What is Love?

What is Love? What kind of love does it take to actually marry someone and stay married? I've never thought romantic love is sufficient, and I firmly believe the kind of love it takes is a choice, not an emotion, though the emotional part is certainly helpful.

The only really successful marriages I've seen are lighter on the romantic ooshey-gooshey feelings and way heavy on the mutual submission and seeking the good of the other person over one's own good. There has to be a certain amount of romance, though; there's no denying that. But that can't be the only thing that brings the two of you together.

A friend of mine is concerned about my thoughts that I will never experience love. And another friend is concerned about how negative I view myself (though that's changing--my view of myself, not his concern). As far as love goes, for me to experience love (according to Chapman's The Five Love Languages), I really need words of encouragement. That's what it would take for me to make a real emotional connection that I am loved. Guess how often that happens. If someone says something to me once a year that's truly encouraging, well, that's an utterly amazing time for me.

But this is not the norm for relating with people. We are not normally encouraging to someone else. So, that doesn't leave me in a good position to feeling and experiencing love in any meaningful or fulfilling way. For me, love is truly a logical proposition: people act in ways toward me that I know is an indicator that they love me in the ways that they can demonstrate; therefore, I know people love me. It doesn't fill Chapman's so-called "love tank", but it's the best I can get. Can this ever change? Sure. Will it? I can't say. But I can't expect it to, as that would require me to think people will suddenly start acting contrary to human nature, and that will invariably lead to repeated let-downs. And I can't go looking for these words of encouragement, either, because there's nothing genuine about it. Oh, the sentiment might be genuine when expressed, but it has so much to do with the other person's desire to express those things on their own, not at my urging.

The optimist says, "People will start telling me how great I am any moment now." The pessimist says, "No one will ever tell me I'm worth anything." The realist says, "I can accept when people compliment and encourage me, but I dont' need them to tell me that." Granted, I've been much more toward the pessimist side of things in recent times, but that has more to do with wondering what my purpose in life is and seeing that I haven't lived up to much of anything.

Anyway, the relation to romantic love? If I'm resigned that human nature will not support me in any meaningful or fulfilling way, what hope can I have that someone will choose to have any kind of romantic inclination toward me? I'm not saying it can't happen, but the likelihood of it happening? The proverbial snowball apparently have a great deal in common.

She's a Beauty

What great and glorious weather we've had here in Houston the past two days! And I've been inside for most of it. I went to see Sin City yesterday afternoon. Excellent movie, not for everyone. And today, I've napped some, spent lunch with a friend, and I didn't have to teach Bible study today.

Tonight, I'm going to watch Shrek 2, and maybe an episode or two of "Fushigi Yugi" so I can get closer to bringing the disks back to my friend Matt so I can then borrow his "Farscape" season sets (one season at a time, of course). I'll have to do reviews for the past week's movie watching.

Shock: I've Watched Another Movie

A friend recommended I watch An Affair to Remember. She brought the tape (ugh! Sorry, Linda!) to me this morning, and I watched it as soon as I got home (after heating up my chicken for lunch, of course).

I love this movie. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr star in this movie that inspired Sleepless in Seattle. I'll admit a tear or two came to my eye. It's a beautiful story of romantic love. Guys, this movie would be a winner to show a date. (Guys, it's also okay to have emotions and express them!)

Could a movie like this be successful in today's society? I would gladly be proven wrong, but I don't think so. In today's society, love is only "proven" by sex as early as possible. The lack of sex, then, would seem totally unrealistic, and not pawing each other just wouldn't fly. Isn't the whole point of a relationship today how much you get off on the other person?

Anyway, I highly recommend this movie (I don't think you can go wrong with Cary Grant).

Your Inner European

Thanks, Dan, for the info. I never would have picked this from a list. Danger? Allure? Give me a break!

A fun little toy that ultimately means nothing...

Your Inner European is Russian!

Mysterious and exotic. You've got a great balance of danger and allure.

Who's Your Inner European?

What About the Children

My heart has been broken many times over in the past couple of weeks. All the horrible things that have been happening to children, babies even.

• A 20-month-old boy was abused to death. The doctors/coroner said they had never seen such a skull fracture. They also discovered tons of scar tissue on the bones and mini-fractures all over the boys arms and legs, as well as scars all over his body. In his short time here, he had been passed around to five different people to take care of him. His birth mother granted custody on a legal pad (notarized, of course) to the woman who wound up killing him.
• Another 18-month old died from a drive-by shooting. He had gone with his dad and two(?) sisters to get ice cream. Some guy started following their car and opened fire, possibly in a case of mistaken identity.
• Then there's the mom with two kids whom she prostituted out to make money so they could survive.

