Divine Plagiarism - faith

The Things I’ve Found. (An Accounting of the last half-decade.)

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:56:58 -0600

The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone / And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet / Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet / And whither then? I cannot say.
- Bilbo Baggins

It is probably for the best that we cannot go back and advise ourselves on the merits of one course of action or another. I imagine doing so would be much like driving back to the starting line of a marathon after finishing it yourself, and then expecting another runner to take your word on what the finish line looks like; even worse, that may content himself with your description and miss out on the run entirely. Of course, if the course runs right off a cliff, you would probably be doing a good thing to thwart the would-be runner, but precluding such a poorly engineered path you are doing them no favor at all. The whole point of the run is the running of it; the finish line becomes yours only in the course of those 26.2 miles. Life is this way, I think… we become alive only in the process of living. This is true even when life doesn’t turn out the way we planned or hoped, perhaps even more true then: we sometimes find things that we never would have thought to hope for when we first set out. And sometimes, we become someone new along the way.

This is, of course, not entirely theoretical for me. I remember, or at least I remember remembering, how this whole thing began. I was descending the stairs of the Kennedy School, my mind already off at pilot training and wanting nothing more than to take my overpriced piece of paper and leave Cambridge behind forever. Walking outside, I see my good friend Nika talking with a strikingly attractive girl who I had managed to miss entirely during my previous two years at this school. We have what seems to be an interesting conversation, which results in a plan to have more conversation over coffee in a few days. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow… if you’ve been my friend for an appreciable amount of time, you’ve already probably heard the story. If not, here’s the synopsis: it ends very poorly. It doesn’t matter anyways; the two people involved in that story have long since become ghosts of time and memory. I’m no longer who I was then; I imagine the same is true of her. Not that I would know on the latter account… I’ve known nothing of her for three years now.
That last fact is one of the most fascinating aspects of the story. Three years ago, when all hope was lost and I was praying at the top of my lungs and wrestling with God on my floor and I decided that I would fight to the end nonetheless, I thought that this was about her. Looking back, I’m not sure it was about her at all. In fact, as far as I know, she played no role at all in the events of the last few years. Yet, in her absence, she played the foil perfectly. I prayed for her every night for the first two years… I still pray for her from time to time. I prayed that she would be strong and brave, that God would break her heart and make her whole; I prayed against all the demons and ghosts in her past, I prayed healing over the pain of childhood scars, I prayed that she would find wholeness. I prayed with passion and fury and fire and determination and a hundred other things. I prayed as I would never have prayed for myself. And perhaps, that’s why I had to pray for her; I could never have prayed those things for myself. Somehow, it feels like God took all of my prayers for her and applied them to me.

Over the course of the last three years, I’ve been around the world three times looking for an answer. I’ve chased that answer through time and space, through the wars and peaces of the present and the past. I’ve chased it through the recesses of my heart, through my hopes and fears and dreams and nightmares. I’ve chased it through my own history, chased it as I was making more history. And I’ve found a thousand things. She wasn’t one of them. Knowing this, had I to do it again, I would have gone nonetheless. I don’t think I would have understood when I set out. I still probably don’t. That last fact was probably the most important thing I found. I’ve heard it called brokenness. That’s what it felt like, at least.

I think somewhere in the back of my head, I once believed that the world, or at least my world, rested solely upon me doing all the right things at the right time. I had decided at some point that I was Atlas, and if I missed a step, the universe and causality and everything would go spinning off into chaos. (Of course, even then I was not foolish enough to formulate my assumptions in those terms. Or perhaps I was more foolish not to… I would certainly have been disabused of them much faster had I done so.) As a corollary to my Titanic pretentions, I seemed to believe that if something wasn’t working out right, then I was doing something wrong; hence, if I just figured out how to do it right, I could bring anything to its right and preordained conclusion. This story proved this assertion wrong, quite visibly; I believed and believed hard that she and I were meant to be together. (My heart was telling me things that I still can’t place in some higher plan, and as a negative consequence of its undying faith in that story, I still haven’t totally recovered my trust of my own heart.) Yet, there was no magical combination of words I could say, nothing I could study and master in order to put all things in their right place. I at long last came face to face with the realization that the world was wrong and I couldn’t fix it. And I began to realize that this universe was much, much bigger than I had thought, filled with a multitude of wills that were just as sovereign as mine. Further, the one Will that held it together was not my own. My duty was not to the Sisyphean task of righting all wrongs in my little world, but to my Creator who called me outside of my world and into His universe. Realizing this was the first great discovery of this journey.

Here was one of the greatest miracles: once I left my world behind, He began to bind up all the wounds of that world. The last words she gave me were meant as weapons; they were intended to wound. Perhaps I deserved them, it doesn’t really matter anymore. But I do remember the way they tore the breath out of my chest as I read them at the library’s public computer. And I remember the way they rang in my ear the three days after that, three days when I held on to the words of a Shane & Shane CD, replayed twenty times at least, as I felt every hope I had pour out onto the floor. It felt as if every fear was realized all at once, every reason to abandon all hope was vindicated, every accusation that had ever been made about me was confirmed. In that existential earthquake, where every defense was cast down and every vulnerability laid bare, the only safe place I could find was in the arms of Christ. I held to Him for dear life, and I hid in Him as every fear and accusation crashed down upon His back, and after it all, we were still there.

Joseph once told his brothers that what they had meant for evil, God used for great good. I will not make excuses for her contempt for my heart, just as I will not make excuses for my contempt for her will. But God used it. He turned her dagger into a scalpel, laying open my deep pain so that He could heal it. On some subterranean level, I had believed that I was deserving of the contempt that she had shown me, of the contempt that had been shown to me along the same lines in the past. In that accusation, I taught myself to accept, perhaps even seek out that scorn. I was wrong to do so, and in doing so I did a great disservice to my future wife and my Creator, both of which cared intensely about the intactness of my heart. So, in the starkest terms, I could finally see it. ‘It is wrong for you to treat me this way.’ The words I was afraid to tell her, the words that I should have told her long ago if I cared about her at all. But I learned to say them, and I learned to believe in the value of my own heart. My love and my trust were commodities to treat with care and concern, for they were of great concern to those who cared and would care for me. If someone was unconcerned with the former, then they did not belong in the camp of the latter. In this is a second treasure I’ve found: the ability to tell someone else ‘no.’ I think it’s called boundaries.

