baby steps

I've learned a lot about myself lately.

Mostly ugly things, which is not a self-pitying declaration but really a statement of fact. Specifically things about my temper. I was an angry little kid and I've grown up to be an angry adult (ish? young adult? 20-something?); the only difference is that I don't have anyone I unleash on very often. That's really only because I don't live with my family anymore. As a kid, my brother and I had knock-down-drag-out fights until we were both way too old to have an excuse. (Incidentally, he's been a douchebag almost the whole time he's been in Washington on leave, ignoring my parents in favor of some stripper 'ho, and I feel that same old violent anger boiling inside me. But now he knows jujitsu and I can't do anything to him.) I got into screaming matches with my parents, which have thankfully become rarer, but they still happen.

And I know, in recent years, it's kind of gotten to be a silly thing; when I was a trainee, I punched John & Erik all the time for being obnoxious little twerps & for intentionally pushing my buttons, and it's become good fodder for teasing. And that's fine. I don't punch anyone in Yakima; haven't gotten to know them well enough yet, I suppose. (I'm moving in with three boys in three weeks, though, and I imagine that'll change pretty soon.) At any rate, it seems it's become endearing — "Oh, Molly, she just gets so worked up over little things" — rather than seen as something serious or damaging.

But despite any outward appearances to the contrary, that temper of mine is still lightning-quick, still present just beneath the surface, ready to come out snarling at a moment's notice. That's how it feels: like an animal of some kind, snarling and snapping, "the jaws that bite and the claws that catch." And, as with all our animal feelings, our baser urges, there's some pleasure in giving into the anger. There's a part of me — a really big part, I think — that wants to wallow or bask in that rage, give myself fully over to my anger, and just refuse to listen to the more moderate voices in my head. This past week, I spent hours upon hours thinking of all the most spiteful things I could say, and as a writer, I knew I could use words as weapons to pinpoint a friend's most vulnerable spots and make her feel worthless and alone. And I relished it. I was looking forward to the moment when I'd get to pull out these carefully practiced hateful speeches, when I'd get to see her face fall in dismay when she learned "the truth" about herself.

That's where I was when I headed to Ghormley this weekend, a place that's supposed to be focused on God and nature and love and childhood and fun. It's hard to be sullen at Ghormley, and I was able to throw myself into playing with the girls in my cabin, but God wasn't content to leave my heart out of the picture. Boy, did I fight it. I sat there Friday night and well into Saturday morning just revisiting all my hateful thoughts, building them up again, not letting myself forget the hurt and anger I felt, which ultimately meant I had to tune out or neatly exempt myself from a lot of what was being said and sung.

I finally let my anger ebb away, more for convenience's sake and because it took too much energy than out of any altruistic realization of my wrongs. I'm still working on that one. The weekend was wonderful, as Ghormley always is, and that friendship is teetering a bit less precariously than it was last week.

But the whole episode just brought me back to an idea Kaetochi and I talked about recently, and something I've been finding in a lot of different places in life: Being mature is just a series of small decisions to not be immature. It's not some big switch that gets pulled when you're 18 that makes you lose any urge to be a jerk to the people around you; it's a conscious, constant effort. And it's hard. This is nothing earth-shattering or new, here, but it's newly-remembered for me. I dealt with this when I did the juice fast, too — the "slow, slow, steady process of self-denial." It's remembering in each moment that you have a choice between caving to those baser urges, which usually hurt you or the people around you, and actively pursuing the high road. God's road.

Where does this leave a stubborn jerk like me? It's more than scary. This realization means that I'm in control of my emotions. Usually, I unconsciously assume that my emotions are somehow independent of my brain, and if they take control over me, I'm just a helpless prisoner. Not so. My emotions can only get the better of me when I let them ... which means that every time my emotions get the better of me, it was deliberate surrender on my part that allowed it to happen.

