Hope

Aftermath–plus special announcement at the end.

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“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”–C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man.)

I’ve written about this brilliant little book before, but one thing that interests me that I have not really touched on is what happened in the aftermath of it.

The system in England when Lewis wrote that books was followed pretty quickly by America, it was probably already in place in the rest of Europe at the time, at least the countries at the forefront of our minds.

Nazism, the great evil of the War, was leading to the abolition of most men, but Lewis was concerned that what they were teaching schoolboys (and girls no doubt) was going to lead to the abolition of all men, in feeling if not in biological form.

Wise men saw where it was going, but where has it taken us now?

We live in the Post-Modern era. It is rightly called that, if we mean by modern Modernism, which Lewis and his predecessor G. K. Chesterton were both very much concerned with. Modernism was not about being modern in a fashionable sense, like it’s usually used now, or referring to technology or medicine. Modernism was the principles, or lack thereof, of thorough rationality. Which Chesterton showed in his book Orthodoxy to really be irrational.

It is basically materialism, but with odd ideals on top of it, that really make no sense whatsoever if you take the idea literally that nothing has any value except in our own emotions.

But as Lewis pointed out, the men who taught this didn’t believe it themselves. They were teaching values in spite of themselves. The problem is, even if they were better than what they taught, it had the same effect on their students as if they hadn’t been.

My parents, and perhaps your parents generation were the prime victims of this teaching’s first effects.

You’re probably familiar with how psychology got very popular in the 60s-90s, and it still is now. It was beginning before then, but at least in America, it really took off once we began pushing religion aside and needed explanations for all the phenomenon’s sin and human nature used to explain.

We’ve come full circle almost in the pat few decades, we’ve come back to realizing that psychology explains nothing. Now we are looking to physics and other such things, we’re looking to sexuality, we’re looking to race, we’re looking to everything except what originally worked for people: Religion.

My dad had behavioral issues as a kid, and born when he was, he was medicated, put in Special Ed and diagnosed with mental illness, he tried rehabilitation. Like many people of his generation, and ours, he also tried drugs.

It’s strange that drugs and psychology both took off at around the same time. (People can bicker about dates, but a few years or even a decade on the grand scale of time is pretty much the same time.) Both were around before then, but they got popularized, jsutfied, studied, and theorized about. They came to be seen as normal.

Clearly they aren’t the same thing, but strange that the very thing that told us that our dependence on substance was a problem coming from deeper issues did nothing to stop us from abusing substances.

Have you noticed that to highlight a problem in society is no to weaken it, but exposing it makes it become uglier, more used, more prolific, draws more people in.

Exposing it just to comment on it, that is, real solutions are different.

But Psychology did not fix anything, it diagnosed things. Medication could not fix those problems, in face many meds make the problems they treat worse. My dad went off his, and does better now that he did while on them. (Of course, you should be careful about getting off medication, the process is difficult and should be walked through with a doctor’s help. He didn’t quit all at once.)

Now, we live in the information, option generation. In the aftermath of all that identifying, we’ve become clueless about what to do.

Relationships have been diagnosed, studied, and tested; the result? We have a really hard time maintaining even eye contact.

Are they directly related things?

I think so.

Exposing how bad we are at relationships did not help us fix them. It made the revelation overwhelming.

Before, people knew some folks were bad at relationships, but those who were were seen as responsible for their own actions. Since no one thought it was genetically inevitable, people could try to improve, or could be ignored by the general public if they chose to remain unpleasant. Not knowing how deep our mental problems supposedly went, we thought we could move on.

Having it blown so completely out of proportion crippled us. Because it made us think we were powerless to do anything about it.

Doubting our ability to control ourselves is now common phrasing for young people. “That’s just the way I am.”

But we took it further.

It was too depressing to live in that, so we began to take these things that were exposed so that we could not hide them anymore, and we began to say they were not bad, not shameful, after all. Instead they were cool, enlightened, they were our identity.

It’s okay to be gay, it’s okay to have mental health issues, it’s okay to have a disability, it’s okay to do what makes you happy.

Not all the above examples are on the same level of crazy of course, but they all stem from the same thing, a desire to take a shame and turn it into a pride.

In some cases that may be okay. But we’ve gone way, way too far past that line.

