connection

Familiarity.

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 If I understood you

and you understood me

we could speak with complete familiarity

but since I just met you

and you hardly know me

we only speak with incongruity.

How pleasant and natural it would be

if at once we could see

each other plainly.

But I don’t know you and you don’t know me

so we have no real clarity.

 

I wrote that. It came to me yesterday in ASL class because I had been thinking about how we speak to each other.

Maybe this isn’t your experience, but I’ve noticed that people who know each other really well, they can be more honest.

I say things to mys sisters I would never say to a friend. Why? Because my sisters will know what I mean.

I won’t bother to be polite to siblings all the time, since I know they won’t get super offended. But I will be polite to a stranger or a classmate because they don’t know me well enough to know when I’m not serious.

I actually sometimes get taken seriously when I’m kidding and I think it was obvious that I was kidding. I know that’s not unique to me, doesn’t it bug you when it happens?

I might tell my sister to shut up and know she won’t be that bothered by it, but I wouldn’t say that to someone else unless I had the intention of making them feel I was angry.

C. S. Lewis observed in The Four Loves that when people have affection for each other, they can say offensive things and not offend. And that the deeper the affection, the better they will know what times to say such things.

Which is not to say we can just insult each other, there’s a time for it and a time when it will be hurtful. If someone in your family is pouring out their soul or crying their eyes out, that is not the time. Or if they’re angry and venting to you.

Usually it’s when we’re in a good mood that we can poke fun at each other and feel  closer and not father apart.

Why are we so polite to strangers? People often theorize that we are scared of what they will think.

But I submit to you that not everyone is scared. at least not of being disliked. Often when someone does dislike us, we feel that they have misunderstood who we are.

“He/she thinks I’m just a—- but I’m not.” Does that kind of talk sound familiar? It does to me.

The reason we don’t speak our mind to strangers is often simply that we know they will not understand us. They don’t know us. And they have their assumptions about people with our opinions that only knowing us better would change. They won’t want to know us better if we scare them off.

The are times when that doesn’t matter and we need to speak our mind regardless. But those are fewer times than when we need to understand each other.

The better you know me, the better you understand me, the better we can communicate. Lack of communication equals lack of understanding. Even if you hate someone, you can still understand them, provided you know  them. You’ve seen movies where the hero and villain understand each other perfectly, that’s why they are at odds.

I don’t me tat we understand English, or whatever our language is. I mean that we have a knowledge of a person’s character, quirks, and feelings about things. That is what tells us what they mean.

This kind of understanding can happen very quickly between some people, especially if they are alike in opinion and character. Others it can take twenty year,s or it may never happen. Some folks lack the ability or the desire to understand each other.

I think that we wish it were different. That we could speak our mind to strangers as easily as to our closest family or friends. In a perfect world we feel everyone would be able to communicate like that. It would be great.

But we need to beware the Tower of Babel. God in His wisdom perhaps has made it hard work to understand each other. A lot of people see it as the worst part of humanity that we have so much conflict. you might want to question that person’s motive.

Conflict is what keeps us pushing forward and it keeps us from corrupting each other completely. Where there is good, there will be conflict as long as men choose to do evil. You better hope so anyway. The most dead-in-soul people never argue with each other, they just sin. We don’t want that.

IF you understand the people around you perfectly, you are either dead inside, or a saint. Because only people who have extreme wisdom, or else just don’t care, are without conflict.

I hope to be saintly, bu I fully expect to have conflict on the way. Because I will meet with the unsaintly. And I won’t always be good either.

So while it would be nice to have total familiarity with each other, perhaps it is for the best that it is hard work. I look forward to the day when evil will not be a thing, and we will all be on the same page.

Until next time–Natasha.

Loud and Proud?

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This is not going to be easy to write.

My ever prolific English Class tackled religion this past week. And how two people were driven away from the church by the thing known as a move of the Spirit. The crying, the shouting, the running around, the jumping up and down. The experience that is baffling to anyone watching it.

