“Dear God”

Trust

“I’m supposed to trust You, but I’m having a hard time doing so. Especially when it comes to the area of relationships.

I know I’m supposed to only rely on You, but to be brutally honest (and in doing so fear I’m risking your disapproval): You’re not here to give me a hug, to cook me dinner, to massage my feet after a long day. At this time I need something physical, tangible: someone I can touch and feel and see. I’m a tactile person.

And I have a hard time trusting You’ll bring someone into my life because I’m not sure it’s part of Your plan for me. And I’d hate for it not to be part of Your plan for me. Perhaps I’d be better off doing it alone?

Yet personal history shows I’m having no luck in that area. And I’m tired of taking chances, making moves and having them rejected. In the last week alone I’ve given out my phone number to a guy friend I like – and he’s not called, and have added one I’ve recently met as a Facebook friend – and had that rejected. There’s only so much a girl can take!

And I know I’m supposed to look to You to fulfil my needs of love, but I’m not sure I can. And I’m not sure I can ever see a time when I can. And that’s painfully, painfully difficult. Something I want so badly is just out of reach for me. It’s like the diamonds are locked away behind the glass – but I can’t see there’s glass there and keep hurting myself trying to get through it.

Lord, Father, Abba… I can’t see a way through this.”

Dream

Monday night I dreamt that this guy, Biscuit, was Superman! Admittedly we’ve recently had a heroes & villains-themed Christmas party.

And Superman was umming and ahhing about being in a relationship with me. And I decided, what the heck, I’d dance anyway. And so I did. I didn’t chase him or call him – after all he’s Superman, he knows! – and got on with the dancing. With my eyes closed – I wasn’t waiting, watching for him.

And as I danced, twisted and turned, after one turn I felt someone there. Someone solid, who grabbed my hand and pulled me towards him. And I opened my eyes. And I danced with Superman. With Biscuit.

The irony is: Biscuit doesn’t dance. Unless he’s really, REALLY drunk!

Still, there’s something in that dream. More than something. I’m aware of the subconscious, of the fact that I need to just carry on dancing, carry on with my life, not waiting.

On a more mundane note, I’ve not been sleeping so well. Think the depression’s hitting a bit. Christmas has never been the most fantastic time for me. I’ve been dumped at least twice at Christmas-time – once in the wee hours of Christmas day itself, though in reality it still felt like Christmas Eve as we’d been out – and family is getting more complicated and stressful. Plus the self-esteem’s taken a bit of a hitting as I’ve realised I seem to have fallen for Biscuit, and all the complications that could cause. If he was even ready for a relationship yet. He’s still getting over the last one.

He’s been off sick 2 days this week. I’ve missed him. It’s felt like someone cut off one of my limbs!

Please pray for my sanity!

If I don’t blog in the next few days, Merry Christmas one and all. Thank you for reading.

It’s a free world innit?

So I’m on the bus on my way home after work, and these two guys get on. Possibly may have had a bit more to drink that was necessary. And one of them’s standing right in front of me, swaying from the pole, in my face. So I lean towards him and ask him – politely – could he please stop standing on me.

Oh, you know that was a big mistake, wasn’t it! Even when I corrected myself and asked him to please stop leaning on me, he was off. Calling me all names under the sun until a woman sat behind me took it upon herself to tell him to shut up and stop having a go at me. It became a full on bus rage incident!

But what struck me was when they both turned round to me and said “It’s a free world innit?”

Of course it’s a free world. As long as you let me do what I want. It’s obviously not a free world for me to expect him to stop leaning on me when there’s a perfectly decent-sized empty space over that he could stand in that would allow me to have a bit of space. And to expect him to reply politely. No, because it’s HIS free world. Not mine.

Which got me thinking about moral relativism (as you do on a Monday evening), and how freedom and sin are, without a standard to go by, subjective words. Without God or laws, there would be anarchy, because everyone’s freedom, everyone’s morality is in a different place.

For example: Free trade. What that really means is free as long as we, the West, get the benefits. It’s not free for your poor, third-world countries who are trying to get back on their feet from the crippling debts and hardships as a result of centuries of colonialism.

Another example: Paedophiles. As far as they’re concerned, it’s perfectly natural to ‘love’ and have sex with a five-year-old child.

