I turned 21 today.

And … I don’t know how to process it.

It was off to a great start this morning…I had some lovely worship/soaking time with God; I had a dance party; I made some tea and French toast.  I hung out with my siblings (all of them) when they got home from school, and that was good, too.  I did some sketching, which I haven’t done in awhile.  My mother brought me home a massive bunch of fabulous helium balloons.  We went to my dad’s apartment (all of us, and it wasn’t awkward at all, which was really good) and had real grilled steak and garlic mashed potatoes and sweet potato casserole with marshmallows for dinner.  We watched The Help and my birthday cake was confetti cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, which is a new thing for me on birthdays (having in previous years had cream cheese pie, until it started being less of a birthday thing and more of a regular holiday dessert) and supremely tasty.  I got some chocolate (the expensive foreign-sounding stuff) as a present. A few dozen people left me birthday messages via text and Facebook, many quite personally complimentary and sweet.

And that’s about it.

Maybe I’m just lonely?  I wanted to do something, actually do something for my birthday, not just watch it go by like my birthdays usually do.  This year my birthday coincided with college spring break, though—which would have been neat if I myself were in school, but I’m not.  So my friends all had plans already. I miss them a lot.

I thought I could make it into a special day by doing nice things.  But that just makes it a nice day.

It was a nice day—a really nice day.  But it wasn’t…I don’t know.  I guess I was expecting more.  I don’t know what. Good grief, I didn’t even drink any alcohol—not like I wanted to party or whatever, but it is my 21st birthday.  My next “milestone” birthday isn’t until I turn 40, and that probably won’t be anything to be excited about.

 It was a very nice birthday.  But it wasn’t a special one, I guess.  And I’m sad.  I’m so sorry, but I’m sad on the night of my birthday, and I don’t have anything else to say right now.

Part One: Fear and Other Things You Shouldn’t Let Run Your Life

So this is the beginning of a long-promised (and just plain long) post about me and my life and stuff.  It’ll be an update about what I’ve been dealing (or not dealing) with in 2013 so far, a little bit of good and a fair amount of bad.  I would also say that it’s going to be an update on what I’ve been doing during the weeks of blogosphere silence, except that I haven’t been.  Doing things, I mean.

So as you may know, I graduated KVCC in December with an Associate of Arts in General Studies (it was going to be Liberal Arts, until they stopped offering the last foreign language credit I needed.  Uuuurgh).  That was…really anticlimactic.  I spent two and a half years toiling away at reading and papers and talking and making my brain do things and came away with a degree that, from a career standpoint, is totally useless until I get another degree (a bachelor’s at the very minimum) to go with it.  Yay.

Over New Years’ weekend, I went to the OneThing conference in Kansas City with some of the lovely folks from Dwell.  That was pretty much the most amazing four days I’ve had in a long time.  Unlike many conference experiences, it didn’t feel like it was “building up” to anything spectacular — God was already tossing amazing revelations at me and working in me from the very first worship set.  He felt so intensely present and thick and personal.  (One thing I felt convicted about over that weekend was reducing my relationship to God to what’s happening with me, and forgetting that He’s a person and it’s an interaction, not just about results.  I didn’t even realize it was a problem until He showed up in person, and woooo.  Another thing — let me tell you, in all seriousness, conviction is great.  I know I’m not perfect, so in comparison with struggling under condemnation all the time, Holy-Spirit conviction is inspiring, which is probably the point.)

So I heard lots from God at OneThing.  He taught me about relating to him as intimately and intensely personal, inviting Him into distraction when I struggle with it, spiritual warfare.  He told me my gift of empathy was important.  he told me to work on storing up knowledge in the spiritual sphere, like I already do somewhat in the natural.

The most intense thing that happened actually was during the last day.  I had wanted to buy a t-shirt from the merch table(s), so I wandered over there during the afternoon break. One shirt in particular caught my eye, one with Micah 6:8 printed on it:  “Do justly, love mercy.”  (The whole verse runs:  “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”)

It was like somebody rammed a fist into my chest, grabbed my heart, and squeezed it.  I had a physical, visceral reaction to seeing that verse.  So I bought the shirt.  I wore it to the evening session.  And in the middle of the worship set I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and then — clear as a bell — clearer than anything else I’d heard all weekend, probably one of the clearest things I’ve heard from God ever — He said, “Do justly and love mercy:  if you do anything with your life, do that.”

And I was like, “Yes, yes!  I am 100% behind that.  I want to do that, and not even because you said it just now.  That verse articulates what I’ve been noticing is a pretty important part of my philosophy of life and faith and success.  That’s perfect.  That’s it.”

And then I got home and was like, “Um.  That’s really hard to quantify.  It’s not like God told me, ‘Go to Romania and spread justice and mercy for homeless people’ or something.  So…now what?”

And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for two months – going, “now what?”  I had a weekend that should have put a ton of impetus behind me, and instead I completely stalled as soon as I set foot back in Kalamazoo.  That stall has lasted for two completely ridiculous months.  I kind of spent the last week or two deconstructing why, and I’ll go into that in another post.  SOON I PROMISE SOON.

Thanks for reading, guys — <3

It’s been awhile since I made any of this…

they walked for a long time in silence
under the wind
and the westward winding of the sky
and the fall
of the dying colors
the wings of words left unheard
and the sun
goes down
scattering fragments of gold
at our feet
and soaking your face
in the color of everything that
you dream about
and i think
how much
i want to go on forever
but i am always looking forward
and every time i take a step
in the quiet
and the shifting play of light
i look behind
and barely recognize
the two who are walking
in our own footsteps.

original poetry by Kiersten M. Lawrence
26 February 2013

Apologetic

Good grief.

