Don't Hug Me; I'm Grey

Grey.

My previous post explored its strange role in our view of life.

It's the color that most comes to mind when I imagine the world's that are created in dystopian books

like The Hunger Games or Divergent.

They are worlds without vibrance.  The characters seem to dress in dull hues and their buildings are drab, sharp, and utilitarian.

When a world is left with nothing but physical survival, as the ones in these books appear to be, there is no beauty, no heart, no art.

Is that the world you live in?  Does this feel like the world of your soul?

Have you seen the series of popular Youtube videos named "Don't Hug Me; I'm Scared"?  They are meant to be humorously disturbing as what appears to be a children's puppet show turns into a lesson in fear and the grotesque.  The second of the two videos, however, is particularly interesting.  In it, a puppet sings a song and teaches the others about time.  As expected, it turns slowly macabre.  Characters imagine their own decay as they, their friends, and in one case, their parents fall into states of senility and eventual death.  One particular lyric refers to time teaching us about the "future".  That word is sung over top of a picture frame showing the word, "nothing."

That video, while certainly intended merely for humor, is a perfect illustration of a world without beauty, without hope, and really, without God.

God, to me, is the game-changer, the infusion of white.  White, as the last post pointed out, is "the color with all the colors in existence combined."

"You see, grey is almost a bright color."  Almost.  When your life is grey it easy to ignore what is missing.  When your life is black it may be easier to see that you are missing brightness.  But grey dulls your senses, and helps you get used to missing out and makes you think this is all there is.

But, if there is a God, there is meaning, purpose.  Love's magic returns.  Friendship again has lasting value.  Suffering has a context that allows it not to be meaningless.  Someone cares how I react to it.  How I live my life and how I treat others matters.

I share this with you because I too sometimes get beaten down by life.  Times like these make me wonder what it's all about.  Does anything matter?  And so I fight for my soul and preach to it: "Father loves you.  He will give you grace for each thing that comes along.  He cares.  You, and your life matter to Him."  And with repeated exposure to reality, divine reality, I can, sometimes slowly, find colors once again.

What color is your life?

If you could pick a color to describe your life, what would it be?

Recently, one of my students wrote something that I thought was profound as it explored the color of a life.  Here it is:

When something is taken away, something valuable, you want it back. Now, when I say valuable, I

don't mean money and material things. My most valuable possession...was my emotion. It was taken from me and was replaced by something dreadful. Surely, you can guess what it was. A certain darkness that no one wants.When I was in the jaws of this darkness, pain hit every inch of my heart, mind, and soul. It masked all emotion and I become blank, as blank as a clean paper plate. Dull.

When this darkness came like a blanket, black and white suddenly turned into grey. Nothing influenced or inspired at all. I sat often wondering what the world is doing without me. The news often spoke of this darkness and much tragedy happened because of its grip on people. But, since I'm on the listening end, these things are just... nothing. The world is nothing. Life is nothing.

The physical touches of others was almost like touching a ghost. Their touch went right through me. Invisibility became a necessity. A heaviness tugged at my heart and your heart became a 1000 lb. burden carrier. Life got harder to live, harder see. It got harder to breathe. People often asked me if I was alright, and the trademark answer was, "I'm fine."

The reading of a good story no longer gave me the urge to go out on an adventure. The face of my lover never truly gave me that fluttery feeling in my stomach anymore, nor do his kisses send shivers down my back andgoosebumps across my skin.

There was a sense of recovery one day but, that grey still lurked. I added a tint of yellow, like a smile, and the grey absorbed it and became... brighter. I threw in some red, like love, and the grey became darker. The color grey never truly disappears. Ask any painter or artist. Grey is a color that will only become ugly when you add other colors to it.

Yet, there were two colors that could change it completely.Black and white. Once I chose black and it made the grey even darker, making me sing even deeper. But, when I added white, that was a different story. You see, grey is almost a bright color. It's easy on the eyes. Once you add white, it brightens. Now white can be a multiple amount of things. God, love, peace, hope, family, friends; white is scientifically proven to be a color with all the colors in existence combined. Black is the absence of color.

