New Year's Eve

I really hope that this New Year is better than the last. I think most people hope that, but really, this past year stank. Just before the beginning of this year, I got broken up with by the man I thought I'd marry, and saw everything that I'd invested my life in pulled from under my feet. Shortly afterward, my sister got engaged, which was obviously wonderful, but both rubbed it in and was hard to come to terms with in terms of basically losing a sister (I know, I know, I haven't lost her, but things won't be the same any more). My faith, which was the one stable thing in my life, if not disappeared then radically changed, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyspraxia and told that I very likely have ADD, and scraped through my first year of uni while grappling with depression and stress-related illness. On top of this, in spite of genuinely trying to be a nice, and more importantly a good person, I somehow made enemies of people around me who (at Christian Union and Church, ironically) spread rumours about my mental health, self-harming habits, relationship with my ex-boyfriend and vairous other painful topics, which, in a new environment where I was depsperately trying to make friends, made life very hard.

I guess this was a pretty standard first year of uni really, but frankly I'm just glad that I've made it through alive. I'm not really grappling with depression and more and the illness has let up, although goodness know's what'll happen when term starts, considering that this coming term is suppposed to be the most stressful of our uni career. All I can do is pray in sheer desperation that God have mercy and that I'm not stretched so hard I snap.

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I was chatting to a friend about marriage yesterday. There's been an influx in the past year in the amount of people I know who're engaged, and he's one of them (the first, to give him credit) but the only one who isn't a Christian. We agreed that part of the motive for Christian young people getting married early is because they want to have sex, whereas that's hardly ever a factor for non-Christians so non-Christians usually wait longer. He pointed out that his motives in marriage are by that measure perhaps purer than many Christians. He can have sex any time he wants, with pretty much whoever he wants if he so desires, so the commitment is greater: a) to only have sex with this one partner for the rest of his life, and b) to spend the rest of his life with this one partner, although he's already reaping all the benefits of a sexual relationship without commiting. Much as I think there's another side to the coin, he does make a good point.

ANYHOW, enough with the sex.

Next to Me

This is one of those songs that I listen to, and while things may still seem crap, there's hope. A cutesy sentiment I know, but when a song spells out what I feel and what I've been through so well, and tells me that I'm not the first person to feel that way and that I don't have to struggle through it alone, I have to give credit where credit's due:

'When they drag you from your bed before the dawn
When they beat you 'til you know you can't go on
When you believe you're right but still you're always wrong
Come and sit down here with me

When they freeze you out of every conversation
When you get hurt but they tell you you're exaggerating
When you don't fit into any of the plans that they are making
Come and sit down here with me

When rejection is your natural condition
When they give someone else your job or dream position
When you've got more to offer than they could possibly imagine
Come and sit down here with me

When there's no one to trust at the hour of your confession
When there's no grace to give you time to learn your lesson
When you are only worth ten percent of your possessions
Come and sit down here with me

Come and sit down here with me
You're in perfect company
No matter how lonely you may feel
Come and sit down here with me

When all that you believed is a dream that is dying
When they still sell you lies but long ago you stopped buying
When you're more scared of falling than excited by the flying
Come and sit down here with me

When you have long given up hope of your own healing
When all the prayers you pray bounce back down from the ceiling
When the last breath you take is the only one that's appealing
Come and sit down here with me

Come and sit down here with me
You're in perfect company
No matter how lonely you may feel
Take the weight off of your feet

Come and sit down here with me
You're in perfect company
No matter how lonely you may feel
Come and sit down here with me'

-Brian Housten 'Next to Me'

Christmas

Christmas passed fairly uneventfully for me. It's too easy in the frenzy of good food of presents to forget to stop and really think about what we're celebrating. I think that's rather a shame really, as I think that the 'Christmas story' has enormous social significance. God squeezes himeself into human form, and is born a vulnerable baby, into a dirty, messed-up world, entrusting himself to his creations, who he knew would reject him and eventually kill him. He is born to a working-class teenage mother. He is attended by outcasts and foriegners, and fast becomes an asylum-seeker, when his parents flee genocide (in the name of state security) in his native country. If we let this truth permeate us it surely has to dynamically affect our worldview. Christmas may have been cutesyfied and commercialised until it seems nothing but a nice story involving animals and presents, but we must not let this induce us into trying to play down its significance.

At the risk of becoming the mother from Almost Famous, I would be very tempted to change the date of my celebration of Christmas to a date in September when I know it won't be commercialised. I hate the idea of big business profiting from my celebration of what should be such a socially significant story.

Innocence Again

'Do you remember when
You were way back then
You held the world inside your hands
When you told me love
Was the strongest stuff
Your strength was innocence

But, oh man
The signs of the times are omens
You're starting the day in
No man's land again

Who are you gonna be?
When you're on your knees, who do you believe?
Fear is a lonely man
You've been given innocence
You've been given innocence again

You should know by now
That your darkest hour
Is when your broken heart goes down
It's a bitter end
When the sweet begins
Grace is sufficiency

But, oh dear, we'll never deserve it
No dear, we never could earn it
Now, here, the choice is yours

Grace is high and low
Grace is high and low
Grace is high and low
We'll never be the same'

-Switchfoot 'Innocence Again'

Today I asked God to restore my innocence.

Proving God

It occured to me the other day that we cannot accept the human instinct to search for a greater being or purpose in life as proof that such a thing exists. It's also man's instinct to fear what he does not understand or is not familiar with, but it does not seem rational to accept those fears as grounded. I don't know if that makes sense.

Maybe it's not important, (or even our business?) to 'prove' God's existence anyway, at least not scientifically speaking. I'm not saying that faith shouldn't have intellectual basis, which considering my nature would be a bit like a fish deciding that water was to be shunned, but when was a relationship ever established or maintained through scientifically prooving that the other party existed? Besides, we live in a post-modern(!) age where it's hard enough to prove that your goldfish exists.

I think that half the time I've simply been zealous in my attempts to prove to my friends that God exists because I've been insecure in my faith. In reality, we probably shouldn't have to, our lives should be the proof. This sounds awfully trite, but I think it's what it boils down to. I certainly know that if my life isn't proof, then my intellectual proof is meaningless. After all, if I truely believe what I've always claimed to, it's going to have a pretty phenomenal impact on my life. Which is actually fabulously exciting, in a bladder-burstingly terrifying kind of way x

Otherlyness - a new hope

I've been feeling pretty, well, un-faith-filled of late. My life's gone pretty pear-shaped, and I've ended up completely stopping attending CU at uni, basically stopping attending church meetings, and my relationship with God just doesn't seem to be there any more. To put it bluntly, I don't want to be a Christian.

It's not that I have particular trouble believing in God (although sometimes I'm skeptical and as I've said I don't feel it right now), or that Jesus lived, was amazing, and even rose from the dead two millenia ago, but I hate the culture of mainstream evangelical Christianity, it makes me feel sick to my stomach and I don't want to be associated with it. I know they're doing their best, but all I ever seem to see is the damage and hostility their good intentions cause. If that's really what the Christian faith is all about then my faith is dead, as I want no part of it.

Fresh hope has come for me tonight in the form of the concept of 'Otherlyness', put forward by Jim Henderson et al (see: www.offthemap.com). It is 'the spiritual practice of noticing and serving others in ordinary ways'. I love that! 'Holyness' now has such bad connotations for me of superiority complexes and a refusal to engage and grapple with the world's problems, maybe this new take on it has a better angle. I'd love to read Jim Henderson's books 'Evangelism without Additives' and 'Jim and Casper go to Church' and learn more about his take on things. Maybe they'd help me work out what to do about the thorny issues of church and CU.