And this is all I can recall at this moment, but there are many more stories. I hope I never am in the position of having to do anything about something like this, but if it's going on, I'd rather know about it and take some kind of action to protect the child than to find out I missed what was going on and allowed a child to suffer.

The 20-month old boy I mentioned in particular has just caused me all kinds of anguish. I started a poem even, but I'm not sure I'll ever finish it. It feels incomplete to me, but I think I've said all I wanted to. I'm struck by the selfishness of all of these people that used this little boy to vent their frustration and anger, and their unwillingness to do anything of particular importance to help this little boy. I can't help but feel that God took this little boy because he had gone to the point where he would never really recover properly. Or it was just the stupid woman smashing his head against the bathtub or wall or whatever she did when she was totally drunk, and who knows what else.

How can this happen? I don't understand. I know evil exists, but come on—this is a baby. How can anyone even conceive of such a horrible thing? :::sigh:::

What a Day!

Saturday. What a long day, but man, what a day it was!

I woke up at 5:45 to the call of nature. I was going to go back to sleep until I had to wake up at 7, but I started thinking about work, and I realized my heart was pounding hard. I asked God to help me put work out of my mind. He did. Since I can't go back to sleep, I look at some of my 600 emails (no exaggeration there).

7:40 I realize I need to be at church at 8:00 for this thing I call the "prayer loop". It's kind of like a prayer walk, but we drive around the loop. I wasn't sure anyone besides me was going to show up, but there were two others. We got going about 8:20. We started with a prayer of safety once we got on the loop, then read from Luke 19, where Jesus prays over Jerusalem. And then we let the Holy Spirit guide us in how we should pray.

>From the beginning, I felt the Spirit filling us, almost to the point where we were completely insulated from everything around us. And suddenly we were around the loop, and over an hour had passed. I was totally blown away by what we prayed for and how we were lead, but even more blown away by the sense that we had somehow stepped into the presence of God at work, that this little thing we did called prayer truly connected us to the heart and mind of God and empowered us to speak as needed. I think the three of us were awestruck at the end. I could hardly contain myself.

Then I watched the balance of The Bicycle Thief. It's an Italian film released in 1948 about a man searching for his bicycle that was stolen in Italy. Excellent movie.

A bad thing was passing on the art day I had set up with some friends. We weren't going to get started until 1, and there was a concert I was going to tonight; we were leaving immediately after church to go downtown to the little coffee house where Mute Math was to perform. Anyway, that would have only been 3 hours I would have been able to spend doing any art with the extended travel times here in Houston (especially with the construction closure in the name of progress).

So, I went to Saturday night church for the first time in several months. Again, I was totally blown away. I truly felt the presence of God. The worship was such an incredible time for me. I realized tonight that because of the vile contempt with which I have been holding against myself, that I was separated from God from all that self-hatred. God has been working on that in me this week, to the point where I can separate how I view myself from how God views me and step away from that negative self-talk (sorry for the psychological mumbo-jumbo). My connection with God was so much closer tonight, maybe closer than I've ever been or felt. I was moved to tears, but they didn't quite make it out. That emotional response in recognition of God's working in me was something I hadn't expected. Dr. Brooks then preached a fantastic sermon from John 10:10ff about the abundant life Jesus came to bring.

And then, Mute Math. The opening band blew me away: a tight set, good vocals, and good lyrics for the little bit I could make out. Mute Math, though, how can I describe them? This might possibly be one of the best concerts I've ever seen. [Though I think there was too much distortion in the sound; my ears were almost bleeding.] These guys played aggressively, in particular the drummer. Before they played, he had his ear-piece on [monitor stuff?]. Then he took the black duct tape out, unrolled some, and started wrapping it over the ear-piece under his chin and connecting back to the top, almost like having a bonnet on or having his head in a sling from a bad tooth [remember those old, old TV shows?] We figured we were in for something wild. And they did not disappoint. Simply stinking amazing. The drummer was soaked 20 minutes into the set, and the lead singer wasn't far behind. The two guitarists were less animated, but I don't think the crowd could have handled more spectacle, and besides, there was no more room for more animation -- there was barely enough room as it was for what went on.

Thank You, God, for an utterly fantastic, awe-inspiring, humbling, powerful day!

Creativity

The other day, I was trying to think of some stuff for work, and I was at a complete block. Then I recalled an exercise I did in a training class, and the instructor told us to do this exercise anytime before a creative endeavor and our brains would be prepared to "think different" (please don't sue me, Apple).

