whatiremembered

[whatiremembered]

Writing on my phone

Why does it feel safer than on my laptop?

Because it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere

It’s just on my phone. It can’t hurt anyone— can it?

I have to get started.

Keep going

Keep writing

I made a promise to god I can’t break, but every day I fail to write I break the promise

God isn’t mad at me, but I still feel like I’m failing him

He tells me I’m not

That I’m writing now, and it counts, even though it is just a little.

I wonder if I could actually write a whole book on my phone. With my thumbs.

It scares me

Everything scares me these days.

I know I have nothing to fear but God, but I’m afraid god will put me through more if I don’t obey.

That’s why I’m writing this. I promised I’d write something tonight.

It’s not about gender— the thing I know I’m meant to write about now, but it’s something.

I hope it’s enough. God tells me it is. God is merciful. He is much more gracious and forgiving of me than I am of myself lately, but I’m working on it.

[whatiremembered]

I am just an ordinary man with no plan. Watching his steps.

[whatiremembered]

Taking Sides

Everyone is taking sides, and I don’t want to. My side doesn’t have sides. My side only wants the fighting and hatred to stop. 

It is easy for me to say, sitting here on the other side of the world, but it is still a harder position to take than picking one side or the other in a stance of righteousness.  Nothing about this is righteous or right. Everything about it feels wrong to my bones. 

My grandparents on my father’s side lived in the farmlands outside Rotterdam during the Second World War, under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. My grandfather was active in the resistance. If you made it to the end of the underground railway on a boat to England, there is a chance it was my grandfather and his friends who put you aboard. 

Although we don’t know the details, there is reason to believe that he and these same friends executed collaborators in the night,  after the allied forces liberated Holland. He was a devout Christian, and it was because of his beliefs that he felt called to protect the innocent Jews and others who were persecuted at the hands of the Nazis who had taken his country. But participating in cold blooded killings must have been too much for him, because later in his life, after immigrating to the United States,  he suffered from severe mental illness, which led to periods of hospitalization. 

I have no doubt that he believed these acts were necessary. After the atrocities of Nazi occupation, for society to be reborn, these elements could not remain. I have no doubt that he saw no other option, and that justice would never reach those who named names for favors and protection, while innocents suffered and died as a result. 

But such acts take a toll on the human soul. It is not so easy to end a life and not be burdened by it. I won’t pretend I know first hand, but I am certain of it. 

Such is the state of Israel and Palestine, and the rest of the world while we watch on. How can we participate, or even observe and bear witness, and not be contaminated? How can we stand by and not be driven to madness by the horror? I don’t believe it is possible. We all lose something of our humanity as this happens. 

300 miles of tunnels. Imagine it. Like an ant farm under Israel. The only functioning democracy in the middle east. What else can they do? It is an infestation and stamping it out is the right thing to do, for history. Cut the cancer from the body and let the body heal. From a ruthless, purely rationalistic standpoint this is the right approach. In time they will have casinos and become sports mascots.

This is how colonialism works when all else fails. It is not unenlightened. It does not start with eradication. But if the native population refuses to conform to the laws and behaviors of the “civilized world,” it is inevitably where it ends. There is no place else for it to go. 

I can make no judgement from where I sit, comfortably in California, far from the obscene tragedy of war. I can only reflect that war will never end until we can truly love our neighbors, and our enemies, and ourselves. 

[whatiremembered]

Everyone is taking sides, and I don’t want to. My side doesn’t have sides. My side only wants the fighting and hate to stop. 

I know it’s easy for me to say, sitting here on the other side of the world, but it’s still a harder position to take than picking one side or the other in a stance of righteousness.  Nothing about this is righteous or right. Everything about it feels wrong to my bones. 

[whatiremembered]

“God is small. God is that little boy hanging from the gallows. God isn’t powerful and mighty. God is weakness and powerlessness. So this, again, is what I’m wondering. Might a spirituality of God’s bigness and awesomeness be hindering our ability to see the smallness and weakness of God? Is not the triumphalism associated with worshiping God’s bigness hindering our ability to see God as the child hanging on the gallows? Hindering our ability to see God in the body of the demented mental patient. In the craving addict. In the senile old person in diapers. In the starving child. In the drooling retarded. In the street walking prostitute. In the homeless man on the park bench. In the queer kid being bullied on the playground. Might our God be too big? Too big for us to see the smallness of God? Where is God? God is here—weak and hanging on the gallows.”

— Richard Beck (via personalentropy)

[whatiremembered]

My submission is my strength.

[whatiremembered]

I am forgotten and I want to forget and be discovered again and again.

It is all that I can do to just keep these words coming out of my head, but this is the time.

I feel like a coconut that washed ashore on some desert island, waiting for years to sprout, then finally taking root in the sand and poking its first leaf up to the sun.

It feels good to stretch up and around again, to feel the sun on my face and skin.

[whatiremembered]

It’s hard quitting anything you’ve been doing the most of your time.

It’s hard to change. To be reborn as someone you were not yesterday. But there is this light at the end of the tunnel that keeps pulling me forward.

I’m trying to let go. Not to cling to anything to let it happen. But it’s been slow. Birth usually is.

I talk to god all the time. It’s been all that feels right to do lately, but I’ve also felt like I’ve come unmoored from the practical realities of what I’m doing with my life in this world.

I’ve been out of work for three weeks, and have a good prospect.

I’ve been stuck on in this still limbo of inaction. The crush of disappointment from losing work, though to be honest, the work had long since vanished and I was collection a check for nothing, which is its own sort of torture.

It has not been easy, but I know it has been necessary. I have surrendered to god’s path and it is the only way I know anymore.

I know it will lead me to the promise land, because there are moments when I know I am already there. That they path is the promise land. That this is god’s kingdom. Whose else could it be? What else is existences? What could it be but the kingdom of god? If god exists, and I don’t see how else anything could exist, then this world is his kingdom and it is good.

But surely it is broken. We all see that don’t we? But is it the world that is broken, or our vision that is fractured?

My perception of the world is imperfect. It has always felt so. I could never focus on what was right in front of me. I believe god has fixed that and that is what allows these words to flow from my fingers as I type. But beyond that, all of us struggle to see the world for the wonder that it is. The language we use to communicate to on another skews our vision and forces us to perceive in fragments.

Only god’s vision is whole, because it is god who sees through all of us at once.

This is a new beginning. Sitting here in the sun on November the 6th, I am at home in God’s kingdom.

I feel both alive and dead and reborn again and again.

It is almost too much to bear.

[whatiremembered]

Been learning this one the hard way this year

[whatiremembered]

Piet Mondian, 1914

[whatiremembered]

Humans are the image of god. Touch one and find out.

[whatiremembered]

I sometimes think Jesus really just have the best back rubs ands that’s why he’s so famous

[whatiremembered]

I am fortunate to have been redeemed. To be found again.

I was lost.

But now am found.

Was blind.

But now I see.

What more could I add to that. It is all that I am.

[whatiremembered]

[whatiremembered]

I don’t want to keep putting myself in the way of what god wants. I want to be a clean house for him. A temple, and image of him, a home on this earth.

[whatiremembered]

In my prayers I come to God with these things:

Purify & cleanse my heart from anything I may be wanting that is not in your will.

Humble me, help me seek what is good for me, not what feeds my pride.

Guide me in my faith. Show me your miracles and how you are capable of the impossible. What man cannot do, you can do effortlessly.

Remind me you will do it if it is in your will. Remind me of the promises you have given me and how you always keep them. You are faithful.

Thank you for everything you have given me and every battle you have saved me from.

You are more than able.

You are worthy.