the people you meet

It is just so crazy..
When older sisters tell me about these people they meet in college, who become their friends and change their lives. And then eventually I meet them, and they are so different than what I expected. But as time goes on, they too change my life, or become my lifegroup leader, or leave before I have a chance to say more than a few words to them, thanking them for everything.

balloons, sylvia plath

I'm really not a big fan of poetry, but Sylvia Plath's stands out so much.

(1963)
Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish---
Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!
Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free
Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.

security

最爱还是你，这是我的决定。-唐禹哲
(I have decided that the one I love most is you. -Danson Tang)

I'm always wondering, sometimes too much, when I first people, why God is putting that person into my life. Right now, the strongest example would probably be lifegroup. Why is that person I really wanted to get to know not in it? Why wasn't I put with someone I can't stand even though I deserve it (what a relief!)? Why all these people who are new? And I guess lifegroup is supposed to be awkward at first this way, mysterious and uncertain, but it was much easier than I had prepared myself for. I've stumbled around so long at church, scared to be myself yet at the same time feeling judged for portraying someone I'm not, ready to give up. But God's love pulled me through, and for the first time, I have nothing to hold back. I've never felt so secure.

I have to admit that I purposely signed up for and did certain things in order to excuse myself from a lot of church events this semester. But God immediately called me out in the beginning, convincing me to readjust my priorities and be even more committed. So I go for this strong commitment, eventually discovering with patience how it connects with my newfound sense of security, and then suddenly He switches gears with a "oh by the way, here are some time conflicts...oh and some relational issues...and white lies you need to tell, just to shake things up."

What does that mean?!?! It means I either have to compromise my commitment, or sacrifice my outside responsibilities. And God knows, I'd rather give up my commitment to church than give up those other obligations, even if I'm doing all of them for myself and other people, in a situation where their opinions come first and God's comes second. Maybe my perspective is just off, and God really wants to work through and test me outside of dependency on church after building me up all this while. But decisions need to made, all the time, and time walks all over you if you don't walk with it.

novelette, teaser 2

Super out of context, hehe. (unrevised and cut)

"He actually waved at me, and it was the first time I had seen him all semester. I seriously couldn't stop smiling, I was that relieved we were okay. Then, while I was walking with this goofy grin on my face, I totally forgot what my room number was. I felt like a dork."
"Relief is all you need sometimes," I said, looking up from the potato I was peeling, and Risa laughed before rolling her eyes.
"Very true, until your professor gives you a dirty look for being three minutes late."
"You really forgot where you were going?" I thought she had meant it as an expression, emphasizing the dream world she so often lived in and told her stories through.
Risa nodded, throwing a piece of cabbage at me. "Yep, I did. I sure did."

It was a nice day for a picnic, the sky completely covered by wispy clouds but not enough to completely block out the sunlight. Risa was lying down on the grass towards the edge of the field, laughing and repeatedly insisting the six-year-olds around her to listen up. Lock was helping Mary carry food out from the cafeteria inside the building, the squeaky back door propped open by Walker, the janitor. Parents were just starting to arrive, and the ones who were already here whispered quietly to each other a few feet away from the big tent and field where their kids were running around or already eating.
A little girl came up to me, asking if I could help her open her juice bottle. As I took off the cap and handed over the bottle, I couldn't help but realize the days were starting to get chilly; summer was slowly coming to an end and college was crawling in just around the corner. I immediately felt alarmed, wondering if I still had time to buy school supplies, if my dormmate and I were going to get along okay, if classes were going to be overwhelming. One of the staff workers came then, running with a cell phone in her hands, looking alarmed.
"Emma!" she called. "Is Emma here? I have a doctor on the line."
My mind rapidly returning to the present, I stood up slowly while Lock and Mary both turned around to stare at me from the food table. The little girl's juice cap fell from my lap, and she reached under the table to retrieve it.
The staff worker sprinted over, running her hands through her tangled hair. "It's the doctor, it's your grandfather, he's in the hospital," she whispered, her words tumbling out so fast I could hardly catch up. "They said it wasn't an emergency but they needed for you--"
"I got it," I said as she pressed the phone into my hand, even more worried than I was. "Thanks."

