i can't keep my eyes open.
i feel like i'm going to faint.
in two hours i'll be watching 20 kids until 10pm
then until midnight, i get to clean up
then get set up for the next morning when we walk the children through the exodus
then i have a work of art meeting
then i finish two papers and go to class all night on monday.
pray for me!!!
Sleepless (or near sleepless) night two of three begins.
I am sitting in my ice cold house. The heater is broken and I can no longer tell if the constant shivers and old-man like stiffness in my bones is sleeplessness or the beginnings of hypothermia. The table is so cold, I hesitate to put my computer on its surface. I feel as though I am back in Boston. I remember the night I wore two winter hats, a pair of tights, three sets of wool socks, three pairs of sweatpants, a t-shirt, a sweater, a hooded sweatshirt, a jacket, and three pairs of gloves to bed as a cuddled up inside a sleeping bag blanketed with three heavy blankets.
Then, at 3am, the fire alarm went off. Trust me! Trust me, there is no fucking fire! Nothing related to heat could possibly find an unthawed nook in our giant apartment complex. Finals are tomorrow and I will not leave the room temperature coccoon I've carefully made. I pull tighter into my warmer world where I can pretend it is a December night in Seattle, which would now seem like tropical paradise.
The alarm presists.
Then, the voice of a calm young woman, who obviously is not in danger herself of leaving a freezingt apartment complex to go into a below freezing night that, at 3am, is surely at least 20 below zero. Before coming to Boston, I never believed that there was even a purpose of single digit marks on a thermometer. Negative degrees? That's not possible. Are freezers even that cold? I still don't know. Kind of doubt it.
The woman says, "Floor 9, evacuate at the tone. Floor 9 evacuate at the tone."
I stared at the ceiling where her voice seemed to be coming from. "Don't you dare go down to floor five. If you go down to floor five, I will find you and rip those falsely soothing vocal cords right out of your safe and warm throat."
"Floor eight, evacuate at the tone."
"Floor seven,"
Her chorus dragged on like a blood curdling, sadistic version of 100 bottles of beer. "one thousand people sleeping warm in their beds. one thousand sleeping people. take 100 out, freeze them in three feet of snow, 900 people sleeping warm in their beds."
"Floor six."
I was no longer threatening and it was no longer in my head. Out loud I was praying: "God, you brought me to the fuckng tundra that has been a tundra to me in every sense of the world. It is spiritually dry and cold. It is freezing the life out of me making me hard and tired, and all I'm asking for in return for obediently following you to this wintery Hell is one night at room temperature, sleeping before a final exam. That is all."
God seemed not to care. There was more tundra for me to experience.
"Floor five, evacuate at the tone. Becky Tucker, move your freezing ass outside so that you can be emersed into an ice age at the tone."
I obeyed. I always obey. I talk big but am a people pleaser in the end. Authority runs me like Greenlake joggers run their pit bulls - the dogs may have been ferocious, but love lulled them into compliance and to matching the gate of some silly middle aged man in a bright blue sweat suit listening to sermon tapes from Chuck Colson as he starts his day at God's heal.
Five hours passed - ok 2 - ok, probably a half hour - but it felt like five hours and I'm writing the story so....five hours passed before they let us back in. "It's ok, there's no fire," they told us. I was too cold to be sarastic or indignant. I was too tired to run back to my bed. I gave in. Cold it is. Cold it will be. I give up fighting the weather - but not my dreams of home.
What's the point? I don't know. The table feels warmer now. The temperaturehas hints of a tropical breeze. Harry Middleton and fly fishermen everywhere are laughing at silly men claiming to know an equation for meldeing predestination and free will. Together with them I pitty those poor students who are cramming for their exams.
It could be worse. God has been good to show me the cold so that I can remember paradise when I am near it.
