Love

Friends or Family?

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Well my family has left for vacation, and I am staying at home.

I’m not completely alone, my grandma is still here.

This is going to be the longest I’ve gone without seeing my family. Three weeks. It will be hard, my siblings and I are each others’ closest friends.

We spent our last full day together with another friend, and then watching our favorite anime together, (it’s My Hero Academia if you’re wondering.)

One thing we talked about in passing was how we’ve had difficulty befriending someone we know, and it seems like they don’t really want us to.

I pointed out that church (where all but one or two of my friends are) is supposed to be family, as the bible says, but if you look at how we’re instructed to behave to each other, it sounds more like friendship.

Proverbs even says better is a friend close then a brother far away, and there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Then I pointed out that we three have always been family, and we have always related to each other as sisters, but that it was only the past 5 years or so that we chose to also become friends.

Up until 13-14 I’d say, I treated my sisters like sisters. People who annoyed me, and who I could annoy, with no fear that it would end our relationship. There is a security in a healthy family, room to grow up and develop, while making plenty of mistakes along the way that family blows off, while it would end most friendships.

Of course, the biblical way to treat siblings is nothing like that, but as most adolescents, I didn’t care.

But after returning to Christ, I began rethinking how I acted. It didn’t change a whole lot until my sisters did the same thing, but overtime we began to build our relationship into something very strong. We enjoy it now. We enjoy each other’s personalities, and we are our closest confidantes. We have the kind of sibling-hood you read about.

And sometimes that amazes me, because I know it didn’t have to be that way. I’m so glad we all chose to become friends. (There’s actually a show on Disney Channel that addressed this idea, Liv and Maddie, “Sisters by birth, friends by choice.”)

I was comparing it to the Church family. Once you become a christian (as our doctrine goes) you are part of the family. And the basic instructions off the bat are that we accept you as such. overlook you faults the way a family would, and be your support. If we fight, we also forgive quickly.

That’s a family dynamic, a baby Christian needs that because they will get a lot wrong in the first year or so. That’s okay. I did too. And I was raised in Church. You cannot teach spiritual maturity, only exhibit it and hope it will benefit other people. I had my  mom as an example of it for years before I learned to emulate any of it.

A new Christian is only beginning to be a new person. And that makes them immature. We are meant to show grace.

The sad thing, a lot of churches do not even reach the family dynamic. They don’t accept people, they don’t forgive, they don’t support.

This does not mean that it doesn’t work however. The problem with corporate church is that the same flaws tend to creep in as with businesses and charities, many just don’t do what they should because management skills are not adequate.

Which is why I think the church was never meant to be a corporate experience, but there are people who find a way to work the system.

Many churches do find the family dynamic. But what the New Testament instructs us in is far closer to friendship in many ways.

We are not just to support each other, but to find each others strengths and talents, and develop them. We no longer just accept, we are also to correct, to sharpen each other. To hold each other accountable.

Family can do this, but it is something that comes more naturally into a really good friendship. Family can be too close to see the problem. Friends build distance on purpose by having diverse interests, getting space from each other, and so they learn more about the other person because they see them from more angles than if they lived with them constantly.

The church is designed to meld these two dynamics into a hybrid I think only is possible in spiritual ways. It is really difficult to explain until you experience it. My family became my friends. I hope someday to have friends who will be family.

The trouble is, churches can not really support friendship. I have a church that supports family a lot. Better than most places do. But it is still trying to figure out friendship.

A lot of discipleship we do is focused on family, one girl who’d been through their school of ministry even admitted to this. Not a lot of it is focused on friendship.

Yet, I think a lot of what the epistles show us is how to be a friend as well as a brother or sister.

I think in Acts, the apostles already had a family dynamic, but after they started to travel and organised, they had to have friends.

My dad has learned the hard way that family can be heard to organize to do anything if everyone acts as and individual. It takes the build up of friendship, the learning to work with a very different person, to speak their language, that allows for teamwork.