* * *

By the time I got back from the hospital, two and a half hours later, there were still three or four children sitting around, their parents absorbed in a deep conversation. Risa was cleaning up the arts&crafts table but she noticed me just standing there and strode over. "How do you feel?" she asked, putting down a bucket of sanitizer, and I gazed across the field, emptied of the children we had worked with all summer and instead littered with juice boxes and aluminum foil. Coy robins flew down from nowhere, timidly poking at bread crust and fluttering off when the squirrels came.
I considered how to answer this, because the past three hours had been a huge blur.
"Are you still worried? A little tired?"
"I guess I'm relieved," I said simply, and she broke into a satisfied smile, her arms coming around my shoulder. I didn't say anything and she didn't either. She sat us down and we stayed like that for a while, and when Lock looked on from sweeping the sidewalks, a little anxious, she smiled at him too to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. After a few minutes, I said, "I feel like if I nodded off now, I could sleep forever. There's just too much to think about." And there was. But if anything, I did know that the world wasn't going to end right away, with this summer slowly coming full circle to completion. Everything was returning back to the way it had been, the changes that had come leaving without a trace, noted only in our new smiles and memories.
"I'm glad, though," Risa said, and then she winked at me. She tousled my hair as if she were my mother, or an older sister, letting me know she was going back to work, and then leaned over to retrieve her bucket. "Relief is all you need sometimes, after all."

writing a story

Wasn’t it beautiful when you believed in everything, and everybody believed in you?
-Taylor Swift

In his book A Million Miles in A Thousand Years, Don Miller says a lot of interesting things but it’s more like a guide to how to write a good story rather than anything particularly inspirational or moving. I was kind of disappointed, although there’s this one thing he brought up about story-writing that made me nod enthusiastically in agreement. He says

But stories are only partly told by writers. They are also told by the characters themselves. Any writer will tell you characters do what they want.
If I wanted my character to advance the plot by confronting another character, the character wouldn’t necessarily obey me. I’d put my fingers on the keyboard, but my character, who was supposed to go to Kansas, would end up in Mexico, sitting on a beach drinking a margarita. I’d delete whatever dumb thing the character did and start over, only to have him grab the pen again and start talking nonsense to some girl in a bikini.
And as I worked on the novel, as my character did what he wanted and ruined my story, it reminded me of life in certain ways…I could see God sitting at his computer, staring blankly at his screen as I asked him to write in some money and some sex and some comfort.
So as I was writing my novel, and as my character did what he wanted, I became more and more aware that somebody was writing me…[And] after thirty years of [not] having anything like to a desire, the Writer who is not me told me I was to find my father.
I told God no, but he [kept coming] back to me and asked me if I really believed he could write a better story—and if I did, why didn’t I trust him?
I didn’t have an answer to that question. Why didn’t I trust God? I believed he was the Writer who was not me and he could writer a better story than I could, but I did not trust him.

I can relate to this so much, with how every story I write always ending up straying away from the plots I want, because the main character and I end up disagreeing so much. This may or may not seem weird to non-writers, but story-writing is intertwined with life, and here’s how I would explain it with a piece of mine.

There used to be a person I liked, and I don’t know if I still like him because I don’t struggle with it as much as I used to. But he became an inspiration in my life, and he was more religious than I, so I let him write my story. Everyone told me to seek God, I didn’t know how to on my own, and he was there to help, so naturally I put my world into his hands. I trusted he could write my story better than anyone else, even better than God could. God never sat down with me and pointed out flaws, suggesting revisions and laughing at my terrible jokes. It was too hard to let God write it anyway because I was never sure if I was listening to Him or to my own ambitions. It’s different with a real person.

So I let him write it, and after a while, a little too late, I realized he wasn’t very good. In fact, he was pretty terrible at it and you can never be satisfied when another person is controlling and suggesting things for you to do anyway. I had gotten confused too because along the way, I started convincing myself that this is what God wanted; that God was writing my story through the person I liked because I had associated the two of them with each other too closely. It was so discouraging that I threw all my so-called spiritual experiences into a trashcan and held the pen to my own story. I let God play the secondary character instead of the writer and I cut the other person out completely for a while.

