Why I Need People

Human connections are important. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the value of community and relationships and everything that goes along with those. As human beings, we need to know that there are other people who are like us, who think the same way and feel the same things, who are passionate about the same areas, who need us just like we need them.

The other day, I was texting my roommate and resolved that she needed something to cheer her up, due to a stressful day at work. So I drove to a Starbucks to pick up our favorite drinks. While I was waiting for the barista to make our Passion Iced Tea Lemonade and Pumpkin Spice Frapp, I had a short conversation with another customer about the merits of Mocha Chip Frappuccinos (Human Connection #1 of my story.)

After receiving the drinks, I surprised Roommate at the church office she works in (Human Connection #2). Roommate was happy to see me and I was happy to make her happy, in the same way that she has made me happy in countless ways during the two years of our friendship.

I didn't have anywhere I needed to be, so I drove with Roommate to pick up one of the students she works with from the train station. There was a church event happening that night and the student just needed a way to get there. I'd never met Student before, but as soon as we picked her up, I introduced myself and immediately felt comfortable in the way that only happens between two like-minded and -souled people (Human Connection #3).

After all of this Human Connection, I decided to stay and help at the church event that Roommate was helping to put on and felt decidedly more connected than I have felt in a very long time.

John Donne said that "no man is an island entire of itself" and he was right. We can try to live like hermits and create shells that swallow us whole, but eventually we realize that we need to feel connected with other humans in the same way that we need to breathe air and drink water and eat food. Without those connections, we become lost inside ourselves, like islands falling into the sea.

Everything Changes But You

"Finish Last"
Stellar Kart

People change and plans get changed and
Everything changes but you
Everybody moves around and
Everything gets pushed around but you
You always stay the same, stay the same

I want to finish last
Last in the world's eyes
No matter what I do
I will be first in your eyes

I am running in this race and
I am pressing onwards towards the finish line
You have promised me a better life
Far beyond this world, far beyond this place and time


This song has been on my mind lately. The first time I heard this song, I was 16 and I thought I had my whole life planned out. Things changed, as they always do, and a split second later, everything I had planned for had fallen apart.

The problem is that even though we try to pretend like we know what's going on in our lives, we don't. And when everything we thought we had taken care of spins completely out of control, we have to realize that there's only one person who never changes and it's his plans (and his opinion of who we are) that really matters. It's cliché, but so true and so hard to learn.

I am doing a different thing right now than I thought I would be doing a year ago, and that's ok. I'm human and that's just how human plans work. What I need to be thinking about is whether I'm doing what God has planned for me. And as long as I'm doing that, who cares if I'm not exactly where I thought I would be a year ago?

Nightmare

I woke up this morning at 4:22 from the most vivid dream I've had in a long time. After I woke up, I realized that my roommate had turned off our fan and so I was sweltering underneath the piles of covers I insist on sleeping under and this probably had more to do with why I woke up than the dream. But it was still an intense dream and it still had meaning, I think.

When I was younger, I was haunted by my middle school years. Memories of prepubescent cruelty and crushes that never ended well would sneak up behind at the most random of times, forcing me to pull out my dad's old laptop to write story after story of girls who lived perfect lives on beaches and never once forgot who they were. One of the stories that I remember most clearly was called Seven Summer Suns, and it was about a girl named Summer Black who had seven summer romances. I never finished any of the stories because eventually the thing that I really wanted to write about would start leaking out of me and I would abandon my meticulously plotted out charts of which boy Summer liked at which point in time to write semi-autobiographical nonsense.

The thing that I really wanted to write about was a boy named Gun Hi Bae. He was a classmate of mine in 7th grade and a few years preceding that year. He wasn't one of my best friends, but he did sit behind me in my English/History class and sometimes we would make each other laugh. One day in 7th grade, he didn't come to school and our entire class was immediately alarmed because Gun never missed school; he was just one of those kids who either never got sick or never thought it was a good enough excuse to stay home from school. We found out later that his entire family was murdered the previous day because of sketchy business partners of his father, or something like that.