After adding small colors here and there, such as orange for my hunger and blue for my lovers eyes, my gray started to turn into white.

Dating Wisdom from an Alien

 It helps to know what the point of a relationship is.  It would help a lot with decisions.  Still, that can be so confusing.

Sometimes it helps to get some insight from an outsider. 

Aliens qualify, then, don’t they?

So, in class we’re reading this book called The Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman.  The main character, Jason, discovers he’s the child of alien parents.  This causes some challenges for him, as you can guess, particularly in relation to his human girlfriend, who has no idea about it.  Anyway, the following paragraph lends some insight into Jason’s (the alien) understanding of dating:

“Every evening I saw Paula.  No matter how exhausted I felt, I would meet her at the mall or Banzai Burger or the batting cages—anyplace we could go to be together.  We would talk about pointless things, and that was okay, since important part was just talking.  Every once in a while she would start bringing up that picture of Billy Chambers, or the message written in that house in Old Town, or my glove, which I should never have shown her.  I would always find a smooth way of changing the subject, and she would let me.  It was nice to know that she was more interested in me than in the mystery.”

You know what this alien gets?  Dating is about boring stuff.  In fact, all relationships are about “wasting time” together, or in other words, laughing about silly things, talking about the day-to-day, sharing what’s on your mind, asking questions about each other, eating ice cream, walking dogs, and so on.

If you can’t do that with the person you’re dating, you may want to consider moving on. 

Here’s why: boring stuff is really personal.  And that’s what we’re doing in relationships: sharing the real me with the real you. 

The biggest outsider who showed me this is God.  He is intensely personal.  He’s not particularly looking for a nation to come to Him.  He’s looking for individuals, real honest people, to love and to know.  He’d like to waste time with you and for the two of you to get to know each other. 

When you’re in a relationship like that, whether with God or a human, then what is “boring” to someone else becomes really intriguing and fun, because you get to share that with each other.

Yearbook Angst

I found my senior year yearbook.  Up in the attic, while looking for a book for our oldest daughter, I came across that old 1994 record of my last year of high school.

Initially, I was excited because I hadn’t looked at it for a long time.  Just recently, someone from my class facebooked me about a 20 year reunion this summer.  Thinking about that and then flipping through the pages,though, I felt…weird. 

I have seen very few of my classmates since that balmy June graduation date.  As I flip through those yearbook pages, I find that all those teenage feelings are still frozen in time.  The awkwardness I felt about this person, the fun I had with that person, the judgment I felt from another, all of them are cryogenically locked in my memory. 

What surprised me most was the defensive reaction I still felt towards people who I thought saw themselves as better than me in high school.  But did they?  Or is there still some of that teen insecurity lurking inside the abandoned mines of my brain? 

Even more surprising was the judgment I felt towards some of those pictures on paper.  Could I not believe that people, like me, had grown up, changed, learned to love, learned to let go of silly school-age attitudes? 

And the funny part of it all, was that I really had a great high school experience overall.  Still, there is something so tender, so exciting, so frightful, so fragile about that time in life.  It is, for many of us, the beginnings of early adulthood, the first time you begin to think and act like your own person, when, of course, one has no idea who they are! 

Because of all this it feels like everything about high school is a judgment on your person, whether positive or negative.  Plus, that time of life is so filled with evaluations from grades, to graduation tests, to awards, to sports, to performances, to college applications, and, of course, the most direct evaluations: friendship circles and dating.

In my 38^th year, and as I remember my 18^th year, I dig down in my deepest essence and I see my soul.  It’s strangely troubled by all these conflicting emotions about a time so far away.  But the ancient words come to me now, words that, in college, first taught me how to weather all the judgments of life. 

“Why so downcast, O my soul?  Why so downcast within me? 

Put your hope in God.”

