Hiding

In the game of hide n seek, I have always been much better at hiding than seeking.

My favorite hide n seek memory involves me and a childhood friend (we'll call him R) hiding from his sister (A) and my cousin (H). They decided that it would be "oldest" against "youngest," and R and I were to hide first. We hid out in the woods on the side of the yard nearest the house. Then, R said to me, "OK, let's trick them!" and he and I belly crawled army style across the lawn while A and H searched the treeline on the other side of the lawn. The house had been declared "off limits" by their supreme highnesses, but we belly crawled behind it and then we crouched down and ran around the other side while they searched the woods where we had just been. That gave us time to come in the back door to the kitchen without being seen. We could hear them calling our names as we eased the screen door open and gently let it latch.

Inside, the adults were having choir practice, and some of the ladies were getting "lunch" ready, which where I come from is an afternoon snack that is composed of several types of bars, possibly some kind of salty snack such as mixed nuts or crackers, and sometimes sadwhiches, served with beverages that include, but are not limited to, hot or iced tea, coffee, lemonade/Koolaid, and ice water (if you are lame). It is not the midday meal that people in the city think it is; rather, it is served at 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The ladies, good Luthern grandmother types, welcomed us in, and we sat down at the counter to brownies and milk for at least thirty mintues before A and H came tumbling in asking if anyone had seen us. There we sat, covered in chocolate frosting and smiles. A and H were so mad, but we had proven our point. Don't mess with the youngests. We hide incredibly well.

I have always found great places to hide. I was the first of our set to consider hiding in the bathtub behind the shower curtain. I once hid in the bottom of Grandma and Grandpa's bizarre closet that you had to step over a little partition to get into. It had a wooden door that we were forbidden to shut if we were hiding in there, and they kept old magazines in the bottom. Don't ask me why. I piled these on top of myself. Even though this was everyone's favorite hiding place, no one had ever thought to get under the magazines, only behind the suits. No one found me that time. I was also an expert at coming out after someone had been caught without letting anyone see where I'd come from so that I could continue to reuse my hiding place over and over again.

At college, I would disappear on Saturdays to do homework. I had a series of places I would go, all of them excellent places to hide: The DC early in the morning, the end of the department hall until 11 or 12 when people starting arriving for events, the Seminary Library on the bottom or top floors, two rooms back in the journals where they stored extra furniture because so few people used the space. Even now, at work, if I don't want you to find me, you won't. I know who goes down what hall and when. I know a few good places to lay low when I need to get away from people. I can even hide pretty well in a crowd. I have been known, even now, to turn off my cell phone for a day (sometimes, in rare instances, two) and just disappear. I go to various places that make me happy where no one will look for me, though this is harder now that everyone and their mother knows me from work.

My faith is no exception to this rule. At church, I recently decided that I should volunteer to be a greeter because they needed greeters and it wouldn't be that big a hassle to me. Aside from the fact that no one knows where anything is (cause I also help set up some of the decorations), I am finding myself extremely uncomfortable in this new role. I have been going to this church for three years, but I take long vacations from church altogether from time to time, and I have mostly been sneaking in after the first worship song has started and bolting out before the last chord of the closing song has finished ringing. Now I am shaking hands and saying hi to people and mostly people say things like, "You haven't been going here very long, have you?" like what the crap am I doing being a greeter already.

Everytime someone from last week remembers my name this week, it makes me want to run. Everytime someone says, "Hi, how are you, (my name)?" I cringe. Even though the fact that no one knew my name even after I got involved was the reason I left my last church, this makes me want to head for the hills. Everytime someone says, "Wow, you just really jumped right in, didn't you? You just started coming here, right?" I want to spend the rest of my Sundays on my couch watching NASCAR. No, I did not just jump right in. I have been hiding for three years, and I don't want to stop. How about I go back to hiding, and you all can go back to doing this yourself? I thought it was going to be really easy and they were begging for help, so I did it, but God is really using it to show me just exactly how much I have distanced myself from His people--His Peeps, if you will.

