Monthly Archives: March 2013

Uncertainty is the Key

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One of my friends has had her obsessions flare up again (she is worried that her brother will die on his spring break trip), and she emailed me for prayer and advice.  I asked her, “Do you want tough love?”

Her response:  “Yes, okay, just hold on a second I have to prepare myself.”
A minute later: “I am ready.  Go.”

I wrote back:

I’m not going to reassure you about this because LIFE IS FULL OF UNCERTAINTY, and we have to learn to live with it.  I’m not saying this to be mean, but the truth of the matter is that he could slip on the Minnesota ice outside and hurt himself that way just as easily as a trip to California.  We DON’T KNOW.  We CAN’T know.  All we can do is make decisions based on the evidence available.  The evidence available suggests he will be fine.  Whether you worry about him or not won’t change anything except for how YOU cope with his spring break.

The best thing that you can do for yourself to keep from spiraling is to repeat to yourself, “I can’t know if he’ll be okay.  He might be.  He might NOT be.  Either way, he knows God, and I have to just live my life with uncertainty.”

I want to reassure you.  But that would be just silly—who am I (who is any mere human) to reassure you of something like this?  Our lives ARE like a vapor!  We have no way of knowing.

The evidence available suggests that most healthy young people live till their 70s, so that’s what I’m going to plan for.

***

My friend thanked me for the tough love; I think I’m allowed to dole it out because she knows about how cognitive-behavioral therapy changed my life.  CBT is really just a giant act of tough love, isn’t it?  We’re put through torture so that we can barrel through the hell of daily life with OCD.  I know I am so glad to have gone through it myself, and that is why I am not willing to reassure someone of something we can’t know.

Life is full of uncertainty, and each obsessive-compulsive wants to eliminate it– which is just not possible.  Still, we go to great lengths to attempt this impossible feat.  Really, our rescue is in learning to embrace the uncertainty.

If it boggles your mind a little, that’s okay.  It still does mine too, and I’m a success story!

For those of you with OCD, is it hard for you to receive tough love from people?  For those of you who love an OC, is it hard for you to dole it out?

Quite Literally

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During the many years of my life when OCD was in charge of me and not the other way around, one thing that it demanded was that every single thing I say be true– literally true.

There were no sudden exclamations to friends of “You’re my favorite!”  No declarations of “This is the best!”  If I was leaving a voicemail at 12:14, I wouldn’t say, “Hey, it’s quarter after; call me back.”  There just wasn’t any room for that in my mind and in my life.

Lyrics were difficult.  I was very careful with what lyrics came out of my mouth; I didn’t want to make any promises or statements that I couldn’t hold to or that weren’t true.  I had to stay one step ahead of the singer to gauge whether it was okay for me to sing those words.

I remember one evening, I was singing along in my car to an Andrew Peterson song.  In it, he is singing to God, and the lyrics are, “I will sing your song from sea to shining sea.”  As soon as the lyrics flew off my tongue, I started to think about how I now was required to plan a cross-country roadtrip just to keep my word.

As a writer, I was very timid about memoir, believing that if I didn’t get every detail right, it would amount to a sinful travesty.  Dialogue?  Way too risky.

Even sarcasm was difficult sometimes, though I never entirely abandoned it.  I did wonder for a time if writing fiction was sinful in and of itself, since the stories were made up … you know, lies.

I tiptoed for so many years.  I was so exact, so literal, so bent on perfection.

Today, I am an honest woman– but I have freedom.  When I tell stories, I don’t worry about getting every detail right.  I have space in my life to breathe.

shhh

Do spoilers really spoil the story?

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I was intrigued to discover that researchers at the University of California–San Diego had studied this idea from a scientific/psychological perspective.  Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt ran experiments with twelve classic short stories, including mystery, ironic-twist, and literary stories.  The stories were presented in three ways: as-is (without a spoiler), prefaced with a spoiler paragraph, or with that same paragraph incorporated directly into the story.  “Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions” (Kiderra, “Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’”), although when the spoilers were incorporated into the story, they weren’t received as well as the stories prefaced by the spoilers. 

Although “the researchers are careful to note that they do not have a new recipe for writers to follow” (Kiderra, “Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’”), I think there is much to be learned from this study.  Christenfeld boldly states, “Plots are just excuses for great writing.  What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant.  The pleasure is in the writing” (Kiderra, “Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’”).  Another further article regarding this study states:

Perhaps, [Christenfeld] said, people enjoy a good story as much as a good twist at the end. Even if they know how it comes out, they’ll enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

“Writers use their artistry to make stories interesting, to engage readers, and to surprise them,” Leavitt and Christenfeld said in their paper, to be published in the journal Psychological Science (Potter, “Spoiler Alert: Stories Not Ruined If Ending Revealed”).

Leavitt and Christenfeld, though not writers themselves, are onto something, and Death, the narrator of The Book Thief,  explains this very well:

Of course, I’m being rude.  I’m spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it.  I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much interest in building mystery.  Mystery bores me.  It chores me.  I know what happens and so do you.  It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.

