empty castle time bombs.

This blog post stemmed out of all the times I’ve heard guys talking about how reluctant they are to ask a girl out, and all of the times I’ve heard girls talking about how much they like a guy, but are going to wait until he comes to them and initiates. Both of these situations result in the same exact thing...

Nothing.

So, this is my probably controversial attempt to turn nothing into something. Here we go.

We’re all so shy, it’s scary to open up that bottle with truth and feelings, where the vulnerability aches so badly it screams and the glitter falls off your heart to reveal the gooey shades of black underneath. We’re all so scared, it’s easier to stitch on our cardboard masks and smile as we sink deeper and deeper into the dirty quicksand our idleness soon becomes. At the same time, we’re all so loud that our hearts practically jump out of our chests to beat on our arms, staining the sleeves and crying out for someone to hear them and notice them and love them. We’re all so bold, we can march right on into the storm and laugh at the darkness, completely oblivious to the raging lightning until it strikes us with an electric pulse.

For those of you who aren’t catching my drift yet, we are messy.

But a lot of us (myself included) like to think we aren’t. We like to think we’ve got everything under control and that it’s only a matter of time before the right person comes along and cleans all of our messes up for us. Men are princes and women are princesses. That’s the fairy tale girl's dream, right? To twirl around in her satin dress, watching the fabric as it dances and spins around her snow white body, just waiting for her Prince Charming to come galloping to her tower where he’ll hold her and kiss her and assure her that she’s the most perfect, beautiful young lady to ever walk the earth. Meanwhile, his shining armor will still glisten, completely unscathed by the winding path he’s journeyed, slaying the dragon with the flick of his sword and reaching his true love right before she loses hope. He can carry her on the back of his valiant steed, dashing off to his castle of sparkling silver, glowing like the miles and miles of stars he passed underneath to reach her side. Happily ever after can begin. 

But we aren’t princes and princesses, and we don’t hold onto the promise of a castle as a future home. We work in dimly lit offices on crowded city streets, sneaking out of the cubicle five minutes early so we can have a slightly extended lunch break at that greasy diner down the road.

Men are not knights; our armor isn’t pure, like silver, but chipped, like the paint on your old neighbor’s house, and rusted over with dents and holes and plenty of places where a knife has come in a little too close. We aren’t superhumans with space on the back of our horses. Superman only flies on paper.

And women are not princesses; their ripped up, scarred dresses aren’t tailored by the fairy godmother. The door to leave their tower is swinging wide open in the wind, all they need to do is walk through it to feel the grass. And happily ever after does not exist; happiness is a state of mind, as fleeting and fading as the stroke of midnight.

So far, we’ve established that we’re human. Not superhuman, and not sketches out of a dusty book of fairy tales. Now it’s time for the gritty details. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy (I hope you caught the differences in “like”). What is the next step? 

As a common relationship metaphor goes, men are the hunters and women are the prey. It is the man’s duty to be on the lookout, scanning the area for any signs of movement and then going after it. He initiates. Meanwhile, the woman gets to bat her eyes and send out slight hints that she’s there, cracking twigs and rustling leaves. Eventually, the man will find her and ask her out. The best formula for happily ever after (tick tock tick tock).

But what if the man isn’t hunting? What if he’s just taking a quiet stroll through the forest, completely unaware of the snapping of branches and crunching of dead leaves around him? He doesn’t have a gun and he’s not on the lookout. He just closes his eyes and lets the summer fill his lungs as the leaves continue to fall. If this is the case, it doesn’t matter how many times the woman bats her blue eyes or cracks down on those twigs. She’ll just keep dancing circles around his tracks, floating like a gray haze over his invisible rifle. Yet we are assured this is the best path to happily ever after (tick tock tick tock).

