Direction

Every now and then I wake up to a dream. It's never the same one - the theme is the same but the framework is always different - and I never jolt out of bed in a cold sweat or a screaming fit. But the dreams have become so real that I can't see the thing in real life without my hair standing on end and my breath catching in my chest.

Black dogs.

Wolves.

Grinning around evil daggers in their red mouths.

Angry eyes.

Lean, mangy bodies moving with terrifying confidence, vicious accuracy.

The dreams started when I was in high school. They all begin the same: a school gathering, standing in my kitchen, doing some mundane task, a normal day. The most recent one opened with me going to the garage to let my dogs inside.

I saw more than just my dogs though. There were more, maybe four or five. Their faces were so different from my cheerful, mousy labs.

While I had to get Sasha and Casey inside, I had to keep the wolves out.

That's the other thing: they're always going after something or someone that I love. It's the toss-up, that choice between saving and fleeing.

In previous dreams I usually stood by and woke up when they got inside, got too close. But the last time was different. One of the wolves scrambled up the steps and burst through the laundry room door. I grabbed it and threw it back outside.

It was the first time that I took action, that I did something to not only prevent the beast from invading my house - as I had in all the dreams before - but also to get it out when it did break through.

My uncle - the doctor one - told me that dreams do mean something. Not the ones where you're chasing Goldfish through a swimming pool of Jell-O dressed like a ninja chicken, but the realistic ones, the ones that could be reenacted in real life. I wish I could interpret dreams. I wish I knew whether or not I could discount the one I had in a hotel in Rhode Island, when I looked at my new husband and thought, "He will cheat on me." I wish I knew whether the boy would come after me when he saw me through the storm door and not wait to be pursued by me. I wish I knew what the wolves meant. In "Harry Potter," black dogs meant death, but I've been having these dreams for years and have lived to tell about it. I thought it was something related to the "wolves in sheep's clothing" idea, and my most recent dream represents my efforts to keep my wolf at arm's length instead of playing the game, suffering through the hypocritical meetings, putting a smile on my face while my dead eyes give away my lie. My personality is such that I search for reasons in everything, and I put this reason to it because I can't stand to leave it open-ended, unlabeled, unanswered.

Maybe that's the answer. I don't have the dreams very often, but since I've put this label to it, I haven't had them at all. I still can't hear wolves howl without something stopping in my chest, Halloween still sets me on edge when it falls under a full moon, and I'm having a really hard time getting through the Hound of Baskerville episode of "Sherlock."

But for now, at least the dreams have stopped.

They may start up again, but for the present I have a story to put to them, a chance to say "this is what this means, it's not as scary if you look at it like this."

And that is some small comfort as I lay huddled under the covers, begging the howling demons to go away.

Lunch

For a creative writing class I had to sit in a public place and write observations for an hour before turning it into, as my prof so annoyingly left it, "something." 

Here is "something." 

An Exercise in Discomfort

or

An Introvert in Public

I feel like a spy.

Agent Ginger 21.

On recon with special orders from the Commander to collect as much data as possible for a report due Wednesday.

"How to Make Writing Assignments a Little More Exciting. Volume A."

Most of my observations are auditory (I can't look around and write at the same time, who do you think I am?). The girl at the next table doesn't want to work with so-and-so on a project "for lots of reasons." The nurse across from her is whining because she doesn't have the Powerpoints she needs (seriously, you've been on campus for a week - what kind of Powerpoints do you need already?). The nasally voice by the door "doesn't, like, know how to handle life sometimes, but is glad [her friend] understands."

The female voice dominate the room. Probably because they're the most high-pitched.

(Piercing.)

Except for that baseball player over there rumbling underneath all of it with his grating monotone.

Oh. Not a baseball player. I actually know him - he was in my small group (an introvert's hell) freshman year.

A shining testament to those who graduate looking exactly like their freshman ID.

How much you want to bet that girl's on the phone with a guy, asking him to come study with her? She's got all the tell-tale signs: the giggle, the wispy voice, the-

Oh. Not a guy. Maybe she just sounds naturally flirty all the time.

I'm really bad at those types of observations. Once I tried to guess who was coming down the hallway without looking, just by listening to the way their shoes sounded on the floor. I failed miserably.

Maybe I wasn't meant to be a spy. Maybe I was cut out to be...something that didn't rely so heavily on my not-power of observation.

(Your inner monologue is too loud to be a spy anyway - spies are supposed to be objective.)

Student Bethanie Denise.

At the Hive.

With orders from the prof to write about what I observe in one place for an hour.