The good news, I guess, is that God's supposed to help with this ... but the ongoing bad news is that I don't think I really trust him to do that. In words, perhaps, but it doesn't come out in how I live my life. Stubborn, independent, hot-tempered and reveling in it; how's that for a winning combination?

Anyway. I think I lost my point somewhere in there, so I'll stop. Hopefully, this week I'll be able to rein in my temper, for the benefit of all involved.

Love always,
molly

things worth sharing

The last week or so has been a good time for reminiscing, as it often is when I come home. Mark's home now, too, which is a wonderful blessing, but he's not really one for reminiscing.

I've been reading through the Rose Wilder books, the series that follows the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little House on the Prairie. Almost everyone read those books growing up, right? My friend Courtney in Yakima never did, and that just makes me sad. Those books were an integral part of my childhood, with my mom reading them aloud, and then being able to read them myself. The Rose books, too. I'm flying through them, remember how attached I was to the characters when I was little.

We also pulled out some old cassette tapes — the Wee Sing tapes and Discovery Toys tapes and, best of all, the lullaby tapes I used to fall asleep to. "Sleepytime Tunes" and "Lullaby Magic" are the two that I remember the most. Just listening to them sends almost a little shiver through me. They always used to help me sleep, and I remember pulling them out even when I was quite a bit older (still in elementary school) and listening to them. "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and "Goodnight, My Someone" ... hearing them is so strange, like it's echoing very far back in my memory.

But all this reminiscing has a point, kind of. The twins that I'll soon be living with, Chris & Drew, talk more about families and kids and marriage than anyone my age. It's very weird, these two young guys, who look like they could be frat boys or something, talking about what kind of father they want to be one day. But it's interesting. Chris asked me once what I'll want to pass on from my family to my own kids, and it's a question I keep coming back to. For a long time, I was staunchly opposed to kids, and I still go back and forth on that. I want to be able to be selfish, and travel the world, and not worry about uprooting someone ... plus there's the whole needing-to-find-a-husband thing, and what if my kids come out stupid, and the whole having them thing that would suck majorly and is really the most disgusting thing in the world (yes, I refused to watch the video that day in health class; anyone who says birth is a beautiful thing is a big fat liar, or suffering from memory loss), so the likelihood of me having kids ever is very much up in the air.

But I do like to think about what I would pass on, and recently I've been thinking that the songs and stories of my childhood are the most important legacy I have. All the nursery rhymes, all the folk songs, the "Oh, Susanna"s and the "Old King Cole"s and the "Little old woman who lived in a shoe"s and the "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie"s and all of those — things that probably most kids today don't know. I think about the girl I mentor in Yakima, and her little brothers, and they just have no way of knowing all those stories that I grew up with.

We listened to those songs over and over again, on tapes in the car, and in little cassette players at home; I listened to storybooks on tape for hours, and we sang the songs all the time. If I am a good writer, it's because I was a reader from a very early age; if I am musical, it's because we always, always had music around growing up. Now, I wasn't raised listening to the Beatles, or anything famous, but we always had songs. And all those old stories — the American tall tales, the Paul Bunyans and John Henrys and Johnny Appleseeds — those are things I would want my kids to know about, too.

In the Rose books, the author talks a lot about how much Rose loves reading, and how much she loves storytelling. Storytelling is something I want to work on. If I ever have kids, I want to have stories that I make up and tell every evening, stories that make their eyes go wide and that they want to hear again and again. Not storybook stories, but stories that I make up all my own — or stories from my own life that they want to listen to. It's just so important, that oral tradition. I still hope to someday have my dad just talk into a recorder for hours on end, telling about growing up on a farm and doing rodeo and all the other bygone-era kind of stories that he's told me in pieces over the years.

If I have kids, I don't want them to be glued to various screens. For one, they will never have video games, even thought they'll probably be implanted in their brains via computer chip by then; I still hold that video games were the worst parenting decision my folks ever made for Mark, and I blame Call of Duty for his ever going into the Marines in the first place.

