Let me climb under your skin or let me in..

I want to come in, Mister, you know I'd hang on every word.
I'd wrap around you, but you've surrounded yourself in thorns,
now I can't touch you without bleeding.
You say that I'm the one walking away, always running away from love,
yet I'm here still, silently bursting, like a bubble, I'm so fragile,
waiting for the word, but there are no words left in you,
if you only knew
how easy it'd be just to fight for me.
You say you're fighting, that you're tired of doing this dance,
stepping toward me as I pull away,
but I've been pulling you back
to me all this time and you've been turning your head,
and I can't have your eyes
so close to mine if they won't look at me.
They say a miracle starts with the beat of a heart
but mine has beat itself out waiting for one love to take it in.
You've been sleeping, I've been dreaming of you, of the you you used to be when you used to look at me like I was all there was,
but somewhere along that line you lost it, that interest, didn't you?
HEY Mister, you know everything changes, before I knew what had been done,
before you knew it I'd come undone,
now, is there anything left to do?
I can't spend another minute convincing myself you love me
when my heart's convinced you don't want me,
that you've wanted someone else all along.
Still, I can't let go of what I know,
the way you used to hold me and never wanted me to go,
you said you never would, now that's all you can do for me,
either be my king or let me leave...
But you're letting me go so easily.

It's the hunger.

Sam is here tonight. We've watched the first disk of OTH (if you don't know what that stands for, you are missing out on some true pleasure in television-watching.) But I can't stay up watching how life should play out; all I can do for right now is write about how life doesn't. It just doesn't.

I have a "book" I am supposed to review for Hensley, and I don't know when the due date is, but I'm sure I should start working on it. The only problem is that it is (ideally) a soon-to-be devotional for married couples, and at this time in my life, I know nothing about marriage.

There have been a lot of people working on interventions lately, for Jake and I, trying to save us, but I'm having trouble figuring out what they're trying to save. I can sort of see it, as if it's off in the distance up in front of a car in a morning fog, but it's not quite clear. How can anyone save something they don't really know? They might have the want-to, but unless you know how to save it or what's really threatening it, how can you have any chance at being it's hero?

The appeal of Jesus for some is that he "saved" us from our sins before we even existed, before he ever knew who we were because we hadn't even been born yet, but we're told often, as a deterant from believing that we're completely alone and uncared for, that God knit us together, that he knew us before we knew us, and we're taught as part of a Christian education that Jesus was with God from the beginning, that God is omnipresent, and that Jesus is God. If all that we've been taught is true, how could he not have known, from the beginning, exactly what he'd be saving? Those who are attempting, lately, to do the saving in our lives claim to be followers of Jesus, yet they know nothing about what they're so determined to save.

I wish I didn't see all of the between-the-lines bullshit, I really do. But I do. I was taught from an early early age that the between-the-lines exists, and after living so long in a life where the lines couldn't be trusted, all I know now is what reveals itself to me in between the words people say and claim, and I can't help that. Now, when people speak with tenderness, I see the hypocrisy and self-gain from their "care", and I really don't think it matters how long or how hard someone fights to form the words, I will always see the lines for what's between.

I don't even know who or what needs to be saved these days. All I know is that there is no touch of a loving savior and no intervention worth believing, not here.

One night,

Jacob was feeling particularly rotten about our choice.. and to lay it out there, by "choice" he means: the day we partook in the kind of sex that produces a fetus that then must be accounted for to the point of an entire life recon resulting in marriage and adulthood aka a tornado or "the mistake" or "their sin" or whatever verbiage you'd have in mind to attach to the ever-lengthening label on our lives.





Anyway, my response was this:





"We're not God's Plan B."





What I meant was: It's not as though God had a Plan A, aka life before "the mistake", and then when we had sexual intercourse he was all like 'Oh no! What to do..what to do...? Well, I suppose I'll have to do this (Plan B).'





I'm sorry..I don't know everyone's theology, but mine says that to think God has Plan Bs is completely inconsistent with believing he's omniscient and omnipotent, and aren't those characteristics the foundation of what we believe about him? Are we supposed to pick and choose which things we are to believe about our Creator?