The exercise is essentially comparing two items that are not normally associated with each other. The two items he mentioned at that time are a cat and a refrigerator. There were 60-70 people in the class, and altogether we came up with roughly 50 ways a cat and a refrigerator are alike. In redoing this exercise the other day, I could only come up with 20, among them

• They run
• can be fuzzy
• leave puddles on the floor
• like to be under things (refrig. under cabinets; cats under chair/couch/table/etc.)
• have an appendage extending from the rear
• have motors
• hum/purr
• both will be running and then just conk out
• can contain mice
• can contain milk
• come in a variety of colors
• can be finicky

I'll have to get my list and update it with the other things I wrote down but can't recall right now. I'll take suggestions...

I came up with a list of other things to compare (which was quite an exercise in and of itself). (Easy) a car and a plane; (not so easy) a cat and a plane; (hard) a cat and a piece of glass; a cat and a piece of carpet; (ludicrously hard) an orange and a piece of glass. I'll fill in these later (and take suggestions from the peanut gallery when I get around to actually thinking about these.

Terry Schiavo

Originally, I was under the impression that she was a vegetable and on
life support, and I felt it was humane to allow her to die. Keeping
someone "alive" at all costs is an abuse of our technology and robs them
of their dignity as a human being.

I have changed my mind on this case. First, she has not been on life
support. She breathes on her own; she can hold herself up if propped up;
and she reacts to people around her, even if minutely. The feeding tube
in question is used because she physically cannot eat.

Withdrawing food and water from her is the cruelest form of execution,
and she has not committed any crime (except for being in her husband's
way). Now that the tube has been withdrawn, the doctors say she will die
in TEN days to TWO WEEKS. Of course, I'm no doctor, but this length of
time indicates to me that she is still functional. Other than physically
not being able to eat, she is not dependent upon machines to keep her
alive. And I don't believe this is a "painless" way to die.

Why is her husband, Michael, so damned intent on killing his wife? He's
moved on to another woman with whom he has had TWO children. The only
person who says she wouldn't want to be kept alive is Michael. And why
only mention this after she has been in this condition for EIGHT years?
If her parents are willing to take on her care; why not let them? They
have even filed divorce papers on her behalf so he doesn't have to keep
the responsibility, and he has refused to allow it. He's determined that
she must die.

An Interesting Thought

Tonight, I went to dinner with my upstairs neighbor, Karen, whom I've known about as long as she's been in Houston (I beat her here by two years). I had mentioned something about my previous job, that when I started, I could see five years, then blackness for a while, then an unknown period (which, you would think blackness is unknown, but it had a totally different quality, this unknown period, like it was being masked from me because it was too early to see, that it would be too much information for me to handle at the time -- this I've just realized now, not then).

I remarked to her that I did indeed work at my previous job for five years (actually, 5-½ years, but five years from the point of seeing), and that I now perceive that I'm in blackness in my life, with nothing seeming to go right, I can't make heads or tails of my life, I don't like my job a whole lot (that's why they call it work, right, because otherwise you'd do it for free), and I can't see any future beyond this present bleakness.

She asked if I considered myself a prophet, and if I had visions like that often. I thought for a second, and then realized I've had lots of prophetic things in my life, so I said simply, "yes", but I hadn't had but a handful of visions. Further, I told her that on a recent spiritual gifts survey, prophecy came out as my top gift, followed by teaching and wisdom, and that being in a Southern Baptist church really helps me put that prophetic gift to work.

I then told her about a friend of mine, Larry, who told me it was no wonder satan was camped at my doorstep telling me all these horrible things about myself. When Larry told me this, I told him that I didn't know how much of it was satan and how much of it was just me recognizing who I am. This thought passed through my mind tonight when I was telling the rest to Karen (but I didn't share this particular thought with her), that I still don't know how much of it is satan and how much of it is just me. And I asked this question internally, "Is this really from satan?" For the first time, I heard an answer, "yes," and then the afterthought, "no one thinks any of these horrible things of you; no one!"

I might not yet have won or succeeded in all I would like to do, and I have made many, many bad decisions, but I'm not a loser, a failure, or a waste of oxygen/carbon dioxide processing because of these things. I think I can have hope for my life (almost as much hope as I have for everyone else) that it will be more than just living out the consequences of my sinful decisions. I think there can be God bringing about good things in others' lives through me despite myself. That is my greatest desire, that people will see not just what a difference God can make in their lives, but what a difference He has made in their lives. And I'd like to be in on it, not so they will know it was me and think highly of me, but so I can make sure they know it was God Who has done for them. [This still isn't quite the right nuance of it, but it escapes me at the moment. This is close enough for now.]

I truly want to believe this, and I at least have some hope of actually believing it now.

Writing

I wrote five pages yesterday. Wahoo!

Can I keep it up? I'm not saying, because I don't know.