Un-Learning Helplessness

So I have this really awkward "I haven't posted on here in forever and this feels really familiar and yet really strange" feeling. It's weird, but I've felt like I needed to write on here for a few days now...to the point that I would log in, type a line, delete it, and then log out (this happened four times). I'll honestly be surprised if I actually end up posting this. (One of my professors always says, "How about dishonestly?" when he hears someone preface a statement with the word honestly. And now whenever I say it I get this Holden Caufield-like feeling that I'm just a phony.)

Things right now are weird. Everything is weird - on a macro-level and a micro-level. I'm about to give up on reading the news because it just depresses me. But it feels like everything is weird on a personal level too. For everyone.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend about prayer and she said something that I had always felt but had never quite had the courage to vocalize: "Prayer just doesn't seem to work fast enough."

I feel that now, more than ever. This morning in church as I prayed for a family friend who had lost her son in a car accident last night, I found myself getting a defeatist attitude. I just want to feel like my prayers are actually doing something - like they're actually worth the breath required to speak them.

I'm taking Abnormal Psychology this semester and it's screwing with my mind (for that matter, all of my classes are doing that this semester, but that's a story for another place and time). A few classes ago we talked about the principle of learned helplessness. Some guy (whose name I should remember but don't) did an experiment with dogs where he tied them up (or caged them or something) and he shocked them. At first the dogs tried to get away, but eventually they learned to be helpless. So when the guy untied (or uncaged or whatevered) them, they didn't run away when he shocked them, even though they could have.

As I studied for that class tonight and remembered that principle, I realized that even though prayer doesn't seem to work fast enough, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. And that also doesn't mean that it always works more slowly than I want it to. Maybe the answers to my prayers come at times and in ways that I don't realize or recognize. 

Also I'm going to actually post this because I ended up with some half decent thoughts that are far less confusing than they were when they were in my head.

Some Nostalgia...

Tonight I was looking through some pictures and I came across this one:

Sam, Me, Abigail, and Bekah

This is me with my three best friends from when I was in high school. The four of us had the type of friendship where we all were in tune with each other - metaphorically, and literally. We used to just sit around a piano and I would play it and we would all sing random stuff...usually hymns or something by the Barlow sisters, but every now and then we'd write stuff of our own to sing. I still have the one song we actually completed memorized by heart.

We didn't really start off as friends. In fact, the beginning of our friendship was so rocky that my senior year of high school I chose to write my memoir (and eventually a short children's book) about how the four of us met and didn't get along at first. In the memoir I said that we all bonded over playing a card game together, but I have an embarrassing confession: the truth is that we really bonded because one day when we were at youth camp one of them told a joke and I laughed so hard I peed my pants in front of the three of them. And they each swore a solemn oath that they would never tell. And then they helped me sneak back into our dorm so that I could change clothes.

I still laugh thinking about it...

None of us went to the same school so all throughout high school many of my weekends were devoted to, "the girls" as everyone called us. Or at least that's how my parents referred to them. And how their parents referred to the rest of us.

I was always the one to come up with bad ideas, Abigail was always the one to help me carry out my bad ideas, Bekah was always the one to tell us the idea was bad, and Sam was always the one to clean up after the idea blew up in our faces.

The time that I fell on a treadmill at our youth leader's house and left a dent in the wall and a skid mark on the running part of the thing, Bekah and Sam weren't there. I think that situation might have ended a little differently if they had been. Instead, good old Ab was with me to cheer me on as I turned it on high speed and tried to run my hardest...

Although one time Ab and I converted Sam to the dark side. This was at my fourteenth birthday party, when we got her to sneak out of my house with us so that we could play a prank on all of the other girls at two in the morning. I got in trouble for that one...

We had a sisterhood...funny nicknames for each other...we made up funny futures with husbands for each other...the works when it comes to girlhood. 

And then one by one we each finished high school. We each went our separate ways and started to do our own things. We all made new friends. We just...grew apart. We still get together about once or twice a year, but it's not really the same.

Anyways, those are my thoughts tonight.

Post Church Camps Thoughts

Lately I've been thinking a lot about joy. I worked at a camp this past week and the whole time I found my prayers mostly asking that the the campers and the staff there would be joyful and would be able to really rest in the knowledge that GOD is beautiful and His creation is beautiful.

I feel like sometimes (or a lot of times) us church-goers get so caught up in serving others and reading our Bibles and praying harder and going to church stuff and preaching to our non-Christinan friends about how they should be just like us and maintaining our nice Christian facades and etc...

And then we miss out on the point of it all.

It seems like (at least in my case) it's really easy to let that stuff become the focus. It's so easy to get caught up in the dailiness of church and then I miss out on the joy that comes from just being in communion with Christ. Because quite honestly, that kind of joy is really what being a Christian is about.

I feel like it's so easy to lose sight of what we really ought to be doing: loving GOD and loving others. And we do that because we are so focused on taking care of the ten million tasks we have to get done for our service projects and our mission trips and our youth conferences.

Anyways, I have more to say but my dad wants the internet so I'm signing off for now. I might post again later if I think about it, but I'm not really sure if I'll remember because I still haven't quite caught up on my sleep.