Serious though,

i’m dying right now. 

that unexpected message just made my heart do funny things. 

Also: Lisa K. and Sarah C. filling my house with infectious laughter, Michael filling it with food, and some other favorites filling it with music for our Lord, is a pretty solid way to spend a Thursday night.

I need to remember that I frequently allow/ask my cats to make relational decisions for me.

slash

use who they do or do not like as a vetting mechanism. 

Getting into Keats’ heart is the key; being disliked by Ruu is the biggest deal breaker.

=___=

Today I received a box of boxes of after-eight mints, an alehouse t-shirt (plus bomb pizza and beer), TWO awesome star wars gifts (an X-Wing moleskin and darthmaul chopsticks!), a Dietrich Bonhoeffer book, and the lolcat bible. NOT TO MENTION AN AMAZING SURPRISE PARTY (at which I got to see almost all of my favorite people, actually talk to my estranged neighbors, and lose two games of rummykub!) 

Seriously though, I have the greatest friends and family. 

Thank you for blessing me so much on my birthday, you guys. I would be so much less without you. 

[note: the important thing about the “list of gifts” is how incredibly thoughtful and related to me they all are. no single thing that I was given today had a big price tag and a little thought. and I have never been more happy.]

Other Note: extra crazy gift/challenge from God today—the neighbor who walked a demon into our house not three months ago asked me, with deep sincerity, if he could come check out our church and maybe start coming with us. And made plans to do so. Un.freaking.real. 

This song is called Emma. I stumbled across it 20 minutes ago on Spotify. 

Its messages:

Don’t be afraid when you’re sad. 
Don’t be afraid when it’s cold or dark. 
Don’t be afraid when you’re hurt. 
Don’t be afraid of your belief.
Don’t be afraid, my warrior bride. 
Daddy’s here.
I will keep you warm and hold you tight.
I will always patch you up and give you love.
Fly. Your eyes will continue to be opened.
Your battle is won and victory is sure.
And, most of all, You are not Alone.  

“Look beyond the window there,
to the sky above, to the open air.
Look beyond what you can see,
close your eyes and just believe.
The Lion roars and the lamb lays down, 
they live together in a whole new town. 
They’re calling me and they’re calling you,
from the cold hard facts that we’re on our own,
to the age old truth that we’re not alone.” 

Cory, over at Mad to Love, recently wrote vulnerably about his depression. Mine is something I’ve always been pretty open about with people I’m remotely close to, but since growing out of my “angsty early teen phase” (as I like to call it) I haven’t spent much time talking about or writing about what it actually feels like, just the fact that it is there. The following excerpt from Cory’s blog really spoke to my heart. These are good, good words. And not words spoken (or reblogged) in order to garner sympathy, but to simply be revealing, authentic, and honest. The chemical imbalances that cause clinical depression are also much more common than we’d like to think, so encouraging a more wide-spread knowing a little bit of what “the depressed” suffer can bring us all closer together. 

corycopeland:

Depression is explained simply as a chemical imbalance within the human brain. But, in my experience, depression takes upon many forms and possesses many reasons for showing itself. Ever since I was 13 years of age, I’ve been burdened with an inherent sadness that seeps deep within my heart and leaves me close to tears more often than not. It weighs heavy in my heart and causes an aching for a peace that may never come. There isn’t a particular or tangible reason I suffer from this affliction. I had a beautiful childhood and adolescence, filled with a loving and laughing family who cared for me and provided for me to the best of their abilities. I wasn’t bullied, nor was I left alone or ignored. I had friends and was active in sports, doing all the things a “normal” functioning teen would do to lead a fulfilled life. But perpetually, it all meant so little compared to this heavy weight I carried in my chest almost constantly.

Solitude called to me as I spent hours alone in dark rooms (using reading as an excuse), simply wanting to be left alone so I wouldn’t have to offer explanations of what was wrong. I was conflicted because being alone magnified my wretched feelings of absurd assumptions, which in turn haunted me with suicidal thoughts and plans, but being alone was the only way I felt safe somehow. Going to church or to school, or even out in public at all, meant putting on a brave face and a shining smile—something I hated doing because I felt like such a fraud. It was tiring.

