Ginger

Meet Ginger: my sassy mentor-turned friend, who's spirit is truly poetic.


How many people can you meet for coffee and randomly start reciting poetry with? Really.

Haha, here you go ging.

SAY not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

Adventures in Befriending Total Strangers

Transportation devices are like these conversation breeding machines where everyone is the other's equal. It does't matter if you're a congressman, an eight year old, a hipster, a carpenter...it's like democracy at it's finest. (Or a tyranny where the bus driver is king).

I might be 1 in 1,000 people who feels this way, but 999 times out of 1,000, if you put it out there, the person responds as if they feel that way too. If you put out the genuine vibe, they come back with it. It's like transferring energy or something.

On buses, plains, trains, boats, I have talked, laughed, wept, prayed and shared music with perfect strangers, and I just needed to verbally process that it's one of the best feelings whenever it happens.

On Set for the "Singularity"

I like being around cameras and creative people..and IBM computer makers who postulate the end of the world is coming via cyborgs.

How I look at Work.

I hate it when girls say, "I look soooo bad" when they know they look like a hot mess. It's like the day after a big night out, waking up in an oversized Tshirt, excess residue of fake tan, fake eyelashes still on, booty shorts, and morning beauty glow.

Come on, everyone knows you still look amazing.

Which leads me to my next point: you haven't seen someone look truly awful until you've seen me go to work in the hut. Imagine an actual homeless person dressed in golf pants and a wrinkled collared shirt.

But one out of every 97 days, I decide to look like a normal human. I'm always caught off guard by how much other people are caught off guard. I'm feeling pretty routine, but why is my manager acting awkward around me and why am I getting free Starbucks...along with my entire family?

1) Guys, you have no idea how much power a girl has in facilitating her own attractiveness. Some of you think you know. You don't.

2) Girls, if men are catcalling, stop complaining, because you do have the option of making yourself look ugly.

Don't forget you made this.

"20 reasons why ___ is lame and gross."

It's a document I always make when I get broken up with. If you keep imaging your ex pooping, you literally can't be attracted to them anymore. IT WORKS.

The Beautiful Imperfect

This summer, I've had the honor of experiencing life's recent twists and turns with these two women--even though we're miles apart. It's funny, because we're all going through interesting seasons with their own respective challenges...and because I'm learning a lot, I feel like every time we're on the phone, I end up vomiting all of the truth onto them and their situations. Somehow God uses it. Both of them tell me, "Leah you are such an encouragement..."

If only they knew--that they encourage me WAY more. Even on the days they aren't feeling positive or upbeat. Here's why:

I love being in relationships with people who know that they are flawed. Everyone is imperfect, but a lot of people cover up or ignore the areas where they fall short, because they feel like they have to "have it together." But really, who has it together? Our judgments are so thinly based. Things are rarely how they appear. Someone might seem like a whole person because they have a great job, always say the right things, dress well, act responsibly, etc.--but how do you the place it's coming from? The first step towards healing is brokenness, and knowledge of brokenness. Some people who "have it all together" are deeply insecure.

So I think the most NOBLE and encouraging thing a friend can do for a friend is to let them in on their flaws, give them permission to hear about it, speak into it, and walk through it with them. These girls are never boring to live life with because they dream high, struggle deeply, and mess up all the time--but their hearts are beautiful because they belong to God. At the end of the day, sharing life with them is an adventure because we don't cover up insecurities with "put together-ness." There's no easy way out: we'll be stripped, broken, built up, and changed.

It's the most exciting thing to get to be a part of--to see God come in and transform your friends lives. Love you girls. An angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.

God, romance me

I'm naturally drawn to the exotic, but knowing God has made me see the exotic in the ordinary: family sitting around a fire telling stories late at night, listening to rain pour outside my window, running into an old teacher in a coffee shop, getting an encouraging text from a friend 2,000 miles away, getting a book in the mail...

God invites us into a rich reality in Him. It's creative, transcendant, normal, joyful, painful... and all about loving the people around you. When God romances me, I find the balance to dream without being driven by dreams; I can long for things without losing contentment and thankfulness for the present moment; and I'm free from the sin that so easily entangles...

Coffee and Sweatshirts

I can't wait for fall. Crisp air, coffee,
sweatshirts, friends, romance,
beauty, leaves and leaves,
falling everywhere.

