Life Abundant (the wonders of people, enthusiasm, and long talks about heaven)

This photo has really no relevance to this post except that it's nearly Christmas. And I love snow.

“...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." -C. S. Lewis

Trying to sum up exactly what I'm wanting to convey in this post may be rather difficult.  I'm afraid it's one of those subjects that is hard to bring up and harder to do justice.

I'm talking about Thankfulness For Being Alive and the Many Wonders of People and Relationships and Long Talks about Heaven and Literature and Unashamed Excitement about Many Things.

I've got some pretty crazy awesome people in my life.  It's easy in the middle of the messy, uncomfortable, dirty parts of my life to forget how I've been blessed, in small ways and in large.

For some small ones, take snow. It tried to snow a couple times this past week and though it didn't stick around, I wondered (again) at the beauty of it, arriving in waves from the sky and giving the air that crisp, vibrant wintery smell.

Another small thing: Meals with friends. I got to eat a meal with my Bible study group this week, and then another meal with a friend's family the next day.   There is something very simple and beautiful about eating together.  Especially when you pay attention to all the little details, the way people laugh, the jokes they laugh at, the little looks they give each other as sarcastic (but loving) comments make their way around the table along with the casserole and the cookies.

On to some of the larger things.  I had Bible study small group with two girls on Thursday night.  We ended up talking about emotions and fears and Psalm 25 and then we got to pray together.  I got a fresh appreciation for the way they loved Jesus and, by consequence, loved me.

Then on Friday night I went to a "nerd Christmas party" with my literature group.  We talked about everything from science fiction to music, but the part of the conversation that engaged me the most was when we talked about Heaven.  

C.S. Lewis talked about Sehnsuct in a few of his writings; the uncanny longing in every human soul for joy, true joy, and for something just beyond our grasp and not found on earth.  

"That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves."

The conversation on Friday night gave me a fresh dose of Sehnsuct.   We have this promise that God has gone to prepare a "place for us."

Don't all humans want a place for us?  We seek it out in so many ways, but I would venture to say that many of our endeavors come back to this longing for a place.   What amazed me was contemplating afresh this.   We have this hope beyond worlds, this hope and faith that there will be a Place for Us, and that Christ himself, the chief Person we were created to glorify and love has designed it.

He painted our name on the door with His blood.

Doesn't that just drive you speechless?  It doesn't often enough to me, but it should, and when I feel Sehnsuct most deeply and realize that it's fulfillment is in Jesus, then the silence and the peace fill the rivers of my soul again.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” -Lewis, again (and I shall never stop quoting him, never)

Being with people that share this longing for a Place and a Person is one of the best things for my soul.  

These people are excited about Life and about Miracles.  They are unironically enthusiastic about stories and music and Truth in Literature.  They appreciate mysteries and mountains and the place above the tree line where the silence is deep.    They talk about Heaven and their eyes light up.

You can see in their smile that they are not talking about a place they are mildly interested in.  

No, in these people, I see the fire blazing because their souls are alive, and they are seeking after the Person and the Place they were made for.

I am ridiculously blessed by God in the gift of knowing them.

Tagged!

I will say that this has absolutely no relevance to the rest of this post.

So, I was tagged a few weeks (months?) ago by Micah at http://snippetsandslicesandscenes.blogspot.ca/.

Eleven Facts 
1. I am Canadian, which probably most of my followers already know.
2. I am an INTJ (Introverted Intuitive Thinker Judger) in the Meyer's Briggs personality type system.
3. My favourite TV show is Doctor Who for many, many reasons; one of the largest being that the Doctor gives me a fresh excitement for life, for adventure, and for living with meaning.
4. I love dystopian fiction and its ability to communicate Truth.
5. I began writing because I loved Narnia and wanted to write stories about it (2006-2008).  That grew into the writing of my own original fiction a couple of years later (2008-onwards)
6. My favourite book series is The Chronicles of Narnia, though Harry Potter is putting up a fight.
7. My favourite movie series is The Lord of the Rings.
8. I love the rain.  Where I live we get a lot of rain.
9. The first book that made me flat out cry was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
10. I own 8+ nerd shirts, including 4 Doctor Who themed shirts. 
11. I play unashamedly with my sonic screwdriver and my fez and I enjoy fish fingers and custard.