Cory’s post makes me want to write more about my own depression, the place that God has had in my dealing with it, and the struggle it can sometimes be to have depression in the church. I think I’d like to sit down and do that, but I’m working on a painting today that I need to get finished first. I highly recommend reading the entirety of Cory’s post, if you’re at all interested. And know that it isn’t hopeless. Depression is manageable. The Lord never allows us to be afflicted with something that we cannot conquer in his power and guidance. It’s just a walk. And often times a very difficult one. But never hopeless. Never. 

So today I finished a two-day binge of Tamora Pierce’s Trickster duology, via audiobook, which means basically in all activities I was doing that didn’t involve actually carrying on a conversation with someone, I had a book running in one ear. (…I know, but I do this sometimes. Blame my need to cater to my input-intellection pairing.)

Tamora Pierce’s protagonists were my role models growing up. She writes fantasy novels, usually in quartets, that revolve around a different uniquely strong female character in each series, from a girl who masquerades as a boy to become the first female knight of the realm to her future daughter who gets sold into slavery only to be employed by a trickster god as the spy master for a revolution in a foreign country. Every now and then I go back and read one of her books, or catch the new ones, just for a break in the rigor my brain subjects itself to regularly. Its funny though, because I’ve discovered that even when I am tuning into a book based in a world I half-lived in throughout my adolescence, I can’t turn it all off anymore. 

Today, at about half-way through Trickster’s Queen, I realized that this definitely was’t the first book that I’d spent the entire read/listen subconsciously digging deep into God’s narrative woven a midst the author’s intended story. And that there are Biblical themes (such as Lordship and servanthood) that I can’t fully place myself into because of my cultural experience/their complete absence in our world today, but don’t know if I would ever be even as close as I am to understanding them without the ridiculous level of immersion I’ve had into the fantasy genre. 

All of that to say, I’m legitimately thinking about writing a series of blogs/re-tailoring my blogspot blog to “Finding God in Flights of Fancy”, with blogs written on my meeting God in the middle of Tortall or Hyperion or deep deep outer space. 

I’m curious if anyone else would be interested in reading them. That will in no way dictate whether I write them or not, cuz, heck, no one reads that blog anyways cuz I don’t write in it enough. But I’m still curious if it’s only a really cool idea to me because I AM a sci-fi/fantasy nerd or if it would be cool across a broader spectrum.

So, if you have thoughts, I’d be interested to hear them. 

   Today, after work, I was supposed to drive over to Oak Park to meet with Mr. Tran, my fifth grade student’s dad, to work out a new tutoring schedule for this school year, as we start back up after a month long break for vacation.

   As I pull up to their house, Hau’s middle-older sister peeks her head out the door, waves, and disappears inside. As I’m parking, Hau scampers down the sidewalk between the brick red paving stones that serve as their front lawn and puts his face to the passenger side window of my car.

   ”Hey bud, I missed you! How are you, how was Arizona?”

   ”Good, good. My dad didn’t tell me we were tutoring today!”

   ”Oh, well that’s fine, because we’re not. He and I are just meeting up to talk about what we want the tutoring schedule to look like for this year.”

   ”…my dad’s out eating lobster right now.” The lobster would come back up multiple times in the next hour. Something about it being lobster was very peculiar/important to all the family members.

   ”Oh. Okay…. welll… I guess you can just have him call me then,” as his face is mixing between acceptance and hope and disappointment and he’s just standing there. “…unless you want to tutor today?”

   ”Yeah! You can check my homework and then we can read!” Me, blinking, brain trying to catch up to what’s happening here.

   ”Well, okay, but I didn’t bring any of our books with me…”

   ”That’s fine! I have my book. And I’m onto SIXTH GRADE math now; I finished the fifth grade book. And you can check my homework and make sure I did it okay. And then we can read my book, cuz I didn’t get to read it while I was in Arizona, so we should read it.”