Solzhenitsyn once said something to the effect of once you take everything from a man, he is free again for he has nothing to lose. This was the third thing I found: my courage. I remember that people would say she was strong. They said the same of me, and for the same reasons: we shared a certain loudness and a contempt of suffering. I do not think they were right. It was far easier to face death than to face life; far easier to face men who wanted to take my life than to face my own heart. I was armed and equipped for combat, familiar with the emotional armor that had kept me safe for so long. There is no armor that you can wear from yourself, though; nothing that is honest that can protect you from vulnerability. For some crazy reason, when I met her, I had dared to hope and had let my guard down. Perhaps without warrant, I gave her the ability to hurt me. She did not ask for or want that ability, and ultimately ended up using it to the utmost to compel me to reverse that decision. But even this was turned to good: in that crucible of a weekend, when every fear was realized, I came to a point when all hope had failed, and I chose to hope nonetheless. I fought for three years more on that fool’s hope, and if I found nothing else, I found my own heart. A friend had told me at the beginning of all of this that my future wife would get a better husband for all of this. I think this is part of that.

Of course, the story didn’t end with that weekend; really, it began there. I discovered a hundred more things, and my story of Christine (quite different, I’m sure, than Christine’s story) is so comingled with that period of time that I don’t know what experiences belong to that story and which belong to the myriad of other experiences that shaped me. There are a few things that I don’t think would have happened without my story of her, though. For one, learning Spanish has become and remained of great use. Further, I discovered my own fascination with culture and language; as a greater irony, my interaction with military anthropology would probably have never happened otherwise. (In another irony that I am not particularly proud of, she figures a bit into my choice to fly the Gunship… at the time, I found appetizing the prospect of flying the plane that she would hate the most.) Without the culture and language vector, I may not have taken all those Cross Cultural Communications and regional studies classes at the Joint Special Ops University. I definitely wouldn’t have my cool Blackwater Draw hat, or have spent time digging around on the site with the local university’s fieldwork team. I probably indirectly owe my discovery of Spain and my fascination with history to our interaction. Bar-the-lona didn’t explain Christine, but it is a great town nonetheless. And without that vector, I may have missed the significance of Mosul (Nineveh) and Ali (Ur) while flying over them. Scratch that last one, the Genesis downrange Bible study would have probably covered that last count. Anyways, this story provided the catalyst for many avenues of study, and though those studies I discovered a good number of academic passions that might have otherwise gone latent. Even in this, even if I never found the answer I originally set out to find, I found a great number of other answers that proved quite timely. Still, the greatest treasure I found was hidden not in world history but in my own history.

When I left Cambridge the first time, I had no desire to return. The battle of First Christine cemented that intent. It took this story to give me cause to return, yet in the course of this story, God retroactively redeemed my two years at Harvard, giving me the joy that I should have known at Harvard while I was actually there. I had always seen myself as a bit of an outcast, a script that I seemed born to play regardless of where I went. Being a member of all the unpopular categories in Cambridge served as an easy segue way in this regard. In the midst of my war with the town and the school, I doubt that I was really open to the idea of community; cross this with my previously mentioned former Titanic pretentions, and I was pretty much sold on the idea that it was my destiny to be on my own during my sojourn there. In the fallout from my collision with Christine, I think I held that on some level that the town picked sides. And, true to the outcast storyline, that side wasn’t mine.

Strangely enough, I think I’ve gained some empathy with Pastors’ Kids in this regard. When dad isn’t perfect, you have no recourse: God sides with him and the church sides with him. So you might as well make your own way in the world, because all the other sides are already spoken for. In reality, your grievance may be legitimate, but in reality, the church and God never picked sides. This was how I felt about Christine and InterVarsity. She used Christian-ese words, invoked her position, and when things got ugly, she treated me as if she was a spiritual leader lecturing a slow student. When things got really ugly, she flung accusations ex cathedra at me. (Rather than repeat the mistakes of the Garden again, I’m not assigning blame. Scratch that. I am assigning blame. I am a man, and honoring Christine, a sister in Christ, was my duty… I failed in it. And I am thankful for grace in that regard.) I had assumed that I had no recourse in that world; to question her rightness was to face a multitude of fingers pointing at me. I had believed at a very deep level that the Cambridge Christians, at least the ones who were read in to the situation, picked her side. I was wrong to assume there were sides in the first place.

At some level, I think I was seeking vindication. ‘You were right and she was wrong.’ What I ended up finding was far better: validation. ‘It is okay to feel the way you do. It was okay to like her, and it was okay to feel hurt when she treated you the way she did.’ I was wrong. She was wrong. What happened was a tragedy, and who is more to blame is not a useful question. Redemption and reconciliation were the only questions of consequence. Remarkably, I found that redemption and reconciliation in a way I didn’t expect. I never did find it with the girl, but I did find it with the whole town.

I am deeply, deeply grateful to some people from that town that never gave up on me. I am grateful for their patience as I flailed through working these things out; I am thankful for their kindness and openness and a hundred other things. And after I had pounded my fists against Harvard’s walls long enough, I realized that there were no grievances that I had that grace didn’t cover. I still can’t totally explain how, but I now have a wonderful community of Harvard-affiliated friends, most of which I met after my time as a student. Had I not been chasing an answer in this story, this would not likely have happened. But it was not Christine, nor my stubbornness, that produced this miracle; it was by grace alone that God redeemed my time at Harvard and invited me into community. That grace was expressed primarily through three spiritual mentors: Jeff, Andy and Kelly. And if for no other end whatsoever, this whole journey would have been worth it for the three of them and the community that had been available all along. This was the greatest treasure I found, and in this treasure I am contented that this has been a path of great blessings.

