speech, freedom, and hearts

I'm working on a little micro-short story about a squirrel named Claudio. But I have something to say, and while I was reticent to put it on my blog at first (because I avoid political and religious discussions like I avoid the bubonic plague whenever I time-travel to medieval Europe), I realized that my blog is a place to say my somethings.

This is for my dear friends who also love God, especially those who have been caught up in the recent Chik-Fil-A kerfuffle, particularly in social media outlets, but this is not limited to that--there's just barely a scrim between politics and religious beliefs lately. It is just too easy to spread vitriol with the click of a "share" button these days.

You see, my dear, dear friends, some of your posts have made me cry.

They might have been angry, disrespectful, arrogant, and even hateful. Some of the "jokes" were particularly awful, guys. Very petty and even cruel. Others were not angry or hateful--there is nothing directly wrong with posting that you're going to eat chicken on a particular day.

But perhaps there is something inherently wrong with it.

This is why I humbly request that you guard the words you post. Be wise. James does a better job of explaining why this is so terribly important than I could ever hope to do.

A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it! (James 3:3-5)

Your words hurt, my dear friends. Even when they seem of no account.

Given the way Facebook works, hundreds of people will see those words and pictures--even those who are not your friends, in many cases. Hundreds of hundreds will get the message, and thousands if it's shared.

And every one of those hundreds of pairs of eyes has a heart, and hearts can be so, so fragile. Everyone who reads your 140 characters has a soul. A beautiful soul, I believe.

It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell. (James 3:5-6)

You are hurting people, my dear friends. And that is wrong. Some of you are (perhaps accidentally) encouraging ideas of hate and misunderstanding in your culture. By our speech, we can ruin the world. And that is wrong. In championing various sides of a cause or defending various values, we risk damaging so much. We must remember that championing and defending are a bit different from loving and learning "the unforced rhythms of grace" (Matt. 11).

We must be cautious, my friends.

And yes, according to the Bill of Rights, you have the right to free speech. It is justly limited, because words have consequences. But you have that freedom under the law of the land.

However, you are a follower of God. You have made a choice to be obedient to God. Therefore--and I know this is very, very hard to read--your civic right to a freedom of speech must be curtailed by your own submission to the way of life that God laid out long ago.

This is scary: You can tame a tiger, but you can't tame a tongue—it's never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. Curses and blessings out of the same mouth! My friends, this can't go on. (James 3:7-10)

I do not bring this up to be angry, to scold, or to judge. I avoid soapboxes. And I have no desire to be on one, ever. But you see, you are my friends. And true friends sometimes have to say hard things to each other. I need to learn this lesson myself.

You are my friends because we all are believers in a world I have often imagined--a great world, a beautiful world, a hopeful world. A heavenly world. A to-come world. A being-made-today world.

That world does not have a place for free speech, at least not in the sense of American free speech. It has a place for freedom--but of a more beautiful, magnificent freedom than an amendment could ever define. I dare you to try to limit that freedom to words, my friends. It is too glorious.

Shall we practice that freedom? Shall we share it? I should very much like to do that with you.

Do justice, my friends; do mercy. Do obedience, do right, and do good. Give respect, give dignity, and give honor. Be reasonable, be gentle. Be innocent. Be kind. Be wise.

Love God with reckless abandon. Love people in the same radical way.

Do you want to be counted wise, to build a reputation for wisdom? Here's what you do: Live well, live wisely, live humbly. It's the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts. Mean-spirited ambition isn't wisdom. Boasting that you are wise isn't wisdom. Twisting the truth to make yourselves sound wise isn't wisdom. It's the furthest thing from wisdom—it's animal cunning, devilish conniving. Whenever you're trying to look better than others or get the better of others, things fall apart and everyone ends up at the others' throats.

Real wisdom, God's wisdom, begins with a holy life and is characterized by getting along with others. It is gentle and reasonable, overflowing with mercy and blessings, not hot one day and cold the next, not two-faced. You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honor. (13-18)

I would very much like to leave the politics in the dust and go adventuring. I would like to help bring about that world I have imagined. I hope you agree.

All scripture taken from James 3, MSG.

my room isn't messy. it was just rehearsing.

I seem to have interrupted my room.

There is a perfectly folded pair of jeans sitting on the floor in front of my dresser, slightly askew and six inches outside of the drawer in which it belongs. It tried hard. Good attempt, jeans.

I'll put them away in a minute.