No, if I have kids, they're going to read. From the day they're born, I'll read them stories; they'll start out with Dick & Jane, like I did, and fairy tales, and Arabian Nights, and Little House on the Prairie, and Nancy Drew, and Beverly Cleary, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and Pippi Longstocking, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and E. Nesbit, and Harry Potter, and everything else that fires up the imagination. And they're going to play outside, pretending to be pirates and bandits and explorers, and they're going to tear up the garden when they play safari, and they'll build forts from old refrigerator boxes and go barefoot all summer long. That way their brains won't be mush from watching TV or playing mindless video games for hours on end, and they'll have good stories to tell their own kids when they're grown up.

In Eight Cousins, Archie quotes someone as saying that "A love of good books is the best safeguard a man can have." Word, Arch. Word.

Love always,
molly

On decisions

So it's been a while.

I think I need to resolve to blog more often. For one, I'm a writer, and what is a writer who doesn't write? Useless. (The fact that I write for a living doesn't exactly exempt me from this; it's like how pleasure-reading falls by the wayside during college, because you're forced to read so much for class. But pleasure-reading is still vitally important, as is pleasure-writing.) (Why is "pleasure" such a bad word these days? Hm.)

 Also, if I write more often, I will (hopefully) avoid the novel-length posts that I end up writing when I go months in between. (Side note: "Hopefully" in its common usage was accepted by the AP last month sometime. Maybe the month before. Don't know how I feel about that ... Its original use, its correct use, was to mean "in a hopeful manner," as in, "She skipped hopefully to the mailbox to see if there was a card for her." But we've taken it to mean "I hope," as in, "Hopefully there's a card in the mailbox." And now we're allowed to do that. I like that language is alive and evolving, I get that, but I also like the rules and am afraid of what could happen if we loosen them. A short story in Mrs. Smith's 9th grade English class will forever haunt me; the sci-fi one about a guy who goes on a "time safari" or something, wanders off the path in the Mesozoic era, crushes a butterfly with his boot, and comes back to his time to find the modern world disastrously changed as a result. And everything is misspelled and awful. If we let language devolve into how normal people carelessly talk, then we'll all be writing in very ugly ways one day. And this is a long aside.)

What's consumed my life for the past month or so is a big decision: I'm moving into a house with friends! Doesn't really seem that big, does it? Well, it's not; when the idea first came up, I had a lot of resistance (I'll have to leave my own apartment! Can't have my bathroom as spotlessly clean as I like it! Can't walk naked from the shower to my bedroom! Giving up the apartment POOL! That kind of thing) but quickly came to realize that the potential benefits outweighed any negatives. And I found a beautiful beautiful historic house in the beautiful beautiful historic neighborhood here, and the owners are wonderful, and they're moving to Hawaii for a year and need someone to basically house-sit. Who better to do that than a group of flexible, 20-something-post-college kids? Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Except for the fact that 3 of our 5 are boys, and the other girl has another friend who is adamantly opposed to girls living with boys, and this friend has had an unreasonable amount of influence in the decision. So it's been a very frustrating, drawn-out process of my friend waffling back and forth, torn between what she thinks God is calling her to do and fear that the other girl will think she's casting herself into the pit of Hell. (True story.)

But anyway. That's mostly done now; we signed the lease a week and a half ago, so it's all OURS, starting July 1, and they dropped the rent down so my non-grown-up-job friends can afford it, and we're taking care of the 14-year-old cat Calvin, and there's a raspberry patch and an herb garden and a swing set with a fort and a laundry chute and windows everywhere. Sigh of contentment. Sigh of relief. Sigh of couldn't-we-have-avoided-all-that-frustration-by-just-making-grown-ass-decisions?!

Aaaanyway.

