pause the music for this one.

well hey, i'm talking, singing, posting videos on my blog now too, taking advantage of technology. the words may not lign up with my mouth, though. and i'm not that good at singing!  haha, it's funny when i sing flat.  mais, voila. :)

run a way

i'm staying at rodney's this weekend. he told me i should write in here more often, i'm linked on his homepage and he said that i don't write in here enough. and that there's nowhere for people to leave comments.

me and quinn made guacamole tonight and then watched ghost world. i read the graphic novel in high school and i remember liking it but i forgot the plot. i'm glad i knew it was a comic book while i was watching the movie.

it didn't really solve anything in the end. the main character, enid, is cynical of everything and can't stick with anything. my brother is writing an article about loneliness and how technology and things make it so we never have to be alone.

tonight he went to this 'party' because he found a connection to follow this girl around, who's a celebrity kind of. she has reached the max capacity for facebook friends (5000!), has like 120 myspace friend requests a day, and if she's not being bugged on her cellphone then her dog needs walking or her boyfriend is with her. she's a hip hop musician or something.

in the movie, enid says to seymour (steve buscemi) that she should just move in with him, that her fantasy has always been to just leave where she is, to disappear, and she invites him.

i think i'm a city girl but i feel alone in the city, i feel like i want to run away and live in the country and have a farm and have sheeps and goats and knit all day long and read some good books and listen to vinyls. i kind of want to just forget all of my responsibilities. kind of like enid. nothing satisfied her. there's a scene where seymour is lying beside her, his arms around her and even though she's alone in the end, there's these glimpses of togetherness.

i see that in people here, people everywhere. people joining together in their loneliness.

i read this quote today, from this magazine andrew told me about called 'geez', it was ten bucks but totally worth it; adless, challenging, amazing. here is the quote:

As Robert Inchausti, author of Subversive Orthodoxy, says, "humans are at bottom irrational, driven not by self-interest but by an insatiable desire to matter."

my blog isn't fancy, rodney! i don't know html. but i asked quinn today, what gives you deep joy?
and she answered, and then asked me, and i said that it gives me a deep joy to connect the dots. to understand. so i'm connecting the dots this weekend, thinking, and seeing all the cool stylish people in toronto, and feeling simultaneously at home and yet alien here.

i got some nice shoes, today. and i went into a store where they had crazy instruments, a double-necked acoustic guitar that was teal, the top neck was bass and the bottom was acoustic guitar. it was crazy.

i hope rodney had a good time at that party, my breath smells like garlic because of the guacamole, but it was really good. i'm glad i'm alive today even though i feel like running away. oh, and i didn't fall asleep at all.

zzz

oh, i am really tired.

i went to sleep around 2:30 last night after being at 135 huron st. and talking about romans 2:12 and god's love etc. i was happy because after we prayed i was playing around on kristen's guitar singing arlan the song 'something' and some welcome wagon. and then mike played some nice jazz.


it was interesting, i liked it when jon talked about the people who are like, "i don't drink coca-cola .... and i wear organic pants." i like being enironmentally aware but i hope i never become pretentious.


then i got woken up at 8:30 this morning by the squirrels in the wall, they were scratching and making noise, and then mike was making noise downstairs, and i remember him saying last night that he had to wake up at 7:45 today. which sucks because he was at 135 huron last night, too, so he went to sleep as late as me.

if i ever wake up in the morning and have any conscious thought i find i can't fall back asleep.

at least, walking home today i saw a butterfly, which really made me happy because i was just telling alicia the other day that butterflies mean that spring is really here. which is awesome. i'm feeling weird a bit right now, but really excited for the weekend, excited to go shopping with quin and sit beside my brother tonight at the gala our school is playing at in toronto and maybe fall asleep because i can't sit still in darkness for three hours and not feel tired.


i'm going to have a small nap!

perfect

something my friend said to my other friend yesterday night:

i cannot wait to see who you're going to date or marry. whoever it is, is going to be amazing, because i respect you so much, and love you so much. you're just so different. the guy who's going to deserve you will need to be just ... ah.

i wish i could put inflection and intonation in writing. this isn't a verbatim quote, but the end ah is the one of those ah's where you're at a loss for words because there just aren't words to express what you're saying -- what you're trying to say has so much weight that there aren't words to wrap around it.