The freedom to be greedy has allowed banks and utilities companies (and many others) to play fast and loose with our money: banks taking risks, and now expecting to be bailed out by us, the very people whose money they’ve risked and potentially lost; gas and electricity companies, reaping the profits of increases in gas prices, but not lowering them the prices drop again (same for petrol companies), but only making a token effort towards renewable and sustainable resources (after all, what’s in it for them?) And here we are, in a global financial ‘crisis’ (though try telling that to those who live on less than one dollar a day: they’ll tell you we’ve been there forever) as a result of the ‘freedom’ of others.

But what do you do in a post-modern age who’s thrown God out with the bathwater? How do you talk about morality, freedom without being puritanical? How do you explain loving your neighbour – locally, nationally, globally – when governments refuse to love those they govern, let alone their neighbour?

How do we live in a world of relative freedoms and relative morality, where individualism rules? How do we talk about ‘we’ as opposed to ‘me’, without sounding irrelevant and priggish?

And how do we, Christians, live in the freedom we have within the morality God sets before us? How do we become salt and light in a world that seems to be getting darker?

Non-dates

I met up with 2 of the Greenbelt guys over the weekend! I know – it doesn’t rain, then it pours (bit like the weather too!) They’d both emailed during the week too.

On Saturday afternoon I went for coffee with Birmingham boy, the one who grew up not too far from where I did. Then walked him back to the station. It was a pleasant afternoon with a friend.

Sunday lunch I met Wimbledon guy at a nearby gastro pub. I got home at 7.45. It only took me 5 minutes to get home from the pub we’d ended up at. It was a thoroughly pleasant afternoon/early evening. We found we have a lot in common in the way we think about church and wot not. We shall see. Again… watch this space.

I’m open to possibilities.

A Story of Gifts – loosely based on Matthew 8

A Story of Gifts – loosely based on Matthew 8.

“Let me put it to you this way…each of those events, demands, people, expectations…each exposes a window into your inner world revealing areas that need healing and restoration. You still believe the lie that experiencing life and being in relationship with me is about your performance. Even the person who wrongs you, or the one who places an unjust burden on you, or the one who makes you feel in their debt…any of these are a gift to you, if for no other reason than they expose what you work so hard to hide.”

So, what is it about myself that I am trying to hide, that certain people stimulate anger and irritation in me?

What is it about my ever-optimistic, loud, ‘Happy Clappy’ housemate that niggles parts of me I’ve kept hidden? Is it because I don’t have that supreme confidence in God he has? Is it because I am envious he always sees the silver lining? Though I don’t think it’s all that. He is oblivous to others in some way: the volume of his singing, the way he treats our home as a hotel for his friends on occasion shows a certain amount of disrespect for those of us he is living with. His insistence that things be done HIS way, that I adjust to him: I responded with a stubborness I didn’t realise I had. Maybe that’s it as well. He brings to the fore my own selfishness, my own desire to have things done my way. Which depresses me, because I’d really like to live on my own, but can’t afford it. Or else, with others but with certain rules. Whereas here, we have to figure things out among ourselves: and he seems to ride roughshod over what I think are basic considerations for those you live with.

There’s obviously things I need to work through and perhaps I need to start praying thankfullness for him, that he is a gift that will reveal the parts of me that need changing, the selfish, stubborn parts of me.

Or maybe he’ll just move out!

Sex and the City – spoiler!

Saw Sex and the City tonight. Really enjoyed it, actually. And there were some really deep bits during it, as well as the sex, the shopping, the shoes and the laughs!

Can you be unfaithful if you’re not married?

According to Available Light, you can’t.

If you read his post, apparently he told a group of unmarried women who were living with partners that they should have no expectations of faithfulness over their partners because they were unmarried. In his own words:

“Years ago, in a graduate class discussion about adultery, I offended several young women by pointing out that it was impossible for their live-in boyfriends to cheat on them. Only married people can commit adultery, I said. It seemed to me that if they wanted to live together without being married, they should not expect their men to keep to a standard of marital fidelity.”

Oh come on! That’s so overly-simplistic. And completely arrogant Christian. As well as outrageous!