Each journey comes to an end at some point. In the interests of presenting my future wife with a whole heart, this journey must as well. The Christine I knew is long passed, as is the Dave she knew. There is one thing that remains, I feel. One last attempt at reconciliation, in the hopes that who I’ve become and whoever she’s become can somehow reconcile as brother and sister in the light of our Redeemer. Perhaps we could even meet each other again for the first time and sort out some sort of a friendship. Or perhaps not. Either way, it feels like the right thing to do, a final exam of sorts. Leave your heart at their feet and walk away whole. I think this is Agape, or something like it. I don’t think I could have found it any other way.

As something of an epilogue, I recall Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. If you haven’t read it yet, I commend it to you in the most glowing terms possible. One of the most memorable phrases is spoken by the God-figure to the heroine-of-sorts. Oural, the jealous and controlling older sister of Psyche, who spent so much time suffering for what she believed was love, finds herself confronted with the reality of her own selfishness. So little of what she called love really resembled love in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, Oural is told that ‘you, too, shall be Psyche.’ This comes true; though her idea of love was distorted, Oural carries many of Psyche’s burdens, even when she didn’t know that she was doing so. Further, Oural is discovered by love in the same way that Psyche was found; in the last accounting, she became the most true parts of her sister. In a way that I cannot totally explain or understand, this feels true of me. I do not know if the Christine I thought I knew ever really existed. Perhaps what I saw of her was a picture of her true self polished by eyes of love. Perhaps I only saw what I wanted to see, remaking her in my mind into a canvas for all my hopes and fears. Probably somewhere in between; human reasons usually end up somewhere between the angelic and the diabolical. Either way, in a way that I don’t totally understand and can’t really explain, I think that in a way, ‘I, too, have become Christine.’ The most beautiful parts of the picture of her that existed in my mind and my heart have now become parts of me. The darker parts of that picture, the parts that were in all likelihood my own deep fears, I’ve faced and found myself all the more whole. I’ve been found in the same way I wanted to find her. In a better way, really, by a much greater Lover. And I hope, I truly hope, that the second half of Oural’s prophecy holds as well. I pray that at the end of all of this, when this broken world is past and long ago, I find that somehow I’ve borne some of her burdens. I know I’ve added to them. But I know this one thing: love has conquered death. Perhaps an there was an ember of love in the twisted mass of selfishness that I gave her. If so, may that ember live past the death of our friendship-or-whatever-it-was, past the death of hope, past the death of this world and the death of death itself, and may it make its way into eternity as a gift to her in the sight of her Father. I did love her, and I do love her. But I am content to wait for a world where hope never fails and love abounds unburdened to be able to tell her. I’ll have better words with which to tell her there. And in that contentedness, I let all of this go and declare this story complete. Which is a good thing entirely, for new journeys begin at the end of concluded ones. Regardless, ‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.’ I have much to do yet.

Over the Hills and Far Away.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:58:00 -0500

May this stand as a marker mourning what was lost, as a banner streamer commemorating a hard fought battle, and as a beacon long burning in the hope of a new beginning. I cannot think of a better way to end this story. I am contented. Berroguetto - Cantos De Monzo. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8qMaRsQSUM

The Way Home.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:01:16 -0500

This seems tremendously obvious in retrospect. Most of these sorts of things do, I suppose. You can’t go back to the people who hurt you and expect that they’ll give back what they took from you. The way home, the way toward whole is always forward, never back. Even if sometimes that forward takes you through the past.

For one, the people who steal parts of your heart out are not typically the kind of people who would treasure that which they steal. The chunks of flesh that they took from you they’ve already discarded, the pieces of you they tore away were treated with the same measure of contempt they displayed toward the rest of you. There is little you can reclaim from a thief if he’s already disposed of the goods.

We all have our ancient wounds, daggers from adolescent arguments and grown-up lovers and a thousand other things. But daggers are not scalpels: they come to steal, kill and destroy and that’s all. There’s nothing in cold storage, nothing that they could give back even if they wanted to. Still, a part of our heart seems to think we could find the things we lost in the places where we lost them; if we could prove our interlocutors wrong, or if we could become the person they said they wanted, or if we were in some other way vindicated, then we would be whole again. We forget that there is only one Creator, and He is not our enemy; we are unmade by our interlocutors only as far as we choose to be.

Redemption is not amnesia, and in this is the deeper reason that we cannot go back. Jesus loves who we are, and part of who we are is what has happened to us. To obliterate the past is to remove part of a person that He loves. Redemption is not a return to a golden age, but the construction of a golden age from the rubble of the past. This is the magic of redemption: our tragedies provide the mortar for our future joy. So we move forward, reclaiming the past as we move ahead into Him. The One who made our hearts in the first place is the only One who can restore them to completeness.

There is nothing that Christine can give back to me, any more than the girl who called her a ‘white girl with a tan’ can declare her incontrovertibly Latina in the light of her achievements. There were parts of my heart that she tore out, parts of me she beat numb with her absolute contempt, parts without which I could not feel whole again. But words cannot be unsaid any more than daggers can be unstabbed. I have no illusions that she treasured anything she kept… there is nothing she could return even if she wanted to do so.

This expectation, I believe, poisons many of our efforts of reconciliation. If we believe that the other side is still holding onto the things we lack, then we cannot meaningfully restore relationship save its return. This is the simple truth: the things that were stolen cannot be given back. Reparations cannot restore shame and humiliation. But that which was lost can be mourned, and if it is mourned by both parties, then the relationship can be healed. Be it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or arguments between once-friends, relationship can only be restored when both sides abandon the idea of getting something back and both enter into the idea of making something together.

Sometimes reconciliation is not an option, though: it has to be wanted by both sides. Both sides have to be willing to mourn what was lost on all sides; both sides have to want a better relationship than the one that exists, even if better is nothing more than a distant peace. But reconciliation is not a prerequisite for healing. We were made by God’s hands alone; we can be remade by His hands alone. No one else gets a vote. So from the crumbling bricks of the city of man, He makes the City of God; from the wreckage of our past He builds for us a glorious future with Him. The way home is forward. We reclaim the past in the process.