i'm so struck! so struck, lately by the fact that the people in my life who are dating or married -- and it is clear that god is blessing the relationship because it's healthy and open and surrounded by community -- have found someone that is perfect for them. not many things in life are perfect. but you just see these two people together and you're like, i can't see them with anyone else in the world. it's cute when they resemble each other. it reminds me of 101 dalmations.



i've forgotten this. or i'm just learning it for the first time. something like that. i don't remind myself that that is the way god sees me, and that is the way i need to see myself.

that whoever is going to date me, and end up marrying me, is going to be not only amazing, and of high standard, but perfect for me. it sounds potentially objectifying and arrogant, but it's irony at it's finest.

because, by objectifying this person, out there in the world, in the way i normally do, it ends up so that i am seemingly over-valuing this concept of finding someone to spend my life with. wanting it so much that i worry and feel unhappy. but what i'm actually doing is devaluing myself and the plans that i believe and know that god has for me because i don't trust that
a) something is actually going to come along (as in, i feel like i'll be alone for ever sometimes)
and b) that that something is going to be amazing.

isn't that what everyone wants?

but it's so hard. it takes discipline to remind ourselves of this once we know this, or are made aware of this.

i want to value myself. see the worth i am.

rob bell, from the book 'sex god':

You don't need a man by your side to validate you as a woman. You already are loved and valued. You're good enough exactly as you are. Do you believe this? Because it's true. You have limitless worth and value. If you embrace this truth, it will affect every area of life, especially your relationship with men.

You are worth dying for.

Your worth does not come from your body, your mind, your work, what you produce, what you put out, how much money you make. Your worth does not come from whether or not you have a man. Your worth does not come from whether or not men notice you. You have inestimable worth that comes from your creator.

You will continue to be tempted in a thousand different ways not to believe this. The temptation will be to go searching for your worth and validity from places other than your creator.

Especially from men.

But you don't have to give yourself away to earn a man's love. You're better than that. You're already loved.

When you give too much of yourself away too quickly, when you show too much skin, you're not being true to yourself. When you dress to show us everything, then in some sense we have all shared in it, or at least been exposed to it. There is a mystery to you, infinite depth and endless complexity.

Your strength is a beautiful thing. And when you live in it, when you carry yourself with the honor and dignity that are yours, it forces the men around you to relate to you on more than just a flesh level.

You are worth dying for.

etc. etc.

perfect.

oh wait

at the market

spanish busker, to me:

"i have a friend who looks like you.

her name is janet."

this may come as a far cry from both my last posts regarding this subject and my general outlook on things, but i don't believe it is unhealthy to express doubt or have doubts themselves. i don't want these doubts nesting in my hair, though.

i've been thinking very much lately about how the lack of necessity of spirituality in others people's lives impacts its necessity and benefit in my own.

i have truly experienced such freedom in my own life from what i believe to be unconditional love. in my own life, i feel that growing up, i had very poor representations of love. a father who really shouldn't have been a parent, a foster mother that probably needed to do some healing of her own. it's a math equation: people who are emotionally, relationally and spiritually thirsty (they all go hand in hand) raise children who are the same.

i was just about to compare myself and my story to those around me who have had what it seems the opposite to me, but no division needs to be made. we've all had weird things happen in our lives and things that are missing which should be there, even if everything seems okay.

what i'm getting at is, in my own life there has been a very vivid need for god - for unconditional love. for something that brings me freedom.

rob bell says "often freedom is seen as the ability to do whatever you want. but freedom isn't being able to have whatever we crave. freedom is going without whatever we crave and being fine with it."

having become a christian in the past few years, i have seen myself grow and change so so much and i thank god for it. having established that it's my (foster) parents now, david and laura, who have greatly shaped who i am, and who have truly shown me unconditional love, i am (not for the first time) considering
if a) why i need god to show me love if my it's my parents who have done it
and b) i ca n 't f inis h typ i ng t h is

as i type a litle bit, read it and then erase it, i'm answering all of my questions in my head. if i were having a conversation in real life, whoever i would've been talking to would've heard all of my started-but-never-finished-sentences. ah, the beauty of writing. (and typing.)