I do not blame young people all that much for being so stupid, not really.

When I read books written in the 60s-80s, I often find them depressing.

The infamous Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus was one of the most insulting things I ever read on the difference between men and women. A lot of authors who commented on it were condescending to both genders.

Like our differences can be summed up in quirks. Try it and it fails you, you’ll never find any one thing that makes men and women different other than our sexual organs, if you look only at what we do and what we enjoy and what we hate and how we think. The difference is harder to pin down then that, anyone who tires just makes fool of themselves.

When the explanation for differences was so stupid and limiting, it’s in line with human nature to throw it out and go to the opposite extreme, that there are no differences. That’s insane, but it’s less boring. Youth do like exciting things.

Plus, the new and different aspect is attractive to many people.

If you look at any popular attitude held now, you can trace it back to evolving from an attitude the previous couple of generations have. We have mutated it into something different.

We now speak less of the values they valued, and more of vague ideas about self-fulfillment. But it all make sense, that age of reason led to discrediting pleasure and fulfillment as in our own minds, leaving the young people weaponless to defend pleasure on the grounds o fr eason, the natural result we that young people ignored reason, ignored common sense, and ignored restraint.

Now we have this mess.

IF you listen to how we talked now, it’s becomes obvious. People acknowledge that there are reasons to ear healthy, exercise, and focus on happy things; but then make a joke out of doing none of those things. They laughed it off, but behind the humor, there’s a secret guilt, and a secret bewilderment.

Why, if it is so obvious, do we find nothing compelling about reason? And why, if it is so unimportant, do we make a joke out of not following it that hides a note of serious concern.

We are unsettled. We are drifters. The previous generations removed the foundation of our lives, tried to put a weak one in it;s place, but like sand, it crumbled when the floods of real problems struck again. It was never going to hold up.

But, lacking both  a solid foundation, and now even a sandy one, we have none. Hence our myriad of problems that center around confusion, uncertainty, and depression. Our general feeling of purposelessness.

We now do not have the logical skills to explain why we feel this way, only words of mental illness, social anxiety, and being addicted to screens.

We laugh at it because we have no idea what to do about it.

This, I present to you, is the aftermath of the abolition of Man, our humanity is not gone completely, thanks to God and the preservation of some values even so, but it is hanging by a thread because our defenses are so weak.

We are glorifying our weaknesses because we have been robbed of our strength and glory.

That is what happened. And it turns out, abolishing man’s strength and glory is very close to abolishing man himself, it is good for us that God redeems our weaknesses, or we would have no hope.

But we do have hope. That’s what this blog is about after all. That even dry bones can live again.

It is now almost the third or fourth anniversary of when I started it with just that premise. And I still think that  a return to truth is the only way to preserve hope.

So, with that in mind, until next time–Natasha.

Announcement:

I have now published the first two parts of a series I wrote on Kindle!

It is about superheroes, mystical creatures, and mysteries.

There may be over 20 parts in all, at 0.99 an installment (lowest price possible), if you would like to check it out, here’s a link to find it, the series is called “When It Started.”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=When+it+started+Natasha+Queen&rh=n%3A154606011&ref=nb_sb_noss

Rebirth.

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I’m still perusing the 39 clues series, I just finished book 4. Despite my post about how profound these books actually were, I was surprised to din this passage:

Irina stared ahead at the wall. Rebirth, she realized. This chamber wasn’t about death at all. It was about rebirth.

Could that happen? After a life lived, after choice after choice after choice led you someplace small and dark…could you…change?

To give you a little context, Irina is an ex-KGB spy with the expected checkered past to match, and she is looking at an Egyptian painting of a queen going into the afterlife.

She recognizes the subtle idea hidden in almost all mythology somewhere, of new life.

This is not really a romantization on my part, or hers, surely anyone can see that any idea of the afterlife is a suggestion that we can have a new kind of life. Generally a better one than we have here.

Some people think that this being common to all cultures is a sign of how we fear death and want some kind of weak comfort out of it.

Such a person writes off heaven as wishful thinking.

