is so focused on how I look and what other people think of me, either because I think I look good or because I think I don’t look good, there’s pride and self-focused fear that I’m allowing to control me. I’m making an idol of beauty because of how it makes me feel about myself, or how it makes other people feel about me. I can’t let that happen. Idolatry is a subtle and deadly sin that can wreak havoc in my relationship with God, who desires my heart to be set on Him.

So instead of spending all my time gazing into the mirror hoping that a beautiful girl will look back at me, I hope that I spend most of time gazing into the mirror of God’s word, wanting to see what He is teaching me about myself and about Him.

The Day I Wasn’t Expecting

A particularly vivid memory of my time in Peru came into my mind today. I don’t know what brought it there, but its poignancy compels me to write about it.

During our second week in Peru, we were working with a church team from Texas. As a part of that trip, we made a couple of “shoe visits.” The organization I went with specializes in delivering shoes to orphanages, and even though this wasn’t strictly a “shoe trip” where that was the sole focus, we were still able to pass out shoes at a couple of homes. I can’t describe what a privilege that is. The absolute and literal servanthood of putting new shoes on children’s feet is an unutterable privilege.

One of the homes we visited that week was a boys’ home, for about ages 8-14 or so. I wasn’t too excited about this visit; it wasn’t that I was dreading it, but I have always had trouble relating to the male species and I wasn’t thinking that I would be too effective in ministering to this particular gender and age group.

Boy, was I wrong. We drove two hours from Lima to get to the home. It was near the ocean, but the beach where we ate lunch was dirty. The sky was gray. And the desert land was unfailingly brown and drab wherever we looked.

As we entered the home, the boys were delighted to see us. They were not perfect boys by any means. Most of them had been sent there by the government for various reasons – abandonment, delinquency, etc. Quite a few of them were special needs, another group I do not feel qualified to minister to.

Yet they touched my heart almost more than any other home we visited. I can’t even describe it, I really can’t. They were in that awkward stage of boyhood, becoming men yet unsure of themselves. Some of them were still so little, so young. A few of them understood my broken Spanish better than the others. They looked out for the other boys, kept the slower ones where they needed to be, and were patient and kind with me.

We had to find all of these big shoes for them, and help them take off their ratty old ones so we could put new ones on their feet. Their smiles were huge. Some of them didn’t want to put their new shoes on; they wanted to save them for special occasions. They hungered for affirmation, for smiles and for hugs.

They told me their stories through our translators, and my heart yearned over them. They didn’t want us to leave. As the bus got ready to leave, they lingered at our windows. Two of them talked to me and held onto my hands through the window, and asked when I was coming back. I didn’t want to let go of their dirty fingers. As the bus pulled away, I felt so sad. The translator who was sitting next to me said, “They are breaking your heart.” And they were, oh they were. In such a good way.

I haven’t expressed this as well as I should have. I don’t know how else to say it. I can’t describe the impression they made on me. I so did not want to leave them there, alone and yearning for affection and attention in the middle of the desert, while I flew back to my privileged country and life. I didn’t get any pictures that day. I was just too busy doing other things. And I’m glad I didn’t bother, but at the same time I wish I had some portraits of those young faces.

That day made me want to adopt so badly someday. I yearned to take those boys under my wings and mother them. How they blessed me! And how I want to bless them. I will never forget them, or how God surprised me with how wonderful that day was, even though I was not expecting it. I can only pray for them now, and hope that they are well.

The Joys of Being a Senior

 

I’m still trying to sort through my own wishes for next year and thereafter. Until I know what I want to do, it’s hard to move in any direction! And what I want to do changes daily. What is it today, you may ask? Well, today, I want to move back home next year. (I know: shocker!) This is something I’ve been trying to avoid for a long time. (Parents, if you read this, don’t get your hopes up too much. ) But it’s so financially practical. I just don’t know what kind of a job I could get, and I don’t have any friends really in my hometown. But I could work some kind of job that I hopefully wouldn’t hate entirely, and I could try to write a book on the side!

I just don’t know if I’m up for all the classes and schooling anymore. I love learning and I love the challenge of academics, but I’m seriously getting burned out on it. I think if I try to stretch my writing by going to grad school for English stuff right away next year, I’m just going to get tired of it. I want to give myself the chance to improve my writing ability by practice instead of by going to class, listening to lectures, workshopping, etc. I don’t want to feel constantly intimidated about my writing ability. I just don’t want to be in that environment yet. Stretching and learning is good, but I’m not ready for that much stretching.

And you know, a lot of authors write successful books, and they never had a degree in Creative Writing.

So we’ll see what happens. I’ll be back next week with an update on my desire to intern at Disneyland next year. Because with the way it’s going, who knows what I’ll want to do tomorrow!

(Input is more than welcomed too!)