My answers to Micah's questions:

1. If you met a Boggart/found your room at the God Complex/were marched towards room 101 in the Ministry of Love, what would await you? If it's a too personal of a question, just tell us your favourite ice cream flavour. Unless, of course, your worst fear is ice cream. Then you can just leave this blank.
hardy har har.  I'll go with room in the God Complex-oh, but that is a hard question.
My Boggart would probably be a lot like Augustus Water's worst fear.  Oblivion.
I like chocolate chip mint ice cream.  

2. How did Sherlock survive?
Mind control.
I have no hypothesis this late at night.  I've heard the squishy ball theory, the TARDIS theory, and a bunch of others. 

3. Which do you prefer - nice eyes or a nice smile?
Nice eyes.  Eyes say so much.

4. What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Sorry, was this supposed to be an educational question?  Cause it's past my bedtime.

5. What is the best smelling book you ever did sniff?
I'll say the box of old books that my Dad brought home one day.  They were all about 90-100 years old and smelled- oh, they smelled beautiful and ancient.

6. Are you the crying type? (The Fall, Doomsday, Toy Story 3?)
Nope.  Sometimes I wish I was, but I'm an INTJ and we don't tend to be emotional.  I can work myself up to being emotional, but crying is usually off-limits unless I'm dealing with something really personal.  Or I'm really tired.
(Or I'm reading Harry Potter or The Fault in Our Stars, to date the only two books that have made me properly cry.)

7. Which fictional villain makes you the most frightened or angry?
Loki makes me frightened, but mostly because I love him as a character and want him to be redeemed.  That's not really a fear of him so much as it is a fear for him.  Bellatrix Lestrange is pretty terrifying.  And Oblivion. Because Oblivion is really a 'villain' of The Fault in our Stars.

8. What would your dream room look like? ...Your dream house?
I'll just describe the insides because I'm not good at visualizing structures.  The inside would be crisp, cream or white walls with black or red lettered quotes scattered throughout.  There would be many bookshelves, some hidden in warm, rounded corners with large comfortable chairs.  There would be words everywhere, in the bedrooms, in the living room, tucked into the corners of the kitchen and the front entrance.   It would be like a large hobbit hole with hundreds of books, well lit rooms, and speakers to blare (or trickle) music everywhere.  Imagine "Don't Panic" blasting through an entire house and a cup of tea and jammy dodgers sitting on the kitchen counter.  Then imagine me with a Narnia book in my hand and a stack of books under my arm, guitars on the wall and the smell of cinnamon.

9. If you could only see everything in one font, from now on, what font would you pick?
Something like helvetica or times new roman.

10. Mac or PC?
Mac. 

11. You're a contestant in the Hunger Games. Detail this for us. What's your strategy? Training score? Do you win, or ... not? If you feel like it, give us even more. Outfits? Favourite thing about the Capital? District? What's the arena like this year?
Gosh, Micah, do you want me to write a book?
My strategy is to hide and trick other contestants and try to stay alive for as long as possible and defer a messy death.  I'm definitely more of the 'flight' rather than 'fight'.   I climb trees, gather food, stay away from the other contestants at all costs.   
I definitely don't win.  First of all, I don't know that I would kill.  Under those circumstances my resolve might be weakened, but I don't honestly think I can say that killing under those circumstances is any more justified than any other circumstances.  I'd prefer to die rather than have to be a part of death.  Even though there can only be one winner, even though my not-killing would not stop others from killing.   I hope that I would be able to hold that resolve. So I probably don't last long.  Also, there's the fact that I'm small and physically not very strong or agile or talented in anything that doesn't involve words and a computer. 

