Guilt

The song came on the radio, suddenly, abruptly, hitting my heart like a freight train. The Script's Breakeven. I could hear the singer's pain, his heartbreak from unrequited love, his lover leaving him, and the guilt crept upon me, choking me.

I knew this was what she felt like whenever she heard it, the one the song was about. I could tell that the first time she heard it on the radio, she knew that it was written about her, about what she did to him. She must have felt her guilt like a brand across her chest, searing, burning. Like I did.

I wondered how many mornings I would wake up feeling like a boulder was laid across my chest, how long the guilt would eat away at me. Perhaps it would leave nothing behind, only an empty shell, devoid of everything, even the guilt. Especially the guilt. Maybe then it would finally get better.

family
friends
awesome blogs that make my day
a Savior who loves unconditionally
good food
good coffee
good wine
chocolate
having a roof over my head
working at a place I like to go to every day
laughter
compliments
smiling faces
sunshine
flowering trees
spring
summer
fall
winter
my car
music
books
sleeping until noon
writing
technology
movies
a God who works ALL things for the good of those who love him



What are you thankful for?

I am a night owl. This may, however, come as a surprise to my family. When I was a kid, I would wake up at the crack of dawn wanting to play and watch cartoons. (I still blame an early bedtime.)

But lately, combined with two months of unemployment and Starbucks scheduling me with closing shifts has turned me into a certifiable night owl. I can wake up early. I just prefer not to. And I'm really so much happier when I wake up around noon.

But none of this is the point.

The point is, when I'm up this late, when the rest of the world is sleeping and silent, I get the urge to write, something, anything. I feel this burst of creativity in me. But my brain is several steps behind my heart, as usual. I'm always without words, without subject matter.

I have a writer's heart, but not the mind.

I know what you'll say. All seven of you who read my blog and actually enjoy it will disagree, saying I write wonderfully here. (Especially you, mom. Thanks. ;) ) But I'm really just relaying real-life information, and not even very creatively, either. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to demean blogging. My life just isn't all that exciting.

And the truth is, I long to create something original, to tell a story that means something, a story that no one has ever told before.

And so, in the late night/early morning hours, I open up my word processor and stare at the blank page, until depression or tiredness force me to give up and finally go to sleep, which is probably what I'll do tonight.




I have a writer's heart, but not the mind.

Dear Insomnia,

Contrary to what you might think,
I don't want to be your friend.

This on-again,
off-again
relationship has to end.

I actually like to sleep.
It's kind of a passion of mine.

To be perfectly honest,
I love sleep more than you.

It's not me,

it's you.

Please,
just go.

Very Sincerely,
Leah.

The Question

I bet you're (before I corrected myself, I TOTALLY misspelled this as "your." Eff.) dying to know what it is.

On second thought, I bet not, because I'm fairly certain the only people who read this stupid blog already know what "the question" is.

The Question: Why do so many people have grudges against the Christian church?

You can read more about it at http://whygrudge.blogspot.com, but the reader's digest version is: My dad and best friend Emily came up with the idea to start a massive blogging effort, answering the question of why so many people dislike the Christian church. You can find a full list of blogs tackling this question at the above website, the home base of sorts for this movement.

I hadn't really thought much about this issue until I read Donald Miller's books. Blue Like Jazz. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Searching for God Knows What. MY FAVORITE. I'm in love with Searching for God Knows What. But that's beside the point.

There's no neat and clean answer to this question, nothing that fits into tidy little boxes. There's really no answer where, on the other side, we come out looking like the good guys.

There's the obvious reason for how ridiculous the premise of Christianity sounds. A virgin conceives a child (yeah, right!), he grows up, NEVER messes up EVER (again, yeah right), is crucified and dies, then rises from the dead. (Um. That's just plain impossible.) But I'm not going to get into all that.