When we look at it like this, simplified & amplified, sure.. it seems silly to believe conflicting things about God, but the thing is, people, we do it anyway. All the time. I mean..I see it everywhere. We walk around proclaiming all these truths, when the reality is that, added together, they don't add up to Truth. He can't be in control while at the same time onlooking with tears in his eyes about what we didn't let him control. He either is, or he isn't, and I choose to believe that he is.





God wasn't scared or surprised when we did what we did and, in fact, I'm not entirely sure he wept. Maybe he wept for how we felt, how afraid we were, and the pain we felt when others couldn't even look at us because of our sin, but he knew. He saw it coming. He had this planned, because he doesn't need a Plan B. Jacob isn't some guy I got stuck with and we just happen to be making it work because of our discipline and prayer and commitment to one another.





Why do I say that? Well, take a look at this realistic assessment and decide for yourself..





Discipline: We don't pay bills on time because we're too busy watching episodes of scrubs or grey's anatomy. We leave the stove on overnight sometimes because we forget to turn it off after we cook up our midnight snack of frozen chicken wings. I don't come home until 4 a.m. most nights, and Jake doesn't always brush his teeth. Oh, and we've both got tires forming around our middles.





Prayer: I don't pray. I don't believe it to be necessary until I do, and then it is. Jake might pray, but not often enough to hold up my end too, and we don't pray together.





Commitment: We've both cheated in our own ways. Yup. How's that for honesty?





So..what do you think? You think our marriage is still intact (and not only that, but our love for each other, too?) simply because we've been doing what it takes to make it work? There is no other explanation of our current relationship than: God wants it. He wants it and he wants our daughter and he wanted it from the beginning and he's making it happen. Maybe we help him out, make it a little easier, every now and then by doing what he says, but ultimately..this was no surprise to him. He is in control.





We're not God's Plan B.





And I really wish everyone would stop looking at us like we are.

Question #7

Should Christians divorce their spouses? Why or why not? What does the Bible say about this?

Ideally, no person should divorce his or her spouse, Christian or not, but that'd be a lot easier to consider if people got the marrying part right in the first place.

But they don't...seemingly ever.

But there's no changing that just like there's no changing world hunger. It's not that it isn't possible; it's that we don't care enough. People don't care enough to not eat even if it means someone hungry gets to, just like they don't care enough to not get married even if it means avoiding a life essentially void of any real meaning or happiness. Yay for a life of despair.

Why do we choose what we know we shouldn't?

Because we're wicked and evil? Nahhhh. That might be part of it, but it's probably not it. Maybe evilness is a symptom, but where is it coming from? Weren't we all set free here, by God, with a destination inscripted on our hearts? Yet we wish to avoid it?

No..I don't think so. I think we're afraid. I think we're like fish out of water. So we flop ourselves into the nearest shallow puddle of muck even though God's tapping on the glass telling us to flop on, that we'll find our glorious pond. We're suffocating in this unsatisfying earthly air and we've no reason to trust each other and therefore no reason to trust anything else. The only thing we can trust is our own fins to get us from one evaporating pool to the next.

Just today, I finished a 27 Dresses/Redeeming Love-like book called Never the Bride by Cheryl McKay and Rene Gutteridge in which God literally appears as a handsome 30-something in order to convince a modern, independent woman to release control of her life and love Him, and even with Him there breathing, she couldn't believe Him, couldn't trust Him fully, without first cursing Him and turning away. He was trying to write her love story, but she wouldn't let Him. Why not? Because she was afraid.

We dive into small loves even when we know they won't be deep enough to hold us, even when we know the water will drain, eventually, because the alternative is to keep hoping for feet when we've only got fins, to believe in something our world tells us can't possibly be true.

Can we be so blamed?

And if we can't be blamed much for sucking in the wrong love too quickly, can we really be blamed for releasing ourselves back into the love-less wild? Because it seems love doesn't exist beyond the safe harbor it's tied to. But love is like air to a human the way water is to fish, and it gets a little hard to breath without it, even if what we're breathing isn't clean.

