What I Want

I'm all jumbled up right now, so in an effort to untangle, here's a list of the things I want in order of priority and importance:

1. I want to see God's family grow both in depth and in size.

2. I want my own family to grow, starting with a wife. (Sadly, this one has been battling for "want list" position lately...)

3. I want better fellowship with Christ-followers my own age. Nay, I'll go one better. I crave it.

4. I want a car that I don't have to repair frequently. Ironically, unlike numbers 1 and 2, my ideal answer to this prayer would say anything BUT "family".

5. I want a good night's sleep. Please.

TUESDAYS

What IS it about Tuesdays? Lately, I've been irrationally angry in a big way on Tuesdays. Something about having to work a short shift in the evening after a typically long day at the church... For some reason, stress gets me on Tuesdays more than other days of the week. AGH.

Potluck Bum

I am officially a potluck bum- I brought nothing, and ate EVERYTHING. It was delicious.

Scared

Promised my brother I'd post, so here it is...

Played music for another wedding. I absolutely, positively LOVE/HATE weddings.... for serious. It was fun to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while, and I am unreservedly happy for the two lovebirds, but nonetheless, this wedding was no exception to my general feelings towards nuptial celebrations. The current working theory is that I'm both of two things:

1. A hopeless romantic.

2. Crazy lonely.

Ordinarily, I'm against whiny blog posts, so I've tried to couch my feelings in analytical language. There are a myriad of questions floating around in my head pertaining to all this... or maybe "floating" was a less-than-accurate word choice. They're at a full boil, more like. Right now, however, I'm taking the brain pan off the hot plate.

Time

Time feels like a dog that paces at my side, sometimes stopping to sniff something-or-other, sometimes yanking my arm out of the socket as it drives forward. Just when I begin to think I know which end of the leash I'm on, it growls at me, reminding me that it answers to no man. We walk through strange and wonderful landscapes past strange and wonderful people, and it slowly dawns on me that we do, in fact, have a destination. Unlike walks with most dogs, this walk doesn't end where it began- or if it does, nothing looks the same to me anymore.

Wait... I was a teacher?

A former student of mine had the audacity to mock me on a certain social website just now. She implied very strongly that I was lazy when I graded students' assignments, because they would write ridiculous things on them and I wouldn't catch them. This irks me for two reasons, really:

1. I poured my heart and soul into that job. I cared deeply for those students.

2. She was right, after a fashion.

I'm realizing that there are certain aspects of teaching 6th graders at which I was simply not skilled, despite working hard to overcome these deficiencies. I lost patience often, I wasn't as vigilant as I should have been in grading, I didn't always come up with the most effective or imaginative lesson plans, I missed countless opportunities to demonstrate Christ to students and to love them well... Maybe I had to come through it and look at it from hindsight to see it properly. Regardless, I intend to learn from the experience now, even as I sought to learn from it then. But why did I have to hear about it from some disrespectful, incredibly insightful punk kid?

In A Funk

Ugh... why am I in such a funk today? It's like my heart has declared war on the rest of me, and my head can't muster the resources to fight back. I had to run away from people at church this morning, just to keep from saying things to them that I know I'd regret. Probably offended some people, made them feel like I was blowing them off, but honestly it was damage control. When I get in these moods, I'm not fit for human companionship- I can't trust myself to be myself. Or maybe I'm a little too "myself" when I'm like this... makes me feel like some sort of emotional werewolf. Is this normal? Is it spiritual warfare, like some not-so-subtle attack of Satan? Is it some unmet, unreasonable expectation or need on which I just can't seem to put my finger? Stress that I haven't really vented out...? A weird, sideways manifestation of loneliness? Maybe some of each of those. Thank You, Lord, for Your grace in times like these!

CAN vs. SHOULD

I can take my pants off in public. I can jump off a tall building. I can eat an entire cake in one sitting. Will I do any of these things? Of course not, for various and sundry excellent reasons! Each of these activities is widely agreed upon as being unwise. Most people agree that just because one has the ability to do something does NOT mean one should do it... so why don't we take this into account when we are deciding upon the positive things in life instead of merely the things that can get us jail time, illness, or worse? Why does this principle only give us pause when the consequences are negative? For example, I can learn to speak Farsi. I can tell everyone I meet that I love them. I can get a job offer for the most amazing, best paying job ever, and I can take that job. But should I? My point is this- it isn't safe to assume that even a present opportunity that seems like a dream come true is the RIGHT opportunity. Sometimes God gives us the chance to choose between His plan and ours... and sometimes our plan looks much, much better on the surface. God tells us that "... every good and perfect gift is from above," but our definition of "good and perfect" often strays from His. Please don't misunderstand- I'm not suggesting we should be constantly situationally paralyzed in life, passing on what God puts in front of us so we won't miss the real gravy train. However, I am certainly suggesting that GOOD can crowd out GREAT, sometimes. For myself, I've spent some time leaning on my own understanding recently, and take it from me- it's a very shaky prop.

Small Ears

I've been thinking a lot about how to respond to criticism, both in personal and professional arenas. My cousin Tim wrote an insightful blog post that boiled people's motivation for criticism down to two things: the truly inappropriate, and the merely unexpected. For example, when I taught 6th graders, I once assigned a controversial "journal assignment": a two-page, thought-provoking, prompted creative writing piece on abortion. I got a whole spectrum of responses from parents, ranging from feelings that it was inappropriate to have 6th graders being made to think about abortion, all the way to gratefulness for providing an opportunity for parents to discuss abortion with their kids. And there were certainly some who were both surprised and uncertain about whether these kids were ready for an assignment like that. I had to think hard about whether the assignment itself was actually and truly inappropriate, or if people simply needed to get used to the idea of kids writing about such a weighty topic. And either way, I needed to learn how to better respond to people when they weren't happy with me. When a student told me he hated me and thought I was a terrible teacher, I had a choice whether to respond with arrogance, with people-pleasing fear, or with God-honoring humility.