So now, girl still likes boy. But she’s also mad, infuriated that he hasn’t caught onto the plethora of glass slipper hints she’s dropped like bombs in front of his face. They’ve exploded and the dynamite’s sent debris flying all around, but he’s sleepwalking; every bit of rubble seems to hurtle just a smidgen of an inch above his head. So we blame it on the man, for it's obviously always his responsibility to initiate. And just like that, the woman’s problem, something she should be assuming complete responsibility over, has suddenly become the man’s problem, weighing down on his shoulders like a little glass house. But he doesn’t cave and he doesn’t break, he just keeps walking, oblivious as this eye-batting, twig-snapping, leaf-rustling girl carries on in the whirlpool of limbo she’s created for herself. Don’t worry, she thinks. Eventually, she’ll find a sandy shore that leads to her silver castle of starlight, where happily ever after twirls around in the main ballroom (tick tock tick tock).

At the same time, there are also many men out there dawdling along, trying their best to conceal their so-called "hunting" with a vague trail of flirty hints and clues that do nothing but lead the girl on. He's too reluctant to actually make the first move and put his heart out there, and so, once again, the limbo whirlpool continues. And why not? It's so much easier to sit back, play hard-to-get and find comfort in the freedom from responsibility and commitment the whirlpool so generously provides. 

We are shy, scared, loud and shockingly bold people; we’re not looking for a human savior, just another rough and jagged soul that doesn’t walk away when we bleed all over the place. And sometimes the truth can make us so jarringly vulnerable that saying it and letting it hang to dry in the open seems absolutely unfathomable. But not everyone can see the whole truth. In fact, most of the time, we’re holding onto a split-second-shard that just barely scrapes the surface before curling back up in its safe straw house.

When one of my close friends liked me, she didn’t wait around for me to initiate. If she had, she would’ve been waiting for pigs to fly, as I didn’t feel the same way about her and had no idea how she really felt about me. Instead, she put her heart out there, slipping it out of the pent-up cage we all construct for ourselves and letting it stain her sleeve. It must’ve been painful, but she knew that it would’ve been even more painful if she hadn’t, if she had kept quiet and played damsel, like so many girls are taught to do. Because of her boldness, she was able to pull herself out of the limbo whirlpool and open my unarmed, oblivious eyes, bringing us both a little closer together, even though the feelings weren’t reciprocated. We are now best friends, a thing that would have been impossible had she decided to sit in the quicksand and wait for a rescue that would never come.

If you still aren’t following anything I’m saying, at least leave with this: if you like someone and are interested in pursuing a relationship, don’t wait for them to come to you. Ask them out. Tell them how you feel. If you’re a man reading this, stop hesitating. Step up and ask her out. And if you’re a woman reading this, stop waiting. Step up and tell him how you feel. Even if a relationship doesn’t follow, at least you’ll know the truth and feel free to move on. Stop wasting time dancing around the edges, playing Ring-Around-The-Rosie, talking about a potential partner with everyone except the actual person of interest and waiting on some obscure vision of happily ever after (tick tock tick tock).

Oh, look. It’s midnight. The masquerade’s coming to an end. Now it’s up to you.

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Click here to check out the first chapter of my work-in-progress novel, Yellowtree!

big-cardboard-whinefest prayer.

I am such a whiner.

A couple weekends ago, I had the opportunity to head up north for my church's young adult retreat. The topic of the weekend was prayer. And seeing that my prayer life usually happens in short, sporadic bursts, I was pretty excited to fix that. I waltzed on in expecting to learn how to really 'pray' so that God would swoop down and take away all of the burdens I had been piling on him. I wanted him to give me some jaw-dropping revelation that would just help make everything better and easier.

But then we had some quiet time, and I was given the opportunity to spend two hours in prayer, walking around to different prayer stations with different tools to help us pray. While all of them were rich and incredibly beneficial, the one that really hit me hard was the 'Names of God' station. It was very simple, with just several pieces of paper plastered to the wall. Each paper had a different name for God, what it meant, and where it was found in the Bible. I took down the verses and went back to my seat, looking up these holy, sacred names that attempted to capture just a shred of God's glorious majesty.

And that's when it hit me. Here I was, going all this time thinking that prayer was solely about me. That it was just this beautiful time of humble surrender, pouring out my heart and my complaints and my thoughts and my struggles, bare before the Lord in all of my vulnerability. And don't get me wrong, that is definitely an important aspect of prayer. But it's also about God. I would just go and go and go, whining to God about all that was wrong in my life and how much I needed him to fix it. I took prayer, this beautiful privilege that God has graciously allowed us, and turned it into a big-cardboard-whinefest that revolved completely around me.