Later that week, we were all invited to his memorial service, and that's where I was in my dream, except it was outdoors and students from my graduating class were there, not my 7th grade class. We were all grown up, too, and I think that's where the nightmare part comes in. We were all grown up and no longer 12 and 13 years old and Gun was still just a 7th grader.

I woke up from this eerie funeral-dream and couldn't stop thinking about a hot tub conversation I had last night regarding the worst thing ever. At 4:22 this morning, I decided on what I think is the worst: Gun's story is the worst and most tragic thing I have ever heard and it's been haunting me for years.

Does my subconscious feel guilty for living through 7th grade? Or is this just my head's way of telling me to start doing something meaningful with my life?

You know what? Who cares? Tragic things happen in the world every day, worse things than what happened to Gun, and I couldn't matter less in that kind of a world. I may have a guilty conscience, but there are people dying out there, right now, and I'm not doing anything to help them.

stage parade

I was wanted once,

a perky yellow daisy afloat in a sea of bound-to-be-exported

roses,

driveling talent wasted and praised.

I was that girl once,

the girl with the smile and the hair and the style, taking her

place

in the center of the stage parade.

I saw clearly once

in a thousand shades of brown, blended at the edges of a

world

of standard blacks and mighty whites.

I am more than what you pretend to see.

Do yourself a favor and know me for what

I truly am.

I am 20 years old.

I am 20 years old and rapidly growing out
of the things that made me a child. I am 20
years old and no longer a young girl with
puppy fat and knobby knees. I am 20 years
old, but while the world is moving into adult-
hood, I still linger in the waiting phase of
life. I am 20 years old and if you expect me
to be engaged or child-bearing or self-
capitulated into what will be my life-long
career, you will be disappointed. I am 20
years old and I still have 80 years to
fulfill all of the things that are expected of
me. I am 20 years old and different from
others of my age, and the things that I
consider important are different also. I am
20 years old and I'm waiting to fall in love,
I'm waiting to make a complete commitment
to another human being, I'm waiting to
figure out what I want to do with my life.
I'm 20 years old and maybe I'm still a child.

Snapshots

Stuff Christians Like is this great new blog I just started reading. It's written by Jon Acuff, a hilarious and witty guy who really understands the church and the direction that modern Christianity is taking. Anyway, on his blog he writes about things that your typical Christian will relate to doing, liking, thinking, or undergoing.

One of his recent posts is #575. Refusing the gift of the desert road. In this post, he brings up this passage from Exodus:

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, "If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt." So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of Egypt armed for battle. (Exodus 13:17-18)

Acuff's point from this passage was that God loved the Israelites so much that he would not lead them into a situation that he knew they couldn't handle. So even though the Israelites may have believed that they were tough and hardy and ready for battle, God knew what they didn't and he saw that they needed to take the long desert road to prepare themselves.

In my college group last night, we watched a video from Louie Giglio. He was kind of talking about this same concept and he said something I really liked:

"We only see little snapshots, but God is painting on a canvas the size of the universe."

This hugeness is a characteristic of God that I really love. I've begun to think of him more as an eternal being than just a super powerful human because that's who he's showing himself to be.

I spent last weekend in my favorite place on earth and even got to attend the church that had so much to do with my personal and spiritual growth when I was 16. I haven't had a chance to visit it in the past three years; well, I haven't had the courage to visit it. But last Sunday, I bundled up all my nervousness and walked right into that church building with my shoulders back and my hair brushed away from my face. And it wasn't nearly as terrifying as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I was even able to hear God in the worship music. And this is what he said to me:

Greater things have yet to come
Greater things are still to be done in this city

I've been focusing a little too much on things that God has done for me in the past. And it's true, he has done some amazing things in my life. He's met me in dozens of cities around the world and provided for me no matter where I've ended up and, countless times, revealed himself to me in the mundane, the ordinary, the average. He's given me gifts and taught me how to use them. He's put me in a family that, I'm convinced, may just take over the world some day and that is just the way I like it. He's done miracles in my life and saved me from so much more than I can understand.

