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Fix Ourselves

Books tell us a lot about ourselves. When I go home to visit my grandparents about an hour from my college, I often go and help out at a second hand store where my Grandmother volunteers. If I’m not needed hauling a heavy box or bag, then I’m with the books, sorting through piles of titles that come in from everywhere. In some ways, it’s like sorting through boxes of treasure, only a large majority seem dull, dusty and all too uninteresting for me to ever spend time flipping through their pages. But even those that are boring often have a story to tell. What’s most interesting about sorting through these books is the way they reflect people, time periods and mindsets.

I’m not always quite sure what to do when I come across a book about how the evil communists in Russia are the antichrist, planning to take over Israel. Or when I find an action-romance novel splayed with a large picture of a Nazi plane engulfed in flames, headed downward to its destruction, while a couple embrace in the foreground. I wonder what kind of stories we will begin to tell ourselves over the years. Will pictures of dying Taliban or exploding North Korean warheads make up the background of our books, while a man and woman gaze into each other’s eyes in the forefront, reminding us that sappy emotional romance is really where our priorities lie?

Books tell us about ourselves. As I place books out on the shelves at the store, I’m surprised at the amount of books there are offering help for the many issues in our lives. Ten steps to a healthy marriage. How to find financial satisfaction. How to reign in your insane children. How to live without stress. How to live without worry. A hundred ways to simplify your life. A thousand ways to spend your money on books that will try to tell you how to fix your family, marriage, business and life. We try to fix ourselves.

The very fact that we have so many books on how to do all these things should perhaps indicate that most people are still looking. Just like the existence of doctors tells us that humans have problems. We see the brokenness of society in the simple laws of supply and demand. We look high and low for something that will finally satisfy, heal and direct. And we look everywhere but up. The true answer to all our confusion and our searching can be found in one Person. But too often we just don’t want to find it.

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Another Ending

The dust has finally settled. After the past couple weeks of wrapping-up school work and winding down for the year, I can finally sit back and ask myself what in the world happened. I’m not really sure why, but somehow amidst all the flurry of assignments over the past few days, I seem to have dropped into total disrepair. Afternoons and evenings would go by and I would be reminded at night that I had eaten hardly anything since breakfast. How does someone forget they need to eat? It seems like a mildly important aspect of life, so I’m not sure how I forgot it. I doubt if this is a problem for the majority of students in college, but apparently for my room mate and I, it is.

However, I have decided to eat again, forcing meals down myself today at specific meal times, in an effort to bring some normality back to my life. I didn’t realise how accustomed I had become to a mildly empty stomach, until I felt sick forcing myself to eat. I’m not really surprised that, as a result of all this, I’ve found myself quite tired and a bit of an emotional wreck. As I contemplate moving out of my flat, I have been sorting through my things in the process of packing, and have been finding myself wrapped up in old pictures, notes and papers. Forgotten memories find there ways into my hands and soon I am engulfed in a world I used to know, sitting in the centre of my small college room as it makes its way into boxes and suitcases. Each new move and change seems to echo all the others — years of good-byes to people and places. Another ending to a year, a job, or a home.

Unresolved grief. Is that the term for when you feel like crying at the most unusual moments throughout the day? Or when you just want to reach out and touch something familiar — to somehow embrace the memories in your mind. Or when that knot in your throat seems to make its way up until you’re not sure if it will just stay stuck there, and you wonder what words it will say when it finally bubbles up. Perhaps it will have nothing to say.

I know that much of this will change. With a couple regular meals, a few good nights of sleep, and some time with family and a three year old cousin who loves me to death, I’ll soon be a bit more mellowed out. However, grief is probably something I will always carry with me. Scar tissue from farewells and places that felt like home. And yet it’s not so much the grief of leaving home that hurts, but rather, not having a place to call home. Maybe it’s because I wonder if I’ll ever have a home. Maybe its the fear that someday I will have one, and like the dog who finally catches the car, doesn’t know what to do with it, and finds himself wondering why he was so eager to get it in the first place.

Thankfully I join a rich history of grievers — people without a real place to call home. People who, by faith, welcomed each sunrise with joy and expectation.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. Hebrews 11:13

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Hospital Clothes

I went to the hospital for an x-ray yesterday. It wasn’t anything major, but I very soon realized how little time I actually spend in the hospital — which I’m glad for. After registering downstairs, and then checking in upstairs, I was then told that I would have to undress and put on a hospital gown — if that’s what you can call it. I was led into a little change room where I was shown my gown that I was to put on, followed by a light blue floral housecoat. The nurse pointed out some plastic bags as well, which might be used to put my personal belongings in. I felt like I was going in to prison. Why did I have to put them in a bag? Was I never to see them again?

