surely these thoughts will be rendered outdated as the years go by, just as thoughts I've had before that seemed so eloquent and enlightened at the time no seem cheap and shallow and thoughtless. No matter:
I have some time on my hands. It's a sensation I'm not used to anymore: I haven't had more than a few days to do fully as I please since about August of 2007, and the freedom of it all is a bit fun and also a bit uncomfortable, but I'm making the best of it all.
The first thing I did was to take a trip. I spent 17 days wandering across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. For my own false-humility's sake, you'll have to ask for these stories on your own. I have tons of stories from my time in asia, but I've chosen to omit a lot of them here because I want you to ask me about them instead of stalking me from over the cyber-fence. That isn't to say I'm not glad you're here, just that I often save many of my favorite parts for those who ask for it. I might get around to it, but if you really want to know, ask me for it. Life together is more special than reading things on the internet. But I digress..
Now I'm back to lovely old Bangkok, along with a few remaining friendly faces. and the next thing I'm doing is going through everything. The chaos of the last many months has left my organization in a shambles. You know how when you're on vacation you take seven of the same picture and you think, "oh, I'll go through and whittle them down later." this is later. and it's a mess. and one feeling I especially can't help but feel as I go through all the pictures and documents and music on my computer (only the first stop on the organization express) is just how much has changed in the last four years. for one thing, I'm a much better photographer than I was 4 years ago. Although I lament the current sad state of my camera, it's taught me well. and by that I mean, my topic selection and the way I would frame a shot used to be really bad. minimalism, dear children. And looking at old papers that I wrote (which deserved lower grades than I received, which were lower than what I thought I deserved at the time. Thanks, Dr. Quinn.) and old albums that I thought were great and would share with friends that now seem unlistenable, and poetry that I wrote that I thought was pretty good at the time, that wasn't. Beyond all of this are the emotional things that come up. Mistakes I made, things I would have done different. People who didn't get to see the best sides of me.
And the first instinctual reaction to all of this is to cringe, in a sort of embarrassment for the past self. but I've quickly gotten over it. It's not that you can shrug it off, it's the comfort you can take from the fact that that's who you used to be. and if that's who you used to be, and you are where you are now, and all of the steps both false and true along the way brought you to become someone better than you were all the way back then, imagine what tomorrow might bring, and what further refinement might come. When even the sorrows become ingredients for joy, our joy is infinite. Therefore, I will not stop wondering, and I will not stop learning. Mistakes are sure to be had, and we will learn from them. And in that all despair flails under the weight of our great hope.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
a place I used to call home.
It's all very odd, this living business. It's especially strange if you do it right. It seems very basic that a natural part of life is to allow people in, to see at least parts of you and come to whatever conclusions about you that they may. That is really beautiful, but it's also scary. In allowing yourself to feel anything at all, you run this risk of not measuring up in the eyes of others. The fear that they might not see in you all that you hope is there can be a crippling one. But with diligence and patience, all the little things about you and them that aren't perfect begin to fade, and all of the differences that seemed so staggering and impossible to overcome seem small and petty.
Five months ago I landed on a very large, strange, and foreign continent, feeling very alone in the world. And then something happened. Over the few days that followed, I met 23 people. These 23 people were born in 8 different countries. Together, collectively, we speak somewhere between 9 and 11 languages. At first, it didn't seem how it would all work. These were people I just met. Acquaintances. On the surface they all seemed very neat and different, in some ways like a new toy still in its' packaging, but also with the sheer mystery. It was easy to make first impressions, I found, but as time passed I found also that many of my first impressions were wrong. It's a strange process that happens when you live with someone, when you spend every waking moment with them and share in all of life for a long time. It's something deeper than the sort of "getting to know them" that only takes a conversation or two, where you can say you know someone, add them as a friend on facebook, and have a little common ground for when you see them in passing. Living with someone exposes them, shows them to be who they truly are. You can dress yourself up for a time, but eventually all the cracks start to show themselves: the flaws, the dirt, the insecurities, the pain. The good things too, are all the more evident. it's in this intimacy of living together that great attributes like joy and generosity and kindness can reveal themselves in a sincere way, because it's here that you get to see them when nobody's looking. If you live with someone long enough, you truly know them. Deeper than the surface, there lies everything about them which is now revealed to you: hopes, dreams, pain, flaws, and the alchemy of joy and sorrow that all of us share. Down at the heart of it we're all flawed, beautiful creatures. When you live with someone you get to understand a little more about what that means, and it's wonderful.
