changes VI: Impulse

I was reading Don Miller's road trip story again, and I liked the way he said that beauty wasn't, to him, entertainment, a fact which he felt the institutional church had mistaken. Real beauty should make you hurt a bit on the inside. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I never used to miss people very much when I, or they, left town. I had a pretty engrained idea of self that to be independent was to be strong. But I've just had a couple friends leave, just for the summer, and I'm left wanting words that explain that by saying I will miss them I mean that they are so important. It hurts, but its a good kind of hurt. Does this make me weak, to become weak for another person? I think this, rather, roots us in whom we are meant to be. Roots us in one another. God, we might accept, is a Trinity- a community in one entity. I love this idea, that community could be so core to our divinely created identity. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't know if anyone falls in love, but I have observed that lives can make sudden shifts, as if a chemical switch is turned in the brain. My boss told me the other day that he was smoking three packs a day, had tried to quit multiple times but one day he just realized what he didn't want to end up like, and, throwing his last pack out the window on the way from one city to another never had another craving. I wonder if you can't fall, by some extraordinary miracle, into purpose. When I met somebody who made me want to be a better person, who made me want to fall for them, I determined that I would if i could. A shift so strong took hold that it hurt to realize it. A good kind of hurt. A kind of hurt that used the lens of grace and determination against my self-realization to get a glimpse of what could be. Like music: a thousand mistakes and poor decisions and absurd stubbornness to create five or ten minuets of uninterrupted incredulidity. Sometimes this resolve would hit me, just like it was whatever the antonym of depression is. Take that experience (you might know it) when a depression hits so hard that it moves through emotional pain and manifests on the edge of physical pain: the moment that undermines hope and drills a hole from the chest to the stomach, that makes you stoop, grimace, clutch your arms around yourself, reduced to grasping at loose timber after the boat has sunk. It is this, but inverse. The resolve hits the same nerve centre with a different impulse. It strikes a piece of rebar into the hole that depression left and causes you to stand upright, proud, determined, eyes locked on the goal, swimming for shore. A determination that is banked on one side with a clarity which vice falls against, and on the other side with the awareness of self- frailty and the need for divine help.