Some families achieve this with seeming ease. My family never had been particularly good at this except in crisis situations. I think it depends on how well the family knows itself.

A lot of friends now are not on this level, thanks to the lack of interaction we have except through technology, but you’ve probably met or known people who still have this teamwork ability. Hopefully you are one of them.

And my whole point to my sisters was that this ability is a choice to develop. That is what makes it different.

We have no choice about our family. We need to accept hem no matter what.

But within the family we tend to have friends. It won’t be every remember, an not the same for every member you do have it with, but there will be the odd person here and there.

I have a bond with family I only see once or twice a year because we are family, but I have a different bond with people I choose to be around and are not related to me except by faith or being in the human race.

I realize a lot of this post may only be interesting if you are a christian, but it was something I had not realized before, and I’ve been in church my hole life. Plus, it’s always interesting to think about social circles like this and how they work.

Plus my real point that friendship is choice, it doesn’t just happen, is one I think many of us need to understand. Myself included. Movies show friendship as something that can happen in an instant…sometimes it can, but I have never found those friends to be the ones I am likely to see the most often or talk to the most… Maybe God in his wisdom reserves the instant friendship bond for a more eternal significance. The people you surround yourself with are going to round our your rough edges, and that’s better for you.

Until next time–Natasha

Speaking of friendship, it is a factor in the book series I am publishing on Kindle, here’s a link if you want to check out the first two installments, more coming once I replace my laptop-

You can also visit my author page and ask me questions about the series if you’re curious about how me and my coauthor came up with the idea.

Thanks for your support!

Passengers

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I just watched Passengers.

My reviews would probably be better if I saw these movies when everyone was still interested in them, but that’s what happens when you’re on a tight budget.

I find Space Movies weird. I like Interstellar, I watched Gravity one time, but there’s always a surreal feeling to it.

It’s the opposite of Star Wars, which makes space seem more normal to be in. These movies really empathize how weird it would feel to be in space.

It’s odd, because C. S. Lewis’es idea of space is that it is full. Vibrant. Not an empty vacuum.

And his idea, while seemingly ridiculous at the time, has now some scientific basis. Scientists think space is filled with kinds of matter we can’t identify. They are not sure what it holding everything together anymore. It just is.

Since they aren’t allowed to say God anymore, at least in secular textbooks.

One of the most annoying things about my astronomy class was that every time we got to something that couldn’t be explained, we were not allowed to say God.

Just like in this movie, when Jim is railing at the universe, he is not allowed to call it God.

Yet, the Universe has a sense of humor? How can a thing have a sense of humor?

You might just as well call it God.

If you look for God in nature, you will find Him. You may not find Him quite like how the Bible would describe Him, no one should take Nature as the ultimate authority on God’s character, Nature is fallen, like mankind, and subject to sin and destruction. That’s what Romans would tell us.

Christianity explains why Nature is both cruel and kind, light and dark, creative and destructive, wise and yet senseless. It’s because it reflects us, the same battles we find inside. Why we use nature for analogies, like having “stormy” feelings, or a “sunny” personality.

Space movies (and books perhaps) seem to capture the human feeling of being lost and overwhelmed by what we find around us. Yet, what we find is beautiful, terrifying, and full of wonder.

Without a personal touch, it seems empty and meaningless.

It’s not much of a stretch to say Passengers mirrors the Adam and Eve story, though it also adds the redemption story to it, self sacrifice, and the power of choice.

A chosen fate seems more bearable than one forced on us.

I don’t know if discussing Jim’s earlier actions in a moral light is what I want to do, they were bad, but not entirely unexpected. The important thing is, once he actually learned to love, he made the right choice. The same with Aurora.

The tree symbolism brings the Garden of Eden story into play too.

The message of the movie seems to be two-fold, that nothing happens without a reason, and that paradise is where you make it. That Love makes the difference between heaven or hell on earth–or in space.

I do not agree 100% with  the idea that we can make our own paradise, but I do agree that love makes even a bare spaceship into a garden of life, and that was a fitting way to show it.