"How to Make Homework Sound Less Like an Adventure and More Like Work Again. Volume A."

I feel so awkward. Not because my chair is rickety or my back is facing a window (I hate that), but the purposeful crawling into other conversations, when I'm introverted and hermit-ish by nature. (Not to mention STARVING.) I'm not the only person sitting alone - the girl across from me is so into her computer screen that a moose wouldn't budge her - but I'm the only one who sat here to deliberately creep on people.

Even if that weren't the point, I would feel stupid. I won't look up from my notebook because I'm positive someone is watching me in harsh judgment. I would put my headphones in and listen to some type of music, but that would mean not being able to listen to what everybody else is saying. Plus I always get self-conscious about my breathing - I start concentrating on it to make sure I"m not breathing too loud or to a beat, and I get so wrapped up in it that I don't focus on my work.

And I get light-headed. Which isn't really helpful to anyone.

Maybe I'm too intolerant to be a good writer. It requires a lot of "being out" around people, and I avoid that whenever I can help it. Stop crunching your ice, sit still in your chair, please blow your nose, enough of the clicking, quit whining to him- Oh my HEAVENS, will you CEASE the ice-crunching. And you've been packing your stuff for ten minutes - what could you have possibly unloaded from that little bag?

To tell the truth, I almost went back to my room when my prof assigned us this exercise. But I had packages to get from the post office. And I wanted coffee. So I parked here instead.

I'm still starving. I didn't get lunch today - probably the same situation with the girl who's changing her schedule because she "can't live like this anymore" - but thank God for my RA and her six-pound bag of gummie bears that she chose to mail to me.

Hello, lunch.

In communications we talked about "noise" - anything that prevents people from communicating - that can come from the sender or receiver of the message, the environment, whatever.

My empty stomach is definitely creating receiver-based noise - how can I observe when I'm hungry?

Four pages written. That's more than enough observation for one awkward sitting.

I'm going to find a sandwich.

Strength

This has been in the works for a while but I finally got around to blogging about it, when it came up tonight over dinner to a dear friend. I wrote about it back when the whole "Duck Dynasty" controversy went down last month, and I'm pretty sure I've written similar things about it before.

It seems that you're only allowed to say what you believe if you aren't a Christian. Or white. If you have any sort of diversity whatsoever, we'll give you all kinds of scholarships to come make our schools more diverse and stand back while you have your say about what you feel is important. But the minute a white Christian speaks openly about something he or she believes, he's called terrible names and dubbed "judgmental" (or, my personal favorite, "ignorant").

The worst part about being a Christ-follower today is the awkward positive you can't avoid. You have to read your Bible and pray and serve meals at your church and participate in the annual Christmas pageant (checked that off the list this year), but you have to make sure it's not in the name of legalism, for the "look at what a good Christian I am, I leave tracts for waitresses" effect. If you're under 30, you have to love youth ministry, play an instrument (preferably something acoustic), and be more focused on "a relationship, not a religion." You see that your world isn't right, maybe even on a small personal scale; but you pull on a smile, listen to Gungor, and chant lyrics that you may not understand but everybody else in the congregation sings them with such passion; besides, when the band swells, you know that you're supposed to put your hands up.

But if you get any ideas about criticizing the culture around you, looking at something and saying "that's wrong" or saying something negative about this new hip version of Christianity, you can just keep it to yourself, you closed-hearted, narrow-minded, intolerant pig - how dare you impose your beliefs on the rest of us.

Listen, I get it. I understand that Christians have a sour history among the nations. I was a history major (briefly), I know how ugly footprints have been left all over the past few centuries in the name of religion. But this trendy-but-tolerant version of Christianity can't be what was originally intended. Look at the most influential men in the Bible, who were most effective when they ignored the popular and (God forbid) politically-correct rules of the day. Something tells me that Christ Himself wasn't exactly worried about His social standing when He rampaged through the market being held in His Father's house. The pillars of our faith - Noah, Abraham, David, Paul, Peter - were not trend-followers. People thought Noah was nuts; Paul went upstream in a waterfall of Jewish legalism and hypocrisy; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego literally stood for what they knew was right and almost died for it. 

Where I live, we don't have people hunting us down to throw us to fight lions before audiences anymore, yet somehow we are just as afraid to bring up our beliefs because it's not trendy or comfortable.

Since when did "love your neighbor" become "don't openly disagree with anybody ever"? We've become so focused on making up for our overly-conservative, prejudiced ancestors that we can't speak up when we're offended anymore. And in an effort to further stifle our dissatisfaction and disgust, we glaze everything over so we don't get offended so easily by what goes on around us.

