New Introductions

I think to be effective in life we need to let each other know each other.
So, I want to share some things I wrote a long-long time ago. Being vulnerable is very hard, but it's often the only credibility statement we have. I think people want to know that someone else does understand, that we are not ants in a community passing each other all day. I think we want to know that we are not just robots crossing lines and washing our clothes in machines. I think we want to know that we are not machines.

I want people to know that God saved me. That God is love and love is real.
I have a fire in my once dead bones because of Jesus- and that's more than a feeling. This journal entry is part a story about a rescue, a very small window in to what I have been rescued from in the past. It's nothing really romantic, or poetic or grammatically correct- it's just life. My life.
I have had people tell me that Christianity is a crutch. And you know what? IT IS. And I am so thankful because I know, for myself, those moments of life where I know I cannot do it by myself; and, I didn't.

So, when did I turn from a private hundreds of journals in to an internet junky? I haven't. I am still not sure how I feel about a blog, to be honest. It seems strange and trendy- but if just one person reads and says "me, too" then I was no longer selfish in writing letters to a phantom audience for so many years. Then maybe you became my audience and maybe it helps knowing you and I are not ants. And maybe it's just the two of us.


12 October 2002 3.27 pm
Nothing can or ever will be the same. I can never experience this moment at the Brazil coffee house with vanilla chai and an orange muffin, sample of chicken soup, again. I see it as a loss. And that may be the reason why I feel or even want to die before I am 25. Lately, I have experienced a sort of sadness that even prevents me from crying. It just consumes me and I feel as though beaten and like it's running madly through my veins and am I dying?
I cannot even rock or curl in to the fetal position- I just stare as I am consumed by this. I know it does not have to keep me sick for long. But it is a sickness. It's an iron fist and when it lets loose of my throat I gasp for thick air...and cry heavy tears that soak my shirt.
I must set standards for myself, for my life and career and to make a career out of my life and a living out of my career. So many places I feel I could run to but none of them have any arms. God does not have tangible arms and my faith will grow because of it. I must stay as a mountain building to all who watch me. I don't want to show how hard it is to find another bus stop, another journal, another job. I'm just so tired and mislead in to thinking I understand why people kill themselves- and I think I do.
Maybe I want to change, read, cry in front of someone, find a picture of someone I miss in the center of my Bible and forget what they look like, avoid open space, sleep all day. No matter where I am the entire rest of the world is right in front of my nose. I don't know why I can't just make it go away?
Nowhere I really want to be, go or end up. I don't want to be held, watched or even adjusted to. It all depends on nothing because that is what I have made of all what happened. Even the blind could easily see how it has control over me. In control, in love, at work- is it possible to have spent 5 years and 100 lives?
I can't even say it all outloud on these pages because it will kill me.
There is a cure. There has to be. Church says to pray and honestly, I don't have an excuse not to or why that wouldn't make sense.  So, maybe I will pray today. What could it hurt? Nothing. Praying is taking a chance on hurting nothing. It's a place to start, anyway, and that's all I can hope for.