Here's my main issue:

Non-Christians see the extremists that make it into the media,
extremists who say natural disasters like the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan
are God judging and punishing us,
extremists who say things like "God hates fags,"
extremists who completely disregard God's relentless love and grace.
(Despite being called to love everyone,
I'll confess I have to make a conscious effort not to hate these people.)

Non-Christians see hypocrisy in us.
They see religious leaders who emphasize living a pure life,
but who hold nothing but
judgement
animosity
and lies in their hearts.

Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to be any better. Because, when you get down to it, the whole lot of us are screwed up. We're called to love as Christ loves, and we fall short, every time. (Proved by parenthetical statement above.) I'm sure that contributes to why people don't want to be Christian. Non-Christians see all of the terrible things we do, despite claiming to love people.

A couple of us at work were talking about this very thing the other day. One of them said something to the effect of "I wouldn't call myself a Christian, but I love Jesus." I think if people could get past the image that Christianity has, they'd find that Jesus is actually really awesome.

I mean, who couldn't love a person who,
despite having the power to stop it,
endured unimaginable, excruciating pain
just for you?

St. Patrick

I was thinking of what to write on St. Patrick, oddly enough, while laying in bed last night after having had two pints of Guinness while out with my roommate.

I'm sure you all know the story. When he was 16 he got kidnapped from Britain by Irish raiders and taken to Ireland, where he spent six years as a slave. Then he escaped home to Britain, where he returned to his family. After becoming a priest, he returned to Ireland to teach them about God.

Here's the thought that occurred to me while my head was all swimmy with alcohol, a sort of fictionalized conversation between St. Patrick and God.

Go back to Ireland.

Um...what?

Go back to Ireland.

That's funny, God. They kidnapped me and made me a slave. Great joke.

Can you imagine his reaction when he realized God was calling him to go back to the very people who kidnapped and enslaved him? Who would want to do that?

This is someone so completely devoted to God's will that he did the thing that everyone who possesses an ounce of common sense wouldn't do. And I find strange that we celebrate this devotion to Christ by drinking copious amounts of alcohol.

Yesterday was. . .

. . .interesting.

The word I used to describe it was
"failday."

I'll start at the beginning.

I woke up yesterday with a heinous migraine.
Which didn't go away when I went to work.

So there I was, sitting outside of work before my shift,
on the phone with my dear sweet mother
trying not to burst into tears.
Because of the pain,
because literally EVERYTHING was irritating me,
because I had to be happy and smiling,
because I couldn't be that girl
who falls apart because she has a
splitting migraine.

So I suck it up and start my shift.

Then about. . .
40 minutes later I realize. . .

My headache is gone.

My first reaction?
God must be telling me I'm working
in the right place,
if I go to work and my headache
goes away.

But the reason for "failday?"

I kept spilling things
and dropping things
and knocking things over
and spilling things
(So I said "spilling" twice? So what?)

OVER and OVER again.


On the plus side,

a customer in the drive thru
said he loved my hair.
And called me beautiful.

Ides of March

In a fun little observation of the Ides of March, here's a list of some stuff that all happened on March 15th:

• 44 BC- Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Roman senators. ("Et tu, Brute?")

• 1493 - Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after finding the Americas and giving all sorts of deadly diseases to the natives they found.

• 1545 - The first Council of Trent

• 1572 - Charles II of England issues Royal Declaration of Indulgence, basically suspending punishments on people who didn't want to attend the Church of England. (But Parliament wasn't too excited about this. They thought he was secretly a Roman Catholic, so they made him undo it.)

• 1776 - South Carolina is officially a badass. They're the first colony to declare independence from England.

• 1917 - Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates his throne, and his brother becomes the Tsar. But the damage was done for the Romanovs. The monarchy fell anyway, due to the revolution happening. Nicholas' entire family was executed the next year.

• 1939 - Hitler and his army occupies the rest of Bohemia and Moravia. Czechoslovakia doesn't exist anymore.

• 1956 - My Fair Lady premiers on Broadway!

• 1985 - The first internet domain name is registered!

