It's the Phoenix-Life for Me

I love new beginnings. I suppose there is redundancy inherent in "new beginnings," but the sensation of being able to start from page zero, at least figuratively, is so lovely and calming. There's a line in Anne of Green Gables where Ms. Shirley tells Anne that each day is a fresh start, and while that thought is exceedingly obvious, it's additionally exceedingly comforting. When I consider that as the sun sets, so too can my foibles, faux pas, and struggles from that day, I can breathe a slight sigh of relief. I reliably make a fool of myself at some point every day, and it's painful to recognize how I've let God down over the course of a 24 hours. There's hope in the knowledge that I can always aim to better myself, grow in relationship with God, and gain wisdom from the circumstances and people around me. If I didn't have that comfort and optimism for coming days, it could be truly wearying to strive for anything better. Although hackneyed, the great number of clichés about life being a journey, and our spiritual lives progressing as we age in years are incredibly true. Human ability to learn from mistakes and improve through experience is remarkable, and it's certainly healthy to strive for something more no matter what place we are in our lives. As of late, I've received a sense of a starting a clean slate from working for a new boss, starting new books, reorganizing my t-shirt drawer, and simply brushing my teeth. Obviously, this idea is connected to God's gift of grace in our lives, as the experience of starting anew isn't any stronger than when accepting His clemency. My grandpa loved to demonstrate how Jesus could wash away our sins by letting a group of kids in the church to stain a white cloth until no white was discernable, and proceeding to use bleach to represent God's capacity to absolve us. Despite the fact that I'm highly allergic to bleach and chlorine, and the thought of God as parabolic bleach being slightly absurd, Grandpa's analogy stuck with me. No matter how mucky I get, and I can get dreadfully mucky, I always have the opportunity to recapitulate, and be clean in God's eyes. I really do despise substantial, abrupt changes, but change is what propels us forward and drives us to want more out of our lives. Donald Miller writes in the foreword to Through Painted Doors (I'm certain this is classified as some form of plagiarism, but I quite like this particular passage):

Here is something I found to be true: you don't start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were... and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

A great deal of the time, Donald Miller's writing encourages me to stay strong in my beliefs, and reminds me that I'm not alone in how I view God and the world. However, sometimes his writing convicts me that I do need to reevaluate some aspect of myself. I do enjoy gradual change immensely, and tracking the small steps that I've taken as a person is one of the most gratifying pastimes, but there are moments in life when I think it's necessary to just, as Miller puts it, leave. I don't especially want to suddenly drop some part of my life, but if that's what I feel God calling me to do, I need to be prepared for that. I didn't ever have any inclination to go to a new church, attend camp for the first time, make new friends at school, or share my heart with a stranger prior to actually doing these things, and yet they've all been hugely fulfilling. At some point, hopefully now, I have to acknowledge that while change is uncomfortable and unpredictable, it's healthy, natural, and necessary. Whether in the area of what I spend my time on, who I look to for wisdom, how I interact with others, what I turn to for contentment, and how I use my resources, I pray that I'll be in a perpetual state of metamorphosis and, hopefully, evolution as I attempt to live and love as Christ did. Perhaps I'll feel called to make a complete about face in some aspect of how I live out my faith, or maybe this "venturing out" that Donald Miller speaks of will simply translate into a constant appraisal and adjustment of my time here. I know that complacency can only damage any attempts to endure on this road towards transformation and engage in a phoenix-style of living. Not that shame for my current self would be at all healthy, but some critical consideration and open ears are definitely crucial. I suppose any proposed change causes me such trepidation purely because I fear that with change, I'll lose a part of the happiness I have, or the person I am today. The photos I included in the blog today illustrate this; when I took a picture of my shadow created by the dim street lights on campus at night, I could see the silhouette of myself. When I turned the flash on, I suppose metaphorically taking a truly good look at what lay before me, the old silhouette of myself disappeared, and clean slate lay before me. Though I love the place where I'm at right now, it would be reprehensible for me to stay in this place purely because it suits me and it's rather convenient.

Links from the Past Week

• Caitlin Jane's Photos
• Check Out #6
• Canadian Tunes
• Islands in the Sky
• Fire Eyed Boy
• Waiting to Die
• One More Day
• Voltage
• Kelly Watch the Stars
• Never Stop Working
• Sammy Sam
• Summerbirds in the Cellar
• Atlantis to Interzone
• Best Thing Ever
• I Got You On Tape
• Insomnia
• Heaven On the Ground
• You Only Live Once
• Moustache Video
• Vitesse
• Throw It
• Hand On High

Films Seen in the Past Week

• Nacho Libre
• Brokeback Mountain
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
• Enough
• Bone Collector
• Return of the Pink Panther
• Bridges of Madison County

Bad Things in the Past Two Weeks

• Gazelda the eMac is in dire straights
• Philomena Guinea has died
• I was more sick than I've ever been in my life
• my family's impending abandonment of me is nearing
• the Eskies lost their first game against the Stamps
• I acknowledged that I will likely never drive a car
• Honduras fared not-so-well in the World Cup

Excellence in the Near Future

• Street Performers Festival
• Pirates of the Caribbean 2
• the house being all mine
• World Cup mania
• football wins
• Sunday dinner at Grandma's
• Dashboard Confessional (only slightly sarcastic inclusion)
• hair cut à la Cait

Books Being Read Currently

• Through Painted Deserts
• Emma
• Angels & Demons
• Skin Tight
• The Bell Jar
• Grendel
• Searching for God Knows What
• Mere Christianity
• Time Out New York
• Soul Survivor
• Adrian Mole: The Early Years
• Red Green Talks Cars