This process was a good learning experience, and a useful heads up; I now know how vastly different I am from my soon-to-be housemates. And I learned that I'm OK with that. Previously, with this group of friends (whom I hold in very high regard), I would have taken that difference to mean that I was somehow wrong; that they had their priorities/personalities straight, and I was being dumb. But nope! I can say that I am very glad to be the decisive, go-getter type of person that I am. Shit would not get done otherwise. So it'll be an interesting year — a perfect experiment, really. The idea-people will maybe learn to be a bit more feet-on-the-ground; I will maybe learn to loosen my grip on "the plan" a little bit; and we'll all learn how to love each other despite painfully grinding differences.

My housemates are the group that's in my profile picture on Facebook, plus 1: Courtney, Remy, Drew, and Drew's twin brother Chris (so, basically, the same picture, just imagine 2 of the guy on the left.) Chris won't be moving in until the end of the summer, after he finishes up an internship in Coeur d'Alene.

Oddly enough, none of our parents had an issue with the mixed-gender concept. My dad says he sees it as the same as a dorm - separate bathrooms, separate bedrooms. We're even going to have separate boys' and girls' floors. His only concern was that I would end up being the housemaid, cleaning up after all of them, but I refuse. I will make them clean ... lovingly. My mom's concern, that may or may not be valid, was "How will you date anyone if you're living in a house full of boys?" The boys themselves laughed at the idea of sitting down to grill a potential date, like 3 angry older brothers at once. The fact that these three boys are probably the only eligible young men in Yakima pretty much evaporates any fear about dating ... not that I do that ever anyway. So it'll be a good year to be good friends.

Back to the writing bit, though. My task last week was to help craft a letter to send to this doubting friend, to try to explain what our mission and vision are so she can get a bit more on board. It's something that I tend to undervalue outside of my job: Yes, I'm a writer, but what good does that do me? I've been a writer for so long (of the crappy middle-school English students, I think I was the slightly-less-crappy one that stood out) that I don't even think about it. Of course I can communicate articulately; can't everyone? Not so, it turns out. So that's been cool/interesting to wrap my head around. It's a gift, one that I can be proud of, and one that is useful outside of my writing-for-a-living thing.

Disclaimer: Blogging does not equal writing.

I would like to write more, though. I tried my hand at a slam poem last month; I like how it turned out, but it will be a long time before I'm able to share it, I think. Long time. It's an odd medium; half personal story, half detached monologue. Even if it's a powerful story, and personal, it would be strange to perform it with the level of emotion it requires each time. Somewhere along the way, it becomes very scripted. But I would like to write more poetry; for the past few years, I only go that route when I'm in the midst of extreme emotional turmoil, and the words just come naturally. Forcing it feels weird. Then again, I don't particularly want to experience any more extreme emotional turmoil.

Our house is quite a musical house; two or three of them play guitar, and two of them sing, and I play piano. I would like to try writing songs with the guitar players. Again, I can do the word thing. Useful. Maybe.

Anyway. Long post. Again. I'll try to write more often, and less lengthily.
Love always,
molly

what if...

OK, new crazy project idea to kick around in the ol' brain.

What if I — not alone, but with lots of people and organizations and volunteers and donors — started a climbing gym in Yakima?

Hunh.

You know, it could happen. Over and over again, when I write stories about things that needed community support — the new med school here, the new hospice center at Memorial, and on and on — people tell me about what a uniquely generous community Yakima is. How people here just get on board and make stuff happen.

So climbing stuff could happen, too. I mean, we're right at the border of great climbing country out here; Tieton's a half hour away, Vantage is only an hour, and I'm sure there are other little places in between or along the canyon. Then Leavenworth's only an hour and a half away, though that's more out of our jurisdiction.

And the only gyms are at Central, where you have to be a student or know a student who can fit you into his/her schedule, and at the Court Club in Tri-Cities, where you have to be a member or pay a guest fee every time, and where the wall isn't open more than 2-3 times a week.

Granted, the guest fee is like $10, which is a lot cheaper than you'll pay for a day pass at any Seattle gym. And at Central, if you can get a student to accompany you, the guest fee is only $6 something. (Or you can be like my student friend, and just slide on through the gate without the desk staff knowing you're not a student.)