Ideally, love exists and we can find it. And if we can't find it at first, maybe we can create it. But what if we can't find it? What if it's not there? What if it is but it isn't all right? What if we're hit or abused or used or even something less extreme, like held back? Is divorce okay then? Does God care more about a union of a couple than the individuals involved?

That's the real issue. Marriage. What is it and why do it? Marriage the basic right we get wrong that causes us to clean up our wrong with more wrong, isn't it?

My sister and I have often said that our lives probably would have been better if our parents hadn't focused so hard on being together and had shared some of that attention with us. Were they so dissimilar and disconnected that making it work together meant neglecting the four children they'd made? In that case, would divorce have been okay? My parents have survived marriage and avoided divorce for over 35 years, but what have they lost in the process?

Back in the Old Testament, or at least according to Deuteronomy 22, virginity mattered more than marriage. I don't agree with that, and neither does Mark Regnerus in his article "The Case for Early Marriage" which I'll let you read on your own time (great points to consider..) Do I agree that God considers marriage to be sacred? (Well, despite my old youth pastor's assurance that the Bible mentions the sanctity of marriage a million times, BibleGateway doesn't seem to think so as it couldn't provide me with crap..) Yes, I do, but not for the reasons our pastors have shared with us.

I think the bottom line is that God loves us and wants the best for us, just like the best kind of dad. But the best kind of dad doesn't do things for us, and he doesn't condemn us when we don't do what he wants. In my most humble opinion, God doesn't either. And the best kind of dad doesn't treat every kid the exact same, because he's aware of each kid's personality and differences and therefore knows that each circumstance needs to be handled specifically and uniquely. In my opinion, God handles His kids, His creation, the same way. Divorce is permissible, but it's not what he would have wanted for us...but a bad, sad, unproductive and drowning marriage isn't what he would have wanted either, because nothing is more important than us, not even something so sacred as marriage.

He sacrificed Himself through His son......is it really so hard to believe that He'd sacrifice an idea for us, too?

(Not that we should abuse His willingness to sacrifice, but we certainly shouldn't take it for granted either..)

Question #4

What would your parents or other family members say if you brought home a person from a different race than yours and said you were in love with that person and thinking about marrying him or her?

First of all, I'm already married and pretty disconnected from my family, so this is a really weird idea to think about. I have, however, dated black guys in the past, and when I "brought them home" it wasn't because I was in love with them or was thinking about marrying them; it was a lust kind of thing.

I dated one my sophomore year and he only came over a couple times so that we could make out. My dad didn't like it and was a nutcase the entire time, but I'd never really brought a guy over before, so it probably wasn't about race, but more about gender. And he didn't really care/wasn't really involved otherwise--he served only as the P.D.A. Police when necessary.

The other guy was a kid from Texas that had been adopted into a white family and only came to visit his Christian dad every summer and some holidays, like Christmas. I met him my seventh grade summer while I was swimming at my grandma's pool and he was working outside at his dad's used car shop, which was right behind my grandma's house. Whenever he came back to Indiana, we acted as if we were boyfriend/girlfriend again, and when he left, it was like neither of us existed for the other. It was weird.

So maybe that's why my dad didn't like the black guys. It's hard to tell..especially since the black guys happened to be horny players and the only other guys I brought over were white, square, Christian virgins I dated in order to get over the black guys. Who knows.

But I do remember growing up arguing about race with my dad. He would never admit to being a racist, but he carried the attitude of one. He would never have dressed as a KKK or anything, but I don't think he would have loved Derrick or Cole if I'd have. And I can sort of understand why; the only other black men my dad had experienced were either arrogant pricks or wife-beater-cheaters (my cousin's old husband & my sister's new one) and both Derrick & Cole acted similarly (unnecessarily disrespectful, overly physical). I think it was those things that had my mom a little on edge too.

But in the end, it didn't matter anyway, because I found myself marrying the All-American blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy, and in that way, I think I avoided the disaster my father was afraid of, even if it had nothing to do with color & more to do with consequence.