Coffee dates with Mel

Reasons why Melanie Herrera is beautiful:

-She looks for cosmic truths in ordinary situations

-She is guided by her heart AND her head (rare combo)

-She goes against the grain

-She's silly, absurd, thoughtful, and perfectly lovable

-She invites challenges

-She's not out to prove she's right, but to keep thinking, observing, living, and growing until she is fully confident that she has discovered what life is all about.

This girl...is a gem.




(^^ Sunday school diagram? heh)

New York City Romance

I always suspected that I would never fall in love here. There's too many attractive, interesting people, and everyone is constantly running around, partying, playing games...

It's hardly the environment to find someone exceptional, because there's always the idea you could easily find someone else.

For me, falling in love requires something powerful - the mysterious connection between two people that violently excludes the possibility of anyone else interfering with it. It's that thing people say comes once in a lifetime. You could go on a hundred dates and never find it, or you find it once and lose it, or never notice it even when it's right under your nose.

Is it safe to say we're all too busy for love? Building our own mini empires?

I Get Free Things

I think when Jesus said, "you have not because you ask not," what he was trying to say was...

Don't just go into Jamba Juice and accept that the deal is 10% off. Ask for 20% off!

I don't know...worked for me. And the next time I wore THESE glasses. 50% off.

Sucka what.

Rejection. Sort of a rant.

Rejection sucks. It doesn't matter what happened--whether it's your boyfriend, or a crush you went out with once, it always feels the same when they aren't texting you back or you see them with another girl. Everything, just...sucks.

The whole time you're shopping for groceries you're saying to yourself, hmmm...wouldn't it be nice if "so-and-so" was doing this with me? But you can't contact them. Can't sound desperate. So you push the thought away, buy your groceries, and start walking home, and vow to never speak to them again.

You see a cab pull over and decide that you deserve a more comfortable ride home than the gritty subway to resurrect you from the general feeling that everything sucks. He rejects you too.

Then you just stop. Really? The cab driver too? And it's raining? There's just no real reason to go home anymore. Why write a paper. Why scratch the next thing off your to do list. You start throwing a small pity party in the street like a statue wishing something exotic or loud would happen just to get your mind off of it.

Of course, ALL you want to do is text him...and of course...it's the one thing you can't do. But the thought of talking to anyone else at the moment feels disappointingly sub-par. So you resort to thinking about him, until gradually a small glimmer of hope arises at the possibility that...he could be missing you too, at that very moment.

Interesting... although, a bit pathetic... that the best consolation in the moment you feel like everything sucks is the notion that someome else desires to be with you. Humans are relational to the core.

When something happens that reminds you of your frailty--you're very raw vulnerability--you realize how shallow the paper pushing, clean, professional atmosphere is. What we're really after is loving and being loved, and that always involves the messy, risky, deep stuff that real living is made of.

Men in Suits

Men in Suits are seriously attractive. Baha. I love this web writing project.

Except this ad is definitely for a competitor...treason....

Mehwell.

Ridiculous Admissions Questions

Alexandra just turned to me and said, "Leah, you will not believe it. This prospective student just asked me if we have an acquestrian program at Kings."

"Um...yes, have you see the mounted policemen on horseback? They're all King's graduates..."

Politics, Philosophy, Economics and Horses.

Adding one more word to the already wordy major. Can we handle it?

Reaching the Grandparent Market Niche?!?!?

Sophia Ashworth

Laugh.

The Divine Side of Prayer.

I'm sure my frustrated, venting prayers look so ridiculous while I'm praying them--especially walking the streets of New York--knowing any person watching thinks I'm talking to myself. Outloud.

Have you ever prayed a prayer something to the effect of this:

"God please take this distraction away. Really, it's bugging me. And I want to obey you, but how can I obey you when I don't know what you're saying? And I want to worship you first, but (long sigh), I just love concrete things more than abstract things. And right now, Jesus seems abstract. So here's my list for tonight: I need this distraction gone, and I need to know that you are real. Help me be okay with the reality of hell, and please show me if I'm really supposed to do music...(longer more exasperated sigh) see, now I'm praying too many things--there's no way I'm going to remember which answers I'm waiting for. Especially with three papers due tomorrow, which, shoot, I haven't started. Yeah, by the way, please help me with those..."

Something inside of me shrinks when I hear people use the phrase, "the power of prayer." Partly because it sounds cliche. Don't get me wrong--I think prayer has great benefits. It makes me verbalize what it is I really desire. It concentrates my will toward those things. In group prayer, it could even concentrate the group on a unified goal. All good things. But there is still this gnawing feeling that I don't really believe prayer invites anything divine into the human side of things.