There are many things to think of.

There is much story (243).

And this, I believe, is the crux of the matter.  Readers—voracious readers who truly love story itself—want to know those “machinations that wheel us there.”  Readers want the details.  Death/Zusak is right.  There are many things to think of.  There is much story.

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Works Cited

Kiderra, Inga. “Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers.'” UCSanDiego News Center, 10 Aug. 2011. Web. 07 Feb. 2013.

Potter, Ned. “Spoiler Alert: Stories Not Ruined If Ending Revealed.” ABC News. ABC News Network, 12 Aug. 2011. Web. 07 Feb. 2013.

Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.

 

Which Education?

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WHICH EDUCATION?

Wind-burned face, knit cap,
flannel shirt, Beckham beard.
He looks like a damn demigod,
smells like jack pine and fresh water,
like snow and soot and sky. 

So much sky.

He has heard the secrets that trees tell,
the gossip of salmon, the poetry of the stars. 

My notebooks full of dates and progress,
Appomattox and the Rosenbergs,
seem silly in the cool shade of this hero.

I could love him again; I know it.

He pulls a Moleskine from his back pocket, says he’s
published a little here and there, no big names.
Can I read them? I ask, terrified he’ll say yes. 

which education3

 

Can shame co-exist with grace?

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Earlier this week, A Deeper Story shared an incredible post called “A Lesson in Words: They Mean Things,” and while I generally like to produce my own work on my blog, this post was too good not to share.

Here’s the beginning of it:

My voice came out braver than I felt, startling me.

“I need you to explain what you mean by God-centered shame.”

The entire class turned and looked in my direction. A guy sitting at our table cleared his throat and shifted in his seat.  I didn’t realize the tension in the room until I spoke up. But it was clear: they are the leaders; we are the students. They know more than we do. They speak; we inhale.

I couldn’t ignore my gut any longer – the small voice telling me to speak! – and so I did. I raised my hand, and when my hand was ignored, I interrupted the greeting to ask my question.

The response to my question was mediocre and confusing at best, and so I pushed a little more. “But, I still don’t understand. How can shame exist within His kingdom if Christ went to the cross despising the shame? Shame cannot coexist with grace. It can’t.”

And they told me that it came down to the Greek roots of words, and in 2 Corinthians 7:10, the godly sorrow leading to repentance is really an offshoot of godly shame. We’re faced with our sin, and so ashamed, we’re moved to repent.

People joined in the discussion. I still wasn’t willing to let it go, but my words were starting to trip over themselves because of the almost robotic-like responses of those around me. Phrases like “Well, I think what he means is this…” and “we can definitely feel shame over our sin and it lead to repentance” and “I can totally see how shame, in this context, would be beneficial to our salvation” were said.

And friends, I swear I saw red.

“I still don’t see how they relate.” I said. “Grief is not shame. Sorrow is not shame. When I feel shame, I believe lies. Grief and sorrow are healthy emotions. Shame is not. Shame is negative. Shame speaks lies.”

To read the rest of the post, click here.

Then hop back over to my blog and let’s discuss!

ashamed

my favorite supporting characters in YA

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I decided to do something a little different: blog about book characters but NOT the main ones!

Here’s my list of favorites:

Magnus Bane from The Mortal Instruments series | A party-boy warlock with sass and wit, and willing to take fashion risks?  Love Magnus.

Molly Grue from The Last Unicorn | Even though Molly seems a little volatile at first (“Damn you!  Where have you been?”), she ends up being the solid one of the group.  I admire her humble servanthood and her level-headedness.

Raffy & Chaz from Jellicoe Road | I had to group these two together.  They are some of the best supporting characters in all of YA … and they bring a whole new element of tension into the story.  I LOVE HORMONES!

Eustace Clarence Scrubb from the Chronicles of Narnia series | Arguably not a supporting character, but I’m reading Voyage right now, and he’s kind of a supporting character in this one.  An absolutely fantastic character transformation.  Love his un-dragoning.

Thomas Mackee & Jimmy Hailer from Saving Francesca | Melina Marchetta completely nails her depictions of teenage boys in this book.  We have Will Trombal to swoon over but also Jimmy and Thomas to fall in love with in a totally different way.

Ben Cassidy from Jellicoe Road | At only 5’4″ he sure has some guts.  Not to mention he is freakin’ hilarious.  I love that he is willing to go head-to-head with Jonah Griggs, even though Griggs is a tank.  (In case you never realized it, Ben, Anson Choi, and the Mullet Brothers from Jellicoe Road reappear in The Piper’s Son, which features Tom Mackee.)

Diana Barry from Anne of Green Gables | Could you find a truer bosom friend in all of literature?

Neville Longbottom from Harry Potter | Neville probably has the greatest transformation of any character in the whole series … in those early books, you would never guess what a heroic heart lay waiting to wake in that chest.

Max Vandenburg from The Book Thief | A Jewish fistfighter who paints over the pages of Mein Kampf and then writes stories on them is my idea of a brilliant character.

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