But that's not the best part about God's relationship with me: even with all of these things he's already done for me, he's not done yet.

He's an active and living God and maybe I have been on a desert road for the past couple of years, but that doesn't mean he loves me any less than he did at one point in my life. If anything, it means he loves me more. And because God is so incredibly huge and I am just one tiny little snapshot in the canvas of the universe, I can't see what he's preparing me for or propelling me towards or sending my way.

But I can trust that he knows what he's doing because, based on what he's already done, he has some great things planned for my life. I just need to wait a little while so I can be ready for them.

Possibilities

As an English major, one of the more irritating things that I have to put up with is the tendency of most people to assume that I'm going into teaching once they find out what I'm studying. This is irritating because people don't realize that an English degree is one of the most versatile degrees out there and most undergrad English majors end up doing something completely unrelated to what they studied in college, so assuming that I am going to teach with my English degree frustrates me to death. 

The irony of this is that I want to do probably the most stereotypical thing possible with my English degree: I want to write. And yet nobody initially assumes that this is what I want to do. 

Anyway, another reason why the teaching assumption bothers me so much is that I had the WORST experience with teaching possible when I was in high school. I unwittingly agreed to teach 2nd grade ESL students for a few weeks of summer school and halfway through the first day realized how much I dislike being a disciplinarian. I would hate to be a teacher. It is on the bottom of my list. 

Except that old adage says that "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach", which basically means that if I fail to make it big off my semi-autobiographical nonsense for young adults, I will eventually end up teaching. 

This usually bothers me, but tonight I'm stuck with memories of the teachers who actually meant something to me: Mr. Quiring and his AP English courses, Mrs. Roedding who introduced me to poetry, Ralph Carlson from Creative Writing: Poetry, Mrs. Phillips who taught me how to read, even Ms. Pettijohn from my brief sojourn at Dana Hills. And I realize that if I had the honor to have as much of an impact on students' lives as these teachers had on mine, I would live a very fulfilled life. 

Suddenly I'm not so afraid of my inevitable career choice.

Mr. Bundles

Dear Mr. Jaxson Forest Lindsay (Jay),

It is I, your 6th grade crush. Remember? I'm the one you handed the "I like you" note to outside of our classroom during recess that one day in late Spring. I'm the one you played tag with all over campus and the one you asked, "Are you alright now, Rheanna?" when I had that nasty cold before the performance of our 6th grade play.

You may think it is pitiful that I still remember this, indeed, that I even remember your full name. Maybe it is pitiful, but that's not all I remember.

It was the second semester of 6th grade when you first whistled your way into my life. I had a crush immediately on your red hair and freckles, and on the fact that you came from Cotopaxi, the school where everyone apparently smoked. I thought this made you instantly cooler than all of the boys at my small missionary-bubbled school. You were a brand new transfer student and all I wanted was to chase you around the playground (I was 12, give me a break).

Our teachers chose Annie for our 6th grade play, and while I was Grace Farrell, private secretary to Oliver Warbucks ("Oliver Warbucks the millionaire?"), you were Mr. Bundles, the laundry man. When I found out which part you got, I desperately wanted to be Miss Hannigan because there was a secret romance insinuated between the two characters in the script and even at that young age, I thought art should imitate life.

During our 6th grade graduation, I flirted and flirted with you, Peter Carrera, and Eric Bean, because I couldn't decide which of you I liked best. I contemplated this issue for a whole summer, finally deciding on you when it turned out you sat behind me in our 7th grade homeroom. Later on in the year, I would stick my hands behind me when the teacher was praying and we would hold hands.

You asked me to the hayride and I had to say no because I wasn't allowed to date. This is one of my biggest regrets.