I don't know what verse to put with this. I guess it has a little to do with Matthew 5:15: "Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house." I have long been afraid that my lamp is not the kind that shines light on people but the kind that lights things on fire and destroys. I'm afraid of getting too close to people of the religious variety because so much of who I am and what I've become does not fit into what they believe perfect religious people should be. And maybe who I am doesn't bless or benefit anybody.

And I get tired of telling that story. I get tired of telling the story of my dead best friend and how it broke my heart and changed me and let me see past a lot of the bullshit that people make up to make themselves comfortable. I get tired of explaining that that's why I live in extremes--taking as much of everything I like as I can get because I might not be around tomorrow and it might not be around tomorrow. I get tired of telling how I have very little faith in other people. Other people leave you--abandon you. The only person you can rely on is yourself is what I've come to believe over the years, and I have built my life around being self-reliant because of it. I don't want to depend on God. I don't want to depend on anyone.

I get tired of explaning how I don't really want to be a Christian and I don't really want to follow God's plan for me (even though I know I should, which creates all kinds of contradictions in my actions) and how my biggest struggle is believing that God has good things in store when so much has been taken away so violently in my past. I get tired of explaining how I wanted to be an atheist for a long time but just couldn't and having to listen to people stare at me like I'm crazy. I get tired of having to tell people about how I was once suicidal and sometimes still feel empty at the end of the day. I get tired of having so many damned problems.

The thing is, I can't come out of hiding one more time only to have people say, "Oh, just kidding. We didn't really want to find you. We wanted to find something pretty and nice and neat. You are a mess. Why don't you go back to hiding?"

Then again, maybe what this stupid religion needs is a few more people who are a mess who just won't hide it anymore. You can't have redemption without a fall. Without a mess, you can't see miracles. Without being willing to see other people's problems, you can't fully appreciate how far they've come and how far they will continue to go. You can't see God move unless you see what He's had to wade through to do it. That's just the way of it. "You have to dance both, they say, otherwise you can't dance either" (Pratchett).

"Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.'"

I guess in the end, all I know is that I can't hide from God. I can run, but he always comes looking for me. And he's far better at finding than I ever was at hiding.

Hungry

"Then Jesus declared, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.'" John 6:35

When I was 15, I developed some bad dieting habits that followed me into my college years. While I never stopped eating entirely, I generally ate only one small meal in the evenings. I drank crazy amounts of diet soda, and I exercised like a maniac (usually at least two hours a day). I never got incredibly skinny, but I did drop a lot of weight in a hurry. Then I would hang out at that weight before starting another attack against the fat. One of my friends split a candy bar into threes and that was her entire food for the day. I pretty much didn't eat unless my parents were around to make me. I sucked on Diet Mt. Dew ice cubes all day in the summer and ate a bowl of cereal for supper. My goal was to keep the total calorie intake under 600 for the day, and if I kept it under 400, I was a rock star.

After awhile, I got very comfortable with hunger. In fact, it felt good to be hungry all the time. It became a friend, and if it wasn't there, gnawing at my stomach, then I was not doing a good enough job of dieting, and I should definitely eat less. The harder the hunger, the better I felt. Sometimes, I still long to have those hunger cramps keep me company and eat less than 600 calories every day. Sometimes, nothing would make me happier. I swung out of this more when I went to college, but I would turn back to it every summer to take off the weight I had gained while eating three meals a day. Again, I was never skinny enough for anyone else to notice other than to compliment me on my looks, which became another drug to crave.

The thing that finally ended it was the year I was on some antibiotics for something else, had a couple allergic reactions to a couple of different antibiotics, and got so sick that I literally couldn't eat. I couldn't swallow anything without getting sick--not tea, not bread, not vegetables, not even water... nothing. I was so dehydrated that they were going to put me in the hospital. I lost at least thirty pounds in less than a month. I had to teach my stomach to deal with food again by eating bannanas, rice, apple sauce, and toast (BRAT diet--no dairy, no green veggies, no salt, no flavor, nothing). My stomach has never completely gotten back to normal from this. I get sick sometimes for no reason. And now, rather than being a (albeit treacherous) friend, hunger is a frightening entity because I can remember being so hungry and just wanting to eat one thing and knowing that if I did, I would wind up crying on the bathroom floor because I was too sick to leave and too weak to climb into my bed anyway. I like to say I got a sampling of what was at the end of the path I had been dancing down. I can't willingly inflict anything like that on myself again. I would rather be fat for the rest of my life than flirt around with something that can turn so dangerous so quickly. And what kills me is how many people told me how good I looked.