My nail polishes are doing a loud, splashy number across my dresser right now, and the red's looking a bit annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of the big number. They must have been using the bobby pins as props, probably once again making up for their inability to do jazz hands by adding a bit of baton twirling to the mix. Last time it was Q-tips, but frankly, I'm just thankful they all have their lids on tight. Twirling and wet nail polish don't go well; even the matte lacquers  just don't have the technique to pull off those stunts.

The hair dryer is thankful that the dancing has stopped. It's fallen on its side at the edge of the dresser, exhausted and spent from scolding the nail polishes all afternoon about their glittery shenanigans. The straightener doesn't even care anymore; it's just contemplating whether a tumble back behind the bureau -- where those polishes never go -- would be a better end to the day. Poor fellows. 

The lamp, like its cousin over at Pixar, is watching all of this with something between curiosity and shock. Mostly curiosity, I like to think, as it is a good-natured and non-judgmental sort of a lamp. It just has a habit of craning its neck in odd ways, no matter how many times I gently remind it that nice lamps do not crane so oddly. Perhaps I should be harsher.

The pillows have clearly been jumping on the bed again. Stupid things. I keep putting them back at the head, plump and neat against the headboard, and they keep mussing the covers and winding up all over the room. I don't know what their problem is, because when I jump on the bed, I don't land on the other side of the room.

I suppose I'd better put them back, too.

The amount of dancing in here amazes me, because while the polishes were perfecting Broadway (this is the last time I buy all that glitter), the shoes seem to have tap danced right out of their home in the closet into a scattered row along the floor --  except for Ben's flip flops, which are a little insecure with stage fright and have tucked themselves halfway under the bed. I really ought to have a word with the shoes about their formation; this doesn't remotely resemble a line, and they need to get better about partner work. My sneakers are in opposite corners and it's totally throwing off the aesthetic of the whole thing. I hope they weren't mocking Ben's flip flops again.

And then there are the clothes. If they've been dancing, it's been in a Martha Graham meets Krumpin sort of way. I think they're free spirits, the clothes, and all of them -- the hoodie, the tanks, the sweater, and even the sock that snuck under Ben's pillow -- have just been doing their own primal thing today. "Have fun and stay out of the laundry basket!" is not a bad adage for life. I suppose I can't blame them. I'll let them have their party and stay on the floor for tonight.

Except for the jeans. They just want to go home and be safe. And after all of today's wild tomfoolery, I can't say that I blame them. 

why i don't journal

This 1) took forever and 2) is too long and 3) I'm going to try not to care about 1&2, because 2 was causing 1 and I'm mad at them both. Jerks.

Okay, here goes:

I've started about a million blogs, so I don't know why this one is freaking me out so badly. Maybe because I've never kept a blog very well. Or a journal. No, no. That is a lie. I once kept a journal very, very well: I carefully documented the days between my twelfth and thirteenth birthdays in a diary.

When I was twelve, I tried with all my might to have a proper rebellion and instead had the third-most horrid year of my life. It was so awful that even now—fourteen years, puberty, and one fully-developed frontal lobe later—I still feel deep sympathy for all girls who go through the gross injustice of being twelve. Or eleven, or thirteen, or whenever they first decide they are Much Maligned. (Of course, the frontal lobe also gives me a lot of sympathy for the parents of those girls. I'm still sorry, guys. I didn't mean any of it.)

But I'm also really glad that most of my teenage angst rampaged around my brain when the most dramatic thing I knew how to do was say wildly sarcastic things to my mom, storm up the stairs, slam my door as dramatically as possible, and pour my troubles into a rose-covered book with a lock.

And, oh, I reveled in that angst.

I'd sob dramatically into my pillow. Sometimes I'd even cry on the pages a little, just to get my writing to smear a bit, so that my future biographers would understand that I was Much Maligned as a young girl. Unfortunately, gel pens were huge in the nineties, and they were crap at smearing.

One day, my dad made me sit at the dinner table until I finished a plate of fish. Injustice! Didn't he know that I was a mature twelve-year-old? I'd eaten my "no-thank-you" portion already.

Much Maligned, I ate that fish with dramatic choking, seasoning it with my tears. Then I ran up the stairs, dove onto my bed, and whipped out my best non-gel pen. There's a gigantic, loopy scrawl in the diary that day, about two-thirds of the way through the year: "I absolutely ABHOR my father today. He has not a scrap of compassion for the trials I face."

I should probably mention that I was really into historical fiction back then, and that my angst played out very nicely when I narrated it as though I was trying to be a lady in the midst of pillaging. I silently imagined my future biographers' remarks about the poise and extensive vocabulary I'd developed at such a tender age.

