Juxtapose

My baby brother's blog gets more comments than mine. Will the madness never end?

Anyways, I've been thinking how much my writing has changed over the years. At one point it was all angst, all tears and gloom and doom and tomb and the womb of sorrowssorrowssorrows encompassing over and above and beyond all that lives and will die and DIE SOON! Then it was more of a fictional stage. Character studies abounded of people both factual and fictional, as I studied and wondered about the motives and lives of people other than myself. Then it was a lot of poetry (some of it the best I've ever written and that has yet to be outdone in creativity). And now a lot of my daily, boring life.

So. CUrrent facet of my boring life: volleyball. Somehow, this happens to be Thee Exclusive Witnessing Method, according to youth pastors everywhere. Don't get me wrong, I love youth pastors - heck, I love those crazy youth, even - but I don't get the obsession with sports. Somehow there's something magically spiritual in popping a ball back and forth over a net, creating webs of fellowship between uber-competitive types and the geeks like me with bad knees and thick glasses. Again, don't get me wrong - I love fellowship. I'll talk to whatever weird person you want to throw at me, I'll chat with the old ladies after church, I'll participate in Drive The Schizophrenic To Work Day, even, but ask me to get the ball over the net, and I'm lost. Oh, and no matter how many times people at my church try to make me think that it's some sort of cheery, body-building, exciting, rock-hard-abs-in-the-sand-and-sun, cute-chicks-in-flippy-ponytails type of sports, I can't get into it. It hurts my wrists when I'm actually able to hit the ball, and when I'm not, it hurts my delicate ego. That's it, guys, my delicate ego. I feel socially inadequate when I can't make a white ball move from one useless point to another. That's it.

So I'm a little bitter. A little. The truth, if anyone cares, is that I find the whole thing to be kinda... not fun. It's not fun for depth-perception-challenged people to be hit in the face with flying objects. It's not fun to try to 'participate' and have ball-hog-happies pop up in front of said depth-perception-challenged peoples in order to save them further humiliation. It's not fun to stand around and look dumb. In fact, guys, it's just pretty darn Not Fun. Even on my days when I acutally touch the ball, I'm not having fun hitting the ball over the net. I get no joy, as such, in the event. I have fun talking to people, yes, but the sand and the ball are only a tool, so to speak.

All this is fine. I can look stupid for two hours straight and stand around bored at the same time - that's fine. But if I get one more survey about a preferred church youth activity and the funness and invaluability of church sports and I say that I give it a zero on the Funness scale and get told to "Hey, participate!" Well. It won't go over well.

Unfortunately, the big sells of youth activity, such as volleyball and batting cages come as easy fun to most, while my kind of fun, the Hang Around with a Bible and lots of Food type, that I have always found to be so easy to acclimate myself to, have never been a big sell. Sometimes (listen for the collective gasp), I even wonder what's with the huge emphasis on sports in my church and wonder about its relevance. But then again, I wonder about the relevance of a lot of things in churches nowadays. I'm wishing for a stripped-down, raw-and-earnest, bare-bones church right now. My church preaches that same stripped-down, earnest Gospel, but sometimes its attitude isn't so much so. I don't know where I fit in anymore, sometimes.

I mean, I'm there with the doctrine. I'm there with the preaching. I'm not there with the extras. I'm lost in a wash of endless reptitive BJU Praises songs, new carpets, committees, new-wine jokes, green lawns, and respect of persons so condemned in James 2. There is so much frustration now. I pray, "Lord, is it me?" Is this my heart? Or is the church to blame? Do people really mean all those things they sing about in those songs, and are they really so inhumanly perfected and sanctified that they can, with such sincerity, sing the things they do about their unending devotion and unfaltering walk with God? I need to refocus, as the whole church does. There is so much that we have, so much that the church here has in the bounty of New England, that we have become so soft. Sometimes there is so much discouragement in This Old Walk.

That is all for tonight.