Our relationship culminated in a death, Jay Lindsay. It was the death of our classmate, Gun Hi Bae. He was in our History and English class and sometimes sat at the same table where we sat. This means that we probably accidentally played footsies with him a couple of times. We went to his funeral together, and you held my hand as we watched his body being brought to the building and, later on, in the van on the way back to school. You pointed out your apartment as we drove and I still can't drive through that part of town without thinking about you and how sad you looked that whole day.

(Years later, I wrote a story about Gun's funeral and I referred to you as my "first love". I still am not completely sure why I did.)

After that, we didn't talk so much. You stuck around for our 8th grade year and then your mom moved you away. During one of our middle school summers, we went to church camp together and you became a Christian. I remember because you threw away all of your shirts with the dragons and "bad stuff" on them and I thought it was really honorable of you to do that.

And then you moved away and for the longest time my ears would perk up when I heard anyone mention your name. Once, I heard you had been put in jail and I prayed for you.

The thing is, Jay Lindsay, you started all this nonsense with me feeling like I have to save people. It's because of you and your problems and my unquenchable desire to fix them for you that I still find myself drawn to broken people who need me. But they don't really need me, Jay Lindsay. There isn't anything I can do to actually save them. They have to figure it out on their own and that's what I never got the chance to learn from you.

Anyway, Jay Lindsay, we recently became friends on myspace, so maybe it's about time that I resolve all these issues that I have as a result of you. Maybe we can have a nice long conversation about how much I wrote about you in my journal back then and prayed that God would let me know if he wanted me to like like you or just like you.

Or maybe we can catch up through a few short and stilted emails and then move on.

But no matter what happens, I'm still glad I chose you to have a crush on in 6th grade. You were nice to me and I had a lot of fun playing tag with you. So thank you for that. And also I'm sorry I couldn't help you with the things you needed to figure out. Hopefully you've figured them out by now.

Hope your life is good.

Lots of love,

Rheanna Lea Cline

Ants in the pants of faith

“I’m spiritual. I live off the faith that has been instilled in me, that has never left. I’ve never let a stumbling block actually make me fall…. We all go through trials, but not one thing has ever made me question God. I have a great relationship with God. I can talk to him, get mad at him, frustrated with him. But, ultimately, my faith is what defines me.”

Yeah, ok, this is a quote from Jessica Simpson. I realize that. But. I think this quote basically sums up what American Christianity is trying to convince us of. 

We always say that God will never give us anything that we can't handle. Pretty much, we tell ourselves that God has our best interests in mind. And I'm not refuting that belief at all; on the contrary, I completely agree. But the thing is that maybe what God thinks is best for us is the opposite of what we think is best for us. 

Did you ever think that maybe God doesn't care about our happiness? Maybe he knows that there is a lot that is more important than how happy we're feeling at any one moment. Maybe he values things like joy and a vividly-lived life more than a temporary and inconstant thing like happiness.

I don't know. Our culture tells us that if we believe in God, we'll get the desires of our hearts. But maybe we're so out of touch with our spirituality that we don't even know what the desires of our hearts are.

Anyway, Jessica Simpson says that she has never questioned God. Frederick Buechner says that "doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving." 

If that's true, then is a faith without doubts, a faith that is asleep and stagnant, worth anything?

If we live in a world that teaches us to look for the easy and happy way of life, then how are we ever supposed to encounter the kind of "stumbling blocks" that might make us doubt God? And without that doubt, how are we supposed to come to know God more?

I don't know. I'm realizing that there's a lot about this culture that I frankly do not agree with. And I need to change that. I need to make a difference.

I need to save the world?

We find strength to face the day

Disappointment is a part of life, especially when you're made of hope down to your very core. 

Disappointment is people not living up to your expectations of who you want them to be, who you need them to be. Disappointment is never getting to fulfill your lifelong desires. Disappointment is losing. Disappointment is not being good enough. Disappointment is drowning.

Since it's Easter, I feel like I should tie in Jesus somehow, but you know what? Even good Christians feel disappointed sometimes.

Magic

An older homeless woman came into the optometry office where I work today. She was holding a pair of very expensive-looking sunglasses and I found out later she bought them from my office after she had made an appointment last year. The most unusual thing about this scenario is that she actually had pretty good insurance. 

