Season 4, Episode 1

i've started this post over and over again too many times. 

there's a part of me that doesn't know how to follow up what i wrote a year ago. 

there's another part of me that's afraid to follow up what i wrote a year ago.

i finished the last blog post with the words "welcome to sophomore year, the year amanda learned what a fight looks like, and trained hard."

i don't think i could ever have anticipated how true those words were. 

it's junior year, i'm halfway through first semester, and daily all i can think about is what the last year has looked like. 

i've forgone quite a few things that have brought me joy, whether activities, experiences, or relationships. 

i've fought hard. against everything and everyone. and sometimes [read:often] it wasn't called for. i took this thought, that i can have courage in things that are scary, and extrapolated it beyond the intended bounds. 

that's not to say that courage is useless. no, it's a fantastic quality. and in some ways, i've seen myself embrace discomforts that would've normally driven me far, far away. so there's been good. there's been growth. 

but i haven't written for myself in a year. 

i haven't written music since january.

i've run out of patience for myself. 

i've run out of grace for myself. 

and it's strange, because in the grand scheme of things, it's not as if i'm spiralling. 

my grades are doing well, my relationships with the women i live with are blossoming in ways i would've never predicted, i have an internship, i'm applying for jobs and positions that i dreamed of as a kid. 

everything is fine, but i'm feeling the weight of every action tenfold it would seem. 

every time i look at the things that i've fought for in the last year, i'm met with an immediate juxtaposition of moderate successes to devastating failures. 

the things i so graciously was given haven't turned out the way i wanted them to. the position i was so excited for has brought a lot of hurt. the friendships i was so secure in have become insecure in ways that i don't know how to react to. 

i'm not the same person who left illinois for school on the east coast. 

i'm not the same person who left college park for ocean city this summer. 

whether for the better or for the worse, i've changed in the last six months. spontaneity isn't really in my vocabulary. guesswork isn't appreciated. i need things to be spelled out for me or else i'm worried that i've missed something, worried that i'm losing things, losing people--and if i'm being honest, that doesn't feel like an unreasonable concern. its almost november, and in the last six months i feel like i've lost more than i know what to do with. 

i should make it quite clear: i'm not despondent. there's still hope in my heart. i'm just finally getting around to articulating all of the feelings that i've experienced over the last few months.

i've always had pretty high standards for myself. i frequently set seemingly impossible goals in the hope of being able to discover just how capable i actually am. i've been doing that since i was a kid. and since i was a kid, the one rule has always been that i needed to recognize that my mistakes and missteps weren't the end of the world. my mistakes didn't mean an immediate "game over".

that's where grace came in. growing up surrounded by religion, i frequently got the parallel descriptions of grace and mercy that stated: 

"mercy is getting what you don't deserve" while "grace is not getting what you do deserve".

for the purposes of my day-to-day life, i suppose i could use them interchangeably at this point, because all i know is i'm not affording myself either of those things. 

if grace is not getting what i deserve, then that would mean stopping the internal monologue that's playing the highlight reel of my failures. that would mean i stop looking only at the things i've done wrong. that would mean i give myself a break (in the figurative sense). 

but mercy. if mercy is getting what you don't deserve, then that's giving myself a literal break. that would mean saying "according to my calculations, i've made a lot of mistakes lately. but instead of forcing myself to dive in and do damage control right away, i'm going to rest. instead of overwhelming myself with tasks and work and things to do, i'm going to let myself stop for a moment. to take a break. to rest."

i'd say i'm holding out on grace and mercy towards myself right now. in the past, i think i had seen some aspect of that, recognized it, and said "i'm terrible at extending grace to myself, but i'm far more willing to extend it to other people." 

maybe that was true, i'm not sure. but i can certainly say that right now, i'm hard-pressed to want to extend grace or mercy to anyone. the choice to be gracious or merciful to someone is clearly related to the level of love i feel for them, which gets into a tricky topic.

i don't get to make that choice. it's not my place to determine who 'deserves' to be loved. in doing that, i put myself in a position where i presume i know more than God. i don't, obviously, but in thinking that i get to ignore direct commands from God, i masquerade around as if i have authority over him. 

the Bible has plenty to say about the subject (which should be of little surprise when we remember that the greatest commandments involve loving God and loving others).

bringing clarity to what God has commanded us to do, john first writes: " And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us." (1 john 3:23)

he later goes on to say: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 john 4:8)

that's a harsh take. basically it reads: if i'm not loving people, i am directly opposing what i've been called to do. i am opposing the King of heaven and earth, the one who created me and who knows all things past, present and future. yikes. 

