You Can't Force Belief

Recently I've been asked to perform a piece I wrote on sexual purity and it posed the greatest challenge I've been up against. At the rehearsal, after I knew I had flopped, I walked up to the director and asked for her comments on the piece. Nothing she said was new but somehow it still cut like a fresh wound. She called the piece "shapeless"; it had no movement and it was just like I was reading it. I sat and cried inside and listened closely as she continued to pour out tips on how to give life to the poem. It felt like producing crap, knowing it's crap and still hoping that it's accepted...but it wasn't. I walked away with my tail between my legs but not because I was reprimanded for a poorly done job but because someone else noticed. As I turned to leave I asked her what I could do to give it life, and she smiled at me and said, "believe in it."

Why was it so hard to believe in this piece? I knew the importance of sexual purity and I could produce statistics on HIV/AIDS, STI's, heart breaks, and sex related human trafficking but I also knew the extreme position I took. It's one thing to go into a church and cry down christians saying "God owns you" but to stand in the midst of people, some not caring about God, and say "God owns you" takes a conviction I do not own. I knew the hard line I was taking and how fickle the arts is. In a world where "everyone is having sex" people are hostile to messages about purity and antagonistic against message of the gospel, yet they love art and though they wouldn't agree, they may listen simply because it is art.

So my rehearsals became fatal attempts to fly because in the back of my mind I knew what I was saying but in the front I was sifting my heart to keep out the offensive part and it just kept flopping. Then I prayed and asked God to give me the conviction to speak with authority but I still had my reservations about the issue so I just kept flopping. It was like attaching an anchor to a rocket and expecting to reach the moon. I started out hot and on fire but then it got to a point where my mind blocked my heart and my tongue froze up but since I was half way there I had to let the words out so they just came out motionless. Even saying it to myself caused issues because I was fully aware of what I was doing and for all these years I've either not taken a stand or took one oblivious to the consequences.

But after some prayer and quiet time God spoke to me and said, "you cannot force belief". In my mind, and in my soul I felt so strongly about this message but in my heart I wanted just one more peep, one glance, one change at wrong before I started to write again. Sin is a dangerous thing. I can heap up all the self-confidence I have but my swag's too tight to let loose this fire in my soul; my heart was too dirty to come clean with myself and say "I've done wrong in God's eyes many times and I don't know where this message came from but it's here and it's not to keep." I was too proud to admit my own impurities and short falls, and not humble enough to ask for help. I thought it was all about me and I lost focus on the one who kept me pure, who cleaned me when I was impure who forgave me over and over again, and who put these words in my mouth because all of my poems are cheesy, and self-centred and commercial and lack depth and substance; and it's only by grace that I am saved from it.

Belief is a strange thing. When Jesus was on earth a woman touched his robe and was healed because she believed and yet the Pharisees saw him raise a man who was dead for four days and tried to kill him. No amount of logic can cause belief. I was at my youth group and we were discussing the bible and the journey it went through from the time the scrolls were written to what we have now and its history is plagued with controversies and reasons not to accept it as God's word written as it was originally. And at the end of it I said that belief in God's word is nothing that we can do in our own strength. It takes divine faith to believe it because if we honestly examine history we would probably come to the conclusion that what we have was altered and therefore not to be believed in. But that's what faith is about. When our faith is gone, our life is gone as christians.

We can't muster up the assent that what is told in churches about Jesus (especially) is right. Neither can I muster up any passion or conviction to back up my poem - especially when my legs aren't strong enough to help me walk away from sin. I have turned my mind towards acceptance of my poem but only God can change my heart to comply. And it's the faith that God has given me which can make me fly. I can't force belief because it comes out forced.  When I performed Toy Soldiers there was nothing that could convince me that I was wrong or out of place and it came out like that. But now, I have to rely on God like this is the last thing I say because if I don't, it very well might be.

The Beginnings (October 18, 2008)

Hello everybody!
 
Reading your e-mails (imaginary or real) got me thinking too. You guys are overseas doing your thing knowing (or hoping) that we are missing you. But what about those left in Bim that you miss? (Like Joe the Plumber? Low, I know but you get my point). So I've decided to update you on my happening here at home too cus in a sense I am overseas relative to you.
 
