Confession

Do you ever have one of those days where you are walking around thinking that you just look awesome? Your internal mirror shows this picture of a girl with that perfectly effortless messy hair, glowing complexion and perfect outfit. But then you get home and look in a mirror, or catch your reflection in a window, or worse, see a picture several days later, and realize your hair is actually doing some weird crinkly thing, there is a pimple on your chin the size of Texas, and oh look, your t-shirt has been on inside out all day. For me, there is no worse blow to my self esteem than having my internal mirror and the the real mirror show me two different pictures; and the more exaggerated my imagination improves the reality of my image, the worse the reality check feels when it plunges your self esteem level into the ground.

Have you ever had a day like that? Its not a good feeling is it? The other day though, I experienced this same feeling in a spiritual way. My own internal compass has been telling me one thing, and the reality has turned out to be drastically and painfully different.

Perceived grievances may be one of the most dangerous attacks on a relationship. When your selfishness and insistence on your own way causes you to see the other person as purposefully keeping you from what you want, it causes you to feel like the victim while projecting your own selfishness on the other person. Lately, I have been masking my own selfishness in this idea that I am actually being incredibly selfless. I imagine that by giving up the things I want, that I am being this great martyr for all the things that I deserve. But that mentality was actually one of the most selfish things that I could have been thinking. Who am I to think that I deserve anything? Why is it that I am the one who thinks I have to be right, that I am the one who ought to have my way, have things that I want? But I have been pushing down this feeling of victimization and letting it build up and up until a wake up call brought my “selfless” ego crashing down.

That wake up call came in the pained look on the face of the man I love when I so maturely confronted him about his selfishness. The more I talked and the more pained he looked, the louder this little voice got in my head, 'are you sure that you aren't the selfish one, Lex?' All of a sudden, it was like this movie reel started playing in my head, watching all these situations that I had previously seen as times when I had been hurt or ignored or blown off, and saw them not only from the other side, but from an objective, or even heavenward, perspective and the shattering realization was that I had been the perpetrator of pain, and not the victim of it. I had been the one passive-aggressively giving up one thing to get another, playing on the guilt and selflessness of another, and ultimately feeling more and more like a martyr when in fact, I hadn't sacrificed anything. When that mirror got switched on me, and I finally saw how I was truly acting and not how I thought I was acting, I was devastated. I had been walking around thinking that there was this halo over my head, when in fact I had dropped my halo on the ground and stomped on it a few months back.

I never realized the connection to selfishness and pride before this experience. Selfishness, though, is only thinking that you are the most deserving person in whatever given situation, and that my friends, is pride. My ability to always think that I know best,that I have all the answers, and that I should get what I want, is a nasty concoction of selfishness and pride, and it is seriously damaging to relationships. That pride has also gotten in the way of me realizing that there is something I need to change. It made me turn all my selfishness onto someone else, because it takes so much less humility to point the finger at some one else than to admit that you are the one at fault. But the longer you allow that to be your mentality the more its going to hurt when you realize that you are the one causing problems, and it might be too late to fix them at that point.

The higher you think you are, the more painful the fall back to reality, no?

In 1 Corinthians 13, there is this one little gem in the packed passage, that I always seem to miss, and when I see it again, it always astounds me. Love does not insist on its own way. Love is not only not selfish, it is truly selfless and truly humble. Love does not think it knows the right way to do things and insist that it is always right, love does not think that it knows all the answers, that it deserves to have the things it wants. Love is gracious, and love does not hold on to that feeling of being wronged, especially when it hasn't been wronged. In love, there is no grievance, perceived or otherwise. And if I can learn to act like that, maybe I will finally understand true selflessness.

Poetry

I  Don't Know How to Tell You

You know I love you, right?
But if I'm honest, it's exhausting.
"Two peas in a pod?"
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Or maybe we are just too alike,
two magnets with the same poles
holding our thoughts at arms length.
You can try to forces it,
until our strength gives out,
miscommunicate,
and one of us escapes,
bent.

I love poetry. I wish I took the time to read and write it more. For some reason, poetry only comes to me when there is no other way to say something. It comes when I am tired, hurt or sad and feel like there is no other way to say what I feel. For that reason, the poems I do write are incredibly personal and they usually end up hidden away in a journal somewhere. I want to start changing that, I think. I want to have the courage to start sharing more of my heart through my writing. Whether through poetry, or through stories, or just through my many thoughts and musings here on this blog. But I need to stop talking about it and start doing something about it. I need to start writing.

Sister

My little sister makes me cry all the time. Not because she pinches me or pulls my hair or steals my doll…

She makes me cry because she is beautiful inside and out. She makes me cry because of all the difficult things she has overcome in her life and because she is stronger for it. She makes me cry simply because more than anyone I know she knows exactly who she is and what God made her to do, and she does it. She does it with reckless abandon, despite her fears and doubts.  Watching her perform the songs of her soul with a voice straight from heaven, I get goose bumps… and I usually cry. Nowhere else do I see heaven touch earth in the way it does when my sister is doing what she was created to do, and totally rocking it!

