Duality and Character
I feel so wide awake right now! I just came back from Kim’s party, so I’m probably highly caffinated from that, but somehow I don’t think that’s why I’m sitting here, feeling like I could write paragraphs and paragraphs right now! Lets see how long I can go without rambling.
First off, Kim’s party rocked. It’s too bad that more people from school couldn’t have come, most of them had to work, but seeing everyone from dance again was so great. I just… I don’t know why! It’s one of the three groups where I feel like I really belong. With the core group of people from dance, church, and school.
Nessa called me earlier today to ask what present to get Kim. I must have sounded pretty stupid, because she identified herself right at the beginning but my brother was saying something to me at the same time, so I missed her name. I figured it was someone from dance, because I would have recognized the voices of Kim and my school friends no problem. Except for brief conversations with Ashley and Elise, I haven’t talked to any friends from dance class on the phone. Crap. Now that I remember the call… I said something like, ‘Yeah, Vanessa was telling me that.’ She probably thinks I’m nuts!!
(Now get ready for some highly unorganized thoughts.) There’s nothing like two hours in the car to sort through some concepts. On the way home from Lethbridge today I thought about a lot of things, so I don’t know where to start.
I wonder if you can learn things about yourself just by sitting there and contemplating. From some of my experiences, I’m going to say that you can. I was thinking about last night; we had a few tents set up in Grandma’s back yard, ready to sleep there overnight. (‘We’ being my brother and all my cousins on my mom’s side.) It was around eleven PM and someone suggested we walk to Gyro. I’ve been there a few times, it’s just a park about ten minutes away on foot. Part of me thought, ‘Gyro? Yeah! Ooh, such the rebels. Very cool, let’s do it.’ But another part of me, a larger part, thought, ‘What?! Are you nuts? Yeah, this is Lethbridge but dangerous people can be out at this time… the grown-ups would kill us if they caught us.’ I seem to get this split-mindedness thing a lot, because even just reading over the last sentence, I think, ‘I sound just like that wimp Chuckie from Rugrats, saying I don’t think this is such a good idea, guys…’ but then, ‘Uh-uh. My hostility was justified. Bad things can happen if you’re out at night… especially to a sixteen-year-old female. It’s not being a wimp, it’s maturity, darn it.’ then again still, ‘Yeah right. Nothing bad would happen, not if you’re with Dustin. He’d kill someone if they touched any of us.’ It goes on. So, I’m either mature or in desperate need of a freaking spine. You decide.
Next topic, grade eleven and revolution of the church and youth group. Okay, maybe ‘revolution’ is a bit strong of a word, but how about revival? This has been coming up quite a bit this summer, which is why… (I’m going off topic for one second. I recently got this butt-kicking new Discman. You can play mp3s on it and put the setting on random play, so the songs play all out of order) … when Going Public by the Newsboys started playing while we were driving home, to listen to the lyrics… wow. We are so there. And it’s strange because I was telling Kim and I was telling Andrea, that this coming year is going to be different somehow. Look at the lyrics to Going Public. ‘This is surely a banner year.’ Exciting. Scary. If I think about it too much, yeah, I get scared. ‘This is too much for me, I’m not ready for this, I’m in over my head.’ But it comes down to this, and Janet’s the one who had told me this recently. If I’m not ready to handle this, I won’t have to. But I want to be.
The youth pastor at Rain this week had a really cool concept that he told us about. I was ahead of him on the theme metaphor. We each had to research an element in ninth grade science, and I did Carbon, so I knew that graphite and diamonds were made of the same thing. He said that the only thing that separated graphite from diamonds was the making process. It’s a lot harder to make a diamond, but the finished product is way more valuable. It’s the same with people. He was talking about how he kept praying, asking God to give him character. When he started to suffer, he got confused about why. Eventually he found out that suffering builds character. My own dad is living proof of that; his father died when he was still in elementary school. As a result, small things don’t worry him at all. (It annoys my mom a lot of the time, but I’m really glad for it.) It’s actually pretty rare you see him noticeably worried at all. I’m no psychologist, but I think what’s happened is that by having something so dramatic happen to him at a young age, worrying almost anything else seems kind of petty. There was a pre-Green Bay party this week, and my parents were bringing the fixings for barbecue beef on a bun. We were on our way there when my mom realized that we forgot the barbecue sauce. She almost died. My dad shrugged it off, which clearly irritated her. They ended up running to the Safeway near the lake to pick some up. But the point is, a large majority of the people there wouldn’t have noticed that there was no barbecue sauce, and a larger majority wouldn’t have cared one way or another. The meat is already marinated in a sauce that is seemingly one atom different from barbecue sauce in molecular structure. I’m giving my dad the point for this one. Anyway, back on the subject. Character. I don’t think my dad was praying for it when he was that little boy, but he sure as heck got it.
Which brings me to this, though not really a conclusion. I want character, and am reluctantly willing to suffer moderately for it. While something dramatic clearly builds the best character, I don’t want something so heart-breaking to happen to me. I mean, no one does, but if I pray for character, aren’t I kind of asking for it?
