The Frustrating Beauty of Relationships

If, like me, you've ever experienced what it's like to truly click with someone, you understand what I mean when I say it is both a beautiful and frustrating experience. To those who have never experienced this, what I just described makes absolutely no sense. So, for any who are not completely sure what I mean, allow me to explain.

There are these wonderfully rare moments in life where you meet someone with whom you can just connect. The connection is strong and seemingly illogical. Or at least, it looks that way in light of a society that tells us people must earn our trust and prove they are worth having in our life before we keep them around. But these sorts of friendships are different. They blossom out of seeming nothingness. They reach a level of mutual trust and depth that would normally take months or even years, depending on the person, to develop. Instead they form in only a fraction of the time. I'm talking a matter of days or weeks.
I find these sorts of friendships to be the purest sorts of friendships, for they form out of trust and understanding when, logically, there is no reason to offer either. But since when was love logical?

Isn't that, though, what makes friendship one of the most beautiful and mysterious things about human existence? For life is a journey, and when we form any sort of relationship with someone, we allow our life paths to coincide for a season, if not longer.
But just as you can't rush through any other part of your life journey--the ups and downs, the joys and struggles, the love and loss--you can't rush through a relationship. When we forget this simple truth is when the frustration I spoke of sets in.
There is actually a word for it, according to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Its adronitis, which they describe as the "frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone."

I had been feeling this very frustration for several weeks before I discovered this definition in one of the many times I was wasting time on Facebook rather than doing something productive. And it got me thinking. Why does this frustration even exist?
Before I even had time to think in depth on the question, a thought popped in my head, "It's because you're so close."

And really, that's exactly it. Like I said, most friendships take a while to form depth, only very rarely do you meet someone you can have such a strong connection with instantly. We usually have to wait months to reach a point where we feel comfortable like that with someone, in that time we've lived life together and grown in the slow deliberate way that life paths frequently like to take. But when one of these rare friendships comes about, we forget that we've only known the other person for a short period of time, despite how comfortable we feel with them. We forget that just because we trust the other on this level that would normally take longer to reach, doesn't mean we have walked through the life with them we normally would have to walk through to reach that level of trust.
If you've ever heard someone say something along the lines of, "I feel like we've known each other forever, but also like it hasn't been that long at all," then they are probably talking about one of these beautifully frustrating friendships.

In my time thinking about these friendships, and just friendships in general, I began marveling at their beauty more than ever. For the very fact that each and every one of us longs for companionship shows our Maker's mark more than anything else I can think of. This desire to not only be loved, but to love others in return is one of the many beautiful ways our relational Creator made us in His image. After all, He made someone else for Adam, not because He wasn't enough for Adam, but because Adam needed a place to pour out all the love the Father was pouring into him.
And it is in these rare, unquestioning, deep friendships that pop up out of seemingly nowhere that I see God the most. For just like with those friends we're close to, but don't quite yet know fully, when we first delve into a relationship with He who made us, this trust  and understanding comes quickly, but full knowledge of His nature and character takes a life time to grasp.

Maybe we should learn a thing or two from this picture. Maybe this deep trust and slow learning was the way He intended it. Maybe we should learn to be more forgiving and nonjudgmental in our relationships, then patiently walk through life together.

Stuck In a Glass Maze World

About a year ago, I had the fun opportunity to spend a day with some friends at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Not only is the museum itself huge, with multiple levels (including some underground levels), containing art from various time periods, cultures, and places, but the grounds are also filled with many modern sculptures. During this particular trip to the Nelson, my friends and I decided to wander the grounds in search of the giant metal tree that we heard had been added earlier that year. On our search, we came across a curious addition I had never seen before. Standing just down hill from the monstrous and beautiful silver tree was a glass maze. While not very big, the maze was still easy to get turned around in. With the glass kept amazingly clean, it wasn't hard to miss a turn and accidentally run into the opposite wall or get turned around and pass a needed turn to reach the maze's center (especially if you didn't want to look like a fool by bumping into walls over and over again).


I think in much the same way, we let ourselves get trapped by what we're told and the lies we tell ourselves. Lies like: I'm not good enough. 
I'm not smart enough. 
I'm not attractive enough. 
I'm too young. 
I'm too old. 
I have nothing to say, nothing to offer, and no where to go. 
I'll. Never. Amount. To. Anything.
"ENOUGH! Enough with the lies!" I want to scream, but if you're alive and breathing in the twenty-first century, especially twenty-first century America with its image saturated culture, you know that thoughts like these, or at least thoughts very similar to these, pop up everywhere.
But these lies trap us in the same way the glass maze traps us. For we can see outside the maze, we can see life going on beyond the glass, we can even communicate with those on the outside, but we cannot hear them clearly through the glass. We can't really connect. Or at least not the way our hearts long to connect.
These lies keep us stuck behind this glass with no true connection, making us feel isolated, even when surrounded by those who love and care about us. And when we finally get fed up with feeling this way, we start to look for a way out. But just like with the glass maze, we are too embarrassed by our insecurities. We won't let ourselves bump into the walls, even if it will help us find the right path sooner, because we don't want those around us to know that we feel trapped. We don't want them to see it. In doing so, we hide even more, further trapping ourselves and maintaining that we never connect with anyone.

