Liars May Say It all, Just as well.

“Above ALL, don’t lie to yourself.The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him… or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.

And having no respect, he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love, he gives was to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in all his vices – all from continual lying to other men and himself.

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone.”

- The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky

The truth is a complete and accurate portrayal of the reality that exists.

It has struck me lately that people are pathological liars, and I include myself in this. By pathological liar, I mean to suggest that everyone distorts reality. In fact, the more I listen to people, the more I am convinced that humanity has very little hope to hear consistent truth from anyone. I think, in part, this is why the idea of “Absolute Truth” bothers people. This is why it is hard to believe that, seeing that we all part-take in this giant facade, there is something out there immovable, steadfast and utterly and absolutely true to its core – unshakable and never incorrect, never bad, never wrong.

The Lies We Tell:

• BLATANT:Blatant lies are obvious contradictions of reality.For example, if I were to call myself a MAN or suggest that I am 6 feet tall. Obviously that would not be an accurate statement.These types of lies are told the least but are the most commonly well known. Most people, when engaging with the general public, will not tell you something that can be seen as obviously untrue. Oddly enough though, it seems like this is the type of lie with which most people are familiar. What does this mean?

  It means first, that when people consider whether they are liars or not, they are judging against the concept of a blatant lie, as stated above.
  This means, consequently, that people RARELY determine that they are liars, because to them, in order to be a liar, you must be saying something that is obviously untrue.

  Lastly, this means that there must other forms of lying that are prevalent, under-recognized and far more stylized. I hope to shed some light on what I think these are…

1. Conscious

• Omission
• White Lies
• For the Sake of the Other

2. Unconcious

• About Self
• About Life
• About Others

Of God and Belief.

So begins Part II of Para Coffee’s life, and the 2nd anniversary of Eric and me meeting.

I can’t say it’s all been easy – try as I may to pretend like I have a good attitude and am a supportive wife, most of the time I’m grumpy, fussy and mad about something or other.

Belief in God is hard – not so much intellectually (at least not for me) but psychologically - especially these days. I saw a trailer for a movie the other day – the title of which is Legion. 

The plot, at least based on the trailer, goes something like this:

An old woman comments on a pregnant girl, and then says the baby will burn. Come to find out the old woman is an angel sent by God. Then there is a hoard of other angels, all send by God, to kill all of humanity because we’ve pissed him off for the last time.

On the other side, there is the arch angel Michael, who defies God to help save the child of the pregnant girl because he is humanity’s only hope. Michael and Gabriel get into a tiff in which something like this is stated:

Michael says, “Hi Gabriel. Always so ready to please God, despite his commands.”

Gabriel retorts, in a cloud of dark smoke with black wings and a machine gun, “Unlike like you.” There is intense music, angels with wicked bones all distorted and wings climbing out of the sky – and who knows where God is – but he is out to kill us all. 

The end of the Trailer

This is world in which we live – God hates the world and wants to kill us all with angels.

This is a stiff change in protagonist/antagonist since I’ve been a child. I’m pretty sure Angels were the good guys and God loved people.

Realizing that the tide has turned has only made it more difficult for me to proclaim belief in God because, well… the God in which people *think* I believe is really Evil. And, if I try to suggest otherwise, there is the confusing logical fallacy of the existence of evil somehow proving God’s lack of existence. Then there is a psycho-mumbo-jumbo (yes, this is an ad hominem argument-to-person…) about intolerance, as if somehow they’re tolerant by being intolerant toward those “intolerant people”! Some how Satan and God have switched places. Some how Demons and Angels have switched places – and anyone suggesting otherwise is really just pretentious, a bigot (anyone know what bigot really means?) and brainwashed.

It is unsettling to say the least, especially because I am a giant people pleaser, I like to look good to everyone, I want to be thought of a smart, and get really offended if anyone tries to lump me into a category that could be anywhere related to Jerry Falwell. In essence, I am a person who is obsessed with looking good and being thought of well.

Another reason belief in God is difficult for me is because I can understand the Atheist (we’ll just capitalize it to elevate it and encapsulate everything atheistic). I have read and researched and continue to think through arguments against God. I ask myself all the time – does this make sense? Why do I believe in God? What does it mean to not believe in God? Would that be better for me, for humanity? What is true about the world in relation to God and creation? Do I know enough to say FOR SURE to myself that there is or is not a God? How can I ever know enough? What is enough? Is it only enough if I can convince other people? Would I be ok if there wasn’t a God? Could I admit that to myself? Am I really just concerned with whether other people believe in God and therefore not being the idiot minority? 

