FacesNicoleMakesWhenSheTalksToBoys.com

I’ve been watching too much Discovery Channel.  You know that show “Planet Earth”?  The one where they use macro filmography and such and it’s very National Geographic like, lookin’ at bugs and trees and stuff?  It’s narrated by Sigourney Weaver, whose calming presence makes you feel okay that a hyena is eating a baby monkey.

Anyway.  I’ve been watching that too much, I think.

I went to get some coffee and read this morning at a coffee shop.  A guy I know comes in, notices the chair empty beside me, and asks if he can sit with me.  Of course, I oblige.

MISTAKE, MENASCO!  VACATE THE PREMISES NOWWWWWWWW.

I don’t have particular feelings for this boy or anything, but I don’t know him that well and we aren’t independent friends or anything.  So, there’s a bit of… weird… that comes when you’re not quite familiar enough to be having coffee with someone.  And, for whatever reason, the small talk started, initiating the FacesNicoleMakesWhenSheTalksToBoys.com sequence.

You see, my friend Kayleigh once took a candid picture of me this one time when I was talking to a boy of the same familiarity as this one this morning.  She captioned it “FacesNicoleMakesWhenSheTalksToBoys.com”.  It said it all.  I look so… uncomfortable… So… emotionally unstable.  I’m not exaggerating.  I look crazy.  Like for real crazy.   Mainly, I’m transparent and any degree of discomfort shows up on my face.  What’s worse are the words that actually come out of that painfully awkward face.

So here we are, drinking coffees, talking.  Only, it’s more like him saying a sentence and then me gushing on for a solid 2 minutes about something similar but not quite like a Super Caffeinated Tween NIGHTMARE.  It’s very unbecoming.

It was in the middle of the second, uncontrollable stream of mindless dribble that I began to hear Sigourney Weaver narrating in my head.  At first, she was all like “STOP.  TALKING…. NOW.” And, of course, I couldn’t stop.  Each new train of thought led to something else that took me on a direct express journey to crazy.  After I would finish talking, we’d sit in silence for a while.  Then he’d bring something else up and there I’d go again.

Eventually, Sigourney changed her tune, after she’d completely given up on me, and started going on about how “survival of the fittest” was about to ween me out of the gene pool AND THIS IS WHY.

And it’s maybe kinda true.  I mean, girls who can’t talk to boys can’t get married and make babies.  That’s gotta be some sort of natural law.  And I can’t manage to sound much more than half my age when I talk to them.

Truthfully, there are only a handful of boys I can talk to among whom I do not turn into an Incessantly Awkward Adolescent.  And I don’t mean awkward like the purposeful awkward teens of today, I mean the ones who truly have some sort of social ineptitude.

Maybe this is why I’ve never had a real boyfriend, never been asked on a date, never kissed a boy.  Maybe.

In all honesty, with no hidden resentment, I am pretty okay with it.  I think a heart for celibacy is a blessing greater than a heart for marriage, I really do.  And remember when I took that online spiritual gifts test a few weeks ago and it said my number one gift is celibacy?

I mean, who knew I had a built in marriage deterrent?  It’s like “OFF” bug spray, but for relationships!  And I’m totally fine with “OFF”, if only it didn’t smell so bad, you know?  Like I’m totally cool if I don’t get married, but it would be pretty convenient if I could carry on a casual conversation with boys that wasn’t business related and didn’t end with Sigourney Weaver explaining how the world will be better without my genetic malfunctions tainting the future generations.

I’m just sayin’.

So, in summation, future procreators of the world will carry on the torch that lights the next generation… As for me?  I’ll be all like:

Healing Through Hell

There is a time for everything but I…

My finger jerks spastically between the “f” and the “t”.  Which key will I tap?  I feel and I think and I can’t tell which is which right now.  What is the word for both?

There is a time for everything.  I don’t know whether I feel it or think it, but it seems I am living with everything all at once as opposed to living things one by one.

I don’t want to feel it.  I don’t want to think it.  I want to know it.  I want an intimate, real knowledge.  I don’t want to guess anymore.