Anyway, when she came in today, I asked her a few times if she was looking for glasses. She either couldn't hear me or couldn't understand, but she finally stated that she was just looking and brusquely brushed me aside as she roamed around the store.

You know those stories about people who help the lost or lonely and then find out they actually helped an angel or even Jesus himself? My old homeless woman is exactly who I would expect Jesus to be disguising himself as.

It's either that, or she's magic and I've just gained a hundred years of long life for my firstborn child. You know. Either/or.

On College

I'm at a point in my life where I discover new things about myself, and about how I feel about the world in general, almost every day. It makes me a little too opinionated, but I think this is what college is about. My CLFM professor said that you should leave college with more questions than you came here with. This is a very good point, especially since the new things I discover usually just lead to all sorts of confusion and reluctancy regarding what to do with what I find out. 

(For example, I have discovered that I do not get theological discussions. It makes no sense to me to have all these arguments about whether Jesus' blood and body are actually in the Eucharist or whether God predestined each of us to either Heaven or Hell before the Earth was created. I can understand why some people would hold these arguments as the most important part of their religion, but I'm finding out that my concept of Christianity is made up of a lot of parts of mystery and usually doesn't have any answers. Read Frederick Buechner and Madeleine L'Engle for more on this idea of Christianity.)

College is for extroverts; that's what I've been trying to cope with lately. The process of meeting new people every single semester and having to create brand new relationships with them is something that I just cannot get used to. I think I need a break from an American college campus; it's definitely time to study abroad. So what do you think: Greece, Lithuania, or France?

I really need a vacation.

In a sweater poorly knit

This happens to be who I am.

New Heavens for Old

Amy Powell

I am useless. 

What I do is nothing.

What I think has no savour.

There is an almanac between the windows:

It is of the year when I was born.

My fellows call to me to join them,

They shout for me, 

passing the house in a great wind of vermillion banners.

They are fresh and fulminant,

They are indecent and strut with the thought of it,

They laugh, and curse, and brawl,

And cheer a holocaust of "Who comes firsts!" at the iron fronts of the houses at the two edges of the street.

Young men with naked hearts jeering between iron house=fronts,

Young men with naked bodies beneath their clothes

Passionately conscious of them,

Ready to strip off their clothes,

Ready to strip off their customs, their usual routine,

Clamouring for the rawness of life,

In love with appetite,

Proclaiming it as a creed,

Worshipping youth,

Worshipping themselves.

They call for women and the women come,

They bare the whiteness of their lusts to the dead gaze of the old house-fronts,

They roar down the street like flame,

They explode upon the dead houses like new, sharp fire.

But I--

I arrange three roses in a Chinese vase:

A pink one,

A red one,

A yellow one.

A fuss over their arrangement.

Then I sit in a South window

And sip pale wine with a touch of hemlock in it,

And think of Winter nights,

And field-mice crossing and re-crossing

The spot which will be my grave.

Personal Relationship

These are the things that have been rolling around my head:


It's the cliche Christian American thing to say, "It's not a religion, it's a relationship." I'm not going to argue that statement. I actually do agree with it.

I do think that often we forget who our relationship is supposed to be with, though.

Yes, Jesus is our homeboy. He's the one we talk to about all our issues and he's the one we "fall in love" with during those mountaintop experiences.

But the whole point of Jesus is that he's human. We love the humanity in him. And he charged us to love the world.

So maybe the relationship we're supposed to be in shouldn't be just between ourselves and Jesus. Maybe it should be between the entire world and Jesus.

Maybe the key to improving our relationship with Jesus is improving our relationship with our neighbors. Maybe loving the world is just as important as loving God. Maybe the way we love God is entirely demonstrative.

These are just the things I'm thinking about right now.