But still: There is no community climbing gym. There's nowhere that a regular person can buy a season pass & climb as much as he/she wants.

And this community could use one. First off, we're the 11th-fattest metropolitan statistical area in the country, with 32.4 percent of our population labeled obese. People need some fun exercise. Second, anything active that could keep kids off the street and out of gangs would be awesome. And third, climbing is a badass sport. Fer realz, guys. Guys would dig it because they get serious muscles all over their bodies, without having to pump iron in a feet-smelling gym weight room. Girls dig it for the same reason (and, speaking personally, because of all the aforementioned lean-muscled guys ... ahem.) (And who's to say that the boys don't love it for the badass climber girls, too? Don't want to be one-sided in my sexism here.)

But it's a sport that provides a good outlet for people who want to be tough and strong and macho, and it trains them to use their brains at the same time. Climbing is like a puzzle that you solve with your whole body. It requires focus in a way that's almost meditative/yoga-ish, and you have to learn what your body is capable of.

Plus it's a sport that makes you feel good about yourself! Instead of working for 8 weeks to get into running shape, you start to see progress almost immediately. You get one hold higher on the wall, and you feel like king of the gym. Or queen. Whatever.

But back to Reason No. 2: This would be a great outlet for kids. Heck, we could even have climber vanpools that could go pick up kids if they couldn't get a ride there. And when I say "kids" I mean anyone under 18; teens, too. Teens especially. If you're at a climbing gym, you're not out making bad decisions. And when you're done climbing, you're too damn tired to go make any bad decisions.

So, yes. Those are the good reasons we need a gym. Now, the practical: How could I spearhead this while working a full-time job? Hm. This is difficult. But I would just need to get a couple idea partners to join with me. And I need to talk to folks in Oly about how they started the gym there, because that's not a big commercial gym at all. That was a small project to begin with, too. Now, the point of that one is not as community-outreachy as my plan, but it still brings together a group of people that wouldn't have that space otherwise.

That's the other thing! Climbers are SUCH GOOD PEOPLE. Not necessarily as in, they love the world & only think about making it a better place (though most of them do), but they're just open and friendly and hard-working and outdoorsy and all-inclusive. (Except some places in Seattle, because hipsters are none of those things.) Climbers become a community just from standing around watching other people try to send routes. Wouldn't that be good for people here? For kids here, who need someplace safe & positive to go? Also, this is already a tight-knit small-town community. I bet it would happen easily.

Hmmmmyes. I think I would talk to the Y, and Madison House (an after-school arm of Union Gospel Mission in Yakima) and probably groups like Trail Seekers and other outreach peeps like that. It wouldn't have to be a big gym; the Warehouse isn't big, but it's my favorite gym out of all the ones I've been too. (Central's and the Court Club's aren't big either, but they're solid.) Hey, it could even go into one of the giant unused buildings in downtown Yakima, where the entire old mall is sitting empty. And I could write grants; I'm a writer, for Pete's sake! Shoot, I could write the shit outta some grants.

Wouldn't it be cool if this happens? We'd have an entire population of kids and community members of all ages who come to love this awesome sport, and take it outside to the surrounding area, which promotes more love & good stewardship of the outdoors & all kinds of good things like getting away from the computer and video games and Facebook and all that shit.

OK. I'm gonna start a Yakima climbing gym. I've got 2 more years here; let's make good use of them.

Rock on. (<---future gym name? Eh? Eh??)

Love always,
molly

for 100 percent kids!

Hello, peoples. So I'm writing this as a semi-public declaration so I'll be shamed into sticking with it: My friend Courtney and I are going to do a two-week juice fast starting on Sunday.

INSANE, I know. Whew. I'm pumped, yet also petrified. I texted my dad about it, and he was like, "what happened to my meat and potatoes girl??" I know, Dad, I know. More like "what happened to my Oreos & Reese's girl?" But that's kind of the point. I don't eat very healthily; I really do eat Oreos for dinner sometimes, and I really do eat chocolate croissants for breakfast most mornings.