• 1990 - Mikhail Gorbachev is elected the first President of the Soviet Union.

• 2004 - French President Jacques Chirac passes a law which bans wearing conspicuous religious symbols in French public schools. It's commonly known as "the headscarf ban."

• 2005 - The International Criminal Court hears its first case, allegations of war crimes which occurred during civil war in the Congo.

• 2006 - An online magazine, salon.com publishes the most extensive documentation of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.

• 2008 - Unrest in Tibet continues. The Tibet Autonomous Region gives the protesters until March 17 to surrender.

Being the terrible researcher I am, I found all this information from Wikipedia. (Ok, so I embellished a little.) Lots more stuff happened on March 15th; this is just the mildly exciting stuff.

In conclusion,

Beware the Ides of March!

Gift Wrapping

Yesterday was my sister Rachel's baby shower. (She's 30 weeks! I can't wait for the baby to get here!) The baby's name is Lily Elizabeth! So cute!

Anyway, I got her a onesie that said "I <3 my aunt" and I knitted her a blanket.

But I'll be honest. . .

I was WAY more excited about the wrapping.

If you've ever received a gift from me you know I'm a little. . .

wrapping impaired.

Here's a picture. It's a little fuzzy. It's cropped from a larger photo, since I don't have a digital camera. (Lame, I know. Cameras and I don't get along well.) It's also tiny, because the more I zoom in, the fuzzier it gets. Sorry.


I was so excited, I had to share. This might be a gift-wrapping epiphany, the start of fabulous gift wrapping to come. Get ready.

Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

I never really understood Lent.

Correction: I never really understood other people's reactions to Lent.

Growing up Lutheran, it was always about giving up something like soda or sweets or cursing, not being able to say or sing "alleluia" (except if you're in choir rehearsal, and even then it's a little sketchy), and remembering how sinful and awful we all are.

UGH.

For most of my life I could never really quite place why I never really liked these things about Lent, it was mostly just an uneasy feeling I had.

It wasn't until God's word became more tangible for me, sometime during college, that I finally got it.

I realized this kind of attitude toward Lent, the constant mourning, the constant "woe is me, I'm such a sinful awful person, and I can't be happy again ever" is. . . not useful.

I realized that Jesus paid the price for us once, for all. Key word being "once." Once for all time. As in, forever and ever amen.

So many Christians around me when I was growing up acted as if some magical, space-time continuum clock was reset on Ash Wednesday, and we're back to the time before Jesus died on the cross, before we were redeemed, and we're still waiting to be sanctified.

While I do understand and appreciate the need to contemplate Christ's immense sacrifice, I think instead of mourning it for 40 days, mourning our own sinful nature, we should keep rejoicing that Jesus came for us, that he redeemed us.

Will remembering how much we screw up make us not screw up anymore? Not really.

Making Mountains Out Of Molehills

Yesterday I had a little training over at Yakov Smirnoff, the theatre that hired me to work in their box office. Key word: little.

It's an annoying story.

They just switched ticketing systems. So here we are, all eight bajillion of us (ok so it was really more like 8) crammed into their tiny-ass call center (basically just a room with three desks stuffed into it), crowded around one computer with the new system on it.

It gets better.

They had someone from the corporate office of the company who made the new ticketing system on the phone, to tell us the basics of how to use it. So the person who had the phone pressed the speaker button. Nothing. Except for hanging up on the nice woman on the phone.

So they then proceeded to spend the next 40 minutes (You think I'm kidding? I'm not.) trying to get ANY of the phones in the room to go on speaker.

So here I was, burying my face in my hands, unable to express my severe impatience and frustration at a situation that everyone was making much more difficult than it had to be, simply because I really wanted to make a good impression, and because I didn't know any of these people.

I kept my cool.

You all would have been proud of me.

Eventually someone did what we should have done 40 minutes before:

USED THE SPEAKER ON THEIR CELL PHONE.