SIN IS SIN. Last I checked, my God doesn't whitewash that. He doesn't judge me directly for the sins that I commit (yes: I'm a child of God and I still sin), which means that I shouldn't judge others for what they do either - I haven't been given that type of authority and, frankly, wouldn't want it even if I did have it. But it doesn't change the fact that my Isa hates sin. If He didn't, He wouldn't have promised to destroy the mastermind and all his followeres with fire; He would have let them off with a slap on the wrist and a villa in Cuba. He wouldn't have provided His children with a way to present ourselves to Him without our sin being visible if He didn't really mind that we did bad things. Evil is rampant in our world, and just because it's not popular to do so doesn't mean that we shouldn't point it out and acknowledge that it's wrong. I'm not saying to foist our beliefs onto someone else, but to play the tolerance card until you're deadened to the reality of sin is even worse - that is a crime against your own beliefs.

And if you break your loyalty to your beliefs, with whom will you remain loyal?

Nothing

What is "self?"

You hear so much about this word "self," yet no one really bothers to define it. There are lots of extensions and variations. You can be a "self-made millionaire" or a bum because you have no "self-respect." You can do something out of "self-interest," or because you're "selfish;" or you could go the other way and be totally "selfless." Young girls are "self-conscious" and some subject themselves to "self-harm" or "self-abuse." We point out "selves" that belong to us - "ourselves, myself" - and those that don't - "yourselves" or "themselves" (that one always strikes me as funny, like, "Hey, look at them selves over yonder"). Some things are "self-sustaining," while other are "self-destructing."

And all of these concepts and words stem from this one ambiguous idea of "self" and create all these other ambiguous ideas that no one seems to define but everybody seems to understand? But how? They don't make sense, and they certainly don't make the others any clearer.

Humans say "self-made" in a way that really can't be used the way "self-sustaining" is - it is possible independently maintain a certain level of functionality, but nowhere in the history of anything has something literally self-made its own being out of nothing. Self-respect is good, and so is self-interest, but too much of either and you could lean toward selfish, which is bad. But adding "ish" to "self" doesn't have the same effect as it does on "fat" or "green": "That man is fat-ish (meaning "leaning toward fat but not really there yet), that book is greenish" ("almost green but not quite, more like a green-yellow mix).

How can one really be "almost self"?

But "selfish" is still bad, like "self-conscious," when all that really means is "aware of one's self." Yet it is linked to self-abuse and self-harm, which I think sounds about as scary as "selfless," which should mean "a total loss of self." But it's even more scary if you view the "self" in "selfless" physically like you would "self abuse" - it literally means "you have misplaced your physical body."

That's another layer to the mess: is "self" physical or theoretical? Take "self-interest," for example. Let's say John was offered a piece of cake but was severely allergic to cake, but he loved cake more than anything else in the world. If John were to "act in his own self-interest," the results would be drastically different if his interest was in his physical self or his metaphysical self. If he acted in metaphysical interest and ate the cake, he would have on brief moment of mental euphoria before his physical interest choked on the cake and died. But if he acted in physical interest, he would crush his metaphysical hopes of cake but at least live long enough to get a cheese ball instead. When he resisted the urge and said he was "proud of himself," that could then mean that he was proud of the stamina possessed by his overall being or that he was pleased with his physical appearance, which really has nothing to do with the overall anecdote and succeeds in losing the reader.

Further proof that my mind need not be "on" after midnight.

Revelation

I mentioned something about this in my last entry. Here's thoughts on it from my journal, written when I was up way too late at night (and, truth be told, more caffeinated that I prolly should have been).

Also, I'm writing this introduction after I wrote what follows...and it's longer than I expected - might wanna grab a snack before you start reading.

~



How have I missed Romans 4? As in, FOREVER?! I have it highlighted in my Bible - probably from the days of New Testament Literature class when we had to read the whole New Testament in a semester as homework - but I've never read it like this before. This one chapter has cleared up all of my wonderings about my salvation, my church, my faith - seriously, everything.

Clearly God's promise to give the whole earth to Abraham and his descendants was based not on his [Abraham's] obedience to God's law, but on a right relationship with God that comes by FAITH. (P.S. Abraham's faith was in play BEFORE the Law - or "The Ten Commandments" - was even in the picture.) If God's promise is only for those who obey the law, then faith is not necessary, and the promise is pointless. For the law ALWAYS brings punishment on those who try to obey it. (The only way to avoid breaking the law is to have no law to break!)