One Last Dragon.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:54:00 -0600

This whole thing, ultimately, has been about God reclaiming my heart so that I would have something to give to my wife, something from which to fight for hers. It is then appropriate, perhaps, to document here my battles with the one last dragon that would claim my heart: my lust and my selfishness. My less personal writing is on my Facebook. From now on, until this war is won, this will be me at my most personal. From here on out, this will be my journal to my wife, as a matter of public record in the name of accountablity, and in the hope that one day I will present this to her as an accounting of deliverance and victory for her in His name. I fight for her. Jesus, please give me the victory. I can't win this without You.

18 Apr 2009. - Knock it off... Reset... Fights on. // Four days of complete purity so far... 10% to 40 days. SEALs were wrong... the next day is easier than the last. Press.

21 Apr 2009. - Seven Days. Fighting. Press.

Forgetting How to Hate.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:29:54 -0500

"People love you the most for the things that you hate/
And hate you for loving the things you can't keep straight/
People judge you on a curve, and tell you you're getting what you deserve/
And this, too, will be made right."
- "This Too Will Be Made Right," Derek Webb.

This is was most uncomfortable realization: both of us went off to war, at least at first, out of our own hatred. And not only in our wars with each other. Both of us had a war we needed to fight with the world. The two of us sought out that war on two very different battlefields.

In the course of my professional studies, I happened across a book authored by a Middle Eastern studies professor she held in high regard. I was struck by how much hatred was written between the lines of this man's work. Multisyllabic words and scattered citations did little to hide the author's intent. To call him a propagandist for a certain people group would be generous, as it would ascribe constructive intent to his work. Certainly criticism can be constructive, but the constructive critic leaves his joy in malice at the door. This man did not. And for this, like Chomsky and Zinn before him, this man was loved by those who shared his hatred.

Yet, for my one finger pointing out, I find three pointing back in. I kill men for a living. There are a lot prettier words for what I do, and I am glad to use them in polite company, but one can hardly gloss over the intent behind a warbird's design. Yet even if written in starker colors, there are similarities between my world and that of academic critique. There is a world of difference between wanting to protect and wanting to destroy; between wanting to save the day and wanting to kill, even if both sometimes happen at the same time. A man might kill to protect things worth protecting, and a man might kill simply to kill. There are gradations, no doubt. My blood boils when I see pictures of an Al-Qaeda torture facility. I hate what they do, I believe rightly so. And I am glad to draw a line of fire between my enemies and those they show no compunction in hurting. I have killed men with mournful resolve, I have killed with regretless sorrow, I have killed with many things in my heart. Nonetheless, I can say honestly that I have never killed a man with hatred in my heart. This is by the grace of God alone. There was a time when this would not have been the case.

I think of conversations some of the conversations here. "I'm bored… I want to go kill something." "As long as the good guys are safe and we get the mission done… if we're not shooting, nobody's shooting at them, right?" I answer. (I sound like a tool.) I understand the whole 'first rotation' thing. You want to go and do the job you've worked so hard training for. Of course. And that was me once. But in my case, I wonder if my desire to make a difference wasn't paired with some unnamed rage. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it was.

A memory from years ago: driving to my flight training squadron, 'Nightmare' by Eve 6 blaring across the radio, I remember thinking "I want to do whatever she would hate the most." In the aftermath of the battle of Second Christine, these words made sense to a very angry young man. I had been willing to give up my life's dream of flying fighter jets in order to be with her. Since the latter was not an option, then I determined to lose myself in the former, and I infected that dream with my bitterness toward her. I am not proud of these words, nor of who I was then. In fact, I am very thankful that God has redeemed some decisions made with mixed motives. (Were we to count pride, though, I think very few of us have any decisions of pure motives.) It was more than that, though. She became the quick and easy synopsis of all the abuse I endured in Cambridge, the summary of all the people who hated me without knowing me, all the people who made me into the accessible and attackable representative of Sa'ad's "other." These people, in turn, became the most recent manifestation of anyone who had every hated me without reason, cast me out, shunned me, or otherwise treated me with contempt for being different. And since I could not meaningfully answer her contempt or their contempt on the battlefield I was on, I sought out another battlefield where I could answer my adversaries in kind. Somewhere I could shoot back. How dark the heart of man. Once again, I am not proud of who I was then: a boy consumed by hatred and fear. But we are rarely so honest with ourselves; I was a Christian in good standing, and determined to be seen as such. So I hid vicious intents from myself by wrapping them in Christian-ese words. I am thankful that God saved me from me. I am sorry that I waited so long to let Him show me my own heart.

I will not recap the last three years again. Suffice it to say that God broke my fears by letting them break upon me; He broke my pride and broke my heart; He broke my hatred for others when I finally faced another's hatred toward me with love. The angry boy cast off, I have put on the man He has made me to be, and I am proud of what He has made. And this man believes to his very bones the heart of the Christian faith: love is thicker than death. So I have put down hatred, and love has become my new weapon. (All things are incomplete forms on this side of the fall. I embrace this nonetheless, even if imperfectly.) I am still a warrior. Born into a world at war, I left behind as much of my hatred as I could as I went off to war. Because of this, I will never have to live with the guilt that I would have brought upon myself otherwise. For this, I am thankful.

In this, though, is an irony: in a world of hatred, you are loved more for what you hate than for what you love. For all the angry, rebellious kids parading around in their Che Guevara shirts, "The Motorcycle Diaries" gives them a veneer of moralism to cover their hatred for mom and dad. Guevara is exciting far more so for what he hated than for what he loved. He demonstrated well the latter half of the Jose Marti quote about those who build and those who destroy. He is the rebel, and the rebel is sexy. In the same way, I remember conversations with well-meaning near-strangers about my profession. "Kill some hadjis for me" and all of that. Mostly no more than sports team smack-talking, an emotional investment in some far off world where good and bad are defined in terms that are as black and white as they are arbitrary. I'm not judging, nor claiming some sense of moral superiority, but things look a little different when you have to perforate the body of some kid too young and stupid to know what he's doing with thousands of fragments of hot metal because his older brother told him to point his Kalashnikov at the good guys. I've flown x number of successful missions, and brought x number of good guys home safe. But, to the world, I am cool because of how many men I've killed. Don't get me wrong, I'm no pacifist. I just question our assessments of value.

