Faith in Sense

Faith in Sense

The more I think about it some days, the more life doesn’t seem to make any sense. It’s completely random and uncertain. At any given moment the unexpected can happen and the next moment it can happen again and turn every thing inside out.  The moment you give up on something you’ve been longing for and waiting for is the moment it happens.  
The day you get arrested for driving under-age and under-the-influence is the same day your sister has her first baby girl.
Months after you break off an almost two year relationship because neither one of you are “phone people” and you’ve just stopped talking, you start having casual half hour to forty-five minute phone conversations.
When you realize that every penny you have in the world you owe to someone else, the woman who’s classified ad for a dog sitter you answered months ago emails you out of the blue to say that she’s going out of town and her regular sitter is gone and to ask if you can do it –and offers you 20 bucks a night to sleep in her house and play with her dogs. When you see life as a series of events like these, life is crazy and sporadic and has no rhyme or reason to it.

But if life isn’t just a series of events maybe it makes a bit more sense after all.  The arrest, though suck-tastic, was probably under the least painful circumstances that such a thing could happen and makes a pretty good kick in the butt to get you back on the right path. When you’re sitting in a cell, knowing that your mother will undoubtedly let you rot there, you pray for your pregnant sister to go into labor so that she will have to come get you and you won’t have to spend 24 hours in jail.  Then she does go into labor… early, and you know that it’s not coincidence, it is a miracle and a blessing. You know that the whole crazy night was all God’s doing.
While lying on your couch watching Sex in the City, you realize that “phone boy” is your Mr. Big, that one guy that you can’t seem to make things work with but who, in spite of yourself, you can’t stop loving, you get the point finally.  Things may not work now but the future is big and full of time.  You may end up in Paris with Mr. Big, and then again you may not.  But the long distance and anti-phoneness of now won’t last forever and it is not the end of all things.
You’re nearly in over your head in debt and you get thrown a rope out of nowhere, but you know who’s holding the other end.  He’s been there all along and knows what you need and will provide it for you. He only let you struggle a while to teach you to have a little faith.
I heard someone say once that faith is believing in advance what only makes sense in reverse.  Life makes absolutely no sense when you’re sitting right in the middle of it.  But once you get on the other side of the situation and look back, you’ll see the sense. In the mean time you just have to have faith that it’s there.

The Leak is Sprung

The Leak is Sprung

I don’t like the word “crying.” I think “leaking” would be a more appropriate term.  “Crying” sounds like something a baby or a little girl does. It sounds childish and really quite pitiful. Definitely not something a self-respecting woman would want to be caught dead doing.  
I can’t speak for all women but I know that when I cry, it’s most certainly not done voluntarily.  It just happens. And once it starts it’s damn near impossible to stop.  It’s an uncontrollable force of nature like gravity pulling water through a hole in the bottom of a bucket. Some days my bucket is the size of a shot glass, and sometimes it’s a swimming pool, but no matter how much water is there to begin with, once the leak is sprung, it’s not stopping until there’s nothing left to leak.  
Leaking is more than just crying; it’s more than just tears.  I don’t just leak from my eyes; I leak from my entire face. I’ve got the tears flowing, the nose running through every Kleenex I can find, and then there’s the drooling. It’s not that I become a human shaped Saint Bernard, slobbering all over myself, but there’s a definite increase in saliva that easily qualifies as a “leak.”
I feel much better about myself when I’m leaking than when I’m crying.  Leaking feels less childish and gets you off the hook a bit since it’s involuntary and all. And most importantly, it makes crying kind of funny…and if you can still find the ability to laugh at yourself, maybe you’re not so pitiful after all.