It takes both the higher purpose of saving all the other people, and the smaller choice to stay with the other person to make the redemption complete.

A good metaphor for life, in it’s way. Two people united for the good of all is what marriage is meant to look like, and certainly what I hope mine will be.

It’s a sentimental movie, but that is by design. Not sure I would watch it again, I do not like sad stories, but it was worth checking out.

A closing thought from G. K. Chesterton: The only way to feel at home in the universe is to also feel like a stranger in it. (I paraphrase what he says in his book Orthodoxy.)

You could say, through this world, all of us are just passengers. On our way to either the worst possible disaster, or paradise. Our choice.

Until next time–Natasha.

Why do opposites attract?

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I’m back with another anime inspired post.

In all fairness, this is really more of an idea I’ve had for a long time, that anime just happens to highlight, as well as many other shows and books.

You ever wonder why opposites attract?

It’s something most people know, though some of us may not have experienced it, and it works with friends and family as well as romantic interests.

 Why is it a law of nature? It goes beyond magnetism. The whole world is full of opposites. The ground soaks up water, water is absorbed, they have opposite properties. Same with plants and sunlight, one receives, the other gives. We breathe in the oxygen that plants give out, they take in the carbon monoxide (or dioxide, I forget which is from breathing) that we give out.

The clear reason here is that there is a need, if everything was the same, it could not grow or multiply.

Now you take this to the relationship between a man and a woman, and it gets way more complicated.

I remember once starting that “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” book, but I couldn’t get into it, it was so stupidly simplistic. It attributed all the differences between men and women to superficial signs of those differences. What always happens with books/movies about this subject is the author ends up looking dumb because there are scores of women who start offering up examples of how they do not fit the model.

In their brilliant book Captivating, John and Stasi Eldredge begin the book about women with an acknowledgement that women can love anything from tea parties to hunting, dress up to canoeing, and that all this does not really make you feminine, but why you do those things might.

I am not going to go into all that, but I highly recommend the book, or searching for their talks on YouTube.

The real point I had was that they are realistic, they know you can’t put women into a box, or men for that matter. I just want to make it clear that this opposites attract thing is not solely about gender. Gender in the sense of hormones, sexual functions, and physical attributes that is; though they all play a small part.

But I mean in personality. Why do opposites attract?

The question is easier to understand when you realize that they don’t always, sometimes like forces do attract, many people prefer to hang around those with similar personalities. I don’t, generally, I don’t meet too many people like me; but sometimes I do and it’s kind of gratifying.

Which actually concerns me, because if I am only drawn to someone because they are like me, is that because it’s easier?

It’s not a secret that people round each other out. The Bible calls it “iron sharpens iron” and “two are better than one.” The Bible also says that the first two people were man and woman, by the way, so there is optimal companionship possible between the opposite genders.

Where this ties in to anime and other shows is in the shipping.

Mock me if you wish, but I persist in thinking that shipping basically reflect a person’s values where romantic relationships are concerned. I am only getting more convinced with time that what kind of fan you are is very telling about your character, but I can save that for another post. The point is, people who ship things for the wrong reasons, or who just don’t care, can take the same attitude toward real relationships.

I will not say there are never exceptions, but it’s the more common rule.

One of my favorite kinds of ships I’ve mentioned before are the opposites attract kind. But I recently got a new insight into how deep that goes.

Often people think opposites attract means your personalities have to be opposites. Two cheerful people won’t attract. Two serious people won’t. However, I find that untrue, in shipping and in life. Many couple are composed of two goofier, laid back people. Int hose cases, however, one person is always more so than the other, there is never complete similarity.

Where the opposite really is important is far more interesting, actually. It has to be in character flaws.

This sounds obvious, but it trips people up, let me tell you. Especially in real life, because honestly, it’s easier to see why two fictional people are too much alike than it is when complicated feelings are int eh way in the real world.