Returning to the story that helped get me here, I've chosen to know nothing about her for more than two years now. But here, on the far side of this change, I think I see one more parallel between who we were. I believe the difference between old Dave and new Dave is the difference between rage and love. Old Dave nursed hidden wounds, shoving his rage far enough down to poison the aquifer of his dreams, and hence he could not be free of the ghosts of his past that denied him identity. Old Christine, from what very little I knew of her, was very similar. Old Dave found a battlefield where his dreams and his rage could co-exist in his choice of aircraft. Old Christine seemed to have found her own battlefield where her dreams and her hatreds dovetailed. Both of us found places where we would be loved and accepted both for the things we loved and for the things we hated. This world loves to hate, and in that hatred we found some degree of acceptance and affirmation. But there can never be peace in hatred.

I heard echoes of her of late. They were not sought for. Apparently, one of her friends described to a mutual friend a person without a name, a monstrous and pathetic and ugly person. Her friend not realizing that the mutual friend knew that nameless person, and my friend realizing that person was intended to describe me, a bit of verbal sparring ensued. I thank that friend for coming to my defense. There was a time when my reaction would have been anger, maybe even hatred. But that time has passed. May she be greatly blessed. If, after two years of knowing nothing of me whatsoever, she still needs to wrap all of her fears and hatred around a caricature of me, then she needs those blessings even more so, and so I give them all the more gladly. If the difference between old Dave and new Dave was found in forgetting how to hate, then may Christine be blessed in the same way. I have no desire to interact with the old Christine… she reminds me of a self I am glad to have left behind. But I would be honored to know a new and free Christine. Regardless, I am forgetting how to hate her, as I have forgotten how to hate my enemies out here.

It started with my war against the world. Men warring against the world is not exactly unprecedented, though perhaps mine has come full circle. Athanasius contra mundum, they said. And rightly so. But there are different ways to pursue a war against the world. Fight against those who have hurt you, and you will inevitably become those same people to someone else. Fight for those you love, for those who are innocent, and for those who have hurt you, and you will conquer even past the grave. The weapon of hatred will do you no good in the higher stakes of this latter war. Love is the only armor dense enough and the only steel sharp enough to conquer hatred and death. But there are many flavors of love. And so, denied any softer expression in this place, I will love the innocents with wrath against their oppressors. But I will not hate those oppressors. A man who fights from love is more dangerous than one who fights from hate, anyways.

An open letter to my accuser (revised.)

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:55:51 -0500

This letter started as a counter-accusation, an attempt to defend myself from her words through my own wit and so-called wisdom. It became, as of more than a year ago, an expression of honesty and growth that perhaps could not have happened any other way. It is appropriate, I think, to leave this letter at the beginning of all of these writings as a marking of the incomplete story at the heart of them all. May this story be brought to completion in His time, and may that completion include a real reconciliation. This remains my prayer.

I could not see how wrong I was. That does not mean that I was not right. Rightness and wrongness mixed together and became dissonance. I have no answers any more, no counter-arguments. You can think of me what you wish. It is between you and God. But I will pray with all my heart for reconciliation. I will own this brokenness, as far as I can, and I will bring it to God and lay it at His wounded feet. I will pray that His blood would wash over both of us, healing both of us, undoing the terrible wounds we have inflicted upon each other.

I pray for many miracles here. One is that He would meet my desires. I am in love with you, and I will not be ashamed of that any more, ever again. But if you never respected my heart, I never respected your will. And I was wrong not to. Learning this respect, there is a difference between reconciliation and my desire for you. There is a world where this war is ended, but I do not run from my heart. It is not one where we are the best of friends, but it is one where we are honest with ourselves and each other. I will pray accordingly.

There are no sides. There never were. There is Him, and He is all, and we both greatly fell short of Him. I am a man. I finally acknowledge my role. I take responsibility.

I am sorry that I hurt you. You are His precious daughter. May He and you forgive me.

A Marking.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:42:03 -0600

This is written freeform. (Other writing is consuming most of my creative time and energy.) I want to record this thought before I learn and grow and evolve further, I want to remember this thought even beyond the end (or new beginning) of this story.

'God, purify my love for Christine. If nothing is left of it, then it was a selfish love and no great loss. But it if remains, then it is of You and I will hold to it. Either way, bless her beyond her wildest dreams.'

Love is thicker than death, so it must be thicker than pain. I am no longer afraid to love her. And I am no longer afraid to leave all of this behind. Love always finds its way home, and my heart will find its way to the woman I am meant to love. So I will trust Him with my heart, and I will follow my heart wherever it leads me.

Wurmbrandt once wrote that only those who dive into deep waters find pearls. I stand on the shore no longer.

Reflections. (Mid-Course Update.)

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:29:49 -0600

I seem to generally write when I find answers. This time I write with only questions.

Praying the same prayer for two years running, I suppose I had assumed I would find an answer by now. I have found other prayers, prayers that she would be blessed, prayers that God would protect her from danger, but I still have the prayer I began with: ‘God, change my heart or change hers…’ He has answered the first part, beyond anything I could have imagined. Answered with brokenness, answered with healing, answered with courage, answered with intimacy, answered with a hundred blessings. But He has not turned my heart away from her. No other pray has lasted this long, and if it were stupid chemicals then surely they would have burned themselves out by now. I cannot say I understand.