but there's something even more wonderful than this. These countless interactions, big and small, that make us get to know someone and allow us to love them does something more than inform us about the truth of something outside of ourselves. It changes who we are, too. It's something my dad once said to my grandfather as the time was growing short: "Everything I learned I learned from you. The things about you that were great, I did my best to take as my own. The things about you that are flawed, I did what I could do differently." And perhaps that's the true joy of sharing life with other people, is that you find the good in them rubbing off on you, and if you're wise about it even the bad in them can be a teaching to you.
I've struggled with the term "grown-up." not on some emotional level, as though I'm either in a rush to grow up or want to stay a child forever, but I don't get it on a definitional level. I don't think it means anything. I don't think there will ever be some point in life where you cross over from being a child to being an adult, despite what professional graduation and wedding planners might tell you. It's a process of change, and it's up to us to make the choice to think about what it means to live well and change towards that. To take what's good about life and expand on it, and to realize what isn't constructive towards goodness and expel those things from our life. This is a truth I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't lived with others.
The other part of living with people that requires all the courage we can muster is this: you live with someone long enough and you just get used to them and you find comfort in them. Life's more fun together, and it's nice to just exist together for a while with people who know you. You get to the point a few months in where a lot of the hard work is done and the rewards of just being able to love each other and live together begin to pay off. It's nice, and nothing to complain about. But sometimes, life together has to end. When you live with someone, they get this piece of you that nobody else can take and that time can't erase, and it makes saying goodbye and looking into the uncertainty of the future painful.
It's especially hard in this case, because it's 23 goodbyes all at once, and my family scatters off to 5 different continents, leaving me in peace to wander southeast asia alone. In all of my previous goodbyes I had the well-founded hope that there would inevitably be times in this life where our paths would cross again. And I can still have those hopes, of course, but this time I know in my heart that many of these goodbyes are the real thing, and that no matter how much I love this person from the bottom of my heart, most likely I'll never see them again in this life. and that's painful, but I find joy in it because although the future is so uncertain, the future can't change the past. In the times we shared together I was left changed, and the love and life that we've shared will carry on with me in all the time to come.
This post is dedicated to Abraham, Aom, Art, Austin M, Ball, Benz, Brittany, Caleb, David, Esther, Eve, Gift, Isabel, Josch, Rebecca, Ribka, Samm, Stephanie, Taay, Tadam, Taylor, Thearith, and X.
Five months ago I landed on a very large, strange, and foreign continent, feeling very alone in the world. And then something happened. Over the few days that followed, I met 23 people. These 23 people were born in 8 different countries. Together, collectively, we speak somewhere between 9 and 11 languages. At first, it didn't seem how it would all work. These were people I just met. Acquaintances. On the surface they all seemed very neat and different, in some ways like a new toy still in its' packaging, but also with the sheer mystery. It was easy to make first impressions, I found, but as time passed I found also that many of my first impressions were wrong. It's a strange process that happens when you live with someone, when you spend every waking moment with them and share in all of life for a long time. It's something deeper than the sort of "getting to know them" that only takes a conversation or two, where you can say you know someone, add them as a friend on facebook, and have a little common ground for when you see them in passing. Living with someone exposes them, shows them to be who they truly are. You can dress yourself up for a time, but eventually all the cracks start to show themselves: the flaws, the dirt, the insecurities, the pain. The good things too, are all the more evident. it's in this intimacy of living together that great attributes like joy and generosity and kindness can reveal themselves in a sincere way, because it's here that you get to see them when nobody's looking. If you live with someone long enough, you truly know them. Deeper than the surface, there lies everything about them which is now revealed to you: hopes, dreams, pain, flaws, and the alchemy of joy and sorrow that all of us share. Down at the heart of it we're all flawed, beautiful creatures. When you live with someone you get to understand a little more about what that means, and it's wonderful.