You can have two entirely different personalities, but have the same basic flaws.

And for an example here I am going to turn to the very popular My Hero Academia. (Sorry non-fans, but bear with me, I think you can still follow along.)

The three main characters of this show are Midoryia (better known as Deku), Todoroki, and Bakugo. I will spare you the long version of who they are, all that you need to know is that these three have entirely different personalities; yet the show/manga over time shows us that their basic character flaws can be oddly similar. Though Deku veers more to the lack of confidence in his abilities, and the other two veer more to lacking confidence int heir own characters, but all three end up feeling guilty for things they really shouldn’t; and heaping on the shame and self-loathing because of that. The way they express it is completely different for each. But even the other show characters note how similar they are at the core of the issue.

In the same way, people can have very different personalities, as men and women, and yet their insecurities, flaws, and foibles may be pretty much the same.

On the same show, Deku often gets paired up with Uraraka, a girl who has a similar personality, in that she’s sweet, and innocent.

A lot of people hate this ship simply because they seem so similar, but upon further consideration, I realized that they really aren’t. They might both be positive, and that is a good thing, but Uraraka does not live on Guilt Trip lane, nor does she often feel as disappointed with herself as Deku. She has her own flaws, but they are not the same as his, in some ways, they actually are opposites. Deku does not really like conflict, she thinks it is fun or impressive.

Anyway, I hope that made my point. You can apply this to any couple really. Look at your own parents for crying out loud. Mine are certainly total opposites in flaws, though they share many beliefs and values.

It is true that having opposite flaws often includes opposite personalities, but it does not have to.

And it is important to think about when you are dating someone, because in the end, you want to be with somebody who makes you better.

Did you know that humans have flawed cells in their body? Defective ones? And that it’s why you are not supposed to marry someone closely related to you? It’s because the chances that their defective cells will be the same as yours drastically increases, and that is why siblings marrying almost certainly causes defects, often mental ones, and cousins now, though it did not at one time. Over time as we get more defective cells it’s likely even 2nd and 3rd cousins will be too risky, but here’s the thing, it is far less of a risk if you marry someone not in your family. The risk is almost negotiable then, because it’s unlikely they will have enough of the same defective cells to give your kids problems.

There have been some exceptions, it can occasionally work out, and has in the past between more closely related family; and the problem was once not even there.

Theoretically, Adam and Eve were perfect, no defective cells, and for several generations, the amount of defective cells would have been too small to cause problems with intermarrying. That doesn’t even become wrong in the Bible until after Abraham’s time. Abraham married his half sister, and before you think that’s gross, it was common at that time and in other religions. Also, it did not cause any problems. But later on in the Bible it does become ore of an issue. However, 4,000 years or so ago, it was probably barely a risk.

This is a physical example of a spiritual truth if you think about it. Adam and Eve were without sin, so being exactly the same would not have hurt them. They did not have flaws, or imperfections, so how they matched up didn’t matter. It was only after sin that they develop both the same, and also different flaws, like cowardice, blame-shifting, and shame.

If sin was not a problem, we could all marry anyone we wanted, and not worry about making each other worse. As it is, if you do marry someone not good for you, it is still possible to make it work; it is just harder.

It is never the good qualities in ourselves that we need to worry about matching with. Two negative people should not get together, but two positive people can, it’s not a problem. Provided their positivism is not fake (which is really a flaw then.)

Anyway, I am not trying to start any weird idea that if you and your significant other have some of the same problems it means you can’t be together. I doubt anyone would listen to me anyway if I said that. We will always all be human, we all have insecurities, prejudices, and pride; but if we have different flavors of those things, we can help expose them to the light and make each other better.

That is the real difference to be concerned about, since at the end of the day, superficial stuff is not all that important.

Until Next Time–Natasha.

 

What’s Your Name?

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“Who can give a man this, his own name?” –George MacDonald. (Unspoken Sermons.)

Hi, I’m back today with a much more mystical subject than I’ve been covering, (and by the way, mystical is not the same as mythical, mystical can be real, but very hard to understand unless you are a Mystic.)