Lastly, it is hard to believe in God because Evil, assuming that God is not the Evil, seems to ALWAYS be winning out – either within myself and other people, through nature and in general throughout the world. The very fact that we must designate between good and evil seems to me to mean that evil is far more prevalent that it ought to be. And therefore – what is God doing in all of this Evil? How much of this am I responsible for? Can humanity be held accountable for the evil committed or is it primarily God’s fault because he created us to begin with? 

So – this is ground on which I wrestle, from which I speak, by which I walk and pray and think. 

My Goals for this Year:

• Write more
• Pray, read and think more
• DO more for other people
• Believe and Trust Eric more
• Assume that my wisdom is flawed insofar-as I am flawed.
• Lie less to myself and others, even if it seems mean.
• Accept truth from myself and others, even if it seems mean.
• Work mightily at Para and complain less.
• Cook dinner more.
• Seek to better all situations, rather than to whine about them to people who can’t help fix anything.
• Lean not on my own understanding, but acknowledge God in all I do and let him make my path straight.

Kelley Up-Date

Whew,

Feels like forever since I’ve written anything.

Just to up-date. We’ve been crazy with Para Renovations, hiring, managing and getting ready for the school year. If you read this, please keep us in your prayers as we know the beginning of Fall is always pretty hectic and stressful.

The Lord is reminding me that I need Him more and more and that I’m pretty lazy and ungrateful when I have nothing to do but watch/read trashy movies and books.

It is a strange thing to be so intent on following the Lord, only to lose sight of the truth in the midst of boredom and general lack of discipline. I am learning that the race is easily lost when I lean on my own understanding.

Hopefully more to come, but these next two week are to be really insane, so probably will be while before anything new pops up.

Lora

Crickets and My Home.

I bought lime-green rain boots my freshman year in college.

In Houston, particularly at HBU, it rains incessantly during the spring, and everything floods. It smells like mud and grass for weeks at a time, and no one’s hair cooperates until mid-march (and those who’s hair still looks good are the envy of girls everywhere). In an effort to maintain some semblance of attendance to class, I decided lime-green rain boots were the way to go.

In Virginia, they seem silly. Probably this is because I am not 18 anymore with bleach-blond hair and multiple-piercings – but for whatever reason, they, my lime-green rain boots, have been relegated to an outdoor perch which has gone untouched since we moved into our new house on Shamrock Rd.

The former owner bought this house in 1941, that is during WWII. The house was built during the depression. It is modest, homey and quaint. It has a dog-heaven backyard and odd little porches with random stairs here and there. The basement is secure from water and painted light yellow from mid-wall to the floor. It is cinder block.

Attached to the top floor is a sleeping porch with glass that tilts depending on whether it’s raining or the person would like a breeze. And, underneath this sleeping porch is where Roxie (the former owner, a feisty 98 yr old woman) kept all of her metal trash cans, jars for jams, a rake, a wooden latter and some old lenoleum to put on top of her greyish-blue painted outside storage cabinet.

Roxie, 98, was an avid gardener. She has about 10 varieties of lilies growing against the back fence, a moon plant, sweet olive, iris, and a myriad of other plants that I could not tell you the name. She also has a clothes line, 3 actually, with a sack of clothes pins. There is nothing like line-dried sheets flapping in the wind.

So my lime-green rain boots have been hanging out with Roxie’s greyish blue storage cabinet, jam jars, rake and ladder for the past month.

Today, I decided it was time to clean up underneath this sleeping porch and become friends with Roxie’s jam jars, rake and ladder. I also decided lime-green rain boots were necessary to plod around in the mess of metal trash cans, with some broken glass I had seen nestled between the ladder, the house and some mess of last Fall’s leaves. Bare feet and glass are not friends.

So, Patty Griffin t-shirt on, some Nike shorts and my lime-green rain boots, I moved the greyish blue storage cabinet and analyzed the pile of leaves snugly pressed against the exterior basement wall.

I imagined Roxie, small-framed as she was, raking leaves and pressing fruit to be frozen and eaten with home-baked bread. It is strange to think that her entire adult life was spend here raising two children, gardening and hanging clothes on the line, watering her now-dying moon plant, and setting up bird-houses to hang from our diseased tree.

Straw broom in hand, I began sweeping from the leaves around the door, and finally made my way to the packed fall leaves, and stuck my broom right in the middle, squishing my lime-green rain boots right up to the edge.

The first cricket bounced higher than my knees, and as I moved my broom from the middle of the pack of leaves, pulling the pile away from the basement’s exterior wall….

100 crickets, all various sizes, began a tribal dance of bouncing up past my knees, as if moving forward and off the porch was not the goal. The goal was to hop in a cacophony of sounds and heights, at the base of my feet, protesting the disruption of their home.

There was a 2 inch cricket, little bitty baby crickets, medium-sized crickets all brown with strange zig-zag markings on their backs, hopping around my feet, clinging to my broom and hissing.