but there's something even more wonderful than this. These countless interactions, big and small, that make us get to know someone and allow us to love them does something more than inform us about the truth of something outside of ourselves. It changes who we are, too. It's something my dad once said to my grandfather as the time was growing short: "Everything I learned I learned from you. The things about you that were great, I did my best to take as my own. The things about you that are flawed, I did what I could do differently." And perhaps that's the true joy of sharing life with other people, is that you find the good in them rubbing off on you, and if you're wise about it even the bad in them can be a teaching to you.
I've struggled with the term "grown-up." not on some emotional level, as though I'm either in a rush to grow up or want to stay a child forever, but I don't get it on a definitional level. I don't think it means anything. I don't think there will ever be some point in life where you cross over from being a child to being an adult, despite what professional graduation and wedding planners might tell you. It's a process of change, and it's up to us to make the choice to think about what it means to live well and change towards that. To take what's good about life and expand on it, and to realize what isn't constructive towards goodness and expel those things from our life. This is a truth I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't lived with others.
The other part of living with people that requires all the courage we can muster is this: you live with someone long enough and you just get used to them and you find comfort in them. Life's more fun together, and it's nice to just exist together for a while with people who know you. You get to the point a few months in where a lot of the hard work is done and the rewards of just being able to love each other and live together begin to pay off. It's nice, and nothing to complain about. But sometimes, life together has to end. When you live with someone, they get this piece of you that nobody else can take and that time can't erase, and it makes saying goodbye and looking into the uncertainty of the future painful.
It's especially hard in this case, because it's 23 goodbyes all at once, and my family scatters off to 5 different continents, leaving me in peace to wander southeast asia alone. In all of my previous goodbyes I had the well-founded hope that there would inevitably be times in this life where our paths would cross again. And I can still have those hopes, of course, but this time I know in my heart that many of these goodbyes are the real thing, and that no matter how much I love this person from the bottom of my heart, most likely I'll never see them again in this life. and that's painful, but I find joy in it because although the future is so uncertain, the future can't change the past. In the times we shared together I was left changed, and the love and life that we've shared will carry on with me in all the time to come.
This post is dedicated to Abraham, Aom, Art, Austin M, Ball, Benz, Brittany, Caleb, David, Esther, Eve, Gift, Isabel, Josch, Rebecca, Ribka, Samm, Stephanie, Taay, Tadam, Taylor, Thearith, and X.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Life as an experiment.
(Vagabond Discipleship, Part 5)
Times come and times go. Life keeps changing. Life always changes. And even though it's hard, it's a sign of something good. I think of what my life would look like if it didn't change, if I resigned myself as an 18 year old to cowardice, hid myself in my parents' basement, and played video games. It would have been a very easy life, assuming mom and dad would have ever gone along with it. None of the pain that comes along with growth would have ever affected me. The photographs that make me long for people and places in my memory would either not have been taken or simply not meant anything.
Outreach is over. Six weeks of endlessly wandering all over this lovely country have taken their toll,
and it's a relief to be back in Bangkok. The final two weeks, which I didn't get much of a chance to blog about, were life-filled ones. I don't mean that as a neat feel-goody sentiment, I mean it in the real sense. Exhaustion, heartache, and staggering beauty, all in the context of burmese migrant slums, public hospitals, minimum security prisons, buddhist and christian schools, improperly equipped internet cafes, the homes of friendly strangers, and the streets and highways of this beautiful land.
I'm sitting on the lovely, rock hard matress on the second bottom bunk of the men's quarters. I used to complain about this matress, how hard it is and how when I was getting used to it I would toss in bed endlessly before I could sleep. I don't complain about it anymore. I love it. It's not that it's any more comfortable than before, it's just that I've grown. I see something more in this mattress now: I see the memories in it. I think of the countless times over the past many months when I would come in, expecting to take my rightful claim to the 15 square feet of space on this continent that I have any jurisdiction over, only for it to be filled with four kids from three continents watching youtube videos.
