Perhaps I only now sit down to write this out of some perverse loyalty to what this once was - maybe every year from now, as my birthday comes and goes, I'll return here to move the header up by one year and feel obligated to say a little something; like a speech. A speech to a vacant audience, in an old dusty theatre which never held sold-out crowds in the first place. A funny thing about a theatre like that - it ends up meaning more to the owner than it does to anyone who ever visited.
Well. Enough about that. What ideas have I ached to get out for some time?
I guess if there was an obvious place to start, it'd be concerning relationships. Not that I'm in one, obviously, but having exited a 2 1/2 year affair some seven or so months ago, I think my perspective on relationships has changed rather dramatically. While I'm obviously tempted to just claim that they're all futile and will only end in heartache, I don't particularly enjoy being that much of a Johnny Raincloud. I am more wary of them in general, and not just because of the 4+ months I've spent in relatively high(er) levels of depression: moreso because I keep seeing them fall apart around me.
Four. I've known of four couples to have their marriage fall apart...in the last two months. Four. That's eight people I know who had to deal with the heartache of learning that "the one" wasn't, in fact, "the one". Learning how freakish the human heart is, that within a year you can go from "I'd be willing to die for this person" to "I wish this person had never been born" (that's relatively tame in fact). So what do you do with, forgive me, shit like this?
What I want to do is condemn people for being too quick to rush into relationships. Us cynics look around and decide that people, as a general rule, become too quickly enamored. They find someone and look them up and down and say "This guy is perfect! There's nothing I can see in him which would get in the way of us leading a happy life together." We think they should say "This guy seems okay - what is there that would indicate to me that we can be together?" It's the difference between declaring victory because nothing's wrong and withholding victory until everything is right. This is my nature - things (including people) will always tend to be bad, unless they prove otherwise.
But that doesn't seem very Christlike.
Neither, might I add, does it seem Christlike to find everyone perfect, to declare every okay person you meet to be a saintlike, or to throw yourself into someone as their soul-mate just because you see nothing wrong with them.
Balance.
Jesus had a remarkable way of knowing how to hold people to a high standard without thinking less of them. Someone once told it to me this way: "He understood to prepare for the worst in people, but genuinely expected the best from them." Think Dumbledore - he knows, just like we all know, that certain "bad apples" will always make the wrong choice. He knows that most people will just do whatever their base desires tell them, and will act selfishly. He knows this, and he prepares for it. But he doesn't live like it. He's smart (in preparation), but he's also loving (in life). He always gives second chances, he always waits for the people to make the right choice, and he always loves them (even when they make the wrong choice).
Back to relationships. Somehow - and this is pretty hard - somehow, we're supposed to prepare for people being people. We're supposed to understand the risks, understand and prepare ourselves for everything falling apart in the blink of an eye. And we're still supposed to jump in.
Because the idea is, we're never really jumping all the way in. In a perfect relationship, I'm not devoting myself 100%, fully, irrevocably to another person. Me and another person are devoting ourselves 100%, fully, irrevocably to God. Together. With, and in, and through, and several other prepositions, each other.
So, surprisingly, neither the cynics nor the bright 'n cheery gang are right this time. We have to balance, and when we fail (as we will), we have to (sigh) run back to God. He'll, after all, be waiting.
