Juxtapose

Being at home for the past week and a half with nothing to do besides stare at NCLEX books has given me some time to do a lot of nothing. My favorite way to study, however, is to sit on the living room couch where I can sit fairly quietly but still have access to all the action in the house, put on a warm hoodie, grab my books and a cup of coffee and my ceedee player, and get to work. It's funny the way music really soothes. Knowing this, and knowing that I've wanted a pair for a while, for Christmas this year my awesome Mark got me this fab pair of collapsible Maxell noise-cancelling headphones, just large enough to make me look like the hipster audiophile, but small enough to stick in my bag of stuff. Not to mention the little Maxell logo on each earphone with the guy in a armchair being blown away by massive bass soundwaves. And stuff.

Anyways, I put the headphones on and get lost in background sound while I study my work and answer questions and make flashcards, and sometimes at the most ridiculous times, my brain seems to register what the music is saying. I find myself crying without really realizing why until I stop a moment and take my eyes away from my page and concentrate on the lyrics of the song in my ears.

As most people who know me at all know, probably my favorite musicians of all time are Caedmon's Call. Their words have been pretty crucial to my faith. I know that sounds tacky and humanistic and very not-independent-fundementalist-Christian-homeschooler of me, but if I'm going to bother being honest, I'm going to do it right. They have the wisdom of the great philosophers of the faith, the men I hold near and dear to my heart for their honesty - the C. S. Lewises, the Augustines, the Isaac Watts, the John Pipers, the James Rheas - and the humility of a human who hasn't been saved for nothing. I take their words to heart because I've never seen anything in their music that would tel me not to. God has used it in my life as much as a theology book has for some. I'm a simple kinda girl, maybe.

My favorite Christians, if I can, again, say things honestly, are those who don't pull punches and who are honest about the fact that they were, as I said, saved for a reason. I enjoy Real People. Not people who intentionally sin because they're "under grace," mind you, but people who realize that they will never be fully able to reconcile theologically, philosophically, or logically, the great grace of God. We're too small for that. All those people who think that we're able to achieve total sanctification - not that we will, but that we are technically able - must surely be limiting themselves in their understanding about God's grace. It's beyond comprehension. When Philip Yancey asks, "What's so amazing about grace," I realize that even though it's the subject of everything I do in life, the subject of a million blog posts and discussions and writings and everything else, I couldn't touch the fringes. You know what? I don't even know. What is amazing about grace is that I will never understand it. That's what's really amazing about it, because I'm pretty much a big baloney head and I like to think that if I analyze pretty much anything for long enough I'll at least have some minor working knowledge of the concept after a while. But I don't. That's what's amazing, that a big balogious baloneyhead like me can sit and write a bunch of pseudo-philosophical crap on a blog a few times a month, can talk about theological issues and debate church politics, can get all riled up about all the absolutely asinine, myopic focii of the modern church, and still, God doesn't hold it against me for being a big, asinine, myopic, pseudo-philosophical, balogious, whiny, opinionated, baloneyhead myself. I say all this stuff on here and in my life and do I ever do any of it? Do I ever live it out? Do I ever make my faith count for much of anything? Do I consistently trample on the grace of God like it's disposable and conveniently available at all time? The answers are: No, no, no, and yes.

Sometimes I feel I can't get out of my own way. My overactive brain keeps me from operating life all happy-go-lucky. I'm happy to be where I am in life - there are so many joyful things. But my brain never stops moving, overanalyzing, constantly tearing down opinions and dreams for myself. I'm striving to be the me that God wants me to be, not the me that people ask me to be. I feel more comfortable as myself with each passing year, finding more excess to take away and more to add, though it's considerably harder for me to add than it is to take away sometimes. This is growth, I suppose, and it feels so strange and natural al at once. All of a sudden my life feels adult in the way that my brain has always felt adult all these long years. I've waited all this time to grow into myself, for my age to catch up with where my consciousness was. I'm not expecting to stop growing, it's just an interesting twist in things, I suppose. Gangly arms and a skinny body and my uncreative outfits and lots of black and bad poetry always were my thing, some strange outward reflection of my awkward self, but now everything feels fleshed out. It feels not so wrong to be a little strange for my own purposes, a little bland in dress, a little brooding, a little introspective. I see that I felt the effects of being the odd man out, a little too strange for some peoples' tastes, at a different time than most, and that I found my own little wormhole out of all-consuming self-consciousness a little earlier than some, knowing that some people never will, and I think I'm really thankful for that. I think when I'm a mom, if I should be so lucky, I'm going to do what my Mum let me do and dress in funny outfits and wear horrible black eyeliner and write commentary on social ills and I don't think I'll make a big deal about it if they aren't the most fabulously popular of everyone in the world. In the end it's benefitted me in that my walk with God isn't, for me, connected intrinsically to my social connections or church or people or anything. He's there. He's here. He's gracious as ever and as big to me now as He was when I was a weepy teenager. Though we all are tempted and all fall prey to it every day and every second of life, that grace led me out of a lifestyle of promoting my own self absorption that I'm so prone to. From gangly to fleshed out. It feels like grace has brought me here and filled out some of the hollow spots in me. I feel womanly, secure, led along, and yet very fragile and human. I enjoy the safety of this precarious balance because in it, it's impossible to forget the grace that led me here.

This is a Caedmon's song adapted from C. S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce." The book is grey and dim and shadowy, the way I like most books to be, and grace is a central theme, but it's in the background there. You should read it.

A bus station, in the steam from the rain
In this line of pale strangers, should I go or stay?

The whole field of vision, fades beneath me now
And the houses spread for a million miles,
in this gray town

And the weight of glory, if you held it in your hand
It would pass right through you, so now's your chance

Would you fall to pieces
Would you fall to pieces
Would you fall to pieces
In the high countries?

We are just pilgrims of the great divorce
I am witness to the light and I am captive to my own remorse

And the weight of glory, if you held it in your hand
It would pass right through you, so now's your chance

You drink the cup to the bottom, but it burns in your hands
The cup was poured out on the Maker instead

Out on the green plains, I am but a ghost
Bound up with all that I call "mine" still the light grows

And the weight of glory, if you held it in your hand
It would pass right through you, so now's your chance

Would you fall to pieces
Would you fall to pieces
Would you fall to pieces
In the high countries?