Rom7:15

This post should’ve happened several hours ago. However, I grew apathetic almost as soon as the idea snuck into my head.

According to my Chinese Lit professor, the people of China experienced a sort of awakening in the early 20^th century called the May Fourth Movement. During this time, China existed as a politically fragmented country under the control of various warlords. Simultaneously, several countries held a sort of economic monopoly on certain regions in China, dubbed the “spheres of influence.” Before World War I, Germany possessed a specific sphere of influence over present-day Shandong Province. After the War, however, the Treaty of Versailles transferred the control of this area from Germany to Japan, and China awoke.

On May 4, 1919, students from Peking University gathered at Tianenmen Square to protest the Treaty, effectively launching a social, cultural, political revolution called the May Fourth Movement. A publication called the New Youth Journal pioneered the spread of ideas and perspectives that would eventually characterize modern Chinese literature.

The purpose of modern Chinese literature was not to entertain.

It was to save China.

A congregation of intellectuals began to see the fictional short story as a freedom of sorts, a method for liberating the minds of Chinese citizens drenched in tradition, a pathway to a new type of thinking.

In the beginning, though, few Chinese felt inclined to walk, skip, jump, or even turn towards this new pathway. Most felt that China didn’t need saving.

Reformation leader Liang Qichao compared China to a mansion; vast and ancient and mysterious and beautiful. And crumbling. He compared the residents of the mansion to the citizens of China. Comfortable, sleeping, willing to paint over a crack in the foundation or sweep away an anthill, slow to change and slow to act. Slow, weary, content to crumble. The residents of the mansion needed to wake up.

I keep thinking. I am asleep, I am asleep. I do things that I don’t want to do, and I don’t do the things that I want to do.

This post doesn’t mean much. No, really. It is the feeble attempt of a little girl grabbing her will by its neck’s nape. It is the first whisper of a rebellion against slumber, against apathy. I wanted to write against this lukewarm tiredness that has crept into our lives. And so I did.

I finally did what I wanted to do.

What, in our lives, do we need to wake up for?

What, in our lives, do we need to save?

Wu Zhen: Water Town

Instead

So I wanted to write about pain. And how there’s a ton of it.

But then I decided to write about beauty.

Last night my three roommates and I decided to put on fake butterfly tattoos for the first day of school, which was today. Lori adorned her neck, Lindsey her ankle, Caelan her wrist, and I…well…

After dinner Caelan and I went on a chocolate and fruit date. We shared broken life and Chinese apple pears and hurt and hearts, and then we laughed and laughed and laughed. We couldn’t stop laughing until we got home, and then we laughed more.

This morning I went on a run in the cold. I passed a street intersection with a cardboard box in the middle, fireworks exploding out of it.

A little orange sits on the desk next to my fingers as I type. It is the last one in the sack. Caelan and I kept giving it back and forth to each other, maybe because the joy of giving surpasses the joy of eating.

And a memory: On my last day in Doha, I sat at the table and watched Craig and Gifford play Guess Who. Only, they played with psychological questions like, “Does your person have a secret?” and “Does your person believe in orthodontia?” I sat there and watched them and tried to absorb the beauty of that moment into my body, but I couldn’t. I saw it as if through a window on a train. It was there for a little while, and then it went.

Maybe beautiful moments like these happen all the time, every day, and they can be found in cardboard boxes or empty orange sacks or fake butterfly tattoos. Sure, pain is there. Darkness is there. You never have to look for that sort of thing.

But as for me, I’ll keep writing about beauty.

A Thin Strip of Paper

There are two ways to live. By the clock, or by the body.

One group of people lives by the clock. They get up at 7:00. They eat breakfast at 7:30. They eat lunch at 12:00. Dinner at 6:30. They go to bed at 11:00.

And they wake up at 7:00 the next day and start over.

The other group of people lives by the body. They eat when they feel hungry. They sleep when their bodies feel tired. They rest when they need to rest, work when they need to work.

The first group is not free. They have added external discipline to their lives in order to be self-controlled. The second group is free from time. They live according to what they know and what they need. They are in tune with their bodies, in tune with their lives.

These two groups of people live side by side. They work together, play together, go to church together. From the outside, their differences seem unrecognizable. In the same way, the two ways to live exist side by side. They are two spheres, these two ways to live, that exist simultaneously. In the same place. Same time. One sphere governs one group of people, the other sphere governs another group of people.

What I am trying to say is this: We are all living here in the same place and the same time, but we are all governed by one of two spheres. I sort of think of them as an Inner Sphere and an Outer Sphere, if you follow me. The Outer Sphere governs by a sort of created code, a man-made label-set, in this case time, and the Inner Sphere governs by the natural progression of things, in this case the needs of the body.

The Outer Sphere includes the rules created by the society. The Inner Sphere, on the other hand, includes the rules of the heart, collectively and generally known as the conscience.

