Insight into humanity

What I would call a Very Telling found poem, that I read on Verbatim (link) (which I've told you about enough already).


I want to

I want to die.

I want to break free lyrics. I want

to be anorexic.

I want to break free.
I want to be skinny; I want

to be a model.

I want to be thin.
I want to lose weight; I want

to know what love is

lyrics. I want

to get pregnant.

Google searches speaking of people searches, much? What is this world a-coming to.

Stranger Danger

Some people say that strangers are just friends you haven't met yet.

Most of my friends are strangers I only just met.

2.5 years ago my life got flipped turned upside-down and I'd like to take a minute just sitting right here and tell you how it happened... but I don't have time.

In that quarter decade I never have.

And though there have been moments where this is a symptom of over-working I don't think it is the main reason. Almost everything I do just feels so "right" and the things that aren't are difficult to spot but I'm working on it. I am living an amazing existence: my job has exciting potential to make a real difference, and open some major doors; I've started a "subversive" Christian newspaper that 2 weeks ago didn't exist but will (prayers said) be printed in 3 weeks - counter to all possibility. I'm coping quite well at the moment, having gotten past some massive internal struggles, and am seeing incredible occurrences on a daily basis. Church is flippin' fantastic and by golly I'm even starting to believe once more that good stuff can, nay will, happen.

But I haven't slept in the same bed continuously for as long as 2 weeks since I was in Russia this July.
And I don't know if I will until I go back.
Which is probably in 2 years time.
And it is foolish to plan that far ahead anyway.
Yet I've still got to at least try to learn the language, just in case...

I was hanging out with my equally busy, work-consumed missionary friend tonight for about 20 mins. We vowed (though accidentally broke it several times) to not talk about work. Here was our conversation:

Him: So, what sort of animal would you get?
Me: Well I was planning on "borrowing" one of my parents' cats but I'm too busy with...
[Pause]
Me: What's your favourite colour? Red?
Him: How did you know?
Me: Well, it's your car. But then you didn't choose that did you, you just had to get what you were given 'cause you're a poor missio...
[Pause, where we insulted Luke for talking geekily about Dr Who, before realising that he did, at least, have a hobby]
Me: Errrrr... what's your favourite reptile?
Him:

End of conversation.

I feel like I have no time for friends. I have nothing to talk about with friends apart from "business". The people I do know are all so relatively new and life keeps moving on so fast that sometimes I sit in the same room as them and feel like a stranger in my own life. Am I a friend I haven't met yet?

Sometimes I wish there was someone there to be my stability in this place of huge change. To know about the different parts of my life and be able to feel my pain and get me, even when I don't. Someone that doesn't feel strange. How is this even possible? Just supposing I had the time right now for a "significant other" to come along - which I don't - that level of closeness would still take ages to develop.

Then I remember this poem (that Nathan (link) posted on his blog a little while ago and gives a little bit of the info for it here (link)) and I think that maybe things will all be OK...

Abigail Burdess – All Kinds of Trouble

I’m in all kinds of trouble now,

The kind where you wake up on a train

And everything, everything’s strange

And where am I? And when did the season change?

I must have been asleep.

I’m sure I must be late.

I’m in all kinds of danger.

The stranger on the platform is not a proper stranger.

“You’re here with me,” he says, “isn’t it great?”

And he’s right.

The kind where there’s too much meaning on the edges of sight

Because he might be there.

The kind where you randomly weep.

I’m in deep, deep hot water.

In a boiling hot geyser

In the mists

In the midst

Of ridiculous Icelandic snow.

Y’know,

You should give up the fags and eat fruit,

Because life should last longer, this life should last longer

If someone like him exists.

Everybody. Lock away the razors and save your lovely wrists:

Someone like him exists.

I’m in every single kind of trouble now

The kind where a kind man could write himself a significant part.

I’m in very grave danger

Of a change of heart.

Tatters

I've been struggling a lot with depression recently. It's part of the whole "burnout thing" but it isn't the first time this has happened... it is the worst since I have been a Christian though.

I can't really estimate how long this has been around - it's hardly a binary state - but though life got particularly hard this last term it wasn't until the middle of June, when my degree ended and the change of pressure inevitably hit, that I have been steadily failing at keeping on with God... Often, you see, it was a way to draw near to Him; a place where being dependent resulted in intimacy, no burden was too great and every struggle could also be seen as a blessing. Not a place of perfection but somehow different to how things are now... where, though nothing much has changed in my actual world, it just sucks. I have been rubbish in no uncertain terms and I ain't gonna dwell on my Roman's 7ish tendencies (link). Nor will I exhort the Romans 18:28-ing (link) of them with any stories, though I have them (God is good). Rather I have an analogy.