one of the hallmarks of puting your faith in god and christ is that of the believer becoming childlike.

i come to these places sometimes, where i want the answers to everything, at all times, the second i ask them. technology shows us how obsessed we are with getting knowledge. wikipedia. i will wikipedia anything i'm curious about, read about it, and then be satisfied.

i tried to read the wikipedia article about unconditional love today, and it made me feel confused.

haha - this is not going to be a very satisfying entry, i'm afraid. i wish i could write all of the things i think about this freedom but it just doesn't do it justice. to write about it, at least in the form of a blog post, is to intellectualize it. it's just words on a screen. you can't intellectualize something that is, in its very essence, something metaphysical and not empirical.

the reasoning for all of this is one of the things about becoming christian, as you may have all noticed, is that thing we call sharing our faith. evangelizing. that word has a lot of weight, to me. like anything, if done just for the sake of itself, it can become mindless and damaging. but not many things are inherently wrong. (ie. sex.)

it's pretty much comparable to anyone who's found a really good brand of, say, cream cheese, and absolutely loving it, and wanting to share it with people around them.

"hey, have you tried this cream cheese? it's so tasty! i love putting it on twelve-grain bagels."

that's pretty much what christians are doing when they go on about god. i guess they tend to do it more than people of other reliigons and sets of beliefs.

what i've found myself lately doing, is talking about god so much and getting myself into intellectual discussions about god and the need for god, and the need to worship and blah blah blah, that i'm losing sight of it. it's true that everyone needs to find it on their own, and in their own way.

i had this conversation with a bunch of my friends the other day and my friend was expressing that he just doesn't see a need for god. this makes sense. he's a very rational person. a very passionate, but rational person. i hope this doesn't sound judgmental at all, but from my point of view, for him a need for god hasn't been awakened yet. i'm trying to make sense of how someone can learn everything about god and see that it is good and still not choose to follow it themselves, to dive in.

i'm thinking, and in my head, there are a few things that people struggle with that show a deeper yearning:

-questions about purpose, ie. why i am alive? what is the purpose of my life? what am i going to end up doing vocationally?
-questions about self-esteem, ie. am i lovable? if he stopped having sex with me would he still like me?, if she really knew me would she like me?

even questions about the world as a whole, the bigger picture, philosophical questions and not just personal things that we think about.

to hyper-intellectualize it, i guess if no one has ever needed to ask these questions, then of course a need for god wouldn't arise. if someone has been given pretty much everything they need, and they had good parents and a good upbringing, and they are relatively happy, then a need for god wouldn't arise. is that too logical? i'm trying to understand other people and therefore accept them i think.


what i want to do is challenge people. and if someone is humble enough to acknowledge that they are asking these questions, show them the freedom i have found.

the paradox of hospitality

my dear friend janessa gave me a book of "lenten" devotions and i was hesitant at first, but i've been reading it every day (i gave up sugar for lent!) and it's actually amazing. this one is from last saturday; it's so beautiful.

this is what it says

Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but open a wide spectrum of options for choice and commitment. It is not an educated intimidation with good books, good stories and good works, but the liberation of fearful hearts so that words can find roots and bear ample fruit. It is not a method of making our God and our way into the criteria of happiness, but the opening of an opportunity to others to find their God and their way. The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations.

just like, read it again.

"it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free."

hospitality is not convincing someone that they need to do something (ie. convert to christianity) in order to be free, but realize their freedom already. i think a lot of what inhibits us (as humans) from finding the freedom we seek is something that we need overcome internally, rather than externally. like, god is already in us - maybe that's why so often people feel like any god they can find would be something found within themselves. because a god is already in them.
the scary thing, then i guess, is how easy it is to value humanity just for the sake of humanity and disregard a "higher power" called god. to see such value in human creation, human innovation, and the human experience. and not see how we are created in god's image and the insane amount of joy that can be derived from realizing that all beauty and truth we seek can be only be sought if it is something we have, to some degree, already found.


my friend kristen is making this gift for his girlfriend and wrote this on a piece of fabric for her. it's a verse from "the message" translation of the bible:

Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

thanks for reading my blog, sarah.