What brought this on was recently watching the Anime Best Picture winner “Your Name.” I was both skeptical and hopeful when I heard about it, and so my siblings and I decided to try it out. We’ve only discovered we like anime over the last year or so, and we’ve been slowly trying different kinds. (I seem to like Slice of Life best aside from the shows I’ve gotten into.) I loved Koe no Katachi, a different anime movie, so I thought, what the heck?

And I thought Your Name was one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen, from a visual and story perspective, though not without its flaws.

However this is not a movie review, watch it if you’re into that sort of thing, otherwise don’t bother, if anime turns you off. But the concept of the movie was something I did want to talk about, because part of what  I liked about it was how similar it was to other things I’ve read, and it’s mostly read, since I’ve seen few movies tackle the subject.

The movie centers around a couple different ideas which I’ll list here for clarity before breaking them down.

  1. The idea that Love transcends Time and Space
  2. The idea that there’s power in knowing someone’s Name.
  3. The idea that people are destined to meet, despite whatever impossible obstacles seem to stand in their way.
  4. The idea that time is interwoven, not just a long line of events.

The first two are the most important, and the ones I feel the most informed of, if you could call it that.

I happen to be a fan of Madeleine L’Engle’s first three books in the Wrinkle in Time series, my favorite out of the three is “A swiftly Tilting Planet,” it’s amazingly complex for such a short book, and it focuses on Joy, and Love, like all three of the books do, as well as Time Travel.

What’s interesting about it is that just like in “Your Name” the boy in this book time travels by going within someone else. Only it is several different people and all male. Also he other person’s conscious remains. he just blends into it, giving them help when he can but only subtly. they can’t know it’s him or it would scare them too badly. It is not possessive, but sharing, like a passing traveler.

The boy, Charles Wallace, goes within for the same reason Taki in the movie does, it is to redeem people and save others. There is a disaster int he book that is going to wipe out the world because of an evil man, and he has to redeem the parents of this man and save some of them also. Taki has only to save an entire town, but it proves just as difficult.

Interestingly, both stories share the theme of someone forgetting quickly as soon as they come out of it, what happened. Only, instead of Charles Wallace forgetting, it’s Meg who is only helping him by a sort of telepathic connection they have (more spiritual than mental) and because she is not there, it fades from her mind. Like a dream. Other characters in the book have dreams that are actually from Charles Wallace’s life, while he is within them.

I find the similarities astounding.

Here we have the idea that lives can be shared across time and space, and it is because of love, joy, and the need for salvation (in every sense of the word) that it happens. We have the idea that our spirits are not bound by time, space, or our minds. Because Meg’s mind may not be able to retain it (her brother has a rare mind that is able to, not many people do) but her heart and spirit can. In the movie, the two people’s minds are only able to remember for a short time what happens, but their hearts and souls remember always.

It’s actually a common idea in Japan that people can be connected and share sorrows and joys, especially with lovers. And the idea is actually not unbiblical. I’ve heard stories of people sharing feelings or some other kind of connection in the spirit, or even physical pain.

But and even more important thing (at least for the average person who probably won’t expereince that kind of trascendential existance in this life) is the second thme. The power of names.

I again turned to L’Engle, this time her second book int he series, A Wind in The Door. In this book Meg learns more about her task in the universe (in Church we would call it spiritual gifting or calling, the secular world also calls it a calling, rather mockingly, but also with some seriousness.) It is to be a Namer, and she does not get it. She asks her teacher about it:

Meg: “Well, then, if I’m a Namer, what does that mean? What does a Namer do?”

Proginoskes: “When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job. Maybe you’re supposed to make earthlings feel more human.”