   A year ago, I was bribing this fourth grader to memorize his alphabet. And he is the fourth grader who would only do what I asked, because he knew that if he behaved, at the end of our time we would read an article about the Chargers together. And then when we got there, who demanded I help him through every sentence. Who I had to continuously battle with over quitting early so that he could watch My Babysitter’s a Vampire or whatever sporting event his dad was yelling about in the room next door.

   This is the graduated-from-fourth-grader who no more than three months ago sat in a room with me in sullen silence for 45 minutes, refusing to open his life science work book, look me in the eye, or explain to me why he was so furious he was crying. And who then explained to me how incredibly much he hates science (an hour after he had been proclaiming the awesomeness of molecules and debating with me about the reality of matter), which really meant he hated staring at the cal-state science-prep full page essays which his second-language English wasn’t strong enough to wade through and his endurance of his dad’s desire to push him, failing.

   And today, as I was talking to his mom before leaving, he asks me if I still have the phonics book from the 1930s that I’d been making him learn his sounds from over the summer. Because “You want to keep working on phonics, Hau?” “Yeah, and those other word books too! My teacher says he has really seen an improvement because I can read better now.”

   Jesus Christ, my life for these days. All the pain and frustration and obnoxious days of warring against 4th-grade-boy-ADD, for today. Thank you, father, for knowing us, knowing what we need, and for feeding us when you know our strength is failing. I cannot get enough of you and what you do.

Edit:

It is never the thing that is bad; it is not facebook, or twitter, or tumblr, or whatever that are bad. It is always what we choose to do with them. But if your eye serves as a snare for you, causes you to stumble, then pluck it out, for it is better to enter the kingdom of heaven with one eye than to be cast into hell with two [Mark 9:47]. Social Networking certainly doesn’t cause me to sin in a traditional sense, but in the sense that sin is choosing myself or anything else over God in any circumstance, it definitely does. (I’m not saying that the extent to which I use social media will get me cast into hell. That’s just the emphatic nature of this particular piece of scripture.)

So, I continue in my internal discussion regarding where to draw the line. 

I waste a lot of time scrolling through netflix to decide if I want to watch something new and then opting to simply turn on Supernatural again. 

Customer 1: 20 year old Brazilian kid with crazy puppy dog eyes, lives with Dad, basically only applies himself to Jiu Jitsu (but is very very good at this). Borrowed his dad’s truck to help me move Alyie’s mattress and dining table into our house; also helped me hang blinds in my old place. Customer 2: 28 year old UCSD Alum and PHD candidate at SDSU, works in a lab doing stem cell research, teaches class at SDSU. Asks me out to dinner. Takes me to a great sushi place where we sit at the bar and the head sushi chef knows him. Guess which “date” was more fulfilling to my mind and soul. For the record. Apparently it is not necessary to have a brain with functioning brain cells to be a stem cell researcher and doctorate student at State. Nothing against SDSU. But wtf.

Also, days like today are when I remember that while my MTBI may call me an “E” and while I do really love people, if I don’t get my hours of “I” time in every day, I exhaust real fast.

(And then my introspection dribbles out of me in blog form because my filtering mechanism is broken by sleep deprivation and caffeine. apologies).

The problem with technology/smart phones/social networking/blogging is that you become “available all the time”—or people expect you to be within reach all the time. Because, let’s face it, a lot of the time its true, and we do respond to emails within 30 second of receiving them or retweet our favorite minor leaguers within minutes of their original tweet.

The problem occurs when real life becomes a factor. When you literally are in conversation with people, doing an activity, or driving the entire day and cannot respond to text messages or emails for 36 hours, much less make space to make your own waves. People tend to assume you’ve died/wonder what has happened.

It’s a very strange balance, having an active real life and an active interwebs/computer/long distance friends/family life.

Later that night I realized that a vast majority of the science I know has been gleaned from Science Fiction. I now am calling into question the validity of relying on any of this knowledge as truth or possible truth.