And someone in my class even said they gave up on church because of seeing that and not wanting to be that way.

If you are not sure what I’m talking about, then it will be hard to explain it. You really have to see it for yourself. People “get happy” as it is sometimes called.

In the Bible if anyone had a reaction like that it was the Spirit of the Lord coming upon them. Interestingly enough, in the New Testament no record is given of people jumping or running or crying or rolling around on the floor, though the Old Testament has some wild stories about that.

And it’s a staple of Revivals to have that happen.

But it can freak people out.

And I should know, it used to freak me out too, and if I’m honest it still puzzles me on occasion.

I am not a demonstrative person. I might get loud, maybe jump a little on my toes, but I’ve never been so overtaken by God that I behave wildly.

I don’t think it’s bad for that to happen, certainly the people it happens to enjoy it. For them it’s a release, a way to clear their emotions from all the stress of life, a way to feel closer to God.

The Church tends to view these spiritual experiences as more holy, and signifying someone is closer to God, versus the people who sit quietly or at most raise their hands and sing.

While people outside the church tend to view this as us getting overexcited, or perhaps being out of our mind, or just weird. At any rate, it’s nothing they want a part of.

But why?

I do sympathize with the no Christian a bit. That kind of behavior would freak me out normally. It can look an awful lot like crazy behavior. But it only comes on in church. During worship usually. I don’t hear about it happening in someone’s private life. Which is perhaps why people decide the church is the problem. Believe in God sure, but those people are weird…

Well, we are weird, I admit. Any people group is going to be wired to the people not in it, and even to other in it who just don’t jibe with their style. I feel a bit out of place at the Nigerian Church that my dad loves because I don’t get it. My dad doesn’t like the style of where I go. But doctrinally, the two churches are almost he same. So the question is, why is the way we worship such a devise issue for us and for Non-Christians who investigate?

I need to be fair. First of all, I do not by any means think that people have to get excited in the loud and energetic way in order to worship God. My favorite way to worship is in private, not so loud. I do enjoy is corporately too. If that really is an obstacle to someone, then going to a church that isn’t like that is no sin.

On the other hand, one thing that Christians who worship in this way tend to understand is that Worship is not really about our control.

At bottom, being wierded out by God moving in what seems like ridiculous or crazy ways is saying that you know better than God what is appropriate. It is also saying that the world gets to measure how sane it is to act in a given way. Why should the world decide this?

People filled with the spirit aren’t going and committing mass murders, or hurting other people, or filled with rage, not truly crazy behavior.

The reason it’s hated is that is is foreign. Even to other Christians. Every Christian is called to be holy (set apart) from the world. People who are acting crazy and don’t care are clearly not concerned about the world’s opinion of them.

God is not going to make sense to us all the time. So it would follow naturally that the way we worship is not always going to seem sensible even to us. As the people it happens to, they don’t get it either.

But I submit that you don’t always need to get it to know it.

And that applies to the many people who don’t experience this. We are not lesser as Christians. The folks who “get happy” are not always the most spiritual in their everyday lives. In fact, often that is the case. Maybe they need it more because of that.

God connects with people however He can, and for some that is quiet, for others it is loud.

I submit that God Himself doesn’t really care so long as the connection is real and true. Why would one little person jumping up and down discomfit God? Why would one person not doing that give Him pause?

What does give Him pause is genuine heartfelt worship, which means not feeling inferior to your fellow believers nor taking pride in being more holy than they. It means giving up control one way or the other. admitting you can’t control whether your worship loud or quiet. Just so long as you worship.

Everyone has their gift, be it small or large, and they can bring that. That’s all that God requires.

And if it’s all that we require of each other, we wills top comparing ourselves. That’s just not important.

Those are my thoughts, until next time–Natasha.

Standing in the Need of Prayer.

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“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

Not my brother nor my sister but it’s me, oh lord, standing in the need of prayer. Not my brother nor my sister but it’s me, oh lord, standing in the need of prayer.

