redemption

owning our stories

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typing-handsGoing home is always an experience. Now the “home” I just came back to visit is not the city I grew up in, nor the town in which I currently live, but the place of my deepest and most resonant friendships.

A few weeks of hanging out with so many of my very favorite “peeps” has filled my soul like hardly anything else can.

I have laughed, and cried, and laughed until I cried. I have joyfully celebrated great victories and tearfully mourned great struggles – many of which I am, regretfully, just learning about. I have met the children of close friends for the first time and caught up with these amazing parents until my heart overflowed. My peeps have even helped me make a few new friends who are already kindred spirits (apparently the peeps of my peeps are also my peeps, lol).

I don’t know how to express it other than this: I have LIVED . . . outside of my own headspace . . . for the first time in way too long . . .

Funny thing is, all this living I’m suddenly doing has made me look back at the last season of my life and wonder . . . READ ON

the dark side of . . .

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vaderThe Force. Well, apart from the quaint metaphor, and the whole midi-chlorian debac – um . . . decision – George Lucas wasn’t really all that far off the mark.

[ . . . ]

Having grown up as Princess Leia – or as literally as I could make it given that we practically shared a name (just for the record, I did come first) – the Dark Side was always the enemy, the interloper, the usurper, the “other.” Good was where it was at; I knew this instinctively way before I ever became a Christian. Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and Obi-Wan were the heroes; Vader the archetypal villain.

The Star Wars mythos became the cultural icon of my young life . . . READ ON

acceptance

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aurora-borealisLet’s face it – life is just one big raw deal. Now do I mean this in the melancholic, overly-dramatic, “Oh, poor me” sense? No. It’s just reality. Everyone experiences pain, everyone has issues. Every human being who’s ever existed came face-to-face regularly with the disappointments inherent in life from the moment of his or her birth (and perhaps even before).

Our existence is difficult and challenging and draining . . . why do we expect otherwise? What is this irrational, sadistic drive in us that tries to put demands on this life that it was never meant to live up to? Jesus Himself, God in the flesh, didn’t escape the pain, injustice, and frustrations of life – why do we think we should we be so lucky? What do we suppose makes us so special?

Well, the fact is that . . . READ ON