You Can't Take the Sky from Me

I was thinking this morning about the symbols of freedom that we use every day. The cliched American flag and Eagle have been flipped in meaning, to a certain extent, by the social movements of the 70's and the overall dissilusionment of my generation. I also thought more generally of symbols that people choose personally. Some people may see freedom as a motorcycle and an open road, while others see it as a camper or a sailboat. Often freedom is a mode of transportation, taking us from here to there, from a place of confinement to a place of release. Many people, whether they acknowledge it or not, think of money as a type of freedom. Freedom from debt, from hunger, from want. Jesus warns us that the very thing that we think is freedom, however, can actually trap us. We cannot serve two masters, and money is a hard master. I admit that I slip into that trap quite often. If only I had more money, I wouldn't worry about anything. Yeah, except I would worry about losing the money. Trust is a place that lacks condition, I've learned. The best place to be to trust is not a place of security but a place of utter helplessness. Last week I experienced that peace which passes understanding briefly and I pray that God would restore me to that place. It is a place of such total desperation that you let go of everything and God gladly takes it up. It seems hard to imagine when you haven't lived it, but believe me, it was beautiful. The trick we Americans have to learn is not to be self-sufficient but to instead be so dependant on God that all our stuff is no longer important.
Everybody has holes in their hearts, lack that has yet to be filled. If we did not, there would be no room for God. I thought that the lack had to be filled by external provision. I lack love; God should send me friends, I am afraid; God should send me someone to guard me. Not at all true, in reality where I lack, God wants to pour himself inside. It's as if my life is a jigsaw puzzle missing most of the pieces. I try to push the pieces in to fill the holes, but they never fit right. God fills the holes better than anything I can try to push in because he pours Himself in to fill the mould. He's the only one who's faithful to me. I suppose that's freedom.

Good Monsters

God sat me down today and told me everything was going to be OK.
I said, "But God, you have no idea what I'm up against."
He smiled, "Oh, I think I have an inkling."
I shook my head and showed him my bank account, my debt and my empty wallet.
He said, "I give you your food in proper time, I open my hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. I am showing you how to trust me."
I gave him a look of forbearing, "Oh really? For your information, being unemployed is an incredibly humiliating experience."
"Yes, but I uphold all those who fall." He touched my chin and raised my eyes to meet His, "and I lift up all who are bowed down. I have not abandoned you in this."
I stood up, jerking away from His grasp. "Really? Because I just don't see you in this. What's the point of it all?"
He looked at me gently and reached out His hand. "I love you. Would you even be talking to me if everything was going perfectly? I am near all who call out to me and I will fulfill your desires. I hear you and I will save you. In fact, I already have."
"I'm sorry." I wrap my fist around his thumb, "I'm just not very good at this whole love thing, and how can I trust someone who I don't know how to love?"
"I'm quite good at the whole love thing, myself." His eyes twinkle, "Let me show you how."

Psalm 145: 13-21

I Don't Wanna Be Alone

I've spent the past two days on the computer applying for jobs. What ever happened to the old fashioned walk-in-and-pick-up-an-application method? Go figure, but I don't think that I'm alone in this process. It seems to be a post college trend. What I don't get are the people who have bypassed the process altogether. I was looking at some facebook pictures of some friends who have gotten married recently, or who have just had babies, or who have stellar jobs already.
Not so with me.
Maybe that's because I'm stubbornly refusing to go straight to grad school, but I don't think so. No, I think that all of what's happening now is natural and normal and I have to keep telling myself that. I wish that there was something in my resume that made me invaluable, that made employers fall over each other to offer me a job, but don't we all? Isn't it the goal of going to college and getting a degree that it makes you more highly qualified for great positions?
But if I had some sort of magical resume, then I would have no reason to trust when God says in the psalms that a war horse is no guarantee for victory in battle. In other words, when things seem uncertain or just plain out there, that's where God fits in. God has led me to Chicago, I still believe that, and He will show me the point soon. He will show me.

I'm trying to be alright with this process, but honestly I'm tired of waiting and it's all very disheartening. More than anything else, I'll be glad for when I move in permanently and my roommates arrive. The song by Good Charlotte was on the radio earlier and it perfectly described everything I was feeling at the moment. "I don't wanna be alone, I don't wanna be alone." Where did the community go? Where did my friends go? Is this the way it always works, to go to college for some undetermined amount of time, meet some people, and then say goodbye and move on to other people, or worse, lonliness? I hope not.

The world keeps spinning round

Huh, well, Anne just told me that one of the reasons why I didn't get the position here at the North Park library is because my stuff that I sent in had all sorts of grammar and spelling errors. I don't know what that's all about. All I can think is that it was in the actual application which I had to hand write and maybe I left the wrong impression? Hard to say. Or maybe I just wasn't supposed to come back and work at NPU.

I tried calling Mr. Tonks this morning about the publishing position and he was out. So was the other head editor who interviewed me, so I'm guessing they were both in a meeting. Maybe they are talking about me in the meeting, discussing how fabulous I am and how desperately they need to hire me. Yeah, right.