I have always envied people like my sister. Those people who know from a young age exactly what they were meant to do, and whose talents match up with their passions in such a way to make that possible. I envy the confidence that comes with that knowledge because I have always felt more like a “Jill of all trades” and a master of none. I have changed my mind so many times about what I want to be when I “grow up”, and nothing seems to stick. I have innumerable interests and hobbies and things that bring me joy. I’ll get really excited, and almost compulsive, about some new hobby for a couple days, get together all the things I need, research everything about it, and talk about it to anyone who will listen. But within a couple days I’ll forget about it, lose interest and move on to the next thing. Sometimes I still feel like I’m stuck in that little kid stage where you tell your patents you want to be a firefighter-ballerina-veterinarian-doctor in space! but change your mind the next day and decide you are going to be a princess in a tower that saves the world with your super powers. Sometimes I feel like I need to grow up and settle on one thing that I am going to “be” and stop changing my mind every two seconds.

But I also realize that maybe my imagination and love of so many different things is just a part of loving life. Maybe it’s what has made me always love stories, both reading and telling them. Maybe I am not actually that far off from where I want to be, from who I want to be, and that my versatility is part of who I am, is what makes me what I am. I don’t need to know who I am going to be, I need to just be who I am.

And in the end it’s not about me anyways. God has painstakingly gifted me to be this person. He has a reason for giving me all the loves and joys I find in so many different areas of life. He has a purpose for this “Jill of all trades” just as much as there is a plan for those lucky enough to have confidence in who they were created to be and what they were meant to do.  

I love watching my sister shine at who she is, and I think that I have learned from her how to embrace being who you are and rocking at it. Both of us have a beautiful future ahead of us, doing just what we were meant to do. I cannot wait to see where God takes us in the next few years. It’s going to be a amazing, whatever it is.

I love you, sissy. Thank you for teaching me everything you have about loving life and living it to the fullest. You mean the world to me. I am so proud of you. Love, Lou.

Created.

 God does not make mistakes.

Do I actually believe that? That all the pain and suffering in the world wasn’t a mistake? Wouldn’t it be better if it was?

What about children born with disabilities? Malformed, distorted, or even just premature… it doesn’t sound like “fearfully and wonderfully made” does it?

What about someone “born in the wrong body”…. Is that a mistake? Did God just accidentally hit the wrong switch, or forget to match the outside with the inside? Accidentally put a female mind in a male body, and left them to fix the mistake with unfulfilling surgeries and awkward relationships? Do we have a right to change that decision, treat it as a medical malformation, or is there something more important behind it?

“Male and female He created them.” Is there something else in between? The ability to chose and change according to our own will. Is there a reason for the distinction of the sexes or was it just some flippant decision of the Man Upstairs?

Is gender a prison, or a decision?

I made a friend this week who used to be a woman. He is a man now; although not legally, or even physically, but for all intensive purposes he is male. If you passed him the on the street, you wouldn’t even give him a second glance, unless of course it was to check him out as he walked away. He says he always remembers that something on his insides did not match his outsides, and if you were to ask him when he actually realized he was transgender, he would fire back, “Well, when did you know you were straight?”

Why is being gay a decision, a realization, while being straight is a normality?

“I don’t think you should love someone, or even be attracted to them, based on what’s between their legs.” He calls it poly-amorous; able to love anyone and everyone.

I am taken aback by the selflessness of this man. He looks at every opportunity as a way that he can make the people around him most comfortable, even complete strangers and even to his own pain. Life is uncomfortable when you appear to be a different gender than you are. When it is illegal to use the Men’s restroom, but your outward appearance makes you an instant threat in the Women’s.

And yet I struggle with the seeming contradictions in his life. He is adamant that he is male, while ten weeks pregnant with a child created “the good old fashioned way”- by a gay friend who was not thrown off by the masculine appearance of his “play partner”. Not willing to be labeled “gay” or “lesbian”, but also not wanting to be called “straight”. Not sure if he believes in God, but claims “How do you know that this is not God’s plan for me?” Certain of his love and deep care for his domestic partner, whom he lovingly calls his wife, while unashamedly claiming that they are free in the marriage to engage in sexual play, and even casual relationships with whomever strike their fancy. Watching his wife cringe at this statement though, I don’t believe for a second that she doesn’t understand a hint of the jealousy and discontent that comes with a cheating husband. 

Somehow, these things add up to even more questions and less answers. At least, I know I have questions…

I don’t know what to say to someone who asks me why they were not allowed to be in the body they wanted. Why do they have to change what they were created as, in order to be who they are? Were they a mistake?

Is there a reason that we have the bodies we are born with, or is it just chance? Why do we place so much stock in our physical appearance? Is who we are on the outside more important than what we know but cannot show to be true?

I believe in the power of creation, that it goes beyond the things we can see and inundates all that we are. Changing who God created us to be feels like a slap in His face. “No, I don’t want to be this, I want to be that.” Doesn’t it say “You made me wrong, you messed me up, and I am going to fix it now”? This attitude claims that gender is decision. It’s not something that defines me, but that I can change or even disregard if I chose to. 

I have to believe in a God who does not make mistakes. Otherwise, He is nothing more than a glorified human and not worthy to be worshiped. I choose to view the world through this lens; “everything is either a call for love or an expression of love.” I don’t have the answers. I don’t know how God is going to make this right in the end, but I do know this. First, God created us to love and be loved. Everyone needs to be loved, and everything they do is either an attempt to ask for that love, or a way to try and show that love. It may not always transfer well, be understood or communicated clearly, but it is a desire to be loved or to love. And also, that God loves. Perfectly. Completely. Unconditionally. To me it doesn’t make sense, but I know with all my heart that He does not make mistakes. Somehow in the end, He will make all things right and new and beautiful. 

God does not make mistakes. He makes broken things beautiful. He makes old things new. He makes wretches His treasure. He makes people who were made to be loved. He makes all things right in the end.