What that person would be missing is two things: One, why do we fear death? And two, why are our ideas of what happens after it so oddly similar across culture. There’s an afterlife, but many common themes in even what kind of after life it is emerge. Themes like wealth, ruling, reunion with loved ones, and there being two different kinds of afterlife. The idea of being able to help our loved ones achieve the good life is a theme in many religions also, from Native American to Egyptian to the Catholic idea of Purgatory. (to be fair, I believe the idea of paying people out of it is now old, but it was the norm in Martin Luther’s day.)

But why do we fear death at all? And why do some religions even carry an idea of dying before you die? Of getting renewed even in this life?

Irina is contemplating this, and you could almost see her quoting those lines for Jean Valjean in Les Miserables: “Take an eye for an eye, turn your heart into stone, this is all I have lived for, this is all I have known.”

Since I was using the 39 clues as an example of family problems, why not put this into that context?

It’s opening a can of worms to even ask how many of us have lived to get even with their relatives who hurt them. To see that they get paid back.

Or, how many of us have, as in Irina’s case, lived under the thumb of some of them. Unable to free ourselves because of our own weakness and desires to get ahead.

Never let it be said the root of fear and cowardice is not selfishness.

I can just feel how uncomfortable even thinking about it would make some of us, myself included. Ugh, I don’t want to think about it. How could I be so stupid as to try to even the odds? How can I still sometimes just wish to retaliate, regardless of the consequences.

If you’ve never felt like this,you are probably perfect…or you have no family. Sorry if that’s the case, but it’s a safe bet most of you do.

It’s not really mistakes that ruin a family dynamic, but the inability to move past them.

Whether someone can’t forget because it was just too traumatic, or because they are too spiteful to not want a shot at revenge, or because the other person is still dong it and constantly reminds them, family drama is a mess.

How many of us have the estranged sibling, the difficult child, the absent or abusive parent, or the critical extended family?

You don’t have to raise your hand.

Just thinking about it is painful.

So, what do we do? We have a terrible time even forgiving ourselves, let alone them.

It’s the sheer beauty of what she sees that make Irina start to wonder about rebirth. Could it be true?

Once, she’s back out, away from it, in the distraction of everyday, noisy life; she pushes it away. Yet the seed has been planted. Irina eventually ends up turning around.

Hope of that sorts sees fragile, better in fiction, but in our real sometimes awful situations, is it even possible?

Yes, it is.

The path of rebirth begins with wanting it. Sometimes it takes a terrible loss, a huge blow up, or sometimes it takes seeing a picture of something better. I’ve wanted it after seeing movies with more positive role models than I always had in my real life.

For your sake, I hope your calling comes through beauty, but may times it is through pain. Sometimes a mix of both.

Really, the method is not the important part. What we do with it is. Do we finally open ourselves up to rebirth? New life? A new way? Whatever the cost?

Or do we go back out into the everyday, noisy, busy crowds and lose ourselves in them.

How does rebirth happen?

It always involves a death first.

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.” Matthew 16:25.

There really is no avoiding my faith while talking about rebirth, even if I wished to. Jesus died for us already, but He also teaches us that we must die ourselves in order to be reborn.

“3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

“…And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3)

You know what’s interesting is that I’ve read and watched all sorts of genres, and been debriefed on related ones, to the point where I know the idea of dying is almost always tied to redemption and new beginnings.

The more mystical genres, such as many animes, fantasy movies/shows/books, and superhero sci-fi on occasion, have death along with resurrection. From Dragonball to Harry Potter to time travel epics to Superman, people die and come back to life in order to get final victory.

Genres like The 39 Clues are a little more practical, but the same theme of self sacrifice remains. especially in war stories. It is just irreversible. (The few exceptions to this are usually too weird and creepy to be valuable.)

Irina’s story also involves death in order for her redemption to be complete.

The idea I’m presenting is not really disputed, in fact, it just goes unacknowledged by most people.

God promises that with the death of our old self, the rebirth of our new selves will happen immediately.

“26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” (Ezekiel 36.)

Change starts with you. That is perhaps the truest teaching of Gandhi, and it was hardly original. It might be more precise to say change starts within you.

All you have to do is ask and want it. Really want it. Sometimes we just have to be sick of ourselves before we can be willing to let go of all our grudges and selfishness.

Irina was sick of herself. And so was I, when it was my turn. I like myself much better now.

Until next time–Natasha.