He goes on to explain that their enenmies, the Echthroi, are trying to destroy the world by doing just the opposite:

“I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming – making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate. That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”

In “Your Name” the problem is not that the characters forget who they are, but that they forget each other, every time the barrier of time is reinstated between them, they forget. And eventually forget even that there was a person they were trying to remember. Though they have a vague idea that they are always searching for someone or somewhere or something. Because they cannot remember the name they don’t know who each other are. It echoes L’Engle’s idea so closely, it’s bizarre.

Knowing your own name is important, so is knowing other people’s. But why?

George MacDonald had some very profound thoughts about this, in his Unspoken sermon about names he notes that the names we give each other are just shadows of what a real name is, since the real name, that God will give us at the end of time, is one only he and we will know, and only that one person will have.

“The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol,–his soul’s picture, in a word,–the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees.” 

(Link to the full sermon here: http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/5/)

Taki and Mitsuha are not names that sum up who they are exactly.

Mitsuha means “third leaf” and is similar to her grandmother’s, mother’s and sister’s names, which are first leaf, second leaf, and fourth leaf, in that order. It symbolizes he place in the story as a carrier on of tradition, but not her personality.

Taki means waterfall or water plunging. He does plunge into water in a sort of vision in the movie, and that is when he is able to save Mitsuha and her village by switching with her one last time. But it doesn’t sum him up.

In the end, that’s not really the point. The names in the movie do just what MacDonald points out our human names for each other are meant to do, identify us to ourselves. Help us distinguish each other, honor each other, and of course, remember who is who.

But as MacDonald and L’Engle both point out, there’s a higher reason for names. Names carry our identity.

My full name (which I don’t use on this blog and won’t actually give here for privacy reasons) mean “joy/rejoicing, Christ’s Birthday, and guardian/one who guards or protects.” If you knew me in real life, it makes sense. Even on this blog, it makes sense.

I’ve been told many times my name was no accident. Not everyone is blessed with a good name. In India many girls are cursed with a name that means “unwanted” there’s a group that takes in some of these girls and allows them to legally change their name into something better. If your name has absolute no positive connotations, I’d suggest you consider going by something else, but most names do have some good meaning.

Why is it important?

It might surprise you.

In the Bible a lot of stress is put on names, I’d say more than almost any other religion. Names are seen as so powerful that priests could not even write the full name of God because it was so holy, they abbreviated it to “Yah.” The bible doesn’t actually say not to write God’s name, that I know of, it’s more of a Hebrew culture thing added later, but that is how seriously they take it.

The second commandment is not to misuse the name of God. Sadly, even Christian often don’t take this one seriously.

But even so, other names have power. Abigail’s husband Naboth, who disrespected King David, name means fool. Sometimes bible names come to mean that thing because of the bearer (I think Ruth is like this, it mean friend), but Abigail tells David he is just as his name suggests, meaning it already meant that and his parents clearly sucked.

Judah means “praise,” and David was of the tribe of Judah, as was his son Solomon, both of whom wrote psalms and considered worship to be very important.

Jesus means “deliverer”, Emmanuel means “God with us.”

The list goes on and on and on, any important Bible figure almost always has a name that connects to their purpose. Noah means “rest or peace”, Jacob means “usurper”, Moses means “drawn out”, and if you know their stories, it all makes sense.

But even more importantly God himself tells us names are important.

Phil 2:9 “Therefore God has also highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name.”

In Exodus 3:15, He tells Moses his name is I Am Who I Am (Yahweh) “This is My name forever.”

Google verses about names if you want an even more in depth list, but even this tells us names can be eternal, and higher, and powerful. Names mean authority.

Heck, everyone knows this, think of even a couple hundred years ago when black people had “slave names”, names usually not in proper English, that they would change when they were freed or they would finally get a last name like a legal citizen would have. Changing the name was a sign of being able to be though of as an intelligent human being. Even before they really were, by most people.

Even in fiction, every writer knows, names are important. My character’s names always come to me, and then unless I use them, no other name will stick in my head. After awhile I started looking up the names when this happened and was shocked to discover that (at least when they were real and not made up ones) each name had a meaning that matched the purpose I had for the character, and something about their personality too.