A few things I do understand better. I felt that it was His will at the outset that I should not know anything about her save in my prayers. I have held to that (a friend of mine did promise to let me know if she gets married, which I will of course consider an answer.) Now I understand the wisdom in that command, even the love in it. A friend of mine once described the way she treated me as ’scorn and contempt.’ I disagreed at the time, perhaps I still do. ’An undue loyalty to one’s fears,’ I think I would call it now… it was a sin I had in common with her. Regardless, I was showing her no love by allowing her to treat me the way she did. I would have loved her far better by preventing her from dishonoring herself in the way she continued to treat me. I would have loved her better had I set and enforced better boundaries. Perhaps, though a bit too late, I have learned that lesson: that same friend ended up reading her blog, and apparently there was an entry concerning me that was pretty vicious. I believe that I have honored and loved C. better by not reading it, by not allowing her to hurt me again in the ways she intended to. I wish I had learned sooner, for if I have done the right thing once, it is only in light of doing the wrong thing a hundred times.

We magnify sin when we spread it in relationship, I think, as we drag others into parallel or complimentary sins. We choose to hate, another chooses to hate back, and now two people hate. What if the other chooses to refuse to accept the hate? What if they choose to be free of it? Then only one person is guilty, and the guilt of that person is no longer compounded in provoking another to sin. Perhaps then it can be reconciled with less difficulty, as the sin is only between that person and God. Of course, for the two to be reconciled, just as Haugen and Mandela say, there must be truth first. There must be a trial to give a pardon, and I have no doubt that in that trial, both of us are gravely guilty. Praise God that His blood is sufficient. Of course, both people must choose to show up to receive their pardon. I have received my pardon from God for wronging His daughter, and my relationship with Him is reconciled. I have received no pardon from her, nor has she taken my pardon, so there is no reconciliation and no peace between us. I am not sure what I can do to make peace more than what has already been done, and I am honestly scared to do anything. I fear offering anything to her in vulnerability, given how she has responded to that vulnerability in the past. I do not know if this is a wise fear, or if it is simply my cowardice and desire to remain safe speaking.

This much, at least, is good: I am not afraid to love her. This has been a five year story. Three years, I did everything I could to squash that feeling. I ran into work, I ran into one or two foolish very short term relationships, I kept hoping I would find the girl which would let me forget her, I ran and ran and ran. It was all cowardice. And it took me away from God. The last two years, when all hope has failed, I have hoped in God for lack of another choice. And it has driven me into His arms. It terrifies me to love her. Every time I pray for her, I find my hopes and my fears at war. But it is the best prayer I have prayed.

I have grown in ways I couldn’t have imagined, have become someone I had only heard in dreams and echoes. New Dave isn’t the same as Old Dave. Praise God. And New Dave has the wisdom to see that Old Dave should not have been with Old C., to know that New Dave will not be with Old C. out of honor for her. Accordingly, I have left behind everything I knew of Old C. No letters, no emails, no pictures, no shrapnel remains. But perhaps what I saw in her in shadows, someone astonishing and fearless and brilliant, has consumed her old fears, perhaps she is a New C. And this is my hope. Though, if I ever understood anything about her, I would guess that it will take her breaking herself upon something immovable before she finds brokenness (she and I always were equally stubborn.) So this is my prayer tonight, a prayer that I could not have prayed at the beginning of this thing, a prayer that is beautiful if it is pure, but vicious if it is stained with malice. I pray that she would find brokenness. The last words I said to her in the first cycle of this thing were (I didn‘t know they would be the last words at the time, four years ago: ) ‘May God bless C. F., for she is named for Someone whom I love. May her back be strong and her heart be pure.’ The perfected prayer is ‘May God bless C. F., for she is someone whom I love. May she find brokenness and her true strength.’ I pray this for her whether or not she and I ever reconcile. It is given freely, with no expectations of reciprocity.

But I am still here, and this is not some academic exercise in agape. I guess this is what is scary about the whole thing. I am generally good at seeing where something is going before I get there. That has not been true about anything in this story. But God has shown himself faithful. And I still believe that He will answer my prayer. C. is His daughter, and she is in His hands. I will not wrestle Him for her. He can worry about her, something gives me the sense that I would be better not knowing. I know the foolishness that I went through on my path to brokenness. I pray that she is less foolish than me, or at least I pray that God shields her from the full consequences of foolishness, as He did for me. But I will not know anything save through my prayers. This ends in God’s time, on His terms. I hope with all my heart there will be a miracle. I would be my greatest honor to pursue her heart, and as I once told her, I would still fight through hell to find it. I do still love her. But if that miracle is a change of my heart, then I embrace it. Perhaps if I am asking for a stone, then He will give me bread instead. I don’t have a clue. But I will not seek answers on my own anymore. So if I have learned anything, I have learned Whom to ask. My heart still tells me that one way or another, there is still more to this story. So I ask Him also for an ending, one worthy of five (or more) years of sweat and tears that have been poured into this story. I cannot write that ending… He is an infinitely better Author.

I will hold on until He writes it, and then I will close the book, whether to pick up part two, or to begin another series entirely. If yes, then I will know it when I see it… and then I’ll set out on the far scarier endeavor of human intimacy… may He strengthen my heart and give me courage then. But if no, I ask for a clear no, one with no hope whatsoever, one where there is no romantic movie happy ending. I feel selfish asking this, but one where I forget about her, where my memories go cold, and I have a hard time remembering her name. Strangely enough, passing through another base on the way here, I ran into a girl with whom I had an mis-romantic collision a few years back (also a pilot.) That interaction was something of a ugly comedic echo of everything that went wrong with C., but it only took a month or so. I found it amusing, not in any vindictive sense, but more in a ’things don’t hurt forever’ sense, that I couldn’t remember her name. So we had very surface conversation, I said hi, she said sort of hi and more a lot of whining about flying tankers (refueling aircraft,) so I said bye and she said sort of bye. And then in an hour I forgot I ran into her, and she returned to the netherworld of memories that you can only pull up with a lot of effort. In the light of that numbness, I found it strangely easy to wish her blessings and wish her well. So if God’s answer is no, I pray with all my heart that I forget C. the same way. I will not have my future wife fight with her ghost. May the story be stored away as a closed book, as processed data, as a completed story with no loose ends. May anything good I remember of her be simply echoes of things a thousand times more true of the woman He gives me. (Of course, if He answers yes, the same remains true. I saw flashes of someone absolutely amazing in C. If God does a miracle between her and I, then I pray that He has brought out the diamond in the rough in her.)