Not the elder nor the deacon but it’s me, oh lord, standing in the need of prayer.

Not my father nor my mother, but it’s me oh lord, standing in the need of prayer.

Not the stranger, nor my neighbor but it’s me oh lord, standing in the need of prayer. 

Standing in the need of prayer.”

This song used to strike me as selfish. Come on, none of the rest of these people need prayer? Get over yourself.

But since reading Toni Morrison’s “Strangers.” I see this song, particularly the last verse, differently.

Morrison thinks that we find in strangers a part of ourselves. That we wich to merge with them, to draw them into ourselves and so regain whatever we’ve lost. In my previous post I talked about that feeling at length.

Now I just want to look at this song, and what its words mean if you see it all as the person singing saying “When all these people are in need of prayer, I am too. Because we’re all part of the same body.”

When we pray for humanity, are we really praying for ourselves? Not for our petty problems (or sometimes serious problems) but for what we hope to have in our own suffering.

I think we may have genuinely selflessreasons to pray. But Jesus specifically told us to look on others as worthy of the same love we would show ourselves. Even when they weren’t deserving of it.

I’m not inot all this “we’re all one, in each other,” wierdness. Not ot the extent it’s taken to, tat we literally are inside each other and acting dependently. We may be depednent, but it’s not in the way that implies.

No, our hearts and minds are our own to guard and keep, and no one else can do it for us completely. Even God Himself leaves a lot of it up to us to choose. That’s the price of being free.

But we are connected in a way. We all suffer, we all have joys, we all share the human experience. And that’s not something to take lightly.

So when someone is suffering in the body, as Paul says, all the rest suffer with it.

The usffering of christians in the middle east is my suffering also. I don’t die, I don’t feel ohysical pain, but deep down the knowledge that they suffer affects me. I may not think it does, bu it does.

Becauase we share the same faith, we’re connected.

My faith connects me more to other christians, but my hunaity connects me toe veryone else.

That’s why I can feel pity for someone like Hitler or Stallin, I know what it is to be human and to fall. And I know what it is to rise up. I wish they could ahve.

My shared experience is all that enables me to pity them and motivates me to help others.

I note that shared experience can pass between humans and animals also, and even, some might say, being humans and other spiritual beings. There’s an ungodly trend going around of pitying the devil in shows and movies and books (Paradise Lost might be the most famous example of this) and while I don’t see why it’s popular, especially if you don’t believe in the devil anyway, it’s only possible because we have spirits, otherwise how could we understand them at all?

Of course that will be denied, but this post isn’t about that so I’m not going into it.

The point is, when you’re in the need of prayer, or of love, or of anything really, you will know better how much other people are in need of it. When you need help, someone else does.

I’ve seen this in my own life, my own suffering has been frustrating to me, but looking around I see how other’s share similar physical and emotional pain to me, and maybe when I pray for myself, I need to pray for them too.

We’re all standing in the need of prayer.

Christian or no, I hope this post was enjoyable to you. I seem to be on a grave bent tonight, but it’s where my mind was.

Until next time–Natasha.

 

The Bus Driver.

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You know those moments that people tell stories about? The ones that Christian authors use to impart spiritual lessons, and pastors do it too, to the point where it’s almost annoying. You want to say “Not everything has to be a lesson, man!”

Well, I have one of those stories tonight.

I’ve been taking the bus to college, as you know. (Sounds like the title of an article doesn’t it?) And last night I noticed something as I got on: I tapped my pass and the driver said “Thank you.”

I thought “Why’s he thanking me? He’s the one putting in hours of his life doing a really boring job that no one appreciates him for, though they should because I sure as heck don’t have the patience to be a bus driver.”

I know the driver just meant to be friendly. That was what struck me. He wasn’t being polite, just friendly. Trying to make the rather isolated situation a little more comfortable.