These were two seasons. Lecture phase, and outreach. Before that was a season of mental wandering in the midwest, and before that were the many seasons of my time at Truman State. I have mental images of the next three seasons, of my time serving in thailand, of the six months in America, and then moving to Sweden and studying the bible for nine months. And the thing about all of these seasons is that while I could make meaningless bullet points about the differences and similarities of each, as I continue to move through them I've begun to notice something. Growth. Time seems to stack itself onto the past like bricks in a building or rings in a tree. Sometimes we don't notice the details, but the growth is there; if you pay close enough attention, you'll see it.
Since the seasons of life seem to break off, to have that line of clear difference that distinguishes between the two times, it's easy to think of them as almost unrelated, but the past informs the present like the foundations of a building keep the roof stable. Even the seasons that didn't go the way you planned are important as long as you take the lessons and learn from them. This is what our lives on this earth are: messy experiments. In living, we learn how to live. If we're good about it, we learn what it means to live well, to find meaning in it. To find meaning in it all, everything that we experience - some great and hidden truth that's eluded us that finds us in the midst of the chaos. Life can be messy and gross and painful and often in the short term it doesn't go the way you might hope, and sometimes you learn that the things you had put hope in weren't ever the things that could give you peace and fulfillment. Recognition, security, material possession, affirmation among peers - To center one's identity around these things has always meant to buy into a lie. One day, our bodies will perish and succumb to decay and none of these things will really matter, which is to mean that they never mattered, not even when it felt like they did. My conclusion about that while I'm still young is that I get one life, and I'm not going to waste it pursuing those false gods.
So what should we pursue with our lives? The campy sunday-school-answer way of putting it is to follow God. This seems too simple, though, so perhaps I'll phrase it this way: If to follow those meaningless things that we've been taught are important is like bowing before a false god, then what we need to do is find the true God and spend our lives pursuing whoever or whatever that true God might be. In this sense I'm not referring to God so much as a sentient being (although I believe he is), I'm referring to "God" as a metaphorical representation of "the meaning of life." Every person seems to have their own ideas of what that means, and while we can gleam insight from their understanding (or misunderstandings), ultimately the only way we can develop our own understanding is to do it ourselves: to experiment. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it means to follow gods, realize that they're fake, and to have to come to a moment of painful humility and say, perhaps to ourselves, "The thing I thought was so important was a lie. I'm going to stop spending so much of my short life pursuing that thing." My days of experimenting aren't all behind me, but here are some of the conclusions I've come to so far:
Every once in a while I have to remind myself that I'm young and that it's all right that I don't have everything figured out yet. That's what life is for.
Times come and times go. Life keeps changing. Life always changes. And even though it's hard, it's a sign of something good. I think of what my life would look like if it didn't change, if I resigned myself as an 18 year old to cowardice, hid myself in my parents' basement, and played video games. It would have been a very easy life, assuming mom and dad would have ever gone along with it. None of the pain that comes along with growth would have ever affected me. The photographs that make me long for people and places in my memory would either not have been taken or simply not meant anything.
Outreach is over. Six weeks of endlessly wandering all over this lovely country have taken their toll,
and it's a relief to be back in Bangkok. The final two weeks, which I didn't get much of a chance to blog about, were life-filled ones. I don't mean that as a neat feel-goody sentiment, I mean it in the real sense. Exhaustion, heartache, and staggering beauty, all in the context of burmese migrant slums, public hospitals, minimum security prisons, buddhist and christian schools, improperly equipped internet cafes, the homes of friendly strangers, and the streets and highways of this beautiful land.
I'm sitting on the lovely, rock hard matress on the second bottom bunk of the men's quarters. I used to complain about this matress, how hard it is and how when I was getting used to it I would toss in bed endlessly before I could sleep. I don't complain about it anymore. I love it. It's not that it's any more comfortable than before, it's just that I've grown. I see something more in this mattress now: I see the memories in it. I think of the countless times over the past many months when I would come in, expecting to take my rightful claim to the 15 square feet of space on this continent that I have any jurisdiction over, only for it to be filled with four kids from three continents watching youtube videos.