But not anymore! Not this week at all, actually. We've been weaning ourselves off the bad stuff, so except for when I caved and had Reese's on Tuesday (two packs ... my logic being that I wanted to be totally off sugar on Wednesday, then I better not have that last dollar in change on me after Tuesday! Um, yes. This is my brain.) I haven't had sugar, meat, much dairy or carbs this week. That's quite a feat for me. I have zero self-control, in this & many other areas of my life ...

But that's part of the goal of the juice fast! To show myself that self-control IS possible, and rewarding, and a better way to live.

So yes. Starting Sunday, we will only consume fruit & vegetable juice. (We could've allowed solid fruits & veggies, too, but we decided to go all in; the benefit of juice is that it's already broken down into a form that your body can immediately put to use. Or so says Courtney.) (Courtney studied nutrition & reads health-food books for fun & is going to be a naturopathic doctor, so I trust her.)

I got the juicer today from my coworker, and tested it out tonight with cucumber, apple and ginger. Whew, a little too much ginger. And then I squeezed some lemon juice into it, because lemon juice makes everything bearable (except paper cuts, I guess). And it's not bad. I think it'll take a while for it to not feel like medicine of some sort, and I don't know if I'll ever look forward to juice like I look forward to Oreos, but that's part of the goal too. I want to change my appetite & learn to crave good foods.

Good quote I found on Pinterest: "If you're not willing to eat vegetables, then you're not really hungry — just craving."

This juice fast is meant as a cleanse, to get rid of the 22 years of toxins I've been putting in my body, and to start healing from that damage. I'm afraid it'll be more like two weeks of feeling hungry all the time ... but Courtney says it'll be good. We'll be praying a lot.

Anyway, I'm gonna write about it here: http://mustlovejuice.blogspot.com/ and hopefully Courtney will be able to post stuff, too. It's mostly for me/us, but if anyone else is thinking about doing a cleanse like this, it might be good to see what someone else is going through.

Wooo juice! My favorite ...mmhmm.

Love always,
molly

perfect love

Hey folks (folk? the one folk ... anyway). It's been a while; 3 months-ish, and that's mostly due to the weather. It's cold in Yakima, and I don't turn the heat on in my front room (because I'm cheap), and I still don't have a wireless router, so my Internet/ethernet is still just in my front room, and when I sit out there for more than 5 minutes my toes go numb. And I can't exactly blog during work hours. So there it is.

But today my friend and I were talking about how to explain God as perfect love. This is something I've thought about a lot in the past few years, mostly looking at how God's love differs from the love we can have for each other. Watching many good friends go through painful breakups and think that life was hopeless without that person, that that person represented the epitome of love and that they would never find anything equal, has shown me how desperately we all need and deserve something better.

Think of your lowest moment — physically, emotionally, spiritually — and think of who was there for you in that time. I always think of people who have taken care of me when I'm throwing up, because that's a pretty gross experience and for me represents some serious commitment on the part of the observer. My parents are always some of the first to mind, because I've known them the longest and gone through the most with them. But then, you could say that my parents are my parents, so they have to be there for me. So it can be even more revealing when newer friends or people I don't really know step up to the plate and stick with me, with no obligation at all.

Perfect love is love that never, ever fails you. Even my best friends, who have the best intentions and stand beside me through my dark times, can't help but let me down in some way. I say this not to be accusatory; just factual. We are human, and we are fallible, and we are destined to disappoint each other. It's our nature. Sometimes they say something that rubs me the wrong way, or that hurts more than it comforts, or they don't take me seriously when I really need to be heard, or they just don't — can't — understand what exactly I'm feeling.

I struggle with this with my parents a lot. Sometimes I just need them to say, "Yes, this sucks. I know that it sucks, and I'm sorry." But so often — and I do this too — when I start talking, they start proposing solutions or telling me that I'll get over it. And while what they're saying may be true, it's not what I need to hear.