To the best of his efforts, since we aren’t allowed to talk to bus drivers unnecessarily. Of course I know that’s for safety reasons, but what a lonely way to make a living if you can hardly even talk to the people you see all day. And you don’t have a co-worker there to cheer you up either.

I feel awkward just in the 12-15 minutes I spend on the bus not knowing anyone.

I’m pretty sure way back when the public transportation thing got going, there wasn’t a rule about talking to the driver. And I’m certain that other passengers at least used to talk to each other. It’s sad to see all the young students on the bus make awkward eye contact with each other, but bury themselves in their phones rather than strike up a conversation.

We’ve been raised with the idea that talking to strangers is bad, and dangerous, and worst of all, unnecessary. That’s the killer isn’t it? We feel that as long as we have our electronic transactions, we don’t need to talk. even bus passes are just card stickers now, no eye contact is even required.

And I see this, and I think to myself, we’re so lonely. We’re just starving to connect with each other.

It’s not that we want to connect on some soul level with every human we meet. I think we want to feel part of their world, just as they, in a small way, are part of ours. We might never see them again, but they were people, and we were interested in them just because of that.

Though most of us would agree general kindness is a good thing, very few of us stop to think what common courtesy and kindness require, that you care. That you see other people as beings who shape your world and are in it and whom you owe some recognition just as they owe you some, because that’s what it is to be human.

To be ignored is perhaps the most inhuman of practices that we do on a regular basis, and I think we feel it deep down, we know something’s not right.

When I do happen to strike up a conversation with someone I don’t know, I always feel it’s a bit of an awkward trade off. You ask the culturally acceptable small talk questions, (which have been disdained by the more withdrawn folks of society, but are in place for a very good reason) but you don’t really feel like you can trust them. Still you try to make things more comfortable by being more familiar, because somehow we feel less afraid when we know someone, even if it’s just their name. Even if they didn’t tell it to us, we just heard them called by it.

We yearn to know things about each other. I don’t think it’s just busybodies who feel that way. It’s everyone. We’ve all looked at a particular stranger and wondered what their life was like, and we wish we could be in it somehow, because maybe we’d find something there that’s missing in our own world.

I’m not the first to think of this, there’s an insightful essay called Strangers by Toni Morrison that I recommend you check out.

What the bus driver, and myself by my slight smile and nod in response, are trying to do is reestablish something we feel we’ve lost.

My question is, is it just this generation that’s lost it? Or have people felt this way ever since we left Eden? I see something of it it Cain’s plea to God after he is sentenced to wander the earth. “Anyone who finds me will kill me,” as if he doesn’t know who that anyone might be.

Abraham said “I am a stranger in a strange land” but he still tried to have peace with some of the land’s inhabitants.

Being strangers and being estranged don’t seem to be the same thing. One is a fact of life because we can’t know everyone, the other is a deliberate choice to be shut off from the rest of the world.

In that sense, the person like me who has spent most of her days at home may yet be less a stranger to others then the person who closes them-self off to feeling or knowing anything about them.

I think we are hungry as a whole to reconnect somehow, but we don’t know the secret. I think technology has only provided the mask to hide behind so that we no longer know this, people used to know that being strangers was a sad thing.

Until next time–Natasha

(P. S. Watch for a new movie review in the next week or so, I’m planning on doing a DCOM.)

Should we have Black History Month?

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Inching my way to 60 followers, it’s hard to believe that for a long time I had 2 or 3. Thanks to all of you who decided to support this blog.

Sometimes I wonder why, when my blog is a lot less flashy and techy then most of the other ones out there, and most of my posts are just my thoughts about things.

But I think it’s great that blogging is one of the few places left n society where people actually seek out each other’s opinions and read them, and hopefully discuss them in a healthy way.

So let’s jump right to the controversial stuff.

My YouTube bar is reminding me it’s Black History Month, and I see it on TV too.

Since I’ve never been to school, these special months or weeks of study devoted to one group or subject are pretty foreign to me (pardon the slight pun) but I do  have some thoughts on just the concept of having a Black History Month.