Even when we don’t know a meaning, a name has immense power. There’s a whole cultist idea about this, but let me say, names don’t dictate everything. They help, sure, but you still choose what you do with your name. So don’t worry about it if your name has a personality associated with it that you don’t like. (I prefer not to look into that stuff at all, I stumbled on some by accident. It was scarily accurate in some ways, but wrong in others. No one can fully predict who you will be except God.)

Well, this ran long because of all the quotes, but it was interesting. I hope it inspired you to go look up what your name means, it might surprise you. And until next time–Natasha (Christ’s Birthday.)

Why do we need each other?

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I stated in my last post that I don’t think people are better off alone, but I got to wondering, what is it about each other that we need?

You ever wonder that? People say “I need you” but how often do they elaborate on why?

Depends on the person. I think for most it goes along the lines of “I need love. You can love. So I need you.”

In all honesty, though, we suck at love. This is probably why relationships are so complicated. Make it out to be just that peopel are different and complicated, but with a little real love, none of that would matter. We’re just bad at love.

Yet the little bit of it we manage to provide each other is just so good, we don’t want to live without it.

Hence, we need each other.

There’s no shame in that, we are designed to need love. C. S. Lewis broke down human love in his genuis little book “The Four Loves” and pointed out that all human love is need love, because even the love we give, we need other people to want. We need to be needed.

He also goes on to wonder why God would create us, and create, in a way, a need in Himself to love us. But the nature of love is to want to multiply.

What exactly does love give us that we need?

Well, it gives us security. Relying on other people for that is risky business though. What if they stop liking us. Do you like your family 100% of the time? Do people always like you? Do you always act likable?

NO. To all three questions.

Love gives us room to grow. A second chance when we slip up.

Love gives us happiness that is all its own, not one that wec an describe. Some poeple minimize love to security and sex, but it’s more than that, we’re just not sure what to call it. It’s led many to concld elvoe is its own brand of happiness.

When we don’t feel love, or loved, we feel miserable.

I sumbnit to you though that it is worse to feel unloving then unloved. It’s somehow unnerving to feel nothing. To feel selfish all the time.

And so I conclude that we need each other, not becuase we need love, so much as we need to love.

God said it wasn’t good for man to be alone. We read that and assume man was lonelhy because he needed love. BIt man had God, God who provided all the love in the world, lavished it on us, what more coudl yhou need?

But God doesn’t need us. as much as He enjoys our worship, we never feel it’s something HE must have.

And Man, mad ein God’s image, had the capacity to love someone who needed them. NOt just ot worship-love. Because God adores, but He also blesses, and man needed to bless.

Of course he had the world, but animals and plants don’t quite feel the same do they? They don’t have a higher understanding of love, so it’s not as satisfying, though still valuable to love them.

The desire to love something at our level is one God must have, being three equal persons in one, and so we have it too. Even beasts have that.

So God made woman for man. But man is designed for woman also. Because we need to love, not just be loved. And we minister something to each other that no other creature does.

It seems weird to pose the question of why we need each other, and answer it with we need to be able to love. But how often does the world get things backwards? It kind of makes sense doesn’t it?

Maybe you’ve heard the song “Hey Brother” I think in it’s own way it sums this up. The song is about being there for your family. But I like the tone it has of just enjoying helping them out.

 

 

Better Off Alone?

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

You know that moment when you’re reading a comment thread and you think to yourself “50% of this is talking more about the cute couples then the message.”

I’ve written about shipping recently, and defended certain kinds of ships as enhancing the story, but I didn’t really talk about the question of whether or not shipping should even exist.

I figured, it’s not like it’s going anywhere, but I’ve been seeing a few people saying they are so done with it. They are sick of all the arguing. It’s funny how seriously people take it too, I won’t argue that. Especially the most unrealistic ones.

This burn out on shipping has more, I believe, to do with a very real question, wrapped up in a lot of fictional characters: The question of whether anyone needs a significant other to be a full, functional human being.