I'm sorry for being so long absent. I'm sorry for promising everyone I'd post in early January and then not following through (I have reasons for that, though they're mostly not very good ones). I'm sorry for other ways I've been unreliable and absent and lazy the last several weeks. I'm kind of dealing with (or cowering under) some spiritual and emotional rubbish right now—that's not an excuse, just an explanation. I've wanted to write about it here but, well, you can see how that's panned out so far.

I love you all (especially if you're still actually actively subscribed to this).
I'll try hard to update soon (meaning sometime in the next week). (Maybe committing to do so in writing will be that extra incentive I need.)

An Announcement:

To the Enemy:

You know what? Jesus wins. My God is bigger and better than you. So just shut up and let me celebrate at least one holiday this year in peace. You suck. HAHA. HAHAHAHA.

all the tags i tried to put at the end of my last post that blogger wouldn’t let me because of character limits (how dare Google limit my creativity; the irony of the post too is killing me)

please forgive me the odd title, oh dear—i’ve been too long on tumblr, even without the hashtag symbols, i am now just gratuitously adding more rambling via the tags instead of using them as an actual sorting mechanism, i apologize for contributing to the breakdown of the organizational order of the internet, except not that much, because organization LAWL, right-brained infp wins, at least on her own blog

NaNoWriMo and my squishy swollen brain

So everyone on staff at OLL and all the guest authors who write pep talks for NaNoWriMo and all the exhausted crazy people who dump stuff in the NaNoWriMo tag on tumblr all say the same thing:  "you’re writing 50,000 words on one piece of original fiction from scratch in 30 days; it is going to be rubbish and you are going to write on in spite of it.”  I’ve heard that easily dozens, possibly hundreds of times, over the last year-plus since I did my first NaNoWriMo.  But for some reason I’ve always had it in my head that that doesn’t quite apply to me.  Like, “I am KIERSTEN.  I am an ENGLISH MAJOR.  I write things ALL THE TIME.   I want to write fiction FOR A LIVING someday.  I am, like, contractually obligated by existence to only write things that are at least halfway awesome.”

And then it just hit me today how egregiously pretentious, egoistic, hubristic, and downright laughable that is.  How crackbrained do I have to be to think I’m only going to write good things?  Furthermore, how helpful is it if I kill my creative inspiration because I’m afraid that it is esoterically “not good enough”?  (The answers are, respectively, “extremely” and “not at all”.)

I’M WRITING A (short) NOVEL IN A MONTH, FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE.  There are novelists I love and admire a great deal who won’t go near NaNoWriMo because they know very well how impossible it is to write a high-quality book in thirty days.  This is a month for pure stream-of-consciousness creative flow.  I can get down the plot and ideas, and then edit the living daylights out of it later.  There will be lots of places where I will have to intentionally write clunky and awkward rubbish just to fill in gaps.  (I have a hard time even doing that in essays, and those are usually pretty boring to read even when I enjoy writing them.)

And that is okay.

Halfway through the month, I am at 32,133 words.
That is not bad.
No bad at all.
And some of it is actually pretty neat, if I may say so.

I declare that this will be a success.  I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS STORY.  Even if I may not do it all that well.

titleless.

We're discussing sexual health and alternative sexuality in my holistic health class this week, and to be frank, I was terrified going in. I had an extremely sheltered, basically asexual childhood; a scary and confusing adolescence as a result; and at age 20 I finally feel like I'm stabilizing a bit, at least for my own self and future. But I can't speak for the rest of the world, or my opinions about it. I don't even know what is or is not, let alone what's right or wrong or good or bad. I didn't even know what to pray this morning. I just stressed about it and wanted to skip and just felt lost. Finally I was like, "God, just show me where you heart is in all of this. That's all I really want to get out of this." The result? After the end of my three-hour class, I wanted to go into the restroom and cry my eyes out. I just want people to get along. I want people to love other people. I want people to not be hypocritical. I want people to not be trapped in a fallen world that confuses the hell out of everybody. I want no one to have to feel alone, misunderstood, or unloved. I want people to realize that there is such a thing as right and wrong, that a moral dichotomy does exist. I'm not saying I have an understanding of what that dichotomy is and what it entails—not by a long shot. I just know it's there. I wish people who do believe in that dichotomy with me could see that you can't invoke one aspect of God's character while ignoring another: you cannot tell someone that God hates their sin while neglecting to tell them that He loves them, that he handmade them and called them "good," that he doesn't just want to burn them from the face of the earth. I wish I could somehow make up for the fact that people do very ungodly things in the name of godly principles. I wish that I had answers for people. I wish you weren't lost. I wish I wasn't lost, even after I've been found. I wish someone had told me the world was going to be such a hard place to live in and given me a few helpful hints. I wish I didn't disagree with some of the overbearing "hints" given to me by very vocal people who haven't known me nearly long enough to have any call to start making assumptions about what I think and believe and want. I wish I wasn't afraid to cry in public. I wish I didn't feel so freakishly lonely every time romantic relationships are a topic. I wish I wasn't a coward even when I do have something to say (but it's easier to hold it all in and not risk saying it "wrong", right? If any freaking thing in the world makes sense, it's how not to risk your reputation by having one). I wish God would give me a straightforward answer about how to love people without compromising righteousness. (I'd even settle for a case-by-case consultancy, which is probably what He has in place already and I just need to be better at listening). But I don't even know how to hold a conversation, about so many things. It isn't just sex...that's not even close to the whole problem. Is there anything that just...makes sense?

I'm really glad I'm not God, because I'd sure suck at it. Just holding His hand and seeing a reflection in His eyes for five minutes is difficult almost to the point of crippling.

All the same...not having a heart? I don't think I could bear existence itself, then.

(I have a lab exam in fifteen minutes. #WednesdaysContinueToEffingSuck.)