I think our spiritual lives end up like that. We get so used to being spiritually hungry and getting complimented for being spiritually starved that we think that's normal. That's because it's so easy to pretend to be full in this society while all the time, underneath it all, we are making friends with our hunger, coaxing it into setting up a permanent home and nursing it on a steady diet of emptiness. And everyone is always so pleased with the results of this destructive behavior because it looks so good on the outside.

It's OK if this appearance of beauty costs so much, we seem to say. It's OK if it makes you sick to appear this way, so long as you are ill in private. Cry on your bathroom floor all you want, but do not bring substance back to our worship. Do not confront us with something that might scare us and later feed us. We prefer to be empty and "pretty" than to be fed and "ugly." Do not show us the images that do not match our ideals. And all along we miss the point that ugly is ugly whether it's done in private or out in the open. It's just a matter of figuring out what is the least ugly. And believe me when I say that crying alone on the bathroom floor weak and sick is about as ugly as it gets.

I have had it with both images--the physical and spritual ideals--that say to be perky and skinny and starving and really just ill is better than being real and heavy and fed. Feed me, Father. I have had it with hunger. Fill me up with living water and the bread of eternal life. To hell with pretense. I'm ready to be honest and show my ugliness for what it is: The seeds of the things that are making me spiritually strong. Bring it on.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a New Year

My co-workers are offended by Merry Christmas, so I try never to say it at work, and thus, end up not saying it much at all (habits in work life bleed over to personal life and vice versa). Never mind the fact that some of them feel they can pretty much attack my religion whenever they want. Keep in mind that this is coming from me. I have no Jesus paraphanalia at my desk and very little in my house for that matter. I do not bring up my religion as a matter of course throughout my daily activities with anyone except close friends and this blog. However, I am subjected to regular rants about how Christianity is based on the Zodiac or about how it's a fable or a myth that no intelligent person should believe. If I said anything like that about some other religion, I would be fired, but it's OK because I'm a Christian; therefore, I should be railed against. And it pisses me off. But I look at it like this: I know better. I need to be forgiving and loving. So I say Happy Holidays.

Which offends my mom. This is a lot of fun because she too knows better. And she gets mad at me for saying, "Well, Mom, there are other holidays that people celebrate at this time of year." But she believes she has the One True Religion, so she says Merry Christmas. And she does this in the name of Jesus because she thinks it's right.

When did our well-wishes become statements about our religion? I was under the impression that many people who are not Christian celebrate Christmas. Technically, the holiday has its roots in paganism. And why is it so offensive to Christians that other people celebrate other holidays? Does it really hurt you to wish them a happy whatever they celebrate? Besides, who doesn't like presents and saying kind words to strangers? I would take a Hanukkuh present if someone felt so inclined (though it probably does not work that way). Feel free to wish me Happy Kwanzaa.

I liked the days when you could wish someone Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas. I realize that I'm ignorant about some things, but I wish that rather than automatically assuming the worst about people, we could cut each other some slack and assume that since there is no other occasion for good will in this society (name one holiday that celebrates good will besides the set of holidays in December. Go ahead.), people mean to use the time of year to tell you that they value you. And each person does this in a different way. Rather than assuming that this holiday is only about the receiver, maybe we could believe that it's about the givers. That giving someone something (a card, a gift, a kind word, a pat on the back) is an act that says, "I was thinking of you and wish to honor you through my culture." I don't know. That's just me. I feel like everybody, Christians and non, should just chill.

Last year, I bought Christmas cards that said "Merry Everything and Happy Always." I enjoy this. It may become my new greeting just to create some controversy.

I have to say that I'm a little relieved that the holidays are over, and I can wish everybody a Happy New Year... wait a minute...