Holiday Meanings.

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I did a post on new Year’s Day and did not talk about New Year’s resolutions…that would make me weird. I notice that bloggers usually talk about popular things around the holidays, like Christmas Spirit, being thankful, and changing your life.

You know, it’s interesting if you put those holidays in order, the order everyone thinks of, (technically New Year’s is both the first and last holiday of the year, since it starts on December 31st and ends January 1st), you get the Day for Thankfulness, the Day for Giving and Receiving, and the Day for New Beginnings.

I don’t want to say it was done on purpose, but there could be some symbolism there if you’re the type to look for it.

Often a step toward change is being thankful for what you have to start with, to take the ingredients of your life and start seeing them as assets, and not annoyances.

Then you might realize you need to be contribute something to the people around you, and if you’re like me, you realize you need to let them give something back to you. People like to be needed.

Finally, this may all amount to some serious life changes.

People complain a lot that New Year’s resolutions are a waste of time and lead only to broken promises, but holiday traditions are not necessarily completely literal.

In the Church when we take Communion, we are not literally eating the body of Christ and drinking the blood, he gave us communion so we could remember that we have done this in the spiritual realm, that eating and drinking mean something different there then they do in the physical. It reminds us of our need for Him, and Him fulfilling it.

In the same way, at Thanksgiving, we aren’t starving (hopefully) and we aren’t always people who are unhappy with this life and need to revolutionize how we think, it is simply reminding us to be thankful. That we are blessed.

Christmas is not the day we can give each other the most important gift of all, New Life, Hope, Christ, but we give gifts to remind each other of that gift. IT’s our way of honoring it.

And New Year’s resolutions aren’t necessarily a call to change everything in one day, they remind us that change is possible and we can make that choice. They remind us we aren’t perfect. But we can keep dreaming, and improving.

While it’s true many people have lost sight of the meaning of all three of these holidays, it doesn’t mean the meaning is not there.

I like the reminder on January first that I have a new year ahead, and a new chance.

I make a dream list every year instead of resolutions. I have things I want changed, but I prefer to dream, and not necessarily have a time limit on it. I’ve put some of the same things on my list for years, you learn patience.

I mentioned in my post about fan fiction that one thing I’ve learned form it is that I am not able to fix everything. I am not that smart. All I have to go on is the truth.

I’ve learned in twenty years of living that there’s alto I can’t control. But I’m at peace with that most of the time. I do get frustrated now and then, but I’ve come to see that God is the one who should be in control, not me.

The thing about writing, and often other art forms, is that you have total creative control, and yet you don’t. You are limited by your own limitations of character, intelligence, and knowledge. Many great writers wrote their best stuff without knowing they were doing it.

Leonardo Da Vinci is famous for his Mona Lisa, and we are not sure who she was, it’s likely he thought he would sell it, but he chose not to. It could be he didn’t plan on it being one of his greatest works, yet it ended up being so.

The same thing with holidays. They remind us of important things, but they won’t substitute for those things, it’s just a day to remember. And remember that we have room to grow.

Anyway, to the New Year!–Natasha.

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“If He raised the dead…”

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If anyone has ever been forced to read Flannery O’Connor’s works for a class, then they’ve probably read “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” And though I thought from the title it might be a witty commentary on the modern way of dating, I was sadly disappointed to find out that  it mean a good man in general is hard to find…or woman.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the grisly details. The story really only has one interesting point or two in my mind, and that one is where the villain of the story, “The Misfit” discusses God with the grandmother, either our protagonist, victim, or other villain, depending on how you look at it. The Misfit declares that there is no way of knowing if Jesus really performed all the miracles he did, but that the most crucial one to know of would be if He indeed raised the dead. If he did, the Misfit thinks, then he was who he said He was. If he didn’t…then not.

The grandmother is unsure what to say, finding out that in the moment of danger it can be hard to actually believe what you’ve been in the habit of believing.

Jesus raising the dead is probably one of the hardest miracles for people to believe in. It’s the one that pushes our concept of what could be possible just a little too far.

Actually the Misfit is off if he thinks just that was proof. Some of the prophets also raised the dead, and later it is thought that Paul did the same, and Peter did it too.