So the promise is received by faith. It is given as a FREE gift. AND WE ARE ALL CERTAIN TO RECEIVE IT WHETHER OR NOT WE LIVE ACCORDING TO THE LAW OF MOSES, IF WE HAVE FAITH LIKE ABRAHAM'S.

This chapter calls faith-gained righteousness a joy, not more work that we have to do because of our righteousness. For the first time the phrase "Jesus, rather than our own feelings or actions, saves us" has crashed over me and totally swamped my brain. Why is this new to me? It's what I've heard at my church for a year now, but for some reason tonight it's finally clicked. So much confusion, doubt, fear, apprehension, and pressure can be alleviated by this one chapter, this single passage that speaks of freedom and joy and peace and promise and blessing - all of which comes by nothing but faith ALONE.

And by the way: contrary to popular belief (or maybe it's just me), faith isn't some high-and-mighty, ambiguous term that only a certain number of people achieve after years and years of intense Bible study and fasting and conferences. Faith is simply believing that God will keep His promises.

THAT. IS. IT.

Even when there was no reason for hope, Abraham kept hoping - believing that he would become the father of many nations. For God had said to him, "That's how many descendants you will have. And Abraham's faith did not weaken, even though, at about 100 years of age, he figured his body was as good as dead, and so was Sarah's womb.

Abraham never wavered in his faith (believing) in God's promise. In fact, his faith grew stronger, and in THIS he brought glory to God (not in how many people he witnessed to or how many meals he served at the church food pantry). He was fully convinced that God is able to do whatever He promises. And because of Abraham's faith, God counted him as righteous.

Let me just reiterate that:

BECAUSE OF ABRAHAM'S FAITH, GOD COUNTED HIM AS RIGHTEOUS.

Just in case you missed that.

And when God counted him as righteous, it wasn't just for Abraham's benefit. It was recorded for our benefit, too, assuring us that God will also count us as righteous if we believe in Him, the One who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

Holy cow. I don't think I've had my mind blown like that before. At least not in a very long time.

I get it. After years of wondering, "Wow, am I doing this whole 'Christian' thing right? What if I haven't been saved this whole time and am actually one of the Pharisees that I despise so much? Or what if I used to be saved, but after years of humanity build-up and not doing my devotions before bed and shameless chapel-skipping and nixing church to do homework (or laundry - Sunday morning is typically the best time to do laundry on a religious campus) I'm not as saved as I thought I was" - ALL OF THAT WONDERING IS FINISHED. The confines of religion (which I've been shedding for the past few years, if you've been following me for a while), the rules of the Old Covenant that were designed to show us that we can't be up to God's standards on our own (do you realize that THAT was the point of the Ten Commandments? Nobody can do all of those things! AND THAT'S THE POINT - we need Someone else to cover our gaps and make us whole before God), the to-do list that I thought came with being a "Christian" - ALL OF THAT IS GONE.

We sing this song at my church all the time that starts, "What does it mean to be saved?" And I know the answer now. It means to believe in God's promises. And don't worry if you don't see the fulfillment of those promises. Abraham didn't live long enough to see all of his descendants - for crying out loud, he was over one hundred years old when his first child was born! You don't have to see them fulfilled: that's not the point. The point is that you believe.

I can't remember if I posted about this before, but my favorite "Bible character" is Gideon. If you look at his story, it's nothing but doubt and hesitation and asking for proof. "Well, if you're really God...How can I do this, I'm too weak...if You're really going to help me..." But he wasn't just the guy who got in the wrong line when God was asking for volunteers and accidentally saved Israel from her captors - God went directly to someone who was scared, mistrusting, and slow to obey, and He used him in the salvation of His people.

You can be scared. You can be hesitant. But you must believe that your God will do what He said He would. And you must act accordingly.

Oh, that's one more thing that I wanted to point out. There's a worship song that talks about "the joy of my salvation." Have you ever thought about salvation as "joyful?" So many times I picture Christians as stoic, cold, and unlikely to express joy over anything lest it be something unwholesome. Or you get the people who are broken during a worship service and on the ground in tears as they contemplate the incredible price of their souls that was paid. But when was the last time you were actually moved to happy tears by the price that was paid for you? When was the last time that such a revelation made you dance, play your elation out on an instrument, listen to your heart singing over what your God has done?

Just a thought.

These are the things that keep me awake at night. If you ask me how I am and I said "tired"....that will make more sense to you now.

Happy New Year, charming start to the new semester, stay warm in the cold night air (listening to "Bam Bam" by King Charles and that phrase just played, couldn't help but put it in).