Why do I think this way?

Simple: I never pray.

But tonight shockingly reminded me that the "power of prayer" lies in God's ability to facilitate in hours what would have taken me months.

First, a phone call from my mom turned my heart away from the distraction. Then, in the back corner of a dimly lit coffee shop, tears welled and wouldn't stop falling from my eyes. Francis Shaeffar's book The God Who is There renewed my faith in a God who does exist, even though the inconsistencies in modern philosophy makes it really hard to believe in him.

The idea that faith and rationality are mutually-exclusive is one that we still haven’t recovered from today. Today, the former is seen as a product of optimistic, “wishful thinking”, and the latter as more of a pessimistic, accurate perspective. This precept is not even true, and yet it keeps thousands of rational people from committing to a belief in Jesus. As a result, most people have developed an understanding of the world that is fragmented, void of an overarching narrative, and meaningless. Schaeffar says, “When we speak of being under the line of despair, we do not mean that these people necessarily sit down and weep, but that they have given up all hope of achieving a rational unified answer to knowledge and life (23).

So the distraction removed, my faith in God renewed, and all of it happened in a way that replaced my worry about hell with a desire to bring people freedom, in this life and the one to come. And to top it off, a few days later, the music stuff was confirmed.

Ha, all that being said, I think I'm going to pray more.

Dream.

I woke up at 5:30 and immediately started tracing the chronology of events in my dream. I knew this one was different. I didn't want it to escape me.

I distinctly remember being frustrated about what I wanted to "do with my life." Dr. Jackson was talking me through it.

"Write down all the things you're interested in doing," he said.

"See that's the thing" I moped back, writing just about every artistic interest I've ever had, "Whenever I think about the gravity of the human condition, I just want people to meet with God. Developing these skills seems really trivial..."

On the top left corner of the scribbled list with words, scribbled-out words, and circled words was the phrase "meet with God."

He circled it in bold and pointed emphatically, as if about to prove a point, "Just focus on this one. Just focus on this one"

He started to blur, I was making excuses until I stopped.

It sort of made sense.

But things in dreams always make a different kind of sense than waking life.

Weltschmerz.

I watched person after person pass by through the large Starbucks window. My heart hurt and my eyes began to water. Taking time to think about how many people go through life completely lost is a painful recognition of reality. How could Christianity be the hope of world when it seems like it's only the hope for a minority group? How could that possibly be good news?

This guy must have seen me crying, but he came up to me regardless and asked if the seat across from me was taken. I wasn't feeling anything close to light--or chatty, for that matter--but I listened to his happy description of New York sightseeing adventures and the like. A few seconds of silence followed...so I thought I'd be real.

"I'm actually a little sad right now."
"I can see that," he answered.
My mouth curved sardonically, "You must have seen my crying."
"Yeah, what was that all about?" (his German accent made the depressing subject seem almost adorable).

Since he was German, I figured I would explain how I was feeling in a word only the German language expresses so accurately: Weltschmerz. By definition, it means an overall weariness and sadness at the collective absence of hope in the human condition. My Weltschmertz seemed a foreign concept to him, but he said he was also a Christian. Not only that but some sort of youth minister back in Germany.

Which is why I was confused at his self admitted statements that were in COMPLETE contradiction with his belief system.

1. He said truth was different for each person.

2. He couldn't answer the question, "Who is Jesus?"

3. He doesn't believe it's necessary to read the Bible.

Now, I'm not saying my newfound German friend is not saved, does not love God, (etc) because I don't think salvation depends on a verbal formation of the correct "theological ideas." But that doesn't negate how powerful and important those ideas are. How important it is to know who Jesus was and is. How critical to think it is necessary to read the Bible, because the Bible gives a description of the world that is different than what most people will tell you. The truth in it allows you to suck the marrow out of life and love people in ways you thought weren't possible.

So his self-admittance to being a Christian, but apparent inconsistency with a real Christian understanding of things depressed me. Not just because of him, but because I know that the majority of people would agree with his three statements above.

And they miss out on the unimaginable freedom truth brings.

After we talked for awhile my German friend opened up about how he had just broken up with his girlfriend of a year and a half. I noticed him shaking. Somewhat. And I hurt for him. I knew he needed Jesus in a very real sense, but I also knew he probably wasn't confident enough in the reality of His existence to look to him.