Two sleepless nights will be done in 8 short hours with only one more to endure. Praise God for Sunday night's rest. I'm sure I will meet God there and will have been changed in the compiled hours of deprivation.
so...i was up until 4am then up again at 7am. i'm probably going to be doing that two more times before monday.
i've to got be honest. i hate harry middleton and i hate fly fishing and if i have to read one more word about either, i might just quit school.
i was talking with neal yesterday about a group from mhgs called eagle and child. i told him i might be ditching youth group on thursday so i can go.
he found the name first odd, then nerdy. i explained that it is the name of the pub that lewis and tolkien used to hang out at.
he laughed at me then asked, "are you going to dream up brilliant fantasy worlds." then he ventured on some silly tangent in a british accent. but i stayed with his words.
as i have been faced with the modern church and broken by it - made hopeless by it - it almost makes me scared to dream of something different. however, as i begin to ponder tomorrow's church - sinners and saints seattle maybe - i feel myself dreaming again...
so....yes neal, i hope we do dream of brilliant fantasy worlds.
...and that to the fantasy, may we add flesh
tears, the word wow, and swirling thoughts on how to do something similar are all i have in response to james' post, "Confessions Like Reed During Ren Fayre "
please read this blog...and if you're in seattle, think of what it might mean for us here.
oh to be sinners and sainst seattle - and to even remotely resemble our older brother...
I read A River Runs Through It, watched the movie twice, and read the book again. I may still have missed it. Why? If Maclean is haunted by water, I am haunted by academics. The task of reading this text reminded me of walking to Kerry park with my friend Chris. “Where are you going?” he confoundedly asked. “K e r r y park?” I spoke the word so slowly it became at least four words. Why was Chris asking me where I was going when we just decided to walk to Kerry park. “Umm,” he still seemed confused, “is Kerry park going somewhere anytime soon? You’re walking like your chasing someone or something. What are you looking for.” Feeling chastised for my gate, I slowed, stood silent, and tapped my finger to my nose, as I always do when I am in deep thought. “Nothing I guess. Nothing. Maybe that’s the problem. What do I do when I’m looking for nothing? Am I present when I’m looking for something? Is it possible to be present here when I’m looking for something that must be ‘there’ because it isn’t ‘here.’ Or maybe it’s between us and I’m looking for encounter – but my rushing is a hinderance……….[on and on into nauseating infinity]” I’m sure Chris wondered if my existential response, floating once again to a cerebral place of philosophical inquiry, was a passive aggressive way to punish him for questioning me. At any rate, I’m sure he wished he had not interrupted my rush.
We walked in silence for a while as I thought. I am so used of rushing through academics and the many tasks academics push into a two-hour corner, that when I am not looking for the answer to a question, I don’t know how to be. “You’re doing it again. Dude, for a short chic, you walk really fast. Can you walk slowly and just take things in?” I stopped, breathed, and tried. Each step, I tried to match Chris’ gate. When I managed to match his gate, I began to multi-task by looking at the moonlit sky, the ivy growing on old brick walls, children and parents walking, elderly couples huddling for warmth, dogs dodging in and out of the brush, curious about every element and smell of their trek. All these things had been there always, but until I stopped and forced myself to look, I knew them not and robbed my journey of their beauty.
I am haunted by academics, and those few moments I allow a ghost to be nothing more and the haunting not to imprison me, I am raptured in a beauty that utterly destroys and reconstructs me. Nowhere is the difficulty of meeting such moments, nor the transformative beauty of these moments so stark as in reading.
Josipovici closes his chapter “reading” with a reading benediction:
Our task is to wrestle with this book as Jacob wrestled with the ‘man’ in pitch blackness, and not for the mere sake of the contest in order to wrest the book’s secret from it, but in order that we may hear it utter its blessing upon us: but that, we must not forget, is what we would expect of our encounter with any great book.
Though I’ve been thinking of that quote for four days, it still stings as powerfully as the first time it invaded my rushing mind just like Chris’ voice. I remember back to seminary when a TA suggested we read the Greek New Testament for devotions because the foreign language would “slow us down.” Expletives! I want to should endless expletives if this is what it has come down to. In order to encounter a text, I must have difficulty reading? In order to walk slowly, taking in the scenery from the Queen Anne Caffee Ladro to Kerry Park, maybe I need to forget how to walk or gain a physical impairment. So, after reading the text only to realize I failed miserably at encountering so much as a word, I watched the movie. After watching the movie a second time, I felt prepared to return to the text. I imagined the boys’ father with a metrenome, holding me to a gentle, artful pace as I sought God’s grace for the hurried mess that has become my reading. Could I enter the story the way Paul entered the water? Could I come even within three years of thinking like the characters? Could I sit on the shore and watch the way Norman did as the world melts into one thing and a river runs through it? Not quite, but I came closer, and that was enough for this week.