I'm at North Park right now, using their computers. I'm guessing I'll be here alot while I'm staying in Sara Cave's apartment. It's odd, the last time I was here, I was still a student. Now I'm an alum. My blood, sweat and tears are what help keep this building up. Heck yes. Now to the grocery store. Up, up, and away!

If we're adding to the noise... (Or Movie sequels, prequels and other such assinine ideas)

History is doomed to repeat itself, just like we're all doomed to turn into some reincarnation of our parents. This is all tied up in the fact that no high-grossing box office hit will escape from some form of sequel or future remake. Don't mistake me, I own Shrek 1 and 2 and plan to buy 3 at some point in the future and the same goes for the Spiderman movies. Superhero movies like Spiderman cry out for a sequel; they are the movie versions of the badly adjusted women in our lives who can't stand to be single for five minutes. I'm as excited as the next guy (unless the next guy is my little sister, who is even more excited) for "Dark Knight" the next Batman movie. I'm thrilled that Hellboy is getting a sequel simply because the main problem with the first one was that the technology wasn't advanced enough to do it justice, so I think that this new one will be much richer and more believable. I am constantly amazed, however, at which movies get sequels and which don't. Thank God that most romantic comedies get to run single. Think of how awful a "you've got mail 2" would be. It makes me want to cry when I go see sequels that make me like the first movie less. The sequels to "Pirates of the Carribbean" have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have to make a concious choice to forget about them when I rewatch the first one. The same applies to the Matrix so-called trilogy. I can summarize each movie in one sentence. Matrix 2 consists of a car chase scene. Matrix 3 is entirely Neo fighting agent Smith in the rain while some dude shoots an unreal amount of ammo at squidlike robots. That's it. Screw the Matrix trilogy and go watch "Equilibrium," which is a shoot-em-up dystopia starring sexy Christian Bale to boot. Thank God that didn't get a sequel.

Damn Star Wars Special Effects

I can trace the implosion of the Matrix trilogy, and the subsequent failure of most recent Sci-fi movies to the post-apocolyptic-like effects of the ideology behind the special effects departments of the Star Wars prequels. Other people have already addressed this ad nauseum, so I won't bore you with the details except to say that the strength of the original Star Wars movies was not the jaw dropping special effects or the ability to create digital races of aliens and robots. The Star Wars movies, especially New Hope, blew people away with its story and the characters. Yes, the Star Wars universe is pretty awesome and I was pretty obsessed with it for a while (I usually pretended to be a female version of Han Solo when we played Star Wars as kids. Who wants to be a princess when you can be a space pirate?) but the universe would lose its meaning without the flesh and blood people who inhabit it. Thus, the reason why the prequels suck and I lack respect for ANYONE who thinks that they're better than the originals, is because they got so wrapped up in special effects that they lost the story. And by the time they realized what they had done, all they could do was create more special effects to distract us from the lack of story. ("Hey, hey, look over here at this really huge fish!")
Addendum: I am a sucker for the second movie, for which I beat myself regularly.

Beautiful Mess

I know that blogs are a dime a dozen, so I won't even discuss that. A professor once told me that having a blog is a really good idea for a writer, so I suppose this is long overdue. It's beyond me who would read it, but who am I to be self-deprecating?

So thought for the day: I cannot ever live in Rockford. Not in peace, anyway. Here's why:

Human beings are messy. People are messy. From what I can tell, nature can tick on pretty well by itself, most animals don't need us (unless they're cockroaches who have migrated to Chicago) in fact, when we whine and complain about nature, it's not about nature itself, nature is fine, it's us whining about us. We're the ones destroying the environment, we're the ones making animals go extinct (to a certain degree, natural disasters also do this, so keep that in mind.) Overall, people are messy. And I'm messy, very messy. I think people spend as much time making messes in their lives as they spend on damage control, depending on the ratio of how messy one is, of course and how much time we have to clean. In fact, we can't fix our messes completely. We can mop them up and sweep them under the rug, but ultimately our greatest fear is that other people will discover how messy we really are. Isn't that why so much of the church seems so artificial? It's because we're messy people trying to pretend that we're not.

Yuck. This leads me to why I cannot live in Rockford. Beloit, Rockford and Janesville are the three major cities closest to me. I would rather not live in Beloit (and technically I don't, I live in Turtle township) but I would live in Beloit because there is something gritty but honest about Beloit. B-towners know exactly how crappy Beloit is, and they don't try to hide it or make apologies for it. We are what we are. Janesville, on the other hand, is very nice and they know they are very nice and they are cool with becoming nicer and expanding and knowing that they have things they ought to fix and change like everyone else, but at least overall they're very nice. Rockford, however, is a strange hybrid of the two. Rockford is two-faced. On one side of the river, they're very nice, oh, they're better than nice. They have everything your little heart might desire. But on the other side of the river. Eew. But that's still Rockford. In fact, that's original Rockford. No matter how hard I squint while I'm looking at the corporate, upscale half of Rockford, I can't avoid seeing the Rockford on the other side. Rockford is messy, and they pretend that they aren't, and I can't stand that.

This messiness is something that I will probably be thinking about for a while, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, if you're thinking about moving to Rockford. Don't.