Research Paper Blues

I've got to write a research paper. Well, I've been writing a research paper, but sometimes with all this schoolwork, my brain feels like it's overheated. I need to take moments to cool it down by doing something...unbrainly.

What unbrainly things do I do, you ask? Why, I read blogs! The best ones I've found so far are Neatorama and Miss Cellania. Fantastic collections of links that make you laugh while still educating you a bit.

However, if I want to get into an even lower gear, I watch original episodes of Star Trek. Yes, that's right. I'm working on my Spock impressions and developing a tolerance to Kirk's poses. It's great. I'm going where thousands have gone before.

Nevertheless, I cannot WAIT until my paper is done. It will be finished, and I will print it out, and staple it together, and take all my books back to whence they came, and everything will calm down. It will be great. Just wait.

The Best Villains in Bookdom

"What," asked Mr. Croup, "do you want?"
"What," asked the marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?"
"Dead things," suggested Mr. Vandemar. "Extra teeth."


"Still," said Mr. Croup chirpily. "Can't make an omelette without killing a few people."


-Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Cactus or Kelp?

Sometimes I worry - all the time, I worry - that I'm too much.

It makes me sad how I always need more love. I never feel loved enough. And it's not that people don't love me. They do, and they tell me that all the time. It's just that it's never enough. I can't ever get enough of someone giving me attention, or making me feel special, or anything like that.

Sometimes I think I have enough, and then within the next minute, hour, or day, I'm hungering for attention again. You would think that I would be able to handle going without attention for at least a few days. It drives me crazy.

For example: I went out with a bunch of girls last night to a fantastic classical concert. We dressed up. We had milkshakes. We rode the Light Rail. It was so much fun. I spent at least 6 hours with a group of girls that all genuinely liked me. And yet today I find myself wishing there were someone else in my apartment beside me who would want to talk to me. Why can't my love/attention quota be filled longer?

You would think that I'd at least be able to make it one day without feeling down. I mean, my goodness. Am I that needy, that I can't go a whole day without wanting someone else around? Will I ever have enough love? I feel like a sponge, soaking it all up, but then something like evaporation occurs, and I need more. Like a plant taking in water. You can't ever finally have enough water. But goodness, shouldn't I be more like a cactus than kelp?

I remember the analogy that really grabbed me a few years ago - Carla described wounding words as things that stabbed someone, filling them with holes so that even when you poured love in, it spilled right out and they could never feel love. You had to fix the holes first. Well, I thought I fixed the holes! God fixed them. Are there more that I don't know about? Or is this just a God-made thing - are all people like this? Or is it just a Michaela thing? Am I designed this way - to be kelp, needing a love-surrounded environment to survive, while others can hoard up their love and survive like cacti in the desert? It's fine with me, if I'm meant to be like this. I'd just like to know if there's something I need to be trying to fix or not.

Trusting God

Martin Luther once said that every Christian problem resolves itself into this simple question: "Can I or can I not trust God?"

I am not completely sure that this is true, but I've certainly found that it is the core question of my life as well as my walk with God.

At this exact moment, I'm also listening to my Theology 501 lecture and taking notes. My professor just said, "A man once told me, 'If you don't learn to trust God when you are young, you will never trust Him when you're older.' "

I'm struck by that statement. Is it true?
I don't want to find out.

So how are we supposed to learn to trust God?
I can tell you the patented Michaela Approach TM. I want Him to prove Himself faithful to me continually without me ever having to take a step outside my comfortable boundaries. Instead, like Beth Moore says in her Breaking Free study, trust in God is developed by first stepping out, throwing it all on the line, and seeing God come through in His power. We learn that He is trustworthy by letting go and taking ourselves to the limits of our weaknesses and then discovering that He has caught us.