Reading the names and just breathing in the vast hugeness of God was incredibly humbling in refocusing my attention on what was really important. I could almost hear God as I fell before him in worship, patting me on the back and whispering, "There, there. You just forgot what was really important. Come back to me. I'm right here, I haven't moved, I'm still just the same as I was before." It wasn't this gigantic, life changing revelation, and I certainly didn't resolve all of my problems right then and there.

But for a few moments, I stopped whining and started breathing, started breathing in the sound of stillness, of just sitting in the splendor of God and beholding his Love, his Might, his Glory, his Peace. From the way he saves us, to the way he consumes us and is continually sanctifying us - he was there and I was there. That's all there was to it. God is so incredibly magnificent if we just take a second to slow down, take our eyes off of ourselves and our own problems, and just look to him. He never gets old. He never gets less exciting or jaw-droppingly gorgeous or awe-inspiring. He is the same constant, perfect God that desperately wants to hear us.

Sometimes that includes our complaints and our whining and our frustrations and our requests. Other times, it's just as simple as saying his names. "Jehovah Sabaoth. King of Kings. Qanna. El Shaddai. The Everlasting God. Jehovah-Jireh. Living Water."

Amen.

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I have included some of the names of God and their verses that I was able to look up during the retreat. Hopefully you will find them as awe-inspiring and humbling as I did.

Jehovah Sabaoth: "The Lord of Hosts" (Psalm 24:9-10, 1 Samuel 17:45, Jeremiah 11:20, Psalm 80:19, Isaiah 1:24, Haggai 2:6)

Qanna: "Jealous, Zealous" (Exodus 20:5, Exodust 43:14, Deuteronomy 4:24, 5:9, 6:15)

Jehovah Mekoddishkem: "The Lord Who Sanctifies You" (Exodus 31:13, Leviticus 20:8)

Jehovah-Jireh: "The Lord Will Provide" (Genesis 22:1-14)

Jehovah-Rapha: "The Lord That Heals" (Exodust 15:26, Isaiah 30:26, 61:1, Jeremiah 30:17, Psalm 103:3)

El Olam: "The Everlasting God" (Genesis 21:3, Isaiah 26:4)

El Elyon: "The Most High God" (Genesis 14:18-22, Psalm 18;13, 57:2, 78:35)

El Shaddai: "All Sufficient One, Lord Almighty" (Genesis 17:1-2)

natural night vision goggles.

I know I haven't blogged for a while, but I am currently trying to finish up the book I'm writing by May 1, and so I've been putting most of the time I have for writing into that. I'll still try to post on here as often as possible, but it won't be as frequently as it was before. Now, onto the real post...

There's something about power outages that bring people together.

Several nights ago, the power went out at my small group. The group meets in an apartment, and by the time I arrived, the power was out across the whole building (and the whole block). One of the guys who was already there graciously volunteered to continually run up and down four flights of stairs to lead the people arriving up to the apartment. Once there, the place was lit up with an array of different candles that several people helped light. When someone needed to use the pitch black bathroom, someone lent them the flashlight on their phone to light up the way. We gathered around peaceful candlelight, the entire atmosphere eerily quiet. Maybe it was the absence of the normal hum of the refrigerator.

When someone had trouble seeing the words to read in their Bibles, another would shine a cell phone or an iPad over them, illuminating the wispy-thin pages. People scooted closer together, opting to share Bibles, so they wouldn't need as many lights. Not to mention the fact that the heat was also run by electricity, so the temperature ever so slowly dropped. And yet, I had never felt warmer.

The power was revived about halfway through, and while it was a good thing for all of the businesses across the street that had also lost power, I couldn't help but feel a hint of sadness. Because we felt just a little bit more like family throughout the power outage. People were just a little bit more willing to help, a little bit more willing to be that awkward person that sits real close to another. Now, obviously, the need to lend someone your phone as a flashlight so they can navigate the murky terrain of the bathroom disappears when the power's up and running.