So is he saying, and I asked this in a comment, that the unmarried, but not living together, person, who hopes (as most of us do) that the relationships might move towards marriage, should not be hurt if their partner sleeps with/kisses/gets intimate in someway, with someone else? What happened to trust?

By implication (and maybe in my outrage I’ve mis-extrapolated this) he is saying that until we are married (and perhaps only until we’re married in church) we should have no expectations of fidelity from the other party, no demands of exclusivity of intimacy.

Bollock! Total and utter crap! Not quite the context (but Jesus never had this conversation), but I think it applies well here:

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ Matthew 25:21 NIV

If we can’t be faithful in the smaller things – and even though I’ve never been married, I can see that a relationship prior to marriage is in someways smaller than a married one – then how can we expect to be faithful in the larger things (touché, I know, but one of the points I tried to make last year, if you’ve been following me that long), i.e. marriage, which has more pressures.

And if we’re strictly ‘Bible is the actual word of God’ Christians, then those women who were living with and having a sexual relationship with their partners, in God’s eyes are married. Though it’s always funny how some Christians can beat you with one stick and ignore the other: i.e., if the Bible is ‘law’, then everyone must be married, whilst ignoring that the Bible equates a committed sexual relationship with marriage.

But then that might make things far to tricky and radical!

What do I want?

What do I want in a man? I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days. Do I really know?

Thinking about Church Boy (CB). What is it about him that I like? Now I’ve got past the obsession, what about him attracts me. Or is it just because we’re comfortable friends and can pretty much talk about anything?

But I (slightly squiffily) told him a few weeks ago that he’d spoiled all other guys for me. So I need to try to narrow it down. Just to get it a bit clearer in my head. What is it?

He’s strong in his faith So many of my friends have compromised, are with guys who either don’t believer or nominally believe, and I’ve seen how it changes their beliefs, changes their priorities, keeps them away from church, from fellowship, from community.

He’s musical Shallow, I know, but he plays a mean guitar, drums like a dream and has a voice I could melt away to! But… I love music, so that’s a good thing. Though he works in music, which means irregular working.

He’s intelligent I don’t mean he’s an intellectual boffin, but he likes to learn and likes to talk about it.

He’s honest Tells it like it is. Doesn’t play games.

He’s a good listener He likes to talk, but he’ll also listen.

He’s encouraging If I can ever pin him down for that long-promised guitar lesson!

It’s not all about him He knows life is bigger than just him, and when he’s committed to something/someone, gives his all. He’s given a lot to the church over the last year, and it’s cost him. Big time.

He’s funny I don’t always get his humour, and I sometimes think he can be childish (what man can’t?), but he’s funny. And can see the black humour in things, which sometimes is needed.

I can’t think of anything else concrete. I think a lot of it is because we know each other so well, we’ve been through a lot (church-wise) together and have seen the best – and worst – of one another.

It’s just a real shame he doesn’t like me in that way. Ah well. There must be something better to come. Whatever shape or form – or not – that comes in.

Too open

Open book

I’m an open book,
with a technicolour cover
that tells it all.
No mystery,
no intrigue,
nothing to catch a reader’s eye,
nothing to make them want
to find out more
about the story inside.
[Sleeping Daisy]

I think I share too much. More than I should. It’s not just about me – when I talk about how I feel, I’m talking about someone else too. There’s another involved. And it’s all very well sharing with the anonymity of blogging. But offline…

“If one partner doesn’t know whether they can trust the other, they will not share certain things. And these may be the kinds of things that if there were trust, would bring them together.

Is this between you and me,

or you, me, and your friends?

Because that is going to change how much I tell you,

how much I let you in,

how much I trust you with,

how much I give to you.

How naked I get with you.

Is this argument between you and me,

or between you and me and whoever you are going to tell about it?

Is this quirky habit of mine something I let you see because I know you love me no matter what, or is this something you will entertain our friends with at a party?

How safe are you?”

Sex God, Rob Bell

I’m not sure I’m very safe.

I need to work on that, as it won’t do me any favours in the long run. And has the potential to cost me dearly.

But as a processor, how do I work through my problems without sharing?

Commitment

I’m a commitment phobe.

Cartoon courtesy of cartoonstock.