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Life Update

Okay, this one is going to be quick and rather random. 

In the reading department . . .

I finally finished re-reading Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. The story is great, the narration good, the exposition annoying. (Never read this book unless you find an edition with a thousand pages of footnotes.) I also got my hands on Viola and Barna's Pagan Christianity. I was disappointed-- I expected the book the be really solid, but unfortunately spotted a lot of logical fallacies as I worked my way through it. Over all, not nearly as comprehensive or informative as it could have been. I don't know that I'd recommend it. 

I am working on John Piper's When I Don't Desire God, in addition to text books for my two classes. I have finished Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Can I just say how much I love C.S. Lewis?

I recently sped through T.D. Jakes Total Forgiveness. And I mean, sped through it. In two hours at Starbucks. I say, if you want to understand how forgiveness works, pick up The Discipline of Grace, by Bridges. It's great!  

Oh yeah, and for something a little different, I've been reading The Message version of the Bible, side by side with the NIV (my preferred translation). Yesterday I was reading in Matthew where Jesus says that out of the heart come evil thoughts, lies, and slander to corrupt man (highly paraphrased.) I looked over at The Message version and it had added-- added, not paraphrased-- cussing as one of the things that corrupts us. So apparently, my staunch defense of cursing is over. The Message declares it-- Jesus forbids it! 

In another department. . . 

Does it seem like I have a lot of time on my hands? It doesn't feel like it. I have had to clean the exact same parts of the house probably twice a day the last week. There are just too many people in this house who are used to it being dirty that they forget to keep it clean once it's clean. And then that wears me out so I take my cat Lux outside until he can't stand the heat anymore so I drive to Starbucks and read so that I can actually focus on important stuff before this kid arrives and I don't have any more relax time. 

In the friends department . . .

In all fairness, we have actually been visiting a lot with friends, since I have been making friends at our new church. This weekend we had three couples over for dinner, played card games, won a volleyball tournament, and mowed the yard. (Okay, I actually played very little part in the mowing bit. Or the volleyball  tournament, seeing as how I can't move.) But all the same, we were busier than normal. And it was nice. 

In the baby department . . .

Aubriana's due date is a week and a half away. I think we've got everything we need, but pray that

she's born to be like 6 or 7 pounds because otherwise she won't fit in half the clothes she received.

Here's a picture!

Face

I am reading one of the books Johnathan got me for Valentine's Day-- Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy. I am only in the beginning, where she is describing an intense level of self-consciousness about her disfigurement (missing part of her jaw due to cancer). She weaves a painful interaction with her family into the narrative, awakening me even more to just how much potential we have of inflicting damage on our children. I don't remember being quite as self-aware as she describes herself, and I definitely recall being much more connected with my surroundings and my family than she is. It's almost as though she's a stranger in her own home.

Then again, we have so very little idea how much our lives touch others', I am not really surprised at the damage we inflict on each other. I hope and pray that Johnathan and I can learn to respond to silliness and accidents and childishness with patience and love and the same grace God bestows on us. That's the only way to maximize human connection with Jesus and each other. I want my children to feel like more than faces.

Villette

Sometimes I think that books have a negative effect on me, especially when I identify too deeply with one of the characters. Have any of you read Villette, by Charlotte Bronte? It was her last completed novel.

Anyway, if you have, then you'll know that the narrator, Luce Snowe, is very odd. She actually plays tricks on her readers in a strange mixture of self-disclosure and reticence. But I relate to what she says about herself, and when I finished the book I remained in the melancholy state she had spent most of it in.

I let my phone go dead, and haven't turned it on in a week. I pretty much go to work, class, practice, and hang out with Johnathan. I am solitary, in that destructive way where you know you are probably doing more harm to yourself by persisting in aloneness.

When we started discussions about Villette yesterday I got a little emotional. I have no problem with self-disclosure, but at the same time I like to hide. This is an odd combination, but I see it mirrored in Lucy Snowe and I felt with some vehemence a desire to protect her from my classmates.

I think I need to get out more.