so...here's my new idea:
next summer or fall, i hope to start a house church.
i want to rent or possibly buy (scary but possible) a house in a poorer area of seattle then move in with a bunch of people (at least 6 or so but if i could, i'd love to get a HUGE house and have even more than that) to start a house church.
probably sometime in january, i want to sit down with all the people that are interested and start discussing what it would look like.
very little am i sure of except that the church would be called "sinners and saints seattle" and would be familially connected with my spiritual family back in boston.
in this moment, i am overwhelmed with tearful, intense anger at gordon-conwell.
i realize a lot of you who read this now don't know the story, so here goes:
when i came to gordon-conwell, i wore my heart on my sleeve. i cried all afternoon every sunday my first four sundays because i missed the kids i worked with. empathy would make my eyes well up in phone conversations. the thought of global injustice, rather than burning as fotter for growing cynicism, broke my heart.
in a lot of ways, from the beginning, i feared that gcts would put me on spiritual prozac - evening out the once prophet-like emotion i had for the world, for those around me, and in my honest relationship with God. i vowed not to let this happen.
then, i come home for christmas and the rich oppertunity to enter into my friend's venture into motherhood. this christmas break was to be a time of new life - not death. after the punk rock baby shower i threw, we all went to lord of the rings. my brother and i came home tired and ready to sleep. he, though, hopped on the computer. as i put my pajamas on and hopped into the comfort of my childhood bed, the falsity of the comfort it offered - the falsity of comfort and of my childhood crashed to the floor and broke into irreconcilable shards as my brother knocked on the door. some haunting nuance to the knock informed me that what followed would change everything. i tended to be over-dramatic though, so i swallowed my fear and almost spoke as though i wasn't scared at all: "what's up jake?"
"ummm...you need to come down stairs and see what i found on the computer."
"is everything ok jake?"
my optimisticc brother said starkly, "no. no, nothing is ok."
i stopped in the moment and prayed, "God give me whatever i need for what is waiting in the dark cold of our "family" room."
what i found waas that my dad had been, yes, looking at some hardcore porn - but that was nothing. he had been ordering women's clothing, wigs, etc. he had been researching surgical procedures and had set up an identity not as michael but as micha.
where once my brother and i spent the week before christmas snooping for a peak at the gifts our parents had lovingly picked out and poorly hidden, we treked to my dad's office no in search of gifts or of love, but of a truth we began to realize went too deep to understand. we found letters, journal entries - proof after proof that my dad was living another life as a woman and was planning on leaving my mom to pursue this.
i didn't cry that night. i just sat shivering in bed until morning.
when morning came and my dad was gone, jake and i confronted our mother with the information. it was not news to her. it had been going on - to her knowledge - for at least 12 years. she never told us because she wanted us to have "normal" childhood. she was visibly broken by the fact that we now knew. jake was disturbed. i was disturbed. but, i decided to be strong for them and, when i returned to gordon-conwell, i would break down.
fast forward two excruciating weeks and arrive with me at gordon-conwell. michael paul and nate knew i needed them. i prepared them for me being a wreck. jenny picked me up at the airport and i dumped everything on her over some piss-poor pancakes at i-hop. she wanted to take care of me as i recovered and grieved. for possibly the first time, i was willing to be cared for. we arrived at gcts and it felt like relief - i could let go and fall apart.
jenny drove me to get my mail since my car was under about 5 feet of snow...how nice of gcts to transport all of the snow in the parking lot onto my car! i got my mail and there was a letter from the dean of students: concerns have been raised about your conduct as a student.
what! WHAT!!!!! i might have said fuck, but, at that point, i was still so evangelical and pure that i wouldn't have said fuck.
long story short, i almost got kicked out, and my instability as i began to fall apart over my dad played a huge role. i had to go to counseling for assessment and spent 10 weeks trying to prove to a stranger that i was stable.
meanwhile, michael paul, who had been protector and comfort in the fall now sat acroos a cafe table with me, arms crossed and leaning back in his chair. he laughed at my tears with judgement and told me - one month after finding out about my dad and two weeks after almost being kicked out of school - he told me, "you are wallowing. if you can't get over this, i don't know if we can be friends." probably not a verbatum re-telling, but essentially that is what i heard and i do know that he told me i was wallowing.