And I’ve heard stories of it even in our modern time. Though it’s surprising how many people would be skeptical just because of that, who wouldn’t be of the Bible stories. We think that because it’s written down it’s far away, and somehow less spectacular.

Jesus raising the dead can be a weird story anyway, he did it no less than three times at least. Not counting after the crucifixion. One time, most famously, it was Lazarus; another time it was a man  Jairus’es daughter, and the third time it was the son of a widow. The last two times it was pretty straightforward but the Lazarus story is bizarre. Jesus purposely delays going to see him so that he cab perform the miracle to show his disciples that death has no power over Him. Yet with Jairus’es daughter he purposely makes sure not that many people are there to see.

Jesus mourns for Lazarus and his sisters’ grief even though he knows what is coming. Showing he does not minimize our pain, and that’s important, since we all know more people die than come back from the dead.

I think people are chary of this notion also because the culture has made an occult and zombie driven ritual of raising the dead. It’s easy to forget that those things are cheap imitations. I look at any power trick evil has as simply imitating something good.

This doesn’t answer he question of whether he did it or not. And to answer that,  and the corresponding criticism that religious people will believe anything, I would simply say that skeptics will believe anything in order to doubt.

If on can accept the other miracles Jesus did, then one has to accept that he raised the dead. It’s as simple as that. It’s all or none with God,, no half baked faith.

It’s funny that the Misfit imagines he’d want to believe any more if he’d been there, to those who have an open heart, all miracles are wonders, and to those who don’t every miracle is but a terror. We’ve probably all felt that panic at something totally unknown and strange to us, usually it lasts only a few moments till we get a reasonable explanation worked out, but a miracle is hard to dot hat with.

God’s miracles are things you have to get used to, but you can, most people don’t know that it’s possible.

Why though, is the Resurrection of the Dead so important to us, and to Christ, enough to make a statement of it?

There’s an idea that’s been going around for a long time that we should accept death as  a part of life. The phrase is kind of a self aware oxymoron. But it’s a part of several religions, and people can find it comforting to look at death as normal. We hate to feel like we’re particularly unlucky in experiencing loss.

But, The Bible would actually encourage people not to accept death, if it were taken at it’s word.

not only does it not ever tell us to just accept it and move on, but it deliberately makes a point of saying God is Lord even over death, and that he will overthrow it. Even the psalms are full of references to resurrection. We are told that event hose who die fro God are merely “sleeping” (which by the way, is I believe where the habit of calling it “at rest” came from.) In fact Jesus calls death sleep in at least two f the cases where he raises the dead, Lazarus and the girl.

This seems like denial…until they start to rise, and the Bible never gives us any indication that they were anything but normal. Jesus himself acts the same after he is raised from the dead…only cheerier perhaps now that the ordeal is over. We know that they ate. What we don’t know is how they felt about it.

We do know, from later scriptures that raising people from the dead is not the same as being given our new heavenly bodies. These people still have to eat and drink. They still walk the earth. It’s more of a returning to the norm, then it is becoming new.

That said, since becoming a new man is the whole point of Christianity, is raising the dead even necessary to the faith? Many would say no, because they don’t really believe it, or think it doesn’t effect them.

And hopefully I haven’t lost those of you who don’t believe this at all. Though I think I would have a long time ago if I were to.

But as I said, Jesus made a point of knowing us that death isn’t really so powerful. I think there are many reasons, one is that He doesn’t want us to fear it, another is that signs and wonders are part of serving him, still another is simply compassion.

What I wonder is why some people got a second chance at life. They probably didn’t need it to go to heaven, so why come back? It seems like it’s more for their loved ones. I really can’t answer that, I don’t know enough.

For now, I think I’ll just conclude with the thought that Raising the Dead is one of he pillars of the faith for a reason. Maybe we should all think about what that means to us.

Until next time–Natasha.

The Gauntlet.

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You know, I love to draw meaning from stories, it’s one of the most fun things I know of. I hope all of you have had that experience of sitting (or standing) with someone and just analyzing a story you both like. You get such a satisfied feeling afterward.

As I mentioned, I’ve been watching RWBY, and the show is just too good not to analyze in depth. There’s a lot to choose from, but today I’m thinking of one of its more sobering themes. It’s problematic, but it plays into a common concern parents and teachers, as well as young people like myself, have with entertainment, and how we should prepare kids for the world.