Conversion Experience

This is why I love class. My English class is focusing on conversion experiences in Victorian novels, and we had a discussion a few weeks ago about the actual experience. We decided on a few general themes: conversion must include an outside agent of change; it is generally a move toward inner peace, but may in some cases be a move the other direction; is usually affiliated with religious experience; and though it can be gradual or sudden there will always be a point of discontinuity. Conversion is also associated with narrative-- reflecting the idea that change cannot really occur unless you tell it.

My conversion experience is gradual-- I view it as a spectrum with very different colors on either end but no visible change from one color to the next. I was baptized as an infant, and though I do not believe in infant baptism I have not been re-baptized because of my conversion experience. When I was a baby, God saved me; and He has been drawing me to Him ever since.

Of course, all of our conversion narratives reflect who we are. Things are not really sudden with me-- they are logical, rational, and pretty obvious; for this reason causes naturally flow into effects. The question then becomes whether my conversion is really gradual, or do I just view it as so because that's who I am? Someone who is more emotional probably has a more sudden (or, at least, jarring) conversion experience. Or maybe their personal narrative just relates to it that way?

I am not really sure how something so abstract works itself out, but I really find it a lot to think about.   

This is How You Know I'm a Nerd

I am very excited that class is starting today. I am taking my first graduate English course (I've completed 18 hours in Education in two semesters and am SO over it) in Theme Novel-- we are doing Dickens, Bronte, Conrad, Wilde, and one or two other authors. The theme is novels dealing with conversion in the Victorian Era! !!!!  !!!!! We are starting with Dombey and Son.

"Mama Day" and Reality

My roommate Danielle is Haitian, although she grew up in America and only lived in Haiti briefly. Nevertheless, she heard enough stories and experienced enough of the effects of voodoo that I think she can get angry about our (American Christians') lack of sensitivity to spiritual warfare.

We were discussing the spiritual gifts the other day-- particularly those which many Baptists believe have "passed away." I don't know how we got there, but we started discussing her background. I remembered how a year ago I was finishing up Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day and telling her about the book. She shivered at some of the parts I described and explained, "I can read or watch pretty much anything-- Harry Potter, Rush Hour, etc.,-- but books like this, where it's real, truly bother me. I don't know if that book is something I can read." [The novel is a strange love story with parts that focus on the hereditary "voodoo" powers of Mama Day and her rival, Ruby]

So I asked her about it. She started by explaining that Haitians dedicated the country to Satan when they received their freedom (in a gruesome way, as she tells it). In Haiti, "Catholicism" might be synonymous with "voodoo", and one of their last national leaders was on a hunt for 2000 human hearts in order to rededicate the country to Satan. According to Danielle, people were disappearing left and right until he was kicked out of office.

Even though I feel more and more horrified every time I think about it, now I know what to pray for. I hope, if you care, this helps! It's not just poverty and strife that afflict this country-- it's spiritual warfare!

Remembering . . .

There's a movie out there, called "The Forgotten." It is about how children are suddenly taken captive by aliens and the families are made to forget their existence. One mother, though, vaguely remembers that she has a son, and that he should be alive. She spends the movie trying to get him back.

This is how I am with God. I forget about Him. It is so easy to live my life without giving Him a second thought. But it' weird, because I still know He is there, I can just ignore Him. It's kind of like knowing that my phone calls at work are being monitored by my supervisors, and yet I plunge on with my job in a sort of reckless indifference. Most of the time I do perfectly well-- say and do what is expected of me-- but I still have those calls where I just don't care.

And yet He snatches at me. I get glimpses of Him when I am reading Harry Potter (I don't know how that happens). He's there when my roommate sings to herself as she's cooking. And in the urgency I have when I talk about God's command to take care of widows and orphans. Every longing in my soul resonates with John Donne's 17th century Holy Sonnet 14:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

He doesn't do it, but he does promise that I will seek and find Him when I search for Him with all my heart. This brings me hope, because He promises that devoting my heart to seeking Him will enable me to both seek (which I find myself unable to do) and find Him (which is my heart's desire.)