the conclusion: no one can hold my brokeness. when i grieve, i am unacceptable and will be abandoned and judged.
and so here i am - once fearless, once wearing my heart on my sleeve, and aparently, i have become hard.
maybe this is being hard, but fuck you gordon-conwell for that! fuck you for teaching me "pittied are those who mourn for they will not be comforted - they will be judged." i want myself back and don't know how to get there.
as i said, in this moment, i am overwhelmed with tearful, intense anger at gordon-conwell.
i'm a pacifist, but don't fucking fuck with my little brother!
he might not get into the degree he wants from his school because a recommendation is late in the mail and the dude who it was from may have failed to fax it.
so, rather than a degree in history with teaching certification, he might just have a degree in history - which is worth almost nothing.
i'm pissed for my little bro! i want to go yell at his reference then storm into western and demand they admit him.
i can't. i'm obviously a piss poor pacifist. but, i'll always be a protective older sister - nobody but me gets to mess with my brother!
...not to mention the heart attack my mom will have!
“Heavy drinking sometimes helps.”
“I am not like the other faces in this bland, cow-like universe.”
“[My wife and son] were both unhappy which is really the point of living well.”
“I was paying $50 a day for the privilege of having my child abused by someone else.”
“I found myself feeling like a free bird, a fat free bird.”
“My son and my wife collapsed in each other’s arms absolutely delighting in the violence they had just seen.”
-Dan Allender, 10/17/2005
though, this time especially, it seems off to quote him out of context as i -- who haven't cried in front of people since the gcts mess clumped itself with my dad and a close friend told me i was "wallowing." -- i was crying in class.
he said something to the effect that if you've lost the ability to weep over your story, then you've lost the capacity for compassion. have i lost compassion? it used to define me...but maybe i have lost it.
the question, then, is am i willing to mourn if that is the cost of compassion...is that a price i'm too stingy to pay?
every once in a while, i get a glimpse of who i really am and am completely derailed.
this happened this weekend. at the end of a leadership training thing at school, i was struck with this question:
why am i in youth ministry (in a established church setting)?
it just isn't my passion anymore. i'm not sure if it ever was. i think i was trying to do what i am supposed to do and then i was locked into the fieldd my years of education and internship. my drive to achieve and accomplish took over and i ended up in a space where i cannot be anyting but tired, uninspired, and burnt-out.
so, what do i do?
if you know me well enough, you know my dreams and thoughts are scattered and ever changing.
here's some of the things i'm thinking about. please offer insight!!!
* starting a house church
* developing work of art ministries
* developing curriculum for missional communities/maybe eventually doing retreats or something
* creating opportunities for youth to interact with and serve diverse populations
* college ministry
* eventually, i think i want to be a professor
* maybe open a cafe/book store that creates space for christians to emerge from the ghetto and that is invitational for diverse interaction.
for the first time, i'm willing to admit that i'm lost and don't have a clue what comes next.
my cry to God and to God's many incarnations in my community is: help!
Reformers days isabout a week and a half away...while working on a reformer's day post, I came across these quotes from Martin Luther:
(Note: I have left the sexist language in because, frankly, Luther was sexist.)
"God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars."
"It is pleasing to God whenever thou rejoices or laughest from the bottom of thy heart"
"Grant that I may not pray alone with the mouth; help me that I may pray from the depths of my heart"
"So our Lord God commonly gives riches to those gross asses to whom He vouchsafes nothing else"
"Be thou comforted, little dog, Thou too in Resurrection shall have a little golden tail"
"When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor"
"For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."
"I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self."
"Grace is given to heal the spiritually sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes"
"Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ."
"Every great book is an action, and every great action is a book."
(Photo by Tony Stone)
The leaves are changing. The season is changing. And fuck! It’s beautiful.
For those that don’t know me well enough, I love the color green. It makes me fall in love with God. The multiple colors of green in a single leaf amidst millions on a tree make me feel loved the way a little girl does when her father treats her as a princess. I feel like a royal heir to a kingdom too beautiful for words. Sometimes in a Seattle spring and summer I will simply stand and stare with so much awe that it is too much for mind to handle – I have to distract myself from the beauty so that I can remain living.