There is another prayer, one where I am much more sure of His will. Reconciliation is always the heart of God. I want peace in the cold war between she and I as much as I want peace in the hot war that I am fighting. Even if that is the ending of the story, I desire peace. I don’t know what else I can do. To approach her is to be attacked, she has made that clear in no uncertain terms. I have offered apologies, and she has forbidden those apologies and attacked. So I have sent one message in two years seeking reconciliation, one that I sent at Urbana before communion, and she has disregarded it. I do not know what else to do, so I fall back on ‘in so far as it depends on you, live at peace with each other.’ I do not suppose it depends on me anymore. But I pray nonetheless. It is sad that the deep rifts between Cambridge and Colorado Springs have found such a perfect case study. But I will pray, because I don’t know anything else to do. The only answer that respects both her will and my heart seems to be continuing in my prayer until God answers it.

I guess this is an answer then. Continue. It seems to have worked so far, at least better than any of the answers I’ve tried. I can’t say this is completely satisfying. Though I don’t suppose it’s supposed to be. I will learn to trust God as I keep falling off this cliff, until He teaches me that I can fly.

Shorter Paths (Part 2.)

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:41:39 -0500

The more I learn about each of our and all of our histories, the more I realize there are only a couple of stories. There are different stages for each rendition, varied props and assorted casts of extras, but ultimately Solomon is right: there is nothing new under the sun. So we choose our roles and we play them to whatever end. And this is where the analogy fails: Fantine dies on the five hundredth night of Les Miserables as surely as she does on the first. In each retelling Valjean finds redemption and Javert does not. One singer may play Marius well, another poorly, but he will always marry Cosette. A character’s lines are unchanging… you are judged by how well you perform them; you can affect quality but not outcome. It does not seem that our stories are quite as fixed.

Perhaps, then, we live in a football game. The way we play determines the outcome. It is not enough to stay within the prescribed rules of the game… no one has ever won a football game simply by not incurring penalties. But many have lost a game by doing so. So within the boundaries of the field, we write a free-flow drama where actions determine outcomes. The quality of the game is determined by the play of both sides in concert, while the outcome of the game is determined by the play of both sides in opposition. And here this analogy fails as well: I cannot imagine our Adversary demonstrating good sportsmanship.

So we are caught in between. Improvised interpretations of a theme, vignettes balanced upon the edge of a knife. Somewhere in between sport and drama is combat. You know the script, but your adversary is constantly trying to thwart your plans. Only skill and wisdom lie between a successful mission and a flaming wreckage. So we are the tightrope walkers, balanced by God’s council, on our way across a canyon. But wisdom is no dictator, and gravity is more than willing to do its duty. Let us then be thankful for the safety net of God’s grace.

There’s one thing worse than completely sucking at something. That’s finding someone who just did a great job at the thing you sucked at. That is, unless and until you can find the humility to learn from them. And then it becomes the best thing.

The story was far more common than I had realized. I’ve seen two near verbatim retellings of my story in the lives of my friends, along with countless variations on the theme. One is still in process… I pray she finds the courage to end it well (and I pray that he finds any courage at all.) The second, well, it ended quite well. And in this is a quite significant revelation: one person can change the quality of the story greatly, but it takes two people to change the outcome.

It’s an ancient equation: the will and heart mismatch. One person desires the other as more than friends, and the other desires only friendship. Throw in a little bit of human fallenness, and the story usually includes the ’just-friends’ character offering and taking more than they really should, and the ‘more-than-friends’ character asking more than they really should. There’s only a couple ways that it can end, really. One may change their will, and they become more than friends. The other may find their heart changed, and they stay just friends. Of course, if neither change, the interaction must at some point end. The courage and honor that both characters show toward each other determine the manner of ending.

I can tell you how to end it poorly. Have the ‘just-friends’ character start telling the other how they should feel. Use interaction as a weapon in order to manipulate their feelings. And then have the ‘more-than-friends’ character start telling the other what they should do. Have them both resent the other, one resenting the other’s will for not respecting their heart, the other resenting their counterpart’s heart for not respecting their will. Throw in a dash of pride, ensuring that neither looks inside to find the source of the dissonance. Garnish it all with selfishness, where one offers inappropriate emotional intimacy outside of any real commitment, and the other eagerly accepts it as an avenue to their heart. Shake it all up, add some heat, and stand back.

In retrospect, I may be able to tell you how to end it better. Have the ’more-than-friends’ character guard their own heart. Have them relinquish their heart into God’s hands, and trust His plan and His timing. Have them respect their own heart enough to safeguard it for someone who will treasure it, have them respect the other’s decisions as legitimate. Have them become secure enough in God to realize that He loves the other more than they possibly could, to realize that God does not need our help to accomplish His will, to realize that God does not give us desires in vain. And have them prepare to walk away if they need to, realizing that walking away may be the best way to honor the other if the other has no intention to honor you. First and foremost, have them learn contentedness.

Notice that the outcome does not change. Only the quality of the story and the collateral damage. This is not saying that the outcome cannot change. But that takes two people.

And this is the story of my two friends. Reading the account of their relationship was almost like reading my own, except in an alternate universe where everything ends well. Perhaps more accurately, in this universe between two people far less proud and far more willing to honor each other. They honor God and each other at every step, even when they are navigating their own fears. It is almost the same exact transcripts, the same songs, the same stories, but without the broken trust and venom. And with a lot more courage on both parts.

There are only a few stories and only a few endings. One will or one heart will eventually change. Yet even in this is a trap. Outcomes can only be reached together, but we are responsible only for our own actions. Concern yourself with outcomes, and you will inevitably desire to change the other. But they are not yours to change, they are God’s alone, unless and until He entrusts them to you. So concern yourself with obedience, and God will change you both.