Day by day, it gets both harder and easier to live in the space between contradictions, in that state of perpetual tension.

And just as I let go of reason, someone tries to thrust it back into my grasp.  And now I have to fight the thing I once held on to.

But at least I have a vicarious knowledge.  I know that God told Moses to go back to Egypt and do a hard thing.  I know that it didn’t happen right away, but that doesn’t mean that Moses was wrong.  Moses wasn’t wrong about hearing God.  Just because it was hard, just because it didn’t make sense, just because it made things a helluva lot worse for quite some time, that doesn’t mean that Moses was wrong.

Sometimes God calls you to Him and the most direct path is from the hell you’ve numbed yourself to and through a raw hell.  And just because I’m entering into the raw hell right now, just because it looks painful, just because it looks like there is an easier way, just because it doesn’t make sense, does not mean that I am wrong.

When you numb yourself from the pain, you numb yourself from the healing.  You have to deal with the reality of your hell.

You can’t get over what you refuse to feel; in doing so you refuse to heal.

And if I look completely undone, good.  Because what was holding me together was a lie.  And if you mourn my circumstances and wish things to be as they were before, then you are wishing imprisonment.

I have to walk through this flame.  It is hard enough.  Please don’t encourage me not to.  I may listen.

The Here and the Not Yet Here: How Faith Holds {My} Universe Together

I think God is the only one who really gets how something can be here, but not here yet.  Well, maybe he’s just the only one who can stay balanced within that sort of system.  Because I sure can’t.

How can you let go of the past and also perhaps even the future while living in the reminders of both?  It’s like living right beside all of these potential universes and paths and stories that never will happen or never will happen again, and worse, maybe never actually happened as you thought they did.

How can you live in a world with limitless possibilities and yet not hold your breath in hope for any of them?

How do you just live now?  Or how do you just live now without setting yourself up for failure or heartache by idly expecting the course of events to progress in a certain way?

How can you just… be?

How do people brush themselves off so easily when things don’t go as planned?  How do they jump right back in again?  Either they aren’t learning their lesson or else I don’t understand what the lesson is.  Either way, I’m not that girl.   So I’m trying to be the girl who just doesn’t hope for anything, I try to just live right now, and that doesn’t really work either.

I need that balance caused by the tension from two opposing forces, pulling the universe, it seems, perfectly taut.  To be here and to be in the future and to be mindful of the past.

I need to hold on to sanity but let go of reason.  I need to stop dreaming but go after my dreams.  I need to move forward mentally and emotionally but stay behind physically.  I need to be somewhere but nowhere near there.

This tension exists and I’m searching for the emulsifier to make everything stick and stay, when I really don’t understand how any of it works to begin with.   It really is beyond my comprehension.

…

We’re reading through Exodus right now, which has been quite helpful.  I read about the Urim and the Thummim.  Urim means light.  Thummim means perfect. Some say they were these two stones, one of them dark and the other light.  They were kept close to the high priest’s heart… physically… like inside his breastplate.  And he would use them to discern God’s will in manners which were beyond human comprehension.  Maybe they were kinda like dice.

I’ll admit, when I first read about all of that, I was kinda pissed.  I mean, here we spent several chapters talking about how the cotton pickin’ drapes and decor of the tabernacle needed to look like, to a nearly ridiculous degree of detail, and then it’s all like here are these two things that will help you make decisions based on chance.  Like why is God so concerned with the structure where he dwells but not the decisions of the people inside it?  Why so much attention to the decor of the tabernacle but not to the heart of the child within it, you know?

And I knew I had it all wrong, but given the current state of things, that’s what it felt like.

But, you know, looking into the Urim and Thummim more, it’s maybe like God was giving them an out.  A well welcomed out.

It’s so hard to make a decision about something you really can’t understand and God was giving them a way to make the decision by “chance”.  And I’m guessing it really wasn’t chance at all.  They just had to let go of what made sense and let God roll the dice.

So maybe that’s the emulsifier.  Maybe that’s what the tension is.  Maybe it is letting go of reason and holding on to faith.