And this choice has continued into my new job as a worship director... there are very often people who are not happy with me, and I very often have to listen to criticism that I feel is groundless or delivered from an immature viewpoint. I've been challenged to keep in mind that the bottom line of my passion for worship is rooted in loving God, which means loving people- and if I want to love people, I need to look deeper. People may lack perspective, they may not care about the bigger picture, they may be selfish and petty and small. I've come to realize that small people need to be listened to with small ears- and a big heart. I have to look past their smallness to the heart that God loves, I have to listen more to how they feel and less to what they say, and I have to value them as people God loves even as I balance their opinion against my calling to lead worship. It's difficult, sometimes, not to take the criticism personally... but the more my identity is rooted in Christ, the more I'm able to see that whether the criticism is based in something inappropriate that I do have some control over or a change that needed to be made that a person is not yet comfortable with, I can draw back into His Spirit and respond to HIM rather than circumstance. "He is my rock, my strength, my shield..." If I'm honestly and in all reality pursuing His will, enacting His calling in my life... then why should a little public opinion shake me? What doesn't kill me, God will use to grow me- and maybe even what DOES kill me. :) 

Now I'm bracing myself, because I have a hunch that God does not have me thinking about all this for no reason- I feel as though I'm being prepared for something. Criticism is sometimes good, but for me, it has never been what I would call easy. I rest, yet again, in God's faithfulness.

Straight Jacket

There's a freedom in not being busy, because no one urgently needs you for anything. No one needs you to show up prepared, to tell them what's going on or what they ought to do; no one needs you to be there for them, eat meals with them, listen to them. Someone said, "Business is the enemy of spiritual growth," but I say it can be an incredible outlet for that very spiritual growth to happen. Just depends on WHY you're busy and WHAT you're busy with, I guess. When you aren't busy, you're at a crossroads. Really, truly, it's just you and God, and that's a beautiful, hard thing. I feel as though the world is spinning around at a million miles an hour, and God and I are stuck in this immovable, padded cell together- except God's not stuck. He's there with me because He wants to be, because He promised He'd never leave. I'm the one in the self-imposed straight jacket, and I'm trying to figure out why I put it on myself in the first place. All these expectations of what my life is supposed to be like... how much money I'm supposed to have, the certain kind of friends that make me feel a certain kind of way, never being lonely or bored or unsatisfied, and God is saying LET GO. "I'd take that nice, comfortable straight jacket off of you in a heartbeat, if you'd let Me," He says again and again, but still I hang on to it, like I'd get cold without it, or there's some reason other than selfish pride that I need it. Truth is, I don't need life to look like what I want it to look like- I just need to trust that what He wants it to look like is better. I don't need to be busy or comfortable to be fulfilled- I just need to lean into God, allowing Him to work even when I'm tempted to struggle, to tighten the "straight jacket of selfish expectations" right back up. His ways are higher, His wisdom is only given to me in small measure, His plans for me are wildly exciting, and His love for me blows my mind. He wants to enjoy FREEDOM with me. All I can say is, right now, I'm sick of eating alone. :)

Biting People

Got a job working for a company that does residential support for the developmentally disabled. The client I've been tasked to work with bit me today, during my very first "training session". BIT ME. Strangely enough, it wasn't that weird. He just walked up and took a chomp out of my shoulder. Didn't break skin, but it hurt like hell. I'm told he was in a weird mood, hard to predict today, and he's kinda violent sometimes. I'm also told that he gives "love nips" sometimes... maybe he got carried away. Other than the bite, he actually seemed to like me. He and I had a little chat, wherein I told him that it hurt when he bit me, and would he please not do that in the future? He tried again about 4 times, but each time I reminded him that he had promised not to bite me, and he backed off. It didn't help that I felt like biting people today, myself.

Judgmental or discerning?

So, there's this guy in my worship ministry at the church who only shows up when he is asked to drum. He makes no effort to develop relationship with anyone else there, he leaves early from rehearsals, and he responds in very immature ways when I try to address my concern with this trend. The other day he said to me, "Am I still allowed to drum if I haven't been to church in a while?" and I didn't really know how to respond. I told him no, he is welcome to drum, but he is still encouraged to build relationships, to make Living Water his home church, to "plug in" further, to grow alongside the rest of the "family" there at the church. My questions is this- am I being judgmental because I want him to actually act like he cares about people and not just drumming? Is it reasonable to assume that if he is going to be helping to lead others in worship, there would be obvious evidence of spiritual growth and compassion towards others in his life? And where do I draw the line and say he can't join us anymore when he's asked to drum...? Tough one. He obvious thinks I'm a judgmental prick, but all I'm really trying to do is my job.

Fact or Fiction?

I've been reading too many stories recently, and it's got me thinking. Are these fantasies as good as reality? Is "good" the best way to compare them, or is "right" a better measure? They certainly can FEEL better, because they can have satisfying endings, they can appeal to the adventurer and the warrior-protector in me, they can "fulfill" my selfish dreams in the work of a moment or the flip of a page... and the list goes on. And I've concluded this: We can learn from a tale, but we cannot LIVE from it.

"Hallelujah, He has found me-

The One my soul so long has craved!

Jesus satisfies all my longings,

By His blood I now am saved."

~Clara T. Williams