God is perfect love because he just doesn't do any of that.

1 Corinthians 13:4 has gotten tiresome because so many people use it at weddings, but it still rings true. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Try to put a friend's name in there, or your own name, or any name but God's, and you immediately see why we can't be perfect love for each other. In our heart of hearts, we are at least occasionally self-centered, and we can get worn out from constantly listening to a friend's problems, and we get frustrated when they don't take our advice and end up in the same painful situation over and over. We keep score; we think of how much we've been there for a friend, and feel they owe us the same time and commitment. We feel pride, thinking that we're the best advice-giver or best crying shoulder and then get offended when our friend turns to someone else for counsel. We listen to our friends' problems, but complain about them behind their back and talk about how we would never make the mistakes they're making.

God doesn't.

God listens, and never says "I told you so." God is never too tired to hear our problems, and he never berates us for getting into the same situation over and over again. He delights in our confidences the same way a parent delights in his child bringing its worries to him. He wants us to tell him what's wrong, because he wants to make it better.

And what's more — no matter what we're going through, God understands. He knows. I get so frustrated when I'm struggling with something, and a friend says, "Oh, I tooootally know what you mean; this one time, I had this happen to me and yada yada yada." I want to say, No, you don't know, you couldn't possibly know; this is my life and my pain and it's nothing like what you've experienced.

But God has experienced it all. He's felt the pain of rejection, every time we turn away from him; Christ was mocked and scorned and called a liar and a madman by the world, and he was abandoned by his closest friends. Read The Magician's Nephew from Narnia; there's a moment when the boy is telling Aslan about his dying mother, and he looks up into Aslan's eyes and sees two great shining tears, as if the lion was sorrier for his mother than even he was. "My son; my son," he says. "I know. Grief is great."

God's love is perfect because it comes from a place of perfect understanding.

That understanding also means that God knows us through and through, and still accepts us unconditionally. I tell my parents almost everything, and I have a handful of friends in whom I confide almost all my struggles and falterings, and I'm lucky to know all those people. But they still don't know my deepest, darkest sinful nature. I don't tell them the things that are truly shameful. I am vindictive and petty and unforgiving and jealous and grasping and angry beyond their wildest dreams, and I dare not tell them so, for fear of losing their friendship once they know the real me.

But God does know the real me, and he's not running. He sees all my imperfections and hateful thoughts laid bare, and still wants me and chases after me, like a lovesick teenager who won't listen to anyone's words of caution but cares only for his sweetheart.

God's love is perfect, and we would call it foolhardy if we saw our friends acting that way. We wound him and betray him and ignore him and deliberately disobey him again and again, and he still won't give up on us. Every now and then, I feel the truth of that like a knife, and cannot help but wonder at it ... If I had done everything I've done to God, to one of my human friends, they would never look at me or speak to me again.

I think back to my friends who have suffered excruciating relationships and breakups. Human-relationship love is very tangible and very immediate and present, and so it's easy to get wrapped up in it and think that it's the real deal. But again, we can't help but let each other down, in small ways or big ways, and sooner or later, a lot of relationships fail because of it. Sometimes they fizzle out, but sometimes they tear at the very fiber of our being, and make us sob those sobs that mean our world has ended.

If we believed that the love that person had for us is the be-all, end-all of love in this world, and that we'll never again be loved so well or so deeply, then I don't know how any of us would get out of bed in the morning. What is the point of living if you can never hope to be truly loved again?

Our hope comes from the knowledge that there is a better love out there, a love that never disappoints or cares more about itself than about us, that never lies or cheats or openly insults. We can get out of bed in the morning in the full certainty that God is madly in love with us, flaws and all, and that the thing that excites him most is our process of falling more and more in love with him.