As usual, I want to take this even further. I want to look into why we believe these lies about ourselves in the first place. I've learned in recent months that these glass walls that keep me feeling isolated are created by lies I've come to believe about myself. Sadly, many never realize this, because our enemy is crafty. He has mastered the art of lies, spinning them until they look like truths we can't easily dismiss.
But why are these lies so appealing if they make us feel so horrible about ourselves? I think it all comes down to who we think we are and who we think God is.
The day I started to tear down these lies is the day I realized that if God is who I think He is, then my image of myself  did not align with what I believed. If God is loving, compassionate, creative, and all powerful, and he made me in His image, then shouldn't I, as a follower of Him, be more than capable to do great things?
I mean, this logic makes sense, doesn't it? Then how come this isn't the logic used by many of us? What I think it all roots back to is what we think of God. If you're like me and you believe Him to truly be the Lover of your soul, then this logic isn't hard to follow. But how many people really believe Him to be these things?

My mom recently told me about a children's storybook bible she heard about where the author, having to summarize things to make sense to little kids, summarized all the lies that the serpent told Eve in Genesis 3 with one doubt instilling question, "Does God really love you?"
Well? Does He?
If you aren't sure on that, then I can tell you from personal past experience that you aren't going to have an easy time breaking down those lies.

Life Is Like a Box Of... Dirt?

Exodus 36. This chapter isn't packed full of awesomeness by any means, but that doesn't mean God doesn't show us a bit of His heart through it.
In this chapter, we are told for the third time in the last fifteen chapters about how to construct the tabernacle. Each time is described in immense detail and with pretty much the same words each time. Almost as if the author used an ancient copy and paste for each description. By the third time reading through this description, my eyes were beginning to glaze over. I mean, let's be honest, I don't really care how they made their portable tabernacle. But as this thought crossed my mind, I realized something... God does. God cared so much about how they built His house that he told us about it not once, not twice, but three times.

Why?

I think there could be several reasons. The first that comes to mind is that He cares about attention to detail. God not only wants us to do His will and use our skill sets to His glory, but he wants to do the job well and spend time putting attention and meaning into the littlest details of the work.
But I also think there's more than that.
While this is true, I have seen time and time again that my God is not a God of the usual, conventional, or predictable. My God plays by His own rules. And these rules don't always make sense to us at first.

Of course He wants us to put meaning into the littlest details of our work, using the skills and abilities He's gifted us to use. That only makes sense. But what if it goes deeper than that?
What if this goes farther than just our work, hobbies, and talents? What if this goes into our everyday lives? The mundane. The boring. The routine.
What then?

I've come to say recently that the Old Testament can have some really epic parts, but all too frequently we stumble across chapters that are about as exciting as a box of dirt. Chapters like Exodus 36, for example. Now what do you do when you come across these boring "box of dirt" chapters? You can do what many do and decide, "You know, I'm not getting anything out of this chapter, book, or even the bible at all. Let's just give up!"
But that's not how I roll. I decided in March that I was going to read through the whole bible. All of it. And I would write something on each chapter I came to the day I found myself there.
So, planting myself firmly in that boring box of dirt, I waited. And while I waited, I tried to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit through the irritated complaints of the lazy adult in my mind begging the child God wants me to be, "Just get out of the sand box! You have a suitcase to pack, sleep to get, and yummy citrus tilapia to eat. There is nothing worthwhile here. IT'S JUST DIRT!"
"But I made a promise," I argue back. "There's gold here in this sandbox, I know it!"

Surely you remember being a child and being absolutely sure you had buried treasure in your back yard, or dinosaur bones, or that you could dig a tunnel to China, build a time machine, or be a world famous adventurer. Maybe you don't remember, but I do. I remember believing these things with such certainty that no one in the world could tell me otherwise.
Well, God wants us to be those children, hunting tirelessly for nuggets of His truth, beauty, and wisdom in every part of our lives. But sadly, we tend to listen to the other voice, the one telling us to leave this hunt for other things.
The thing the other voice doesn't realize is that life may not always be glamorous. In fact, it's usually as boring as a box of dirt, but that doesn't mean God isn't in it, with us through the mundane and boring.

Recently, I read an article titled, "15 Questions To Ask While Dating." The idea, was things you should think about before considering marrying someone.
One of the questions read: "Do we enjoy doing the mundane together?" Laundry, budgets, grocery shopping, chores, and all the other very not exciting parts of life that make up a lot of what marriage is.
But if marriage is supposed to be a picture of what our relationship with God should be like, shouldn't we be looking for Him in even the boring everyday? Shouldn't we look for ways to worship Him and give Him glory not only in awesome spiritual highs, but also in the dreadful lows and the boring boxes of dirt?