Will v. Heart. One wins and one loses, it almost seems. No wonder it becomes adversarial. God is the only one who can break this paradox. In His plan, if one wins, the other doesn’t lose. If they both honor God, they will find the patience to let the story play out If they trust Him, they will learn to face their fears. If they honor each other, they will save each other much pain.

There was a person I one knew quite well, one who looks exactly like me (if a bit younger) who would have been jealous of my friends. ‘This should have been my story.’ But this was their story, and rightfully so. You see, ‘my’ is singular. ‘Theirs’ is plural. And this was the problem all along. What I wanted. Not what she wanted. Not how I could honor her. What I wanted. The fact that she and I had this in common does not make it right for either of us.

My heart was broken. Praise God. It was the greatest blessing that I never wanted, the difference between Old and New Dave. So I add one prayer: ‘break her will.’ May this be the greatest blessing that she never wanted. May it be the difference between Old and New C. This is the costliest and most precious blessing that I can give her… it was the costliest and most precious blessing that I received.

That boy has passed away. And for the better. Looking back, there was no way Old Dave and Old C. could have ever honored each other. They were both too scared, too arrogant and too selfish to reach outside of their safe worlds. Unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable both. Looking back, there is no way New Dave can honor Old C. beyond distance and prayers. But perhaps, and this is my deepest hope, New Dave and New C. can meet each other again for the first time. Perhaps the same story with two much improved characters can find a much better ending. But it is out of my hands. And my prayer remains the same: ‘change my heart or change hers.‘ Nonetheless, I am content here. I already have Everyone that I need.

Hardest Thing I Ever Did.

noreply@blogspirit.com () — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:10:00 -0500

Looking over the story of C., I once compared memories of her to shrapnel. As our interaction exploded into a million pieces, words took on sharp edges and penetrated deep beneath my skin, still red hot with her hatred. So I took a piece of her with me. Whether I wanted to or not.

With as terrible as things were between her and I, it is easy to forget that not all similar interactions are similarly bloody. Any time your path and another’s path wrap around each other, you take a piece of them with you. There are places and words and things that remain. They are not always shrapnel.

‘I will be a part of you meeting your husband. And you will be a part of my meeting my wife.’ I said these words to N., sitting on a riverbank in the Ukraine, seven years ago. I rejoiced in that then. I rejoice in our friendship even now. I know that I brought something of her with me. Maybe more than I knew. I hope I gave her something in return.

From time to time, I am still reminded of her. Of who I was then, and who she was then. We are not so different now from the way we were then. We are completely different now from the way we were then. We were just kids, maybe. Maybe we still are kids. I’m not sure that’s so bad.

I loved her. I knew it with my whole mind, my whole heart and my whole body. Of late, I think I bought into the idea of forgetting the previous beloved in the light of the new one. Probably because of C. If C. is not my wife, then I truly desire nothing of her to remain, all of my feeling for her to be subsumed by my love for my spouse. I realize, though, that sometimes people act with honor and kindness and courage. Sometimes, it is worth holding onto a piece of your love. That if they loved you back, you do not rob your wife of love to still love them. You just get that much more love for your wife. I am proud and honored to have loved N. She is an amazing woman, kind and courageous, and I treasure the time we spent together as undeclared more-than-friends. Even if it is a place that I cannot return to.

Looking back, I think I lived in the aftershocks of her for four years. She was all I knew of loving a woman. In that, I was in no way impoverished. But you cannot live always looking backwards. We were friends, but I don’t think my heart ever really believed it all the way. I think my heart believed that in calling each other friends, she and I could remain close to each other, and that was what my heart wanted. I don’t know how she felt. I don’t know if I should have asked.

We were both in a safe place, I think. We had stayed there for a while. So I suppose I should not have found it that surprising when God said ‘move.’ Really, He more said ‘decide.’ Before flying out to see her the last time, I felt like God was telling me ‘I will give her someone else, if you don’t act.’ Not that He was saying do or don’t. He was saying ‘choose.’ You can’t stay in a halfway place forever.

So two months later, I was kneeling on a Moscow balcony, tears streaming down my face, listening to Miracle by Vertical Horizon. Praying. I knew the choice. He said that He would bless us if I went with her. She is a good woman. I loved her. She was everything I knew of love. We were good together. Things would go well for us. But He told me He had something else for me, something crazy, but He would not let me see it. And it was the hardest choice of my life.

I think I understand something more about that. If I had gone with her, I would not have wanted to see the road not traveled. No academic questions, I would be there with her, and she would have been my path, and all of my heart would belong there. There would have been no ‘what ifs.’

A gifting you are not willing to use can become a curse. Unless she has changed, C. makes choices from her deep fears. One of those choices may be marriage, a safe one where she will not be challenged, where she can try to prove all the things she wants to the world and (unsuccessfully) to herself. This is not a path that is compatible with the deep dreams and destiny I saw in her. Were that to happen, (perhaps it already has,) my prayer would be that He would take her destiny and her deep dreams from her in her sleep, so that she would be at peace with the choice she made, so that she could inhabit her life and be all the way there. Not thinking about paths that she could never again walk.

This would have been true for me, though in much better terms. If I was with N., I would have been all the way with her. And it would have been good.

But, good as it may have been, that was not my choice. Maybe I was right. Maybe I was wrong. Certainly both possibilities have crossed my mind on this journey. Maybe it would have not even worked. But I doubt that. I always felt very comfortable and very natural with her. She said the same of me. Perhaps more of us would have fit together as easily as our conversations did. Perhaps this is too much. I will leave this line of thought, for I will not inhabit with my mind a place that I have left behind with my choices.

So this is the road less traveled. Praying about this choice, the path felt like falling off a cliff. It has lived up to expectations. I don’t know how it goes, nor how it ends. But I know He is here. (Of course, He would have been on the other path too.) All I know is Christ, and Him crucified. I thought I knew a lot more before.