Hospitals are not friendly to any sense of dignity or manliness. The scanty clothes they give you seem as if they were made for another species, one with a single dimension with two protruding arms — certainly not for humans. I could hardly figure out how to wear the silly gown at all. I tried it on with the opening at the back, remembering that in movies I had seen similar gowns close down the back. Then, after fiddling helplessly with strings that didn’t seem to meet, I switched the gown again, overlapping the sides at the front. Nothing seemed to work. Finally, after almost bursting out in laughter in my little stall, I just wrapped the thing around me, pulled the strings together and then pulled on the housecoat, trying to hide the low neck and over exposed chest that had resulted in the way I had put the gown on. Why do hospitals subject patients to such torture? Can’t they post instructions on how to wear these outlandish clothes?

I finally emerged from the curtain, my small bag of belongings in hand, trying smother my giggles. I was glad there wasn’t a mirror around, or I fear I would have just burst out laughing in front of everyone in the waiting room. I just wanted someone to laugh at me — to laugh at how ridiculous I looked, so at least I would know that someone felt as I did. But unfortunately hospitals are professional places, where their scantily clad patients are met with polite faces and professional discourse.

After being led inside the x-ray lab, I was told to stand up on a platform while a giant contraption with a laser was aimed at me from across the room. Barefoot, with my thin clothes oddly overlapping to cover me, I felt like a prisoner in Abu Gharib, rigidly awaiting my fate. First they had me face the machine, with my back to a plastic panel while they shone a light in my eye. Then they told me to turn and face the panel, putting my arms on what they called ‘handles’, far too high to rest my hands on at full length. I had a wonderful view of the close wall from there, where I studied its tiles and small medical notes on a sheet of paper while the giant machine chugged away. I wondered if the nurses ever laughed at all this — their patients having to stare aimlessly at a wall waiting for them to say that the procedure was done and that they could step down from their pedestal of shame.

With my clothes back on, I felt I became a human again, and after wandering the halls and getting lost, I was soon back outside in the fresh air. No more hospital clothes for me.

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This Mess Inside Me

I have a tendency to lose my mind. It seems that in times like this, with the school year winding down, I find myself filled with confusion and anxiety over so many things. My identity as a student is approaching its end for the summer, and soon I will be trying to fit into the working world — always a little too soft, too used to books and classes. I think about my trip back to Pakistan. I hope that it will all work out, and I think about how it will be to visit my family and my country. And yet it’s not my country. I’m not Pakistani, but I’m even less Canadian — so what am I? It’s these kinds of questions that seem to plague my mind so recently. A jumble of thoughts, dreams and worries tossing about my head. Charlotte Brontë writes “A ruffled mind makes a poor pillow.” I feel my heavy head and weary eyes can relate. I can’t make sense of this mess inside me.

Suddenly questions of what I am going to do with my future, where I belong, or if I’ll ever belong, are flooding my mind. I think that often the press of work and studies seems to block them out. But now with the pressure subsiding, my mind dreams and wanders. Some days all I can think of is the future. I want to be in Pakistan now. Other days I find myself afraid of how fast time goes and how soon I will be there, perhaps for good, along with all its trials and problems. I worry. I learned well from my mother.

However, this evening I was reminded of a wonderful verse. After talking about the worries of life, and our fears of not having food to eat or clothes to wear, Christ has these extremely powerful words:

“Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” (Matt. 6:33)

There is my call. And my encouragement?

“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (6:34).

Why do I forget these things? Why do we all forget these things? We have whole industries built around people’s fears and anxieties for tomorrow, and whole philosophies working on trying to fix this innate fear of ours. We fear the fact that we have no power over tomorrow. We don’t even know whether we’ll wake up breathing in the morning or not. We have no power over whether we’ll have the next minute of our lives, and so we plan, posses and protect ourselves until we live in a world that we feel we have control of. I guess I’m just coming to the place where I am losing that control. But it’s good to know that someone is taking care of tomorrow. And what is my job for today? “Seek first the Kingdom of God.”

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I Lost My Mind

Work, you are dead to me,
Or I am dead to you,
At least, that is, I died,
Or I will die,

Then it’s will at stake,
For I will kill you,
Or you will kill me,
So it’s your will or mine,

A mine I didn’t see,
when I stepped on it
Exploded in my brain,

So its the brain, I see
Or I saw, before I lost it

But what did I lose?
I can’t remember

A brain, a will, a mine?
I really don’t mind,

Do I mind? Perhaps,
Oh yes, that’s what I lost

I forgot I lost my mind