The Dichotomy of Stories and Reality

I live a thousand lives tonight
Locked up inside my head
I chose the song of eternity
It ravaged inside my head
I live a thousand lives tonight
All faces black and red
I chose the people who never lived
I cried, and stayed in bed.

You're probably tired about hearing about stories from me.  It seems that's most of what I talk about.  I'm not here to apologize though.  However, today I am going to delve into something that may explain why I talk about stories so much, why they affect me, why I love them.

So here goes.  Baring a little bit of my soul here.  This idea that I'm going to share today is something I've cried over and thought through.  It's very personal to me, but it may be also something for some of you, particularly those who have ever thought that escaping in a story was the only thing that kept them sane.

"in dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own"

I finished reading the Harry Potter series last weekend.  It affected me quite deeply with the adventure, love, and loyalty of the characters; how they sacrificed for each other and the  courageous choices they made in spite of death staring them down. The themes, especially those of death and life, courage and friendship, hit me hard. (I may write a full review and post it here. We'll see.)

It had been rather a rough day at home, the day after I finished reading.  There were things heavy on my heart, real life struggles that hurt and drove me to my room alone.  In that moment, I wanted escape more than anything.  Harry Potter had affected me.  Even though the story had been filled with darkness, with danger- even with death, something in me longed for it above my real life. Harry said "Hogwarts is my home."  And in my longing for my own world to be made right- I wanted Hogwarts to be my home.  It was, despite it's darkness, a beautiful place.  It was adventure, it was escape. It was certainty that their lives meant something.  

Maybe it was certainty that my life meant something too.

All my life I've looked to stories for escape, I've been realizing.  All my life I've seen glimpses of life and love and courage in stories that have provided hope to me as I'm living the pages of my own story. Those stories have given me courage.  They've given me joy.  Most of all, they've given me hope.

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

So there's the dichotomy.  I've depended on stories, to be honest.  I've placed my heart in them, let them affect me and change me.  I don't regret what stories have done for me.

Sometimes, though, I think I dwell on stories and forget to live.  I love stories. I won't ever stop loving stories.  The story of the universe goes on- and we write and live our little stories inside of it.  I fully intend to keep reading and writing stories for the rest of my life, in expectancy that they will affect me, change me, give me hope and strength.

But even in that, I have often lacked the courage to step out of the story world and live fully in my own.  I saw a post on Tumblr that said "we need fantasy to survive because reality is too difficult."

Okay, so sometimes reality is difficult. Sometimes it is horrible. But we will never get beyond the darkness and into the light unless we step out with our swords drawn.  We will never experience life  in all it's beauty- and sorrow- unless we fling ourselves fully into it.

We will never live unless we come out of the dream world.  The dream world will live inside us forever, it will continue to make us more alive then we were.  But I realized that night that these stories matter because they echo my own heart.  My desires for my own story become entangled with the fictional story.  I want to live, to have the abundant life that I was made for.  I do not want to forget that truly living is courageous.

"The stories we love do live in us forever."

Our own stories, we hope will live forever.

Writing out of your soul

I must write for me.

When I started writing seriously I was thirteen. It was a hard, amazing year, due to a lot of personal issues and a really huge season of doubt that broke into my baptism and subsequent growing Christian life.  In my eighth-grade poetry, though the rhythm is bad and the phrases are cliche, I can still feel everything that my soul was fighting with.  That writing was some of my first writing, and some of my worst.  But it was also some of my most honest.

I guess that's a defining trait of powerful writing.  It's honest.  It's honest about where it's been.  It's honest about tears and holding stuffed animals as a teenager because you can't explain that sorrow.  It's honest about how sometimes that stuffed lion that you call Aslan is more real and more alive and more comfort than anything. It's honest about those days you could rule the world, and the days you just want everything to be fixed.  It's honest about how sometimes you are weak and other times you could fight dragons.  Powerful writing tells the truth.  Even if the truth is stained and terrible along with its light and beauty.  Because the truth, the honest truth, sets free.