Then I turned thirteen, calmed down a bit, and quit journaling. I've over-analyzed this and decided that I do not journal because writing is boring when only I and the future biographers will read it. These days, my writing includes Facebook statuses and poems sent to trusted friends. My mom gets ridiculously long emails from me about tea and books and front porches. And I like writing all those things.


I suppose that at the very least, one person will read this (hi mom!), and I'll hop around gleefully and send you imaginary hugs of ecstatic thanks (thanks!). At the very greatest, maybe I'll find out that this is The Best, and I will love writing all the things, and many people will discover what a weird twelve-year-old I was. There is no worst, so I will publish. ;)

(PS - I will probably imagine that I am Much Maligned at some point in the future, because sometimes being Much Maligned is just deliciously fulfilling. If you decide to join me and read this blog, you can't say I didn't warn you about the historical fiction thing.)

guts

I've been meaning to do this for awhile. Write, I mean.

You know that feeling where you're standing at the edge of the pool? The concrete is hot and wet and steamy under your heels, but your toes feel unsure of themselves, curled around bright blue tiles. 

There's water dripping from your suit because the shallow end is safe and you've already made friends with it. It's got limits, the shallow end, and you have complete control over whether or not the water goes near your eyeballs. Boun-da-ries, shallow end. Con-trol. Fake diamond earring water drops fall from your earlobes, too, because you were flirting your ears with the shallow end and got them wet, pretending like eyeballs might be happening today, but they didn't (of course) because you're not like that. And neither is the shallow end, no matter what the other kids are doing in it.

But then you got out because you have freakishly burnable skin and your mom makes you put on more sunscreen several times, and now you are dripping and you want to get back in so that the Coppertone smell will go away, and Dad yells, "Hey, Annie! Jump in!" before you can go back to the zero-depth place.

And oh-dear-goodness, he's in the deep end. The over HIS head deep end. Like some sort of crazy, danger-obsessed man. Does he realize how tall he is? How tall this makes the pool? How many tiny yous would have to drown so that the one remaining you could stand on their shoulders and climb out? How you and the water and the eyeballs are just not happening today?

But dads are persuasive, and you find yourself standing there, breathing the last breaths you might ever take, and he's just smiling, reaching up, his feet treading water. "I'll catch you!"

He's insane. 

You hesitate. You glance at the shallow end. Boun-da-ries. You glance at Mom on a pool chair. Con-trol.

"C'mon, Annie. Jump in!"

You scream when your feet hit the water, when you realize what you've done and you wish with all your heart and breath and brain that you could rewind about five seconds of your life. Sorry, eyeballs. Sorry, breathing. I didn't mean it. Really, I didn't. I loved you. I loved you so much, eyeballs.

And Dad catches you, and it feels sort of safe because he is Dad and he is tall and strong and can swim, and it also feels terrifying because he is insane. And you have water in your eyeballs and they sting angrily, victims of your wild lapse of boun-da-ries, and Dad's laughing and asking if it was fun, and you sort of want to say "yeah" because well, it was, but you also want to get the hell out of the pool and go sit with Mom forever.

But you do it again. 

So, yeah, that feeling? This. Guts.

Many, many people have been encouraging me to do this and plunge in, and I am vastly thankful for all of you, even though I've just insinuated that you're all insane (I'm standing by that, with love).

I don't really know what I'm doing here, or what I'm going to write about. I could bore you with the woes of my daily life, or tell you the poem I wrote when my brother left his dishes to crust over in the sink for the bajillionth time (woe #1). I could write more things like this and give you a vague impression of what a terrifyingly weird kid I was. I could regale you with the stories that float around in my head, like the cloud palace of the Nimmos or the sad fate of the man who was born with all of his magic in his left ear.

I could rant about things that get my goat, like when people ignore the people who need them, or when young adult fiction writers collectively decide that it is impossible for an already-confident young woman to "come of age" and not spend the first chapter/first half/first book dithering about her lack of self-esteem/purpose/boyfriend. I could write random little observations about how bare oak branches against a purpled sky make my heart fly out of my chest for no reason, or how sometimes love is more about dirt-under-fingernails than butterflies-in-stomachs.

I will probably do all of those things in some shape, though I promise nothing. I can promise that they won't all be this long or this rambly. But I am tired, and I have been glancing at the shallow end for the last hour. So I'm going to do a crazy, gutsy thing and click publish.

In about two minutes, there will be screaming.

Catch me?

bandit-like

Somedays it seems like the world is a rotten place, where good people cry and bad people make off like laughing bandits, and then I start feeling angry and rotten and bandit-like. But then I put on my Little Mermaid t-shirt and the rottenness fades. 


It's very hard to be a bandit and sing Under the Sea at the top of your lungs.