It's a Little Strange

Sometimes, I remember something from my childhood or high school or college years and think, "Man, what was that all about and why do I remember it?" Why is my memory of practicing shuffling cards at my grandmother's house important? What does that have to do with anything in my life? Even more strange is the fact that I can distinctly remember the daydreams I would have when my dad took me with him to work in his truck. (It involved puppies flying out the back of the truck in front of us and me catching them.)

But when I actually think about this a little more deeply, I am not surprised at all. I mean, think about it-- a book becomes a masterpiece when every story, event, and word gives meaning to the completed work; I see clearly now that this principle applies to our lives, as well. In the end, every breathe that we take and every event that is even remotely connected to us will factor into who we are. 

Here's another one for you-- one whose importance I can find. My senior year of high school my volleyball team was in a competitive match and I wanted to win. I had this habit of slapping the floor with my open palm whenever I dived and missed or I dived and somebody else missed; and as we neared the end of the match a sophomore setter and I collided. The ball dropped, and I reacted by slapping . . . not the floor, but Lindsay. To this day, I am unsure if I actually realized before hand that I was going to hit her and whether I had the power of stopping myself. Of course, I apologized profusely but I can still imagine the rage in her mom's face and I am still ashamed. From that point, I made every effort to restrain my new habit, and by the time I had hurt my knee and stopped playing I'm pretty sure I had also stopped slapping! So how is this important to who I've become? Well, I know it was important to how others view me-- Lindsay and her mom probably never looked at me the same way again. And it helped me learn how to control my temper a little better. A little.

Imagine

     I just finished reading Hard Times, a novel by Dickens (My goal is to read at least two works of literature each class I take-- but I end up doing less homework that way! A plus!) In it, Dickens desribes the effects of a bad education-- one based solely on fact and reality-- and one of the work's main themes is the importance of imagination in softening life for us.

     I've always been able to use my imagination as an escape. When I was little, I had a Lisa Frank notebook that mapped out my two dream houses, the fourth floor of our mansion (all mine), the town that I owned with its endangered animal zoo and racetrack (as I was really into horses), and it went so far as to include the names of all my horses, which I used to imply their bloodlines, their morning schedules, and their allotted feed for each day.

     In class, I used to give prayer requests for all of my imaginary animals-- a horse I'd found in the hills behind my house, rabbits, turtles, goats, sheep, etc. When my teacher stopped by my house one day and noticed I didn't actually possess all the animals I prayed for, it put a stop to my prayer requests. I can still see her coming out to my backyard and looking around, "So, where are the rest of your pets?" Mrs. Shelton got me in trouble.

     As I got older, my imagination started inserting me into more probable situations. I found I could fully enter into an imagined conversation with all the impassioned angst of my age. One exception is when I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and would sit in the shower to argue before the judge that people in America should speak English, even if it's not their native language. (This passed quickly, be assured.) When I was in high school, I dreamed more about talking to my friends and what I would have and could have said. These last five years of college, my imagination has tended to place me fully into places and jobs and schools and relationships that I see potentially occurring in my future. I'm actually really great at this, but it does more harm than good in making me dissatisfied with the present. Still, on those car rides where I am utterly alone, I whip out my mental Lisa Frank notebook and go at it.

    Maybe I'll share some of these a little later-- you know, when I can say, "back when I was a silly young person . . ." =)

My Paper Holiday

    I am finished with my paper, and starting right up again on my other two due next week. I have some research done, but not nearly enough. However, one exciting thing did happen-- I brought up with Dr. Prior my idea of having a writing for publishing type of class, because I don't know nearly enough about writing. And if I don't know enough, then hardly anyone else does. And unlike some student body presidents I know, I don't have 5 hours a day to write-- I work more than full time and am taking 3 English literature classes. Down to the wire, folks...

    I did get a job offer, though! Well, sort of. I was down in the English department to turn in one of my other papers and saw Dr. Yaw (His name is so cool-- it's actually Adu Gyamfi Yaw; pronounced Adjoo Jeeyomfee Yow). He told me that as soon as I have 18 hours of graduate work done to call him and he will let me teach DLP classes. Since that's what I want to do (and it'll support us while I'm in school), I'm down with that. Graduate school, here I come. Um. In two years. For the next year I'm going to study for the GRE.