I’ll preface this by saying I think Black History is an important part of our past, and also highly interesting to delve into. Blacks played a key role in all our Wars, and in plenty of our other movements, most notable the Civil Rights one. None of that is dispensable history.

Bu-u-t, that’s actually the problem. How on earth is Black History a separate thing from White History? OR vice versa. Doesn’t having a whole month devoted to it imply that it’s different somehow? Like they were another set of people in another place doing other things?

It’s like separating World History from American history. You can do it for a while, America is a young country, but sooner or later you have to include it because it became one of the principle countries in world affairs.

I happen to believe that blacks and whites have intermingled pretty much ever since their origin, maybe not all in Africa, but in other places. I think history itself shows it. (There are paintings of darker skinned figures on Egyptian wall accounts.)

But okay, maybe the idea has merit. ATtleast, when it was conceived. Back in the 80’s a lack of black history curriculum was a problem. At least if I can believe the TV shows account of it.

I have nothing against blacks themselves ( a term I am using because it is Black History Month for crying out loud) but I do have a problem with segregation.

As a white girl, it’s awkward for me when all this race stuff comes up. I didn’t used to give a rip what color someone’s skin was. I don’t really when it comes to people I know. But I hate how “minorities” (barely small enough to be that anymore) are pitted against each other.

The way I see it, setting aside a whole month to Blacks, even if it’s in name only, is more likely to promote envy and jealously among whites, or other races, then it is to promote understanding. In a perfect world maybe everyone would get it, but that’s not this world.

I think history should be taught as it happened. Mingling different aspects of it as the topic calls for. The best history books I’ve read have covered various parts of it, and how it affected various peoples.

You can’t study the American Revolution with any thoroughness unless you also learn how France and Germany were involved, how slaves were affected, and how the Spanish came in at one point. The Native Americans were a part of it too.

And it’s unfair to disregard all that. No country is, metaphorical, an island. Other countries are always involved in their affairs. Much like in person to person interactions.

I think one objection that might be made to not having a black history month is that black pride would not be raised, because our history would be taught as primarily white in important figures.

Well firstly, that’s not true, as I said.

Secondly, if that was how it actually had happened, then…that’s the history isn’t it?

Even if blacks had had  nothing to do with this country until recently, the history still matters.

Besides, if we are all equal, why doe sit matter what color someone is? Can’t we still learn from their life?

Can’t I be inspired by Harriet Tubman as much as by Harriet Beecher Stowe? Or maybe more.

Would you tell me that black Americans are incapable of being inspired by white historical figures.

What does that sound like to you? Equality?

Give me a break.

Now hold on, I am not saying I think black Americans are incapable of being inspired by white ones. I am only saying that would be the implication if we used color as a measure for how crucial it is to learn about a person.

Which is the problem with Black History Month. I want to be inspired by all worthy people, but in the proper context. Not separated as if I have to feel differently about each one depending on their race.

I may make someone mad by saying this, but I don’t give more credit to Martin Luther King Jr. for his stance against bigotry then I give to George Washington for his fight for freedom.

Because both are important. Yet in our public school system, Martin Luther King Jr will be given his fair share of attention, but Washington will likely be misrepresented or swept under the rug.

Why should white students be made to feel excluded? Why should any students?

You see how it comes full circle?

Well, If there’s a point I didn’t cover, feel free to comment below and share your thoughts.

Until next time–Natasha.

A lantern in our hands.

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I just read another great book titled “A lantern in her hand.” This isn’t a review of it, but I want to credit the book with inspiring this post.

The book is, as it turned out, about love. And I am a sucker for any story where love is the focus and the savior as it were. I say sucker, but I don’t believe it’s really naive to think so.

Love gets a bad rap when it comes to making it the saving grace of a story, but I would wonder what else is better?

So I have a question to put to you, viewers, what makes life worth while? I mean, what makes anything we do important?