 

I can’t love, I can’t care, I can’t look beyond myself until my soul is safe. 

And I know it is.  I rest in love.  Father has wrought such beauty and joy in my life just by helping me know and rely on his never-breaking embrace.

So, I want to look back now through those same pictures and try to see other souls on a journey, like mine, not teenage caricatures frozen in some old, biased memory.  I hope I can visit with them this summer and truly care for and be curious about their lives and what life has taught them. 

Let it be.

Top Teen Topics: My Bully

Bullying may seem like just a thing that kids deal with.  It's not. 

When Beth and I first married we rented an apartment in Rocky River.  The landlord was really nice
and helpful.  We lived there about two years and in that time he was always pleasant.  When we moved out, though, he suddenly switched. 

He charged us for all these repairs to our apartment because he said we had treated it badly (what?!).  I was really confused.  He sent us photocopies of all his cleaning supply receipts and wrote big bold letters in the words that felt like it was being shoved in our faces.  Not only that, but the receipts didn't come in the mail; I received a note from post office about it.  In a gesture to prove his point, he had made it so that I had to physically go to the post office to get the letter myself instead of receiving it in the mail.

I was so flabbergasted by it all that I decided to call him and talk about it.  During the very terse phone conversation, he swore at me and, all in all, sounded like a completely different person than I had known those two years.

My head swirled.  I was a nice person; I AM a nice person. Why would this man treat me this way?  Did I do something wrong?  I felt like someone had taken my gentle heart and bashed it over and over again with a club.

That was the first time in my life when I recognize I became depressed.  For quite some time I felt numb.  I would think about the situation constantly, in the car, in the shower, on my pillow at night.  How could people be so cruel, so just plain mean?

I came out of that depression, but I got more cautious and suspicious of people.  I lived very

defensively for a long time. 

I learned a few things over time about dealing with what is basically "bullying."  Here are a few:

1. Who has the power?  Who will you let have the power to determine how you feel about yourself?  Force yourself to determine the answer.  You may first need to answer: Who have I let have power to determine how I feel about myself?  Then, move on to who will you CHOOSE to let have the power to determine how you feel about yourself? 

2. Inundate yourself with truth.  I, for example, memorized truths from the Scriptures.  "You are holy and dearly loved." Colossians 3:12  "So, we know and rely on the love God has for us." 1 John 4:16  "There is no fear in love because perfect love drives out fear." 1 John 4:18

3. Do something about it, if you can.  I did what I could in my situation.  I tried talking to my landlord.  I also wrote him a letter.  I even talked to a lawyer.  Not that all of these were successful, but it was worth trying.

Are you getting really invasive, lewd texts?  This is getting more and more common.
Tell someone.
Tell someone.
Tell someone.

Did you get that?  Don't worry about feeling stupid or beat yourself up because you 'can't handle it.'  You need help.  Tell a friend, a parent, a sibling, a guidance counselor, or whomever you feel safe with.  Don't stay in that deep dark hole and figure you can just climb out of it yourself.

A bullying text situation happened to someone I know recently.  I encouraged them to block the number, to which they said, "Well, you have to pay to have a number blocked."  Think about the damage being done to your soul and then ask, "Isn't it worth some money to protect my heart?"

4.  This is really my answer to number one.  When it all comes down, there will be people who hurt you, even intentionally.  Learn to let your soul find rest in God alone.  He is your fortress-Psalm 62.  Your Father delights in you, yes you, the kid with the bruised, imperfect soul.  Let His opinion of you settle your frightened, lacerated spirit.

5. Finally, don't let evil win.  After my landlord experience I had to learn to be both wise in protecting myself from cruel people, but also still trust others.  It's a little bit of a tightrope walk, but it can be done.

If we start living life in protective mode by deadening our souls and never trusting people, then the evil perpetrated by the bully just keeps winning in our lives long after the bully is gone.

Alas, there is so much to say on this topic, but let this be a beginning.