Now, all of that is dying, exiting my world. And the thing that is infuriating is that it is beautiful. When I see the death of my green gifts, and begin to delight in it, I sigh so deeply that even the sigh hurts and just want to shout, FUCK! DEATH IS BEAUTIFUL!
So, I can see the beauty in the death of beauty in my life.
The question that dawns on me, as I am feeling that I am living in a stage of the death of so much beauty: In the exiting of beautiful people, whose thoughts and way of seeking strike deep awe and longing in my heart, from my life. In the realization that, while amazing, Mars Hill is not the communal wonderland I had hoped. In the perpetual death and deeper death of my church. In the deepening realization that my keen intellect gets me less than nothing. In entering into practicum and feeling intensely that I am failing there and not receiving the transformation I so longed for and now shy away from.
In all this death, can I see beauty?
If I do, can I respond by saying anything other than FUCK!
Am I willing to see and receive seasons as a part of the story and to stop fighting the necessary death of transition and the loss that makes life life?
Can I thank God for and even see God in your rejection of me – in my rejection of me?
Is God there even? Or is it just one of those fallen fucked up things that is too dark even God cannot be present? Is death life or is it Hell?
tuesday again! time for quotes out of context.
this week, i thought i'd give dan a bit of a rest. instead, this week, we have quotes out of context from dwight friesen.
(i hesitate to post these because i respect him soooooo much. i want to grow up and be just like dwight! - but he did say some crazy things yesterday.)
“If you’re every really mad and you just want to stare at someone, I find that using Foucault’s name sometimes works like you’re telling someone off, you know, ‘FOUCAULT!’ and you start to feel better.”
“It’s really fricking good!”
“[Brad Pitt] is so dreamy. Isn’t he? I mean he’s just gorgeous. Do you think I look like him?”
And…as a class, we sang “the B-I-B-L-E”
- Dwight Friesen, 10/10/2005
i left a party at a friend's house in greenlake today to see her neighbors out on the porch playing folk-ish music.
what a beutiful day.
what an amazing place i live in!
i'm going to make a point of really being "in" this place!
Work of art seeks to affect global change on an organic, interpersonal, local and tangible level, putting faces on poverty and stories to injustice as we make the intangible tangible and the seemingly insurmountable within reach.
We desire to engage a generation emerging into adulthood in communal stewardship of time, talent, and finance by encouraging a life that engages global issues and values the beauty and voice of art.
At Manger Art, our yearly art show and main event, we celebrate the incarnation by taking our prayers for the two-thirds world and stepping, ourselves, into incarnation. Our hope is that on the day of the art show, one could truly say and see, “Jesus Christ is born today.”
One year after desperation at the evil empire drove me to creativity and action, I am still moved by this calling. Here is maybe where I have enough faith in a loving God of grace to call myself Christian – that somehow, God chose me to head up this beautiful organization!
We met today to discuss the up-coming show.
Humbly, I need to seek your prayer and meditation on several issues:
Finding time enough to do everything.
Finding funds enough to make everything happen.
For more than 30 people to come this year - we're actually hoping for 250-300 each night for two nights.
For quality art to be either donated or loaned.
For those who come to truly value art and the two-thirds world enough to give and spend generously.
For enough capable volunteers
Here's the big one - we are debating renting a larger venue. This would be a huge leap of faith, and I'm faith poor these days. Please pray for wisdom and the perfect balance of prudence and courage - and ultimately for the grace to cover any imbalance of the two.
Humbly, I also need to seek help:
We need art/artists, street reps, church reps, supplies donated, musicians to play, poetry for a manger art book of poems, a discounted or free venue, music to sell, music to put on our "manger art" cd, tons of volunteers, and YOU THERE ON THE NIGHT!
Please, if you are in the Seattle area or if you know people in the Seattle area who might come, tell them to KEEP DECEMBER 2ND/3RD OPEN!!!!!!!!
Note: We need art to sell and art just to display. We are not auctioning this time. Instead we will have prices on the art that artists are willing to either donate or share the proceeds - ie, you might want $60 for a work and think it could sell for $80 - we could sell it for the $80 and $20 would go toward buying a farm for a family in the 2/3rd world.