A lot of romantic songs dwell on needing another person. Old movies are mocked for their inclusion of female leads who sing about how they need a man to be happy.

Even Disney’s Hercules, which many people like because the female lead was NOT looking for love, has a whole song devoted to making it clear she still wanted it, and denied her feelings out of fear.

I’m sure I could fine more mainstream adult movies with examples of a similar thing.

IT doesn’t matter how seemingly self-sufficient your female lead is, she’ll end up with a man 99.9% of the time.

And you know if she doesn’t, it’ll be discussed in the movie.

I could call out the serious double standard here, since it’s more common for the male lead to stay alone, especially in older movies, or to get the girl as some kind of prize.

Actually what really bothers me is how often the woman was a total idiot. Like in Crocodile Dundee, ick.

The same is true of old books, in fact, it might be more true of books than movies, which have more pressure to be “progressive.”

But the solution I see younger people falling back on, and feminists push them to do it, is to simply say “Well, a woman doesn’t need a man to be happy.” It’s usually a woman do, the man clearly needs someone to balance him out.

And hey, I won’t argue with that. But I think the portrayal of women has gotten to be a little unfair.

They tend to be shown as these top-notch, independent, brave, and above all tough and emo-like characters. I could just use kids movies, and I’ll find you that character in almost any of them. From The LEGO Movie, to Big Hero 6, to The Avengers, (in fact, every single female lead in the Avengers was basically the same character for quite a while.)

Why would a character like this need a man?

Especially when their male companion is usually goofy, clueless, and hot headed? Or a wimp.

You can feel, even if it’s never said, that the woman is just basically putting up  with his nonsense because he’s cute.

Talk about a role reversal.

Now, as true as that might be to real life, is it any less true that men have to do the same thing with women?

And the girls I know, though I can’t speak for anyone else, are not anywhere near being as put together as these feminist archetypes.

The truth is, both the old way men were portrayed and the way women are portrayed now, involves a suspension of reality. They are shown as unbreakable, because society tends to worship the unbreakable, we don’t always care whether it’s a him or her, so long as the right qualities are there.

And the real situation is that the qualities I listed above are far more likely to be shared between two above average people in a relationship, then found exclusively in one of them.

And it’s because of that unrealistic portrayal that people are able to say “Well she doesn’t need a man,”

Let me speak some truth sister, (or brother), if they were shown how they really are, how you really are, you’d be more likely to wonder if they deserved a man, let alone if they needed one.

If you on your worst day is not a fate you wish to spare people, then you aren’t honest with yourself. We do stuff that drives people crazy.

However, I’m not saying we should think that we are better off alone because we suck. Other people do things that suck too. The idea of being together, is that we are better together, the sum of our good becomes our new identity.

That is actually what marriage is supposed to be, and by extension, a dating relationship should be growing toward that ideal.

Way back in Genesis 2, God said “It is not good for man to be alone.” The Bible goes on in other books to say that two are better than one, and that we need tor ely on each other.

It’s not hard to figure out, if you read the bible, that God is in favor of relationships.

So it is the height of pride to claim we do not need each other.

Not everyone is meant to get married, it’s true. But I think most people are, because we were designed for that.

We should not be voting for people, real or imaginary, to be single. Because it ignores the truth that we are not good alone. It’s deceiving ourselves to tell ourselves that.

Being alone is freaking hard, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I am not alone in my house, but I still feel lonely. I’m old enough to be dating or getting married. And I’m not ashamed to admit that’s a need.

The question is of timing, not of necessity.

I would not be good alone for very long.

Anyway, I think this all goes back to humility. Letting go of our obsession with the unbreakable human being stereotype. If you are unbreakable, you’re as cold and hard as rock.

Or, you’re too soft to break. Like clay. Humility is what gets us there. And relationships are what get us humility. Unless you know another way…

Until next time–Natasha.

My sister found this hilarious song/clip about relational expectations, check it out for a good laugh at yourself: