Notice: I'm going to break my self-imposed rule and get uncomfortably personal here for two reasons: one, because I'm hoping somebody who's going through the same stuff as me might read it and get something out of it, and two, because I want people to know what I know now about God.  Some of you have actually heard some of this from me before.

My world fell apart on November 11 of last year, when I found out that my dad had left. They say divorce is really hard on the kids, but what they don't tell you is that it's hardest on grown-up kids.  A little kid doesn't understand very much about marriage or what the family is supposed to look like; they just grow up accepting a skewed form of normalcy (this is not at all to say that divorce is not hard on a kid - it's perhaps the most traumatic experience a kid can have).  But when you're older, you already have ideas of the way a marriage is supposed to be, and of the way your family is, and a divorce shatters them all to pieces.  Everything you ever believed to be true, to be real, to be reliable, is suddenly just . . . gone.

They always tell the kids, don't blame yourself. And I think I know why.  Divorce is incomprehensible.  The brain doesn't like incomprehensible stuff, so it tries to rationalize it, to make it fit.  In order to make something like that make any kind of sense, you find somebody to blame.  Most kids love their mommy and daddy, so they blame themselves.  Me, I blamed my dad.  I won't go into any of the reasons for that except the obvious one: he was the one who left.

Eventually though, I had to come to the realization that I still love my dad, and nothing will ever change that.  No matter what his reasons were, I still believe he was - is - wrong in his actions, but I can't be mad at him, not forever.  And I can't put all the blame on him either.  I can't shut him out, and I'm starting to discover that I don't even want to.

That puts me back in the state of having this huge, incomprehensible thing in my life, and not knowing what to do with it.  If anything, I'm now more confused than ever.  I can't make the pieces fit together this time.  It doesn't make sense; it's all wrong.

Where is God in this?

The day I found out my dad left was a Sunday.  I go to church in the evenings, which meant that after finding out my dad had to move out, I had to face church.  Luckily, I go to the kind of church where people are real; you don't have to glue a smile on and pretend things are okay when they aren't.  So I didn't.  But when I got there, we happened to be doing something different that night - it was called "Celebration Sunday" or something, and instead of the usual format, we just sang praise songs the whole night.  As you might imagine, that was really, really hard for me.  How do you praise God when your entire world has just been shot to pieces?  How can you even find Him to look at Him when everything around you has shifted and you don't know where you stand anymore?

At my church, we have a few songs that we sing nearly every week.  Some people don't like it, but this is what happened that night: I saw the words and heard the notes that I'd heard so many times before, and I realized something very important: God hadn't changed, even if everything else had.  I thought my foundation had crumbled right under my feet, but that night I realized that there was still something holding me up, and it was Jesus.

I started crying.  I couldn't sing any of the words or even look at them.  I could only listen to the words, hearing them as if for the first time.  I don't remember very many of the songs we sang that night (I say we even though I wasn't singing, because my heart was understanding), but I do remember the one that goes like this:

Savior, He can move the mountains
My God is mighty to save
He is mighty to save
Forever Author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave
Jesus conquered the grave

As I stood there crying in the middle of Celebration Sunday, my roommate Audrey and my boyfriend Justin put their arms around me and just held me for several minutes.  And I think that's when I knew that God was right there with me - that He had been there all the time. I knew that whatever had happened and whatever was about to happen, I could get through it.  It wasn't so much Audrey or Justin - it was Him, and they were the ones He was using to hug me and let me know that everything would be okay.

Do you know that song "Held" by Natalie Grant?  I heard it yesterday on the radio, I think for the first time since before my dad left.  I started crying again because it so perfectly matched what my heart had been feeling since that day.  Here are some of the lyrics, the ones that apply to me:

Who told us we'd be rescued?
What has changed and
Why should we be saved from nightmares?
We're asking why this happens to us
Who have died to live, it's unfair

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

This hand is bitterness
We want to taste it and
Let the hatred numb our sorrows
The wise hand opens slowly
To lilies of the valley and tomorrow

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

There's a part in C. S. Lewis' book Out of the Silent Planet when Ransom asks where Oyarsa, the sort of God-figure, was when a part of the earth was destroyed.  The reply he gets is, "Where he is now."  And maybe that sounds really canned to you where you are, but to me, in the midst of an inner earthquake so to speak, the only thing that kept me from falling was realizing that God hadn't left or changed or forgotten about me; He was still there, and at that moment, He was holding me.