Rheanna Explains It All

I'm at work and I sneeze. All I can think about is this episode of Clarissa Explains It All that I saw years and years ago. In this episode, the flu is going around and the title character is terrified of getting sick. So when she sneezes once, she explains that it's just a natural, uncaused thing. Then she sneezes again and she credits it to an undusted room. She sneezes a third time and decides that she must be sick.

I didn't just sneeze once. I sneezed FOUR TIMES. IN A ROW. Someone had better get me to a hospital STAT because Clarissa never explained what four sneezes mean and frankly, I'm worried.

In other news, "sneeze" is a funny word.

His good, pleasing, and perfect will

 

We talked about God's will in my Romans and Galatians class today, about how God's will isn't "footsteps in the snow" that we need to somehow need to find and follow, but a corridor with boundaries and lots of flexibility in terms of what exactly God wants us to do. This is ironic because I fell asleep last night while I was debating over this issue in my head, and I came to the same conclusion my professor presented to us today.

All of this brings me back to something my high school Apologetics teacher, Mr. Roedding said: "As long as you are striving to do God's will, you will not make a wrong decision." God doesn't have a set system of choices and options for us to make; He offers us free will. He gives us the space to make our own decisions, because just like a loving father, God trusts us to make good ones.

In our class today, we also talked about a verse I memorized years ago, probably for AWANA: "then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing, and perfect will." My professor argued that it isn't God's will that is "good, pleasing, and perfect"; God's will involves all that is "good, pleasing, and perfect". God is all about good decisions and He provides us with the resources we need to make those good decisions.

So what it comes down to is this: as long as we are striving to do what is "good, pleasing, and perfect", we will be doing exactly what God wants us to do, and so we will not be able to be "out of God's will". And this can be applied to jobs or picking the right college. It can even be used in deciding who to marry. (Yes, there is more than just one person that you are able to marry. God doesn't set us loose in a maze, blindfolded, and tell us to somehow find the person whose fingerprints match our own. He gives us some leeway in this case.)

God created us with the ability to make good decisions, and we should exercise this ability, rather than allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the fear of doing something that God does not approve of. 

How sweet it is

Easeful – relaxed.

Exquisite – great beauty and delicacy.
Is not she an exquisite creature? p. 70.

Maul – 1. to wound by scratching or tearing.
2. to handle or treat savagely or roughly.
He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands.

Flicker – 1. to shine or burn unsteadily or intermittently.
2. (of a feeling), to be briefly perceptible.
3. to make small, quick movements.

Spectral – of or like a spectra.
Spectrum: ‘image, apparition’ a band of colors produced by separation of the components of light by their different degrees of refraction, e.g. in a rainbow.

Dusk – the darker stages of twilight.
The fire light flickered on the wall and beyond the window a spectral dusk was gathering on the river.



This is what I'm doing for "work" now. I say "work" because it's not really. It's fun for an over-obsessive, perfectionist, wordprocessing freak like me.


I like words.

The Piercing

I’m looking at pictures of you, and
I don’t recognize the person I see.

I don’t recognize that smile, or that
hairstyle, or your sweatshirt, or the
way you do your make-up. When
did you become a stranger to me?

I’m confused by how it happened,
but I know it had to happen. We
aren’t kids anymore, and maybe
that’s all we had in common: just
a background, a story, and stories
can’t last forever. They have to have
some kind of ending. Is this ours?
Is this it? Are we no longer destined
to be friends for life?

Are you ready to let me go?

Maybe you already have.

From a while ago, but I'm feeling it now

save it for later

What happens when we grow up? What happens
when our beginnings have finally turned into the
middle, and we're no longer able to see down
that finnicky old tunnel that most people call life
and that sometimes involves sea lions and youth
pastors and sunsets that can never be erased from
the corners of your mind...? Some people fall, and
some people forget, and some people get lost in
the gigantic San Diego Zoos of life and are never
quite returned again. But when you look at what the
purpose is, at what should be pushing us forward
into this new "epoch" of our life, maybe they were
lost for a good cause. Because remembering them
is almost as good as really being with them.

Right?

Just a thought

Someday, I would like to live on Languid Lane.