That’s when I decided more than ever that I wanted to start over. I want to let God write my story for me, but I don’t trust Him enough just yet to let him do so. Sometimes I do hesitantly hand over the pen, but He always ends up writing for me something I don’t want, so I stubbornly take it back. You know those people who are always walking around, staring at objects and making decisions while asking themselves, “What would Jesus do? Would Jesus do this? Would He do that?” I think that’s where the gospel really influences lives, where God finds room to write.

I walk around asking myself, “What would Jesus do? Can I just do that later?” I'm waiting for God to change me, but I'm making Him wait for me to change.

Broken In (a song)

So you don't mean what you say
When you promise to take me up high
Watch the airplanes
Carve a hole in the sky

And you don't ask why I cried
Or why I act like I've said too much
Don't know when I lie
You don't care what I do with my eyes

But I'm okay, I won't let you down
I've promised more things than I can count
Let's make it easy, say with two grins
We're broken in, and not breaking down

Maybe God kept things to himself
When he said I'd be just fine
Well there's a cork in my hand
And the carpet's soaked with wine

It's never you on the other end
I'm always waiting in line
But it's okay, I'll figure it out
Just broken in, and not breaking down

And it's okay if you're a little late
You've already come around
So I will wait, I promise you,
Until I'm broken down.

make & believe: a testimony

I'm sitting in my apartment and we opened a window earlier while we were cooking and now it's really, really cold. I don't remember September being so cold here last year, so I didn't bring a lot of jackets or warm clothes.
Add to that homesickness for the first time since fifth grade, 2-4 hours of sleep in the past few days, and seasonal depression which typically makes me as weepy and emotional as a post-partum first-time mom, and you've got yourself a good idea of how I'm feeling inside and out.

For these depressive episodes, I'm always thinking along the lines of, "I want to be a good person but I just can't." I want to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, whatever, but when things don't turn out right, I pretend something bigger got in the way. I blame it on exhaustion or hunger or PMS or my (tentative) partial hearing impairment, then go about thinking it's not really my fault, I didn't want it that way. It's my tiredness's fault. It's the bed's fault. It's the weather's fault. Because when I come around to blaming myself, I feel like a complete failure.

I guess that's where the whole sinner concept springs up and appeals to me, a piece of oddly given and twisted comfort. It's not my fault I'm a bad person.. I was just born that way. I can't change the way I am, something else has to affect and change me. Someone had to die for me.

God knows this more than I do, and it was so awkward to explain how my summer was at our class meeting yesterday night in the midst of all my weepiness and exhaustion. Because who really knows if I have any faith, or if it's just a psychological illusion? How do these things happen, and how do they present themselves? During the summer, I slowly destroyed almost everything spiritual that I built up freshman year because of a turn of events for the worse. There became a wall separating faith and real life, and logical reality struck me in the face. I didn't want to go back to Ann Arbor or church and I didn't want to hear another word about how great God is. "How is your relationship with God?" people still asked, and most of the time I lied. It's good. I'm feeling lost but I'm trying. I'm right on track with Bible study. It wasn't that I didn't care, it was just that I knew He was there but I didn't feel the need to pray or read the Bible anymore. I felt so strong and liberated and comfortable, and I never stopped to think I would be in any sort of trouble.

So it was almost creepy the way one day's short car ride back to campus as well as failed expectations broke through the denial I had built up in the past four months. Suddenly I found myself breaking down at 4 in the morning, not wanting to live anymore, then finally forced to run to God because I had no one else to turn to. And in the midst of defeat through prayer, despite all the rebellion and angst of this past summer, God led me back to him, and for that moment I knew I was safe.

A mustard seed of faith can move mountains, and then give you back your hope. God didn't cure the emotional train wreck in me to let me know what I was missing. Rather, it was the one thing I needed in order to be reminded again of His presence, that I can turn to Him in my darkest, sorriest hour and He'll listen. I'm not good, not fine at all, but I know I'm in the hands of someone who is.