The truth hurts. Writing about those things was- is- so hard.  Putting it on paper is declaring it, waging war against it, admitting it to myself. When I wrote it down, I made it real in a new way.

"If he wrote it, he could get rid of it.  He had gotten rid of many things by writing them," said Ernest Hemingway.   A lot of people have pointed out how writing is like catharsis.  Writing, for me, helps me understand why I feel the way I do.  It helps me sort out truth from error.  It helps me to see in ways that I can't see when I don't write.   It helps me declare war and it helps me to fight that war. 

Words. Words on paper, black splotches on ink, changing lives. Changing ME. First and foremost, writing has changed me. I write for me. Oh, I write for others, but I write out of my own soul.  That's where the power of writing transforms.  

And hopefully, as words have healed and changed me, they might do the same for others.

I'm going to write anyways, because I have to write. For me, the most powerful urge is the one that comes from my soul.  That's the urge that calls me to understand the world, the God who made it and the strange and beautiful story that I am living.

ramble on the eve of senior year's beginning

I don't even know about this school year.

I have so far to go, so many things to do.  So many things to learn.  So many things that need to change in my life.  So many hills to climb.

So many adventures to be had.

I'm terribly excited and terribly frightened.

Isn't that wizard?

How can something bring me so much joy and make me so thrilled and exhilarated- and yet scare the dickens out of me the next moment?

Why am I unconsciously running away from the things that I love, the things that I want?

Maybe these are just the ramblings of a tired me when I should be sleeping.

Maybe these are secret things that I usually don't admit to myself.

But this year is going to be good.

Maybe even great.

If only I follow the Lion.

I don't think I want to be amazing...

...I think I want to be real.

I'm a perfectionist by nature.  Sometimes I am able to balance that fairly well, utilizing its strengths and downplaying its weaknesses.

But sometimes, it just makes me feel like a piece of perfect looking plastic with hidden scratches and a flawed structure.

Sometimes I need to be reminded how small and imperfect I am underneath everything I'm learning, underneath the success, underneath the life-that is-ever-so-wonderful.

I'm a small, weak, sinful person.

I have a strong God.

And sometimes I need the humbling reminder of that, of the fact that I can't do it all.  Of the fact that being wrong and being hurt and being vulnerable and messy isn't always a bad thing.  Of the truth that it's so much more fulfilling to be real and to be following Jesus honestly than to be putting up walls and painting pictures of a perfect person I'm not.

And it's so amazing to see God make beautiful things out of messes.

Awe. Writing. Life.

Sometimes I am nearly brought to tears and awe at this gift.  I read, I write, I love stories.  That's something that's been born in my soul.  It brings me to tears.  Over and over again it's changed my life. But sometimes I lose the love I had at first.  I forget how precious it is to feel the pages of an new book or to breathe in the smell of an old treasure.  I forget what it means to muse over a phrase that sings the song my heart cannot express.   I forget the ways that people in books can make me laugh and see the world in a new way.

But deeper than that- I forget that stories are a way for me to understand the world, understand life, and learn to enjoy life.  I forget the swelling of my soul in worship and amazement in a story of fall and redemption.  I forget the joy that comes with simply being alive and with hearing the stories of the humans on this fallen planet, where a rebellion has been launched and hope is not mere optimism.  I forget that everyone has a story, and that in the telling of stories we are changed beyond what can be described.

And then something sparks me to remember, like the cord that was wiggling out of it's socket has been plugged back in.  Then awe overwhelms me yet again.  Tonight was one of those moments.

Thanks, Father, for the awe of being alive.

Thanks, Father, for the beauty and tragedy and awe scattered like bits of blue flowers among grey plains.

Thanks, Father, for stories.