Okay, so I probably should keep going with this, since I barely started.

So . . . my vacation began Friday, May 31, when my mom drove me to my brother's house so he could take me to the airport the next morning, from which I would fly to Detroit to be picked up by Gregg and René, who would then take me to Toledo to spend the next few days with them.  It was a remarkably uneventful flight, which is quite rare for me.

I was a little nervous to meet Gregg and René.  The last time I saw them in person was at last year's Gathering exactly one year previous.  But as soon as I saw them I became perfectly at ease.  That's the nice thing about meeting people, especially people from the Circle.  They make you feel at home.

I got there sometime in the evening on Saturday, but Gregg and René hadn't eaten so they took me to their favorite restaurant, a Mexian place, for dinner.  It was very very good, but sadly the restaurant is now closed.  Why do they only close the good places?  I think it's part of a grand conspiracy to make us forget what good food taste like so that we will eat at fast food places the rest of our lives.  Or, not.

On Sunday I went to church with Gregg and René, only René was working in the children's church thing, so I was mostly with Gregg.  I already blogged about that.  But they had a rack of books out in the entrance area, and one of the books was Basic Christianity, and it was really cheap, and I've lost my copy apparently.  I should've bought it.

But anyway, you probably don't want to hear about every detail of each day.  It was all pretty uneventful, really.  I went grocery shopping with Gregg one day, got my hair done with René one day, and reread Arena by Karen Hancock one day.  I didn't accomplish anything I had originally planned on doing, like choreography or senior project stuff or even scrapbooking.  It was absolutely glorious.

When I was reading through Leviticus, I noticed that God made the Israelites take week-long holidays.  They had to celebrate and not do work for a whole week!  Nobody does that.  But when I was at Gregg and René's house, that was a real holiday for me.  It was the first time in a very, very long time that I wasn't stressed or worried about anything.  My biggest problem was being allergic to the cats, and Alavert took care of that pretty well.  Justin told me one night that I sounded more at peace than I had in a while, and he was probably right.

I think it must be very important to take a vacation - not just to go out of town somewhere, but to leave your home behind you when you go.  It doesn't do much good to go on vacation if you're still going to stress out about productivity and work and schedules and whatnot while you're there.  You have to take a real actual break, and then when you do, you'll feel SOOOO much better.

I am very thankful for my vacation last week.  It blessed me beyond words.

I'm in Toledo, Ohio, visiting friends right now. On Sunday I went to church with them, an experience which raised many thoughts in my mind.

I've been uncomfortable in churches for years. I can't exactly remember when it started, but at one point in my teen years, I started questioning a lot of things about the service. I questioned the music a lot - not the music style, but the lyrics - what they meant, why we were singing them the way we were, whether they belonged in a corporate worship setting (or any worship setting), whether anybody else was thinking about what the words meant or just the feeling the song gave them. Things like that. Over time I started questioning other things too. I grew increasingly distracted, even uncomfortable, in church services - not just the church I went to, but every church I visited. This continued when I went to college, to the point that I pretty much gave up on finding a church that didn't make me wonder, so I started going to the church my roommate went to.

Then my sophomore year, Justin and I visited this little informal church called The Journey. I'm not really the kind of person who makes spiritual judgments based on feelings (as the above paragraph may indicate), but practically from the moment I entered the building, I felt this sort of sense of . . . I don't know, openness, I guess. I felt like I could worship God, as myself, with a kind of freedom that I hadn't known before.  I cried during the first couple services I attended because it was the first time in years that I had been in a church services without all the nagging questions and criticisms going through my mind. It was as if someone had taken all my half-formed thoughts about what I thought perhaps church should be like, and put them into reality. So I kept going there, and I still go there.