You see the main character of the book has dreams to be an artist, a singer, a painter, and an author. She wants to put something fine into the world. As a modern woman (or man) we can all empathize. Almost all of us aspire to greatness at one point in our lives, whatever we may settle for later, and movies and popular stories have certainly helped drive it into our heads that any life that doesn’t change the world is common and ordinary.

I personally relate. I think I tend to see life as wasted when you aren’t doing something big.

The point this book made is that being a mother and a wife is a big thing.

Now, to even suggest that motherhood might be enough of an aspiration is resented by most women.

I won’t say I haven’t seen it that way myself, but I know better.

It’s not that motherhood is all a woman is good for. That’s not it. The point is that what is done in love is done well.

If someone dreams big dreams, it’s a good thing, but they have no failed in life if at the end of it, they fulfilled different dreams.

Some women dream of doing big things, and also of being mothers. Is it a failure if they fulfilled the latter, and fall short of the former.

What if it’s not wrong when a parent’s dream of the finer things is fulfilled int heir children’s lives?

It seems hard on the parents. But if there’s one thing the age of pioneers and pilgrims should have taught us it’s that one generation has to light the lamp, or the lantern, and dare to dream, even if they will never see the completion of the dream. Because sometimes one lifetime isn’t long enough for us.

Back in the Bible when folks lived to be 900 years old, they could have all lived to see their dreams fulfilled, but maybe now that our lives are shorter, we have to learn to be more content with less.

That’s not bad, I think on the contrary a shorter life leaves less time to get too comfortable in this old world. Which isn’t where we all belong.

I guess I’m rethinking my goals. I still hope to make an impact on the world, but if I end up in some corner of the globe with a small circle of friends and family to take care of and help and inspire, my life won’t be wasted. If I only get tot ell my stories to my children they are still worth telling.

Some parents, like the father in “Little Britches” and Casper Ten Boom from the writings of Corrie Ten Boom (The Hiding place; and In my Father’s House.) shine out most in when they leave behind in their children.

The Bible knew that parents are reflected in their children, not always, not every time, but often. I think today we’ve lost that.

Actually, we’re ashamed of it. We hate being like our parents because we feel it makes us less ourselves.

But the truth is, humanity is interconnected. When I went to Cambodia, I felt a common bond with the people there who couldn’t even speak English, it had nothing to do with how similar our lives or personalities were, but in that we’re all human. WE all share certain things.

In spending a few days in their lives, I expanded mine. For I became a part of theirs, and they a part of mine. I don’t mean that they influence what I do over here a whole lot, but there is a connection.

It’s hard to describe, some people have already hit upon the idea that humanity is all connected with each other, and I believe it’s true.

Even more so in families. We are a part of each other.

I believe strongly that we are all unique. But sharing our traits with others doesn’t take away from that. I resemble both my parents according to some people, but I don’t look exactly like either of them simply because I resemble both.

People are like those math problems where you have to figure out how many different way you can arrange the numbers. Only our numbers are limitless and we all have our own special part.

But what we share is, when you think about it, what enables us to love each other.

That’s why there’s so much hate now over he areas of racial tension both in America and all over the globe. It’s because the politicians are focusing on our differences. We should enjoy our differences, and I do, but inflaming them makes them more important than they really are.

Just like in any family where the parents or children puts too much emphasis on being alike or unlike each other. It’s just not important enough to fight over. (I mean of course, to ever begin to fight over. If one side is being unfair about it, I do think sometimes it has to be fought out.)

I might be white, privileged, young, and geeky, but it’s never bothered the people around me, no matter what their background is, and why should it?

To bring it back to the idea of accomplishment, I think the big things are kind of life the differences between people. Important, but not more important then things like love, wisdom, and nurturing and protecting and dreaming.

A wise man leaveth an inheritance for his children, the Bible says. And it’s no shame if in your whole life, what you accomplish benefits someone else more than you, some might even call that selfless living.

Until next time–Natasha.img_1549-4