Comfortable boundaries. People talk a lot about boundaries and comfort zones in church. Usually those words are followed along with "public testimony" and "mission trips" and "the bathroom was just a hole in the ground." Oh, for the life of a missionary. No, I know that the life of missionary would be extremely hard. I've gone on enough trips and lived that life enough times to know that it would stretch me in dimensions I didn't know existed. But I know I could do it. I can live with no hairbrush and no toilet paper. I can speak in front of 500 people who care or 10 people who don't. I don't specifically enjoy it, but I could do it.

No, stepping outside my comfort zones involves something entirely different for me at this point in my life. I shudder to think about it. For me, throwing myself off the cliffs (of Insanity!!) involves things like:

• paying bills
• paying a tithe
• calling people and asking if they'll do stuff with me in hopes they'll be my friends
• going to new churches and sitting alone during the service
• working
• sending my resume in to places where I don't know what they'll think
• scheduling interviews
• buying things I need
• living alone

Getting up every day in this apartment is stepping out of my comfort zone. Lots of times I'm not really sure if I'll make it. But I've begun to see that I'm not trusting God. Actually, I haven't even been struggling with trusting God. I've not even considered Him as an option. (Friends, always consider God as at least an option.) So I've read my books and buried myself in my schoolwork (good old reliable schoolwork. I love it because it's so wonderfully predictable.) and stayed inside and tried to escape from this life that I'm afraid of living.

But now I think I'm learning to see that trusting God is not only an option, it is The Option.

List of Me

I wrote this list probably two years ago. Some of these are still true. Thanks to God, some of them are not.

1. I refuse to answer questions that are too easy - they're beneath me.
2. I often use the bathroom as a place to hide during social gatherings.
3. I can't stand insensitive people.
4. There are some people that I can't stand making eye contact with. I don't know why.
5. Unconditional love confuses me.
6. It's hard for me to even write the word "fat."
7. I get tired of people that talk a lot.
8. I make faces in the elevator and laugh because no one else knows.
9. Sometimes I go in bathrooms just to cry.
   

Infinity Within Our Reach

Sometimes we realize with greater fervor our hunger for the fantastic, the desire to travel past the stars. For centuries, men have yearned for the supernatural - the magical - for something infinitely beyond them. We fly to the planets and stars but are never satisfied with the bits of rock and gas we find; infinity lies beyond them in something unsearchable in our physical form, something incorporeal and yet more real than anything we've ever known before.

Sometimes our eyes open to see the long and narrow road we travel, the burden of the cross becomes a bit heavier, and the rough grain of the wood scratches against our shoulders. We wonder what we're signed up for in this trek - perhaps a long and monotonous journey, always searching to know a God who isn't fully knowable in this world, straining to find the clues and glimpses of Him He leaves around us, striving to become more like Him. A road less travelled, certainly.

But sometimes the veil is pulled aside, and we can see the endless search for those glimpses of glory, glimpses of what Moses saw that transfigured his face, glimpses of God's royal train filling the temple. And we can see what the world does not see - that the search is the joy, that God is the infinite intangible that we search for. I have seen the glory of God in the land of the living, and that is what the world does not understand. The unknowing is the fantastic - the clues are the supernatural visible to human eyes. The long road is fraught with danger, and with toil, but that is where true heroes are forged, true discoveries are made, and true life is lived. It is a privilege to carry the cross, to die for the one who died for many.

The darkness cannot harm what holds the light within. It is not match for me, nor do I heed it. I have light within that yields to no darkness.

Change: Not Just for Pockets

Lately I've felt I needed a new blog. Fresh space to fill with words, unencumbered by old expectations or styles or precedents. It's a good thing, change. (That I can write that honestly and without flinching is an indication of how much I've actually changed.) Change lets you go down paths you've never traveled before. It lets you be someone you never expected yourself to be. It releases you from stagnant ways of life you're mired into and lets you go, be, do - all those two-letter verbs just sit on the other side of change.

This is not my change. Just a representation of it. We'll see how long it lasts until the next big move.