People who live by the Outer Sphere follow the path prescribed to them by their culture, by their families, by the System into which they were born. Some, depending on the country, might call the System the American Dream. Others might call it the Business World. Still others might call it the Way Things Are, as in “that’s just the Way Things Are.”

These people follow what they’ve been told to follow in order to obtain some sort of Happiness, or Success, or Wealth, or Security, regardless of the cost to their hearts or conscience.

They make decisions based on how to keep their jobs, impress the right people, maintain their preferred level of comfort, create as little disturbance to the System as possible. Regardless of the cost to their hearts or conscience.

But I tell you this:

If you have the ability and the awareness and the perspective to be governed by the Inner Sphere, do. Do with all your heart. Do what you know to be right even if it costs you your job, or your status, or your comfort, or your security. The Law, the rules of Society, were set in place to provide external discipline for those unable to control themselves. Jesus came to set us free from the Outer Sphere for freedom’s sake. So that we may live by our hearts, by what we know to be right and true and good, and that we may lay aside the rules of Society as one might lay aside a thin strip of paper, knowing that, by following the Inner Sphere, we follow something Eternal.

There's a Little Boy Singing "I'm Blue, Da Ba Dee Da Ba Da" On the Bench Next To Me

Aloha.

An airport policeman with Aviators just rode past on a Segway.

I spent the past thirty hours on a plane. Two nights. One day. Two continental breakfasts served in a tray. Three total hours of sleep. Six different airports.

I watched Braveheart and Harry Potter 7.2 and cried during both.

The distance between Doha and Maui is much farther in reality than in theory.

And here I am, waiting for the family to arrive in six hours.

Six.

Hours.

Should be enough time to sort out my life.

I can imagine that, once I see my lovely mother, father, and sister, they will want to eat dinner. And at dinner, they will want to have a conversation. And that conversation will require me to explain how I am. Oh, pesky subject. I suppose I ought to prepare a statement. Especially considering the state of lucidity I find myself in.

Well. I left the United States to live in China four and a half months ago. Now, I like tomatoes and apple pie and pomegranates and sweet potatoes and pork and white rice and dark chocolate ice cream. I have read The Five Love Languages, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, The Weight of Glory, Velvet Elvis, Love Wins, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Einstein’s Dreams, One Thousand Gifts, Stories for the Nighttime, The Naked Gospel, Evolving in Monkey Town. I have traveled to the Middle East, and Tibet, and Beijing, and Hong Kong, and Kashgar, and Yangshuo, and Hawaii. I have ridden a camel and run a marathon and studied mandarin and fallen in love with international education.

But all those things, they are only surface things.

I am more deeply changed by others. I can follow those shifts in me backward through little things that happened along the journey.

My “theology” is different. As in…it no longer exists in the same way it once did. I think somewhere along the way I experienced a sort of saturation of broken people, people who were unsure of God’s good plans for them. This brokenness was present in my group, in the Tibetan monks setting themselves on fire for freedom, in the East and the West, everywhere. My visit to the Middle East rekindled my passion for the Islamic culture, rekindled my questions about heaven and hell and salvation and balancing the wrath of God with the grace of God. I witnessed street evangelism, the "hit-and-run gospel," that made me question whether or not I even wanted association with the label “Christian." It can be such a trudging word, baggage-heavy with unfriendliness (perhaps “follower of Christ” might do?). I began reading John, and if anyone were to look through its chapters in my Bible he or she would find my pen highlighting passages about Jesus’ character and the requirements for salvation (belief, belief, belief, belief), amongst other topics. All of these things made me want to know more, to search deeper into who Jesus really was (is), what He wanted (wants) from us, and why He created humans in the first place. I guess somewhere along the way, life happened, and I decided that I don’t know many of the answers that a “good Christian girl” should probably know. I don’t have my theological ducks in a neat and tidy row. For now.

But I do know this. I want to pursue Jesus. I want to live His radical life and be transformed right here and now, and partner with Him in His transforming work in the world. Here. Now. I want to be a Christian who is not afraid of having conversations with God about doubt and anxiety and anger and confusion. I think He can handle it. And furthermore, I realized (to the liberation of my soul) that I will never quite know all the answers. I will die one day, and I will still have doubt and questions and concerns. And that is okay. That is okay.

So. If I strip my current theology down to its fighting weight, I get this:

1.   God didn’t give up on the world – He sent His son for it!! So neither will I give up on the world, but rather work to put as much light and goodness in it as possible.

1.5       I have learned more than ever that people are convinced about Christ not through argument or apologetics or theology. From what I can tell, they are convinced through the love and action of humans who are trying to pursue Christ.

2.   Jesus loves me.

All that should at least get my family and I through an appetizer.

Brownie points and kudos and such if anyone actually read through all of this twenty-year-old angst. I think even I’m too tired to go on.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will, gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.” – Rainer Rilke

I suppose this is all part of the phenomenon known as “growing up.” It can be messy sometimes, and I think I’m learning to respect that messiness. Play in it. Be patient with it. Dance in it, before it gets too clean.