The Title is ______.

post-opera and other news (about grace)

so tosca was incredible. and i left with a very important lesson: you never know when you might run into a classmate of one of the kids you work with. then you have to talk to them the next day in school. the little voice in my head had to whisper to me "shhhh. don't worry...he's as scared of you as you are of him!" nothing quite like an unexpected run in with a third grader. AGH! they can't know about my real life! they might ask questions! truth is, i am more scared of questions from children then questions from adults because children have not yet mastered the delicate art of ignoring the obvious in conversation. ah well. we were all children once. and still, adults need obvious truth screamed at them. in the middle of the night, i got a call from a friend who was at a point of desperation. she is hurting in a way that i cannot understand or help. the conversation consisted of her yelling "FUCK" a lot and me yelling "I LOVE YOU" right back at her. that was all i had. because ultimately none of the answers lie with me. or any of us. the only way to face pain is to deal with it head on. honestly? the grace of god and the power of the resurrected christ is the only solution to the degree of pain and brokenness and evil and hurt we encounter in life. i could have chosen to yell "JESUS LOVES YOU" but when someone feels like there is no proof, words look cheap. in my opinion, the worst thing someone can do for a person who is wounded and hurting is to slap a jesus bandaid on their shredded, bleeding heart and send them on their way. jesus does love her and i am confident that he will hold on to her whether she likes it or not, but what she needs is a tangible manifestation of that love. i believe that we are allowed to experience pain so that we might more fully understand the mystery and violent beauty of grace and forgiveness. out of all of the songs i have written, my two favorite ones are about those two topics: grace and forgiveness. they are fundamentally critical to my understanding of the world. they strike a sense of awe and trembling into my spirit (as well they should!) and i am continually trying to figure out how it all works. i guess for me, the best part is that i probably won't reach a compact solution. speaking of the way things work, i was talking with another friend over dinner yesterday and he had an excellent question. he is a biologist/engineer who likes to solve problems/get answers. he said that he is sometimes sad that he, in a sense, has "all the answers" and therefore expereinces no mystery in life. he indicated that i seemed like a very religious person and told me that in some ways he envied that quality. he wished that there were more unknowns in the universe for him and wondered whether he would be better off knowing less and marveling more at the "mysterious". my heart hurt a lot at that moment. the mystery of god makes me tremble because i know it to be true. and it is unfathomable. i believe that science and faith do indeed work harmoniously together and as a christian, there is no need for fear at new discoveries. we should rejoice! because there is no end to the unknown. how many times in history have scientists believed that they knew everything there was to know about the human body? and yet we continue to learn more things. like i have said before, life is about the PROCESS. the journey. the running man (see post similarly titled). it is about pain and learning and experiencing. the reason why this is so violently beautiful is because beauty is always accompanied by violence. how would you know beauty unless you knew something of its absolute opposite? man's complete brokenness is what allows us to see with clearer eyes the things that are truly beautiful. and what do i consider beauty? that's easy. grace and forgiveness. or in one word, Christ.

posted by k.o. @ 6:04 PM