Anyway, so this Sunday I visited this other church in Toledo. I guess it qualifies as a megachurch - over 1000 people per service. The sanctuary is actually an auditorium, with theatre seats (complete with cup-holders) sloping down to a stage - yes, a proscenium stage with a curtain and all that, theatrical lighting, and two TV screens on either side of the stage, on which are projected a video of the stage that is being recorded by a camera guy in the middle of the auditorium. I think the video also goes to some smaller TV screens that are out in the lobby, for the parents with crying babies or maybe people who can't get into the auditorium/sanctuary when it's too full, if that happens.

So anyway, it felt like a rock concert, only without the rock. Very showy and professional. My favorite part was when this guy sang a solo ("Coming Back to Life" by Echoing Angels), because he had the most amazing, clear, strong voice, and I wish I could hear him sing it again (I looked up the song with the original singer, and he's nothing compared to this guy - just your average, American Idol-genre pop voice).

It really wasn't my kind of place, but evidently it's lots of other people's kind of place. I don't know if I can knock that without knocking every other church I've been to and didn't like for one reason or another. As much as I think my church, The Journey, is just what I think a church should be like, I bet other people think that their churches are just what a church should be like, and maybe in reality we're all missing some aspect or another.

But I got to thinking this morning. I've been trying for a while now - ever since I first visited The Journey - to figure out what about it made me feel comfortable. And I think I finally know the answer: it wasn't trying to impress me. It seems to me like a lot of churches are trying to impress someone - either seekers and unbelievers, or new people in general, or their own members, or young people or old people, or tradition, or maybe even God. And when I went to The Journey, it kind of just . . . was. And I guess because of that, I was able to focus on God when I was there more than at any other church, where I got the impression that they were trying to measure up to some standard set by their higher-ups or by culture or by themselves.

Maybe I have this entirely wrong, and for all I know those churches aren't trying to be anything more than The Journey is trying to be - an authentic expression of worship to God. And what I'm trying to learn now is, maybe everybody's authentic expression of worship is a little different. I mean, maybe somebody even worships by making small-scale lighting designs on auditorium stages. Maybe somebody's form of worship is making big buildings where believers can congregate on a weekly basis - like St. Peter' Basilica or the Hagia Sophia, only not as beautiful.

And maybe it's okay that the church I feel most comfortable in is my own, because it's the one that best fits -my- authentic expression of worship. But if that's the case, maybe I shouldn't try to knock other churches that aren't my style, because that doesn't mean what they're doing is necessarily wrong. It's not necessarily right, but i don't think I'm the one to judge that.

So now that I don't have Premium anymore, I finally updated my page in an effort to get close to what it was . . . I haven't found a way to use non-standard fonts, unfortunately, but other than that it's not too bad.  It'll do.

I was stretching after modern today with my roommate, and she mentioned how good this one really deep stretch feels, and it got me thinking, stretching is a lot like prayer.

For those of you who haven't studied muscles a lot, when you stretch a muscle, you can do the short quick stretches and they can help you feel more loosened up and ready to go.  I think they give your muscles a little bit of a wake-up.  But if you want to increase your flexibility, you have to do deep stretches that last a long time.  The reason for this is, when you stretch a muscle, it responds by tightening (this is of course to prevent injury).  It goes through a series of reactions, called "stretch reflex," before it ultimately tires and relaxes, allowing itself to be lengthened.  (By the way, deep stretching should only be done when your muscles are very warm, or else you can tear them.)  That kind of stretching, done on a regular basis, will help you get more flexible.

I think prayer might be kind of the same thing.  Now, I'm really good at the short quick prayers that you say throughout the day to help you keep going or do the next thing or whatever.  I'm not very good at just praying for a long period of time.  And I wonder if maybe that's the kind of praying that really helps you grow, because it takes so much more discipline, focus, and patience.  I wonder if it has different results from the short quick prayers - I bet it does.  I think I should practice that kind of praying.