It is of course resistance training. When you work out it isn't the rep's you can do that are building muscle, but the ones you really can't. Before I was coping, so up goes the pressure. Simple. I am getting strengthened for the next fight I gotta be in (link). Turns out the stuff from before wasn't enough to grow me beyond my limits. I signed up for it with some reckless enthusiasm about being refined and thus made ready to defeat the nasties in the world, and it seems that prayer gets answered... so I am broken, like the ragged, sinewy fibres of a pumped and aching bicep.

I am not going to tell you that I am ok with this. I sometimes am (rarely) and I will be in the future but it is chronically painful a lot of the time and I am very very shaky in my sinful - that is unloving, lifeless, hopeless and generally dodge - attitude and actions. My faith is a wreck, nothing seems to be working out, and I'd rather I was driving along just dandy down the motorway that is my life instead of stuck on a back road with a girt fat tree across the path... or some such. But something put into words by the father of Sam (link), whose tragic death can teach us all a thing or two about putting up with crap, has spoken to me with a far better analogy:

I had a thought today.

It may seem a little random to you but whatever.

As I was thinking about my faith it seemed that it was in tatters around my feet. shreds of it lay all around.

And then I thought perhaps a good way to picture what faith is like would be to imagine a warehouse full of expensive material, sillk or something like that.

Then imagine that someone had placed a bomb right in the centre of the warehouse and blown it up. bits of cloth would fly all over the place and the once beautiful rolls of silk would be chard, ripped and ruined.

and now imagine me (or you?) standing amongst all the bits, the rags that were once silk sheets but are now no more than tatters.

Surely that cant be can it?

Surely our faith is so precious that it must remain in tact. Surely there are things we cannot question!

As I am thinking these thoughts I run around and try to find matching shreds and try to piece them together but I reject the idea of trying to put them back together since they can never again be the beautiful thing they once were, they will never, ever be beautiful, silky smooth, unblemished rolls of perfect silk.

But thats all I have left.

So, I gather the bits together, I carefully and lovingly sew each piece to its partner, and slowly, very, very slowly I rebuild. eventually, after the most amazing ammount of effort I get to the point where I have connected all of the pieces together and now I have a roll of silk again.

But my roll is scarred, stitched together with unskilled hands, threads sticking out here and there, a piece connected back to front and not exactly pefectly straight edged. no longer perfect, not by a long chalk but its there. All my work has seemd to have been for nothing.

How can I present my broken and ripped faith to Jesus? how will this inadequate, distorted thing ever be good enough to get me into heaven? Can I ever use it again? How dare I? what would Jesus, the "author and perfector of our faith" think.

I have not the first idea but in fear, I approach Him and present what I have.

I hold out my faith, falling apart at the seams, ragged and torn to my Lord.

He reaches out a hand to take it.

His hands are the strong hands of a carpenter, hard skinned and knocked by years of practice, but most of all I notice his wrist, torn through, a ragged hole where a nail once ruined his perfect body, I look up and see his eyes, lovingly examiniging my broken faith, his head is marked by thorns, his back is ripped to shreds by a whip that broke his body and his side is ripped open by a spear "just to see if he was dead".

and then I realise, the author and perfector of my faith understands better than I can ever do what it means to be stood among the pile of shreds that was once your beautiful faith. He knows what it means to be crushed, broken and seperated even from God in a way that I will never know.

So now I can try.

At least I can try to pick up the piecses of my faith, find a needle and thread and start to work out how it all goes together.

Thats where I am at right now...

"For it is by grace that you are saved through faith and this is not the result of your own good deeds so that no one can boast."

any one got a needle?

Thinking like this doesn't come easy to me, mind; I don't always have the 'give-a-damn'-ness to want to do that, even having realised the grace both in this parent's attitude and Jesus's actions. But the very nature of that grace necessarily says that I don't have to bring anything myself to the table to be changed. Two days after starting this post I already feel a bit more alive... and if my experience and (meagre) trust is anything to go by then this fight is not over yet...

evangelism

I am defining the term "to evangelise" in the language of AT! I haven't had a major rant about language and how exciting it is yet but only because my head/schedule is too busy to go into all that. It's all inside waiting for the right time to burst forth.