Good parents give us a glimpse of God's perfect love; so do good romantic relationships, good sex (not that I'd know, ahem), and really good friends. And that's the value in those relationships — they point to something bigger, something more real, something more perfect than we can fathom with our tiny human minds. They make us want more. And if done correctly, obediently, they point us back to God, the source of love itself.

Anyway. That got quite preachy, not to mention rambly (though the rambly should be expected by now). But it's something that matters, so hopefully you won't hold it against me.

Love always,
molly

where I've been

Musing on identity today.

There are so many things that I think myself to be, things that I established as my personality back in 10th grade or 6th grade or even 2nd, but I'm not sure if they're true anymore. Or if they are, they're not on the outside and none of the people in my life now know that they're there.

A good friend of mine here in Yakima asked me last week, "Do you like to read?" I looked at her almost stupefied - this is me we're talking about here - before realizing that she would have no idea from our day-to-day interactions. Of course I like to read! I love to read, I read all the time, I read before I go to bed every night ... but still, her question brings up one that I've asked myself a lot over the past 4 years or so. I read more when I was in middle school and high school than I have since college. In middle school I was pushing through meaty stuff like Fahrenheit 451 and Jane Eyre, books with good words and a message. in high school I was fortunate enough to take good English classes and read more classics. But since college, I haven't really pushed myself to read. I read things that are comfortable and easy to get into before going to bed; I bring Nancy Drews back from home for the nostalgia and read Peace Like a River and Water for Elephants over and over because I know I love them. But I'm not challenging myself or learning more. Can I still call myself a reader?

A bigger thing I feel people don't know about me - but need to - is that I'm mean. I really am, guys. I think back to all the horrible things I did to my brother and my parents growing up, and I feel like a fake when people tell me I'm nice. I'm still judgmental and hypocritical and vindictive and prideful and I love to get my little jabs in - even if it's just in my head. Mark and I don't have knock-down-drag-out fights anymore (I wisely ended that about the time he started training with the Marines in high school; these days I can run and jump on him and wind up flat on my back in about 2 seconds) but I still carry those with me. All the nasty childish things I did to people around me are still a part of me, and I can't tell if I think I'm still that person because it's true, or because it's historically true.

Is the proof of these things in your heart or in your actions? I watched the Batman movies this week; you know his cheesy line, when he gives his identity away to Rachel - "It's not who I am on the inside, but what I do that defines me." Actions speak louder than words, yada yada. So using this weekend as an example - do I get to call myself a climber when I haven't climbed for months? I mean, yes, there's no gym in Yakima, and I don't own the gear to go sport climbing nearby, and I hurt my foot - but wouldn't a real climber push through all that for love of the sport?

I dunno. There are parts of me I'd like to lose, other parts I'd like to hold onto. Not sure what's normal. Guess this is part of growing up?

In other news: Mark called my dad yesterday; he's doing fine. It's still surreal to me. There's a line in Peace Like a River that rings true -- "[I managed to stay anxious about this for 2 days] before worry died, as usual, at the hands of routine." Some days I'm so scared for him I have to get up from my desk and walk outside so I won't cry at work; some days, like this weekend, I'm so excited about what I'm doing that it's just a flicker in the back of my mind. He's still there, and I still want to talk about him to other people, talk about how brave he is and how proud I am, but it seems much less urgent.

Reading about the young guy who had shrapnel tear through his brain and leave him with a traumatic brain injury at 22 -- that's urgent, and it's sobering. I am so incapable of even picturing that -- Mark without his sense of humor, Mark without his quick responses to everything, Mark without his stories, Mark without the temper and sass, Mark without the ability to even speak -- that I convince myself it can't happen to him. I can't see it; it's not possible. But writing about that guy and what his family has been through ... it feels awful, but I'd almost rather lose Mark entirely than have him come back and not be Mark at all. That would feel like a loss that never goes away, a wound that never gets to heal. He'd be gone and he'd be there to remind me of it. How selfish of me is that? jeez.

Anyway. Just the thoughts kickin' around in this jumbled old brain.

Love always,
molly