These were two seasons. Lecture phase, and outreach. Before that was a season of mental wandering in the midwest, and before that were the many seasons of my time at Truman State. I have mental images of the next three seasons, of my time serving in thailand, of the six months in America, and then moving to Sweden and studying the bible for nine months. And the thing about all of these seasons is that while I could make meaningless bullet points about the differences and similarities of each, as I continue to move through them I've begun to notice something. Growth. Time seems to stack itself onto the past like bricks in a building or rings in a tree. Sometimes we don't notice the details, but the growth is there; if you pay close enough attention, you'll see it.
Since the seasons of life seem to break off, to have that line of clear difference that distinguishes between the two times, it's easy to think of them as almost unrelated, but the past informs the present like the foundations of a building keep the roof stable. Even the seasons that didn't go the way you planned are important as long as you take the lessons and learn from them. This is what our lives on this earth are: messy experiments. In living, we learn how to live. If we're good about it, we learn what it means to live well, to find meaning in it. To find meaning in it all, everything that we experience - some great and hidden truth that's eluded us that finds us in the midst of the chaos. Life can be messy and gross and painful and often in the short term it doesn't go the way you might hope, and sometimes you learn that the things you had put hope in weren't ever the things that could give you peace and fulfillment. Recognition, security, material possession, affirmation among peers - To center one's identity around these things has always meant to buy into a lie. One day, our bodies will perish and succumb to decay and none of these things will really matter, which is to mean that they never mattered, not even when it felt like they did. My conclusion about that while I'm still young is that I get one life, and I'm not going to waste it pursuing those false gods.
So what should we pursue with our lives? The campy sunday-school-answer way of putting it is to follow God. This seems too simple, though, so perhaps I'll phrase it this way: If to follow those meaningless things that we've been taught are important is like bowing before a false god, then what we need to do is find the true God and spend our lives pursuing whoever or whatever that true God might be. In this sense I'm not referring to God so much as a sentient being (although I believe he is), I'm referring to "God" as a metaphorical representation of "the meaning of life." Every person seems to have their own ideas of what that means, and while we can gleam insight from their understanding (or misunderstandings), ultimately the only way we can develop our own understanding is to do it ourselves: to experiment. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it means to follow gods, realize that they're fake, and to have to come to a moment of painful humility and say, perhaps to ourselves, "The thing I thought was so important was a lie. I'm going to stop spending so much of my short life pursuing that thing." My days of experimenting aren't all behind me, but here are some of the conclusions I've come to so far:
- Life isn't about accomplishing anything, at least not the way I thought. I used to think that it was really important to do big things in life, for the sake of being a notable person who does big things. That's stupid, because it's coming from a perspective of thinking that reputation matters. When you die, the opinion that some people had of you at one point in time simply doesn't matter. It's not a bad thing to have a reputation, though; it's just that it should be a symptom of a life well lived, and not the other way around.
- We should still do those big things. We should do good things, things that are worth doing, as long as they are grounded in proper motives. What are proper motives? Obedience towards the Lord. Love towards other people. That's it. all other motives are evil.
- Life is something to find joy in. Not just pleasure, although that's a part of it. Even in all of the sad and painful things, there's joy, because even the sad things can remind us that we're alive and life is something worth living.
- Life is better when you share it. We humans simply aren't made to be left alone all the time, or to feel forced to hide ourselves in the name of social etiquette and external expectations.
- Television and the internet and what we eat and other sources of pleasure can be good things, but they're nothing to live for or put hope in. We aren't made to merely consume for our own pleasure's sake. We can try, and at some point we'll be miserable for it.
- Our mistakes can either be our downfall or our teacher. If we learn nothing, all is tragedy. if we allow ourselves to grow from our experiences, even our worst mistakes can be what make our lives better.
Every once in a while I have to remind myself that I'm young and that it's all right that I don't have everything figured out yet. That's what life is for.
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