one of my impossible goals for myself that i set when coming to college was to foster a legacy of loving people well. for a while there, i thought i had it -- i was engaging with people, i was exercising all of the different love language muscles i could manage. i was stretching myself to learn how other people received love best and adapting my interactions with them to ensure they knew i cared. 

things changed a bit in the spring of last year. some of the actions i took, i can trace back to love. but many of them, the majority of them were rooted in a deep desire to be known. one of my biggest regrets of college is that i haven't felt securely connected to someone throughout the duration of my collegiate experience. every group i've joined has been with people who have already had some sort of relationship capital that i then felt i needed to accrue before actually feeling as if i belonged there. 

pick almost any relationship in my life since coming to college and you can see that playing out. in desiring to feel known, i threw myself into relationships with people i trusted. they loved me well, they let me know that i was heard, and seen, and known. then something happened, and the relationship suffered in one sense or another. and the damage caused from that suffering has still yet to be recovered in some cases. 

but i finally realized why this has been hitting me so intensely, this semester especially. these relationships, these friends i have made -- they've done incredible jobs of making me feel known. and in being known, i feel like i have an identity. i'm not just "that girl who sits in the third row of gov479," i'm an actual person.

to spell it out more plainly, i've been finding my identity in the fact that i have a life outside of a certain context, right? i'm not an avatar who only shows up to classes so they would be filled with representations of students. i have a life, activities that i'm involved in, communities that i'm engaged in. my humanity doesn't stop the moment i leave a classroom, or a club meeting, or a church service. i have people who know me, which means i'm a person. as i hinted at earlier, less avatar, more human being. 

so it makes a bit of sense that when i'm removed from those relationships, i feel a bit emptier than normal. but as much sense as it might make, it's not a right assessment. 

the concept of idolatry has been something i've been mulling over for a while now. in case you're looking for a straight definition, john piper puts it as follows (emphasis added):

"Paul says [in colossians 3:5-6]. "Covetousness, which is idolatry." So what idolatry looks like today is the activity of the human heart. This is not a deed of the body. That follows -- a fruit on a branch. It starts in the heart: craving, wanting, enjoying, being satisfied by anything that you treasure more than God. That is an idol. Paul calls this covetousness -- a disordered love or desire, loving more than God what ought to be loved less than God and only for the sake of God. But covetousness is the condition that this disordered heart is in, an act of loving too much what ought to be loved less. And that is why the wrath of God is coming. That is what idolatry looks like today. And it is everywhere in our culture."

so for me to sit here and say that these people, these friend groups, these communities are what give me identity and are what make me feel worthy and accepted and loved flies in the face of what God says in exodus 20 when He says "you shall have no other gods before me" and "you shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God..." (20:3, 5) 

all of these relationships can be beautiful things. i'm allowed to be grateful for my friends who point me towards Christ. that's just fine. but their approval, their acceptance, or their love should never be coming before the approval, acceptance or love of God. trying to win them over or make them like me shouldn't be my number one priority, and it never should have been. i'm not sure i saw that last year, and i think that recognizing it now has made this semester a painful one for me. as i've been an active participant in a variety of seemingly one-sided battles (i say "seemingly", because i'd like to think i'm aware enough to recognize my own biases as i process these) for relationships with people, their rejections have stung incredibly. i've felt like a part of myself has been lost in the carnage of the ongoing war. 

but this isn't true. there's a God who loves me more than i can imagine. i am exactly who He says i am, which is to say that i am a child of God (john 1:12), i am not enslaved to sin (romans 6:6), that i am full--i'm not lacking anything (colossians 2:10), i am chosen (1 peter 2:9), and known (psalm 139:1), and loved (1 john 4:19). 

those statements are all true of me, which means they're also true of the people around me. so what does it look like for me to embrace that perspective for us both? what would it look like to come back to grace, a concept that i'm not sure i'll ever be able to wrap my head around?

 i don't know exactly. i'm not the expert on these things, and i don't want to pretend that i have all the answers. but i know that if i don't extend grace, i'm forcibly distancing myself from God. if He can give me grace for my sins being the cause of Jesus' death on the cross, i think i can afford to give grace to those around me. so that's a goal for me. be gracious and be merciful. 

thanks for reading the grand re-opening of the blog. can't make any guarantees on how frequently i'll be updating from here on out, but this felt like a good start. 

so welcome back. glad to have you here. 

- amanda