Thank you and may Jesus Christ be born today in you and in those around you and in the blue sky and changing leaves!
this morning, i had a good conversation with my friend jeremiah...one of the few that i end with "well, i have to go do _______" and actually did have to go do ________. i wished i didn't have to. i didn't want the conversation to end.
he is so real, so honest, so still faith-filled.
he asked me what i still have faith in that makes me still a christian.
i tried to circumnavigate the question by starting, "Dan, the president of my school says________________" what a heap of shit.
he returned with more honesty and my eyes began to well up.
here is how i know jeremiah has more faith than he thinks - and more faith than i do: he is willing to admit his lack, to share those parts of himself that are obviously scared shitless that he might be faithless. it seems that such raw reality expresses a desire for genuine encounter - for incarnation. how stunningly beautiful he was on the phone.
to my dear, wise, real, ever passionate friend: thank you for being Jesus on the phone today. you may not be much more than this right now, but you are a striking follower of Christ - hold on to nothing else and i promise you will see his face!
hmmm...i wonder if your honesty and your open wrestling makes the face of your name sake shine in your own?
some visual thoughts on what truth is and how God is one:
a relationship occurs between text, author, and reader, that when perichortic (intimately dancing), they are joined and meet in genuine encounter. maybe, where they meet, that space is truth. you may have to squint and look closely to see truth. you may have to begin with faith that it is there. but once you see truth, you meet her and the world is changed.
what if God - Father, Son, and Spirit - are three distinct, separate persons, but the relationship, the dance between them is so intimate that it bonds them together. could it be that the spirit between God's I and Thou within God's self is what gives us a monotheistic religion and that a perichoretic relationship ought to be our primary doctrine and that as beings created and rstored in God's image, we should be growing in intimacy, dancing with God and with each other until we are one just as God is one. John 17.
if you want to read some words that will change how you see God and others - that will invite you to transformation and reflect a wise and thoughtful journey, check out my friend bryan(d thou).
he's been writing some awesome stuff lately!
I am sitting in class eating canned corn and stale cheese nips for dinner because I can't afford anything better whilst wearing urban outfitter clothing.
My priorities are obviously fucked.
It's Tuesday again, and therefore, time to see what the wacky ring master (though actually wise leader) of the blessed circus that is MHGS said last night:
“I don’t know if you can remember junior high, but it is a prototype of hell.”
“Jeremiah has just discovered his penis.”
“the prophets were always getting stoned.”
“you need to become pregnant.”
“bray like an ass but bring some excrement so we can see what we might grow.”
and then he blew us a kiss.
Dan Allender 10/3/2005
Sitting in class, I glanced down and noted the v-shaped scar on my hand. I remembered how I got it. The technician at the hospital told me it was impossible for him to cut me with the scissors he used to cut off my cast. He was cutting me, but assured me that it was just pinching and that I had a low pain tolerance. When he finally got the cast off, I was bleeding and the seed of my scar was created.
Stepping back, how did I, the overly cautious one, end up with a broken hand? My friend Dave said that I was a flake and that I never followed through on my plans with him. I made plans with him for Friday and swore to be there. When friends invited me out for drinks, I wanted Dave, then, to come – rather than flake out again. So, I ran to leave a note for him.
I was wearing platforms so that no one would know how short I was.
I tripped, fell hard, tried to save my cell phone with my right hand, landed badly on my left hand (i'm left handed) and broke my arm.
As I sit in class holding back brokenness and tears over my friend, and meet my scar again, I begin to wonder how many scars I will incur in attempt to have others see me in a kind light.
the world seems grey and broken when you hear that a friend of a friend has a baby rushed to the hospital.
the darkened mess seems more empty when you hear that the child was moved to a different hospital and may not make it.
amidst these, life seems to continue with ease.
things stop and the darkened world seems dirty, evil, and filled with shameful hopelessness when the next news comes.
the problems are not a result of natural causes.
the baby's been abused by someone you know and might even count a friend.
your friend has been arressted for attempted homocide.
nothing is okay anymore.
when the depth of child - baby! - abuse steps onto your front door, the world feels too filthy and desperate to enter.
what the fuck is wrong with people?
i'm wise enough to know that the seed of this evil that found itself nestled and growing in my friend, is no different that that which is in me.
the evil is not out there, it is in here.
violence surrounds us.
my only prayer, "God save me and others from ourselves. Protect us for we know not what we do! God please protect these sweet, fragile gifts you've given the world!"