I just took a French exam today see and next week I have one about creating different mathematical languages so these are pretty relevant examples, nay analogies, of saying the same thing through different expressions. It's an analogy for an analogy!

But I'm late it's tired and this post is not meant to be for anything apart from spreading good news. Hence being an evangel - the word was adopted by Christianity because we tell people the Good News (i.e. Gospel (link)) but linguistically it just means general good news (I think, that's what my inbuilt dictionary tells me anyway). So henceforth I'm taking it literally and going to use "evangelism" as a word to denote telling you about good things I've found.

And the good thing I'm going to tell you about today is this rather fabulous blog I just discovered through an online-community member (life's all about the organic networking) called Verbatim (link). Fabulous idea, brilliantly named creator. Gabriel Smy (I call him Gabe though and he's cool wid it) is the author and 'poetry formed from found text' is the concept. It's sort of like Analogise That! with the noticing stuff in the world to be something more than what it is but with a much more limited (or should I say honed) scope. Finding beauty in the mundane. It has an air of the ridiculous walking hand-in-hand with the sublime that I like. I think this one (link) rocks because it is about computer programming (language in it's most boring form :-P) and the idea of bringing beauty from that textbook is totally analogous to the incredibly beautiful things that programming (which can appear dry to those of us that can't grasp it) creates all the time. Which in inself is analagous to how we find beauty and truth in unexpected and seemingly mundane places, perhaps moreso when there are no trappings... and that brings me full circle to the idea of 'poetry from the ordinary' as both an actual thing and an analogy for life, Ulyssees and the set of numbers between 0 and 1.

If you aren't confused then my hat is way off (metaphorically speaking). I think I may be about to exlode with inexpressible and widely scattered synaptic spasms. The land of bedfordshire is most definitely calling...

Oh and one more thing: small point to BIG, yeah? good points to Good, life points to Fullness of Life, love points to True Love... There is a Reality that all the analogies are just expressing a bit of, showing one aspect of that Truth. A truth but not the whole truth. Well, when I say "evangelise" it's an analogy too. sharing about good news is like Sharing about Good News. Things with a capital letter are the destination to which the analogies all head, so when it's "Evangelism" it's not a simile anymore and you should Listen...! But that is a whole other post/thread/Analogy...

Creating Space

What is he doing, that boy in midfield
With the innocent-looking face?
He's losing himself in the midst of the crowd
Creating space.

How does he do it, that ordinary boy
With no obvious surge of pace,
Find for himself in the crowded pitch
A private place?

The rest of the team and the other team too
Are happy to tackle and chase.
He strolls by himself in the midst of the crowd
Creating space.

Where has he gone to, that ordinary boy
With the incredibly smiley face?*
How could he shift from the well-marked pitch
Without a trace?

The rest of the team and the other team too
Continue to tackle and chase.
He's off on his own in a bubble of time
Creating space.

Allan Ahlburg, Friendly Matches, p46. Puffin, London 2002
*words slightly altered to better describe Sam


An ordinary boy was Sam. Yet really really not. Everyone knew - they could see it in his smile - just how different Sam was. The start up message on his phone said "Smile, Jesus loves you" and that is why Sam smiled... and why he was different. A little over two weeks ago this (extra)ordinary boy walked out of his football game, onto the pavement, into the arms of Jesus and now he is home (link).


A message from his dad:

Sam was a great boy. There was a reason he was like he was, its not just because of the way we brought him up or his awesome friends. he was different.

In the Bible it talks about Christians being like aliens, people who are not like other people, people who don't belong to this world, children of God, in fact.

Real Christians, like Sam, are not super heroes, they make mistakes and do things wrong and don't think they are any better than any one else but they know a secret that other people don't know and it makes them smile.

Sam knew that secret.

You wanna learn to smile like him? If you do then you need to know the secret. Thing is, it's not meant to be a secret, God has made it as plain as day.

If you don't believe in God you can't learn to smile like Sam. But if you believe...

You wanna know more? Reply to this and I will tell you what I told him and then you can chose to believe it and smile or turn your back on it and live any way you want.

The Bible says that if you know the truth you will be set free.

That makes you smile.



Today I create space for the message of a man that just cremated his extraordinary 11 year old son and still wants people to smile. Can you create the space to hear it? Maybe you already have the space and this "secret" of which we speak sounds like it might just fit...