RWBY has, ever since season 2, not hesitated to bring up the question of when children should be considered adults. The idea the show deals with is if it’s really correct to call kids kids after they’ve taken up the gauntlet to fight for good.

This dilemma is presented literally by Yang, a girl who actually uses “gauntlets” to fight, and makes a point on multiple occasions of saying she doesn’t consider herself a kid. Now that she (spoiler alert) has made the choice to risk her life defending the world, been on a mission armed to the teeth, and then lost her arm defending her friend, she feels pretty adult.

Yang’s perspective is understandable, but it is counted by her mentor Ozpin and also her father, Ozpin never talks to Yang about it specifically but he does wish for the youth on the show to retain some of their child-likeness as long as they can, knowing it won’t be for long. He also hopes they will  not lose their sens of humor. Yang’s father Tai tells her directly that she’s still got a lot to learn, just fighting and undergoing trauma doesn’t make her an adult.

Yang does go on to prove she is growing up by making her own difficult choices. But we are still left wondering if it had to be that way. And if it’s right for children to take on such adult roles.

It’s an old problem on shows with young characters that they tend to act more adult than the adults, but this show takes a closer look at why that is. Maybe the simple truth is that we talk down to kids, and they are capable of handling far more than we realize.

Children, as any teacher who’s had any success might tell you, are capable of grasping very deep subjects, often faster than adults do. Things like loss can be hard on kids, but sometimes they still handle it better than adults.

It depends on the person, but it’s fair to say that children surprise us with their maturity often enough to make us question if sheltering them really makes sense.

i don’t mean you shouldn’t protect kids from knowing about evil. But some people think that includes not telling them about suffering and pain, and that’s not something we really can keep from kids. There’s no sense dwelling on it, but if it comes up, should we hedge around it as we often try to do?

RWBY is honest about one thing: This is war. As a kid, that’s what I was told. We’re in a war between good and evil. That wasn’t hard to accept…it’s not really like that’s news to a child. They see the fight all around them.

But in a war there are casualties, an damages, and wounds, and losses. What do we do with those? Some say we should encourage children to think about the happier things in life as long as they can. Others that we should not shield them from harsh realities.

If I might offer some insight on what I think the real answer is…

I think that we over think it, honestly. Unfortunately, the reason we do that is because we have the luxury of it. Not so long ago, most kids would have known someone who had died, or had lost a close family member. Tragedy would not have been a strange notion to kids. They weren’t sheltered from it because there was no way for them to be. Parents couldn’t hide the truth. Cruelty and hate were things kids witnessed, not just in bullying or movies or online, but in person. Between adults.

In many countries, this is still the case. I don’t know why the West doesn’t get it, honestly, I think it’s because we spend so much time running from realities like that ourselves. For some reason, we think our happily ever after comes without a struggle.

It’s not that we should give up on happy endings, which our culture has more of than most, all over its’ fiction and sayings and ideals, and I love that about America; but we tend to pass over the part in every story where the hero or heroine had to got through nearly hell to get to the better ending.

It’s quite simple, if you want a mediocre, quiet ending, then live mediocre and run from what would make you a hero. If you want a truly happy ending, then you have to embrace the sorrow in life and let it temper you into something new.

My pastor pointed out this past Sunday that Jesus said “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” He said “we need to learn how to mourn.”

And that got to me, because, I don’t know how.

Golly gee whiz, I’m not the only one am I? As a freaking culture, we don’t know how to mourn. Our whole message to people is that if you get knocked down, you get right back up. You shove people’s abuse of you right back at them. You keep moving forward.

Well, yeah, you should, but first you have to mourn.

If we hold it together all the time, then our strength will be brittle and a strong enough blow will shatter us. But if we let ourselves break over and over again, we’ll heal a little faster each time.

And this applies so much to children.  I wasn’t usually told to stop crying when I was upset as a kid. Mostly, I could express my feelings. But I still bottled them up out of insecurity, a huge part of my christian journey was learning to cry over my hurt. And just let myself admit it sucked. It’s funny, when you quit trying to be strong all the time, you find things aren’t so hard to bear. Not with God’s help.

