My Senior year of High School, we studied different acting methods during my theatre class--one of which basically said that all the emotional work actors usually do is crap, and all you should do is get on stage and just do the script--say what you're supposed to say and move like it says to move. I'm not sure exactly how this part tied in (we can all see how important I felt this method was), but part of the theory was about how in life we are never really connected to other people. I distinctly remember hearing Mr. Will say, "No matter how close you are to another person, they will never really know you." For a bunch of hormonal teenagers who were already full-fledged emo, it was a pretty intense statement that gave us all adequate motivation to wear all black the next day. Is that really true? Will I really go through life without anyone actually, genuinely knowing me? For most of those kids, that was a hard-to-swallow, harsh reality, but even as emo as I was my Senior year, I knew better. I knew that for me...it was always going to be ok, because even if no one on this earth could really know me to the deepest core, at least God could.
I'm seeing this theme resurface in my life...especially lately. I know I said just two blogs ago that I was giving up on talking about boys, but here we go again. Honestly, what do you expect? I'm a 19-year-old Southern girl who was socially conditioned to believe that I should be married in exactly two and a half years. Time is ticking...on a clock, I might add, that I believe I fed to a crocodile some time ago. (Captain Hook...anyone? ok...I tried.) Anyways, so here I am this naive little Texan dropped into a city that I don't really understand or fit into. And my head and my heart...and pretty much anyone else I talk to...are all telling me different things--conflicting with each other, conflicting with themselves. And I've done the dating thing and I've done the crush-on-a-guy-you-know-you-can't-get thing and a whole lot of other things that seemed like good ideas at the time. But all these things are never enough. They never have been and reason tells me, they never will.
So I come home one night and have this beautiful moment of clarity (which tends to happen every so often at the most bizarre hours): maybe I'm just one of those people who's meant to be alone forever. And this is one of those rare moments where that actually feels ok. I mean, one of my genuinely biggest fears has been the thought that I would graduate college not engaged. Where do I get crap like that? But in that moment I fully felt like God was enough. Really, it was so much more than that. Like if I had to chose one or the other, I really would prefer to have God than a man in my life. Which of course is the church answer that everyone is supposed to give--but I honestly could say it. Church-mask down, I really meant it. And that's kind of where I've been lately. God is so much more consoling and comforting than any man has ever been in my life. He's at my deepest core. I hear this at church all the time--God is all you need. He is enough. And I'm not sure why it is that I have such trouble really believing it. I mean...I've experienced it in my own life over and over. But right now I really feel like God is teaching me how wonderful it is to sit alone with Him. There's this Matt Wertz Song that puts is so beautifully. Here's a part of it...
6th and green is a warm place in November
When the air is cold and the leaves blow on the ground
And I don't think that I can even remember
Why it was that I came to this town.
Because I just want to be lonely tonight
Just me and my maker in this cold moonlight
I just want to be lonely tonight
With no one around to see the sight
Of me lying here
'Cause this is the hardest thing I've ever done before
I said this is the hardest thing I've ever done before
And I don't want to be lonely
But I won't be lonely tonight
Because my maker's holding me
I guess I sort of feel this way. Alone can be a really nice place. Because God is good. And despite all the crap--the stuff that happens that you wish wouldn't and the stuff you keep wishing for that just won't--He loves me. He really loves me.
Just me and my Maker...doing this life thing, for better or worse, till death do us more fully unite.
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3 comments:
A nice thought [the one about God being enough]. However, I am a little confused about what "really knowing" means. Unfortunately, you cannot completely quantify "knowing someone".
Further, you really do not need your life partner to "completely" know you, methinks. I have seen couples who share 80% of their interests and have other friends for the other 20%. That is perfectly fine. I feel that the my-beau-should-know-me-completely attitude is a little too much to ask for.
So, as you said, have faith in God [or whatever it is that you consider runs this ship] and leave all to Him/Her.
And remember, although no-one will "completely" know you [except the almighty], have faith that you will find someone who "sufficiently" knows you... and that is all that matters :-).
Love and Luck,
Animesh
http://animeshpathak.blogspot.com/
yo mere.
feminist that i am, I don't believe anyone (as in any person) can ever fully know you. i think god can fo sho.
a lot of feminists (like, early suffragists, etc.) wrote on the topic because men were like, "but... we represent you in popular gov't" and women were like, "um. no. you can never fully know me so give me the vote. biatch" and the men were like, "grumble grumble" and then we got the vote.
... this has been history with lindy.
You know I think that everyone with a head on their shoulders has got to have some idea of what they’re looking for in a relationship.
Maybe you’ve met guys in the past where you come home from the date or get off the phone and you’re saying ‘Well he seems to have a lot of this, but I don’t know if he’s got enough of that’ or ‘Yeah he has a lot of what I look for but there’s just this one thing about him I don’t like’, and while it might seem natural to evaluate someone like that sometimes, I never do it - at least not with someone I’m really interested in.
Haven’t you ever met a guy who you were just so attracted to everything about him, you could just feel how he satisfied all of your values, and afterwards you weren’t picking him apart with all those questions, you were just imagining everything that would happen the next time you were with him? A guy where you knew he had something to offer and you would do whatever to be sure it was offered to you?
You see that’s the kind of person I’m looking for. It’s like, what if you maybe started off meeting this person and you still had that ruler handy, that one you use in your mine to measure guys, ready to measure if he had enough of this or that, but then, as you talked to him longer and as the time passed you were just having so much fun, it’s as if you just started instead to pay attention to those gut intuitions that just said overwhelmingly ‘You want this guy, you want this guy, you want him bad!’
And instead of wasting your attention on measuring, you just felt that growing compulsion building, and now it’s just like all those values you look for just blend together and you see right then that he had what you really value, and you stop your measuring because this guy’s longer than your ruler
With me, that’s the kind of excitement I look for in a relationship and when the excitement is there, that’s when you feel absolutely compelled to just go for it now.
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