But the need for community? The need for having an ever watchful eye for people in need, whether it be for a light, food, or just a listening ear? That won't ever disappear. And even when we're surrounded by a sea of people, it's so easy to get wrapped up in ourselves and never venture out past our cardboard walls and comfort zones. When the lights went out, people became more mindful of the needs of other people, but it really shouldn't have to be that way. It should just be a natural lens, the night vision goggles with which we see the world and its crazy, beautiful inhabitants. I want to be a light for Christ, a light that warmly welcomes people in and helps them out even when it hurts me. I want to be that awkward person that scoots in way too close to someone else, saturating the cracks and crevices of their hearts with the Living Water. When someone's lost and stumbling and caught in the darkness, I want Christ's light to burst forth so powerfully from my heart, they can't even see me anymore, just the radiant beauty of our Savior.

Now, I know this is so much easier said than done. And, frankly, I'm not even sure what it will always look like. But I'm tired of waiting, tired of passing by all these people in their own power outages and never stopping to lend them a light. So, let us make it our daily prayer to put on the eyes of Christ, his eyes that see through the outer layer and pierce the darkness underneath with a living and active peace. I'm not sure where it will go after that, but it's a start, a tiny seed, and that's enough for God to take and plant and grow into a beautiful thing.

I never would've thought that a power outage would be so convicting, but God's used crazier ways to communicate with people before, right?

identity crisis: man up.

Don't tell me to man up.

You can tell me to step up, or buck up, or cheer up, but don't you dare tell me to man up. And here's why.

1. The term "man up" is often used in correlation with things a lot of society or the church has deemed masculine. "Just man up and ask her out" or "man up and get your hands dirty" or "man up and take charge!" It reinforces the typical stereotypes that all men must be sports-loving, aggressive, action-oriented, visual, Bob-the-Builder type handymen that just go at it and lead all the time. Not that men can't love sports or fix things or be action-oriented. But in pairing those qualities with the phrase "man up," it implies that they are actual requirements of being a man and attaining true manhood.

2. Furthermore, masculinity is not something that can be lost, it's not something that fluctuates. "Man up" implies the need to do something in order to keep or further your masculinity. Like, in order to be a man, you've got to take one more step up and ask the girl out. Or initiate the first kiss. Or fix that leaking drain pipe without complaining. As Sarah Sumner says, "The challenge 'Be a man!' doesn't rattle a woman, but it grips the very soul of a man. Even in the church, it is not a given for men to feel like men just because they are men. Yet I know it's not from God when men fall into the trap of wanting desperately to prove themselves as men on worldly terms."* If manhood truly does go up and down that much, if it's really a roller coaster that can be lost or gained or proved in a heartbeat, then I have no desire to step on board. Count me out of that wild thing.

3. You never hear anyone telling any girls to "woman up." Why? Because if we used the same logic that people use when carelessly throwing out "man up," it'd go something like this. "Come on! Woman up and make me that sandwich!" or "just woman up and follow!" or "woman up and let your emotions run wild!" The stereotypes for women include their roles as housewives, babymakers, followers, overly emotional crybabies, and gentle, relational beings. And by boxing off little cardboard molds for men and women based on these shifting standards, it creates absolute chaos if one of the genders tries to step out of his or her box. So, if the man decides to stay home and raise the kids while the woman works to provide for the family, according to these conditions, they would be losing a part of their masculinity or femininity and gaining a part of the other. Talk about an identity crisis.

4. In conclusion, if masculinity and femininity truly do fluctuate as much as we say they do, then I don't want it. Instead, I'll take the identity I've found in Christ. With this new identity, I don't strive after true, tough, aggressive manhood, or even biblical manhood. I strive to be like Christ, to imitate him in everything I do. I fully believe that if that happens, if we surrender our entire being to God and allow him to shine through us, true manhood or womanhood will emerge. It's not based off of our likes or interests or gifts or how well we lead or how often we cry. True identity is rooted in the character of Christ and the aggressive and gentle, logical and emotional, action-packed and radically relational life he's called us to live as Christians. "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children" (Ephesians 5:1).

So don't tell me to man up.

You can tell me to step up, or buck up, or cheer up, but don't you dare tell me to man up. There's why.

*Sumner, Sarah. Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership. 2003. InterVarsity Press.

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Click here to check out the first chapter of my work-in-progress novel, Yellowtree!