And other people’s.

And dang it, that’s what we need to tell kids. Yes, you’ll have hard times. But it’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s because we treat suffering like it’s something to fear that it’s so hard to deal with it. It can be scary, but that doesn’t mean we need to fear it coming.

And there is comfort. That’s important to remember.

–Natasha.

 

Purpose and Loss.

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At my Youth Group last night we started talking about purpose. More specifically, is it hard to believe that you have one? And what makes it hard, since to be honest, most of us would agree that it is.

It’s always been easier for me, my parents raised me and my siblings to believe God has plans for our lives. They used to pray with us every night about that.

Even I had to admit, however, that it’s gotten harder over time. It’s hard not to get jaded by the world as you get older. The older people get, have you ever noticed, the less they tend to believe they can accomplish anything big, and the less they want to.

You might have heard the song “7 years” it’s a great song, very moving, and one of it’s fine points is the shifting attitude as the singer talks about getting older. He goes from a friendly kid, to a kid trying to be edgy and conquer the world, to an idealistic twenty year old, and then looking ahead, he recognizes that come thirty, things will start to seem like the highlight was in the past and he just hopes he’ll have friends still. And that he’ll be able tot each his children. Then he leaps ahead to when he’ll be sixty.

Looking ahead to old age, the singer has two or three profound thoughts. The first is that you remember life and then your life becomes a better one. This could be a reference to heaven, or to old age maybe being better in some ways than youth. His other thought is that he doesn’t want to be stone cold, but have children around to make him remember that kind of hopefulness he had once.

As you age and lose your energy and drive, being content with a family life seems appealing, and it’s not necessarily wrong either. For some that is their purpose. The people who go through mid life crisis’es feel differently though.

Even the people I know who didn’t have an outright midlife crisis definitely struggled with knowing their youth was gone and wondering if they were accomplishing anything with their lives.

My recent experiences have led me to believe that there is one huge factor in how we lose our sense of purpose, and it only gets worse with age. I think that factor is LOSS.

Something about losing something or someone important to us shakes us up. Even if you go numb, there’s a part of your mind that is reeling from realizing how little control you have. Since we automatically base our sense of purpose in what we think we can control (Think “Wait for It” from Hamilton) feeling out of control makes us wonder if we can do anything.

Realizing that young people can die just as easily as old made me question my age as any safeguard against having a wasted life. While realizing that older people can live a long time and not really learn anything about love or purpose made me question if getting older will help me be wiser, or will it just make me more cynical? It already has in some ways.

I wouldn’t say I’ve lost my ideals, but I tend not to get fired up about them like I used to. I tend to want to fight less over them. What I want more now is to know I can do well what I do, and to have people around who love me.

Yet I can’t get rid of that fiery side of me. I’m a born fighter, I fight whether I intend to or not.

Where does that leave me? And you, I know I’m talking to someone reading this.

The first step toward a Loss not defeating us and our purpose is admitting that our purpose never had anything to do with what we could control. Some people think we control our own destiny, I say that’s only partly true. We’re going to end up in some places whether we like it or not, all that we control is whether we let God use those times to help us fulfill His purpose for our lives, or we let ourselves become purposeless, dragged around by the breeze.

I had no control over ending up living in someone else’s house for two years. And that really bothered me for a long time, sometimes I still wish I could control it. Yet I chose not to give in and let that make me a vegetable, just going through the motions of living. I believed God had a purpose in bringing me here. I still try to have control, probably too much, but I don’t have the reins of my life.

Aging is tough on our resolve to live well and live bigger than ourselves. We realize how little we control as we get older. We don’t singularly control who runs our country (in other countries, the common person controls it not at all), or what taxes we pay, or where we live, or how well our business does. We try, but there are always factors that do not depend on us. That should make us humble and grateful for other people’s help, often it makes us despairing.

There are plenty of older people who are exceptions to this rule, and I’m glad of it. I’m more scared that younger people are giving into despair far more often than the old are.

Don’t let loss shake your faith in having a purpose. Even short lives can be bright and powerful. It may be true that every day we walk out the door is a fresh risk, but that means every day can be a chance to do something brave and meaningful. If we simply do not let ourselves lose our confidence.

Until next time–Natasha.