I muttered briefly and then let out a screech. Eric is, of course, at Para… and I, in my lime-green boots could only stand there in sheer horror, as the crickets bounced, with their wicked and crooked legs snapping.

I destroyed a cricket home, hugging my basement’s exterior wall, making friends with Roxie’s jam jars and greyish-blue storage cabinet. Therefore, I decided a break… and some ice tea was needed to recover from my mutilation of nature and from nature’s obvious disgust with me…

Of Marriage and Women.

My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.  I said I’d hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit.  ~Jerry Hall

Ever feel like you’re not a “real” woman?

There is a woman out there, at least a concept of a woman, whose center is so secure, whose confidence is so brilliant and yet whose humility in Christ is her sole allegiance, that the roles laid out for her to play by conventional society seem trite, silly and ridiculously undignified; and she has no problem requiring more of herself and her company, no problem denying the ego-centric momentary affections of man for the greater goal of dignity and a future-oriented covenantal relationship or a life of purpose-driven singleness. Either way – her goal is bigger than herself and grounded in submission to Christ.

Most of the time, I feel like I ride the fine line between hooker and biach – between strength and passivity, pleasing and contempt and play the various roles asserted to woman in movies like “The Ugly Truth” or “The Last Kiss” or “The Proposal” and really want to be Mandy Moore in “A Walk to Remember” or Rachel McAdams in “The Notebook” – but that requires too much effort – or even, Maria in “The Sound of Music”, Elisabeth in “Pride and Prejudice” or Anne from “Anne of Green Gables.”

There are many a heroine from which to choose, and their behaviors that we implement or view as excellent, affect how we see ourselves, relationships, God and the church.

So I want to look at how marriage is viewed and how this impacts our notions of feminity and masculinity – and therefore how we engage each other (both male and female), and how the church and God speak to all of these ideas.

 To give a grand understanding of the negativity of marriage, here are a few quotes I’ve found on the subject:

 

• Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
   
• Why do married men gain weight while bachelors don’t?  Bachelors go to the refrigerator, see nothing they want, then go to bed.  Married guys go to the bed, see nothing they want, then go to the refrigerator.  ~Author Unknown
   
• Why get married?  For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state.  If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.  ~Quentin Crisp, “The Art of Celibacy”
   
• Marriage:  A word which should be pronounced “mirage.”  ~Herbert Spencer
   
• Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.  ~Robert Graves
   
• People do not marry people, not real ones anyway; they marry what they think the person is; they marry illusions and images.  The exciting adventure of marriage is finding out who the partner really is.  ~James L. Framo, “Explorations in Marital & Family Therapy”
   
• The total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.  ~Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
   
• Wedding rings:  the world’s smallest handcuffs.  ~Author Unknown
   
• God created sex.  Priests created marriage.  ~Voltaire
   
• Monogamy is over-rated. -  Seirra Miller
   
• I don’t believe in monogamy. Human beings are not monogamous creatures by nature. – Scarlett Johansson. 

 

These are just a few of the mentalities floating around. I’ve heard some of them before in plain conversation, felt some of them in my bones – the fear or the possible reality of such dysfunction. I hear it now in conversation with girlfriends, with wives, with various guys with whom I talk, on television, in magazines and in the movies.

I am beginning to think about what makes a woman beautiful, what makes a woman real, feminine, and Godly. There are so many enormous pressures to achieve certain righteous goals, as if we can be self-righteous in our womanhood, as if to say that, like salvation, true femininity is an act of the will rather than the Grace of God. And to move beyond that and to say, that marriage or singleness is an act of the will, rather than the grace of a Creator God.

Why Talk About Marriage and Women?

I think our conception of marriage and singlesness hinges A LOT (not totally) on our conception of who we are as woman, who we think are supposed to be, how we think we are supposed to behave, and how we think we ought to go about choosing a spouse and accepting a call to marriage, or choosing singleness and accepting that call, as well.

And, also, our conception of femininity is tied, in part, to how we view marriage, relationships, sex. So much of the identity of woman is in relation to men or other women. Our obsession with looks, behavior, clothes, mannerisms, sexuality is all directed toward the outside – what does this look like to other people? Am I prettier than her, how do I compare in the line-up with models or porn-stars? Will he find me attractive, weird, awkward? Am I lovable? Am I beautiful? Will I be cherished? Is my value determined by whether I’m in a relationship or not? 

There must be a goal to all of our striving as women to achieve and maintain a standard of “beauty”, to act flirtatious or conversely, to set men straight. 

So – I’m going to be looking at the verses in Ephesians 15 and at the Proverbs 31 section on “A Wife of Nobel Character”.

Also, using a few other sources that have peeked my interest, thanks to this awesome lady Rose.

For now – what is femininity to you? How have you seen marriage viewed in culture? What pressures do you feel as a woman, either single or married?