I had a good week. The End.
 
Thanks for your time and I'm looking foward to the next update. Byebye!
 
-Joe the Plumber

Changes

For weeks I've been trying to figure out how to begin this thing. I know I didn't post one in the last week of school, three weeks ago, before I took my exam break. Well, my exams are over and hopefully this is the last set of exams I'll be doing at UWI. The next time I plan to be there is to collect my gown, then return it. Yep, it's all done: university, unemployment, irresponsibility.

I remember when we first went into university. We were small (some of us), naive (probably dumb) and excited to experience all that this new world would hold for us. Now look at us; we're all grown up (some more physically than mentally, others more mentally than physically), maybe even grown out and we have experienced close to all that this old world had to offer us.

A friend once said that we navigate university. It's not easy being a student and coming home every evening to cooked food and sapping the resources of your parents, far less being miles away from everything familiar. "Navigate" paints a better picture of what we go through because some things happen and we will never know why. And I'd like to credit my existence up to this point to God. Reminiscing on school life made me understand that I have too little control over too many things for me to believe I'm the who should be glorified. Papers get lost, teachers have lives which can affect marking and of course, we have lives which can affect our focus on the day of an exam. We are like ships in an ocean sailing from undergraduates to graduates.

But school's not the only thing that changed in my life. Remember how I was talking about not posting a blog in the last week of school? Well that's because I wasn't here, in Bim. There once was a guy I knew for all my life and folks tried to convince us that we were brothers. We bought into it and were so good at portraying it that sometimes people would look at us and say "you're brothers?...yeah I now see the resemblance." Well that guy got married. She doesn't really have the resemblance though (after all, I am the cute one, they're just my family).

I always knew this day would come. We had teased each other about it when we were small and when he went away to study it was only a matter of time. As they say, time told. Seeing him leave to get married brought more joy than sadness. The really sad part came one day while I was studying. His room is cool and has a soft chair and a nice desk that can host my clutter so I was using it to study. He was still single at that time but I was still using the stuff and as I sat in the empty room with the walls suffocating me, I thought back on the party we threw for him and how, in a very blunt way, he told one of his friends, "b I'm packing to leave." It only occurred to me then and that was pretty much the end to my night. It actually hasn't been bad at all. It's harder to incorporate my new sister and make her feel like family than it is to give my brother the boot.

There were other trivial stuff that happened over the last three weeks like when I sprained my ankle chasing my dream. In short (the full story is on Facebook called "Dream Chasers") I was running and slipped off a pavement because I didn't want to drag myself through the mud and jumping in puddles is actually not as exciting as it may look on television - driving through them...well that's a different story.

Trivial event number two is that my pen ran out of ink during the exam. I thought that was actually pretty cool because that was the only pen I wrote with in all of my exams. I was going to hold a funeral service for it but the invigilators didn't want to give any extra time so I threw it one side and wrote with, get this, black ink! Things have really changed over the past year.

So my exams have been done and I pray they are done. Differential Equations was one rough exam which left many people crying - well those who cared about it. It was 4 questions, 80 marks, 2 hours. I'll never forget UWI and after an exam like that I don't think I'll forget Dr. Sing either. It was interesting; half way through thet last question I paused to think about the answer and I was reminded of last year. Here I was doing the same course, going into the exam with the same course work mark, having the same first question as last year. And I wondered, "What makes this year any different? You still didn't know Laplace transforms (the theory part) well and here you are trying to figure out a chapter that you don't even have in your notes." I think that's the point where I started to feel like crying. But I never once tried to pull myself up by the bootstraps, psyching up myself and screaming "You can do it." I said Lord don't make me fail, and breathed deeply. I think I found the hook for the leviathan.

What's next after UWI? I don't know. I've worked hard for these three years and well I probably won't stop working hard, so I think it's time I work hard and get some money for it. Not some, nuff lol. I have a lot of plans like doing a masters, finding a job, going away on work for charities, and even learning how to fly planes. Maybe all of those things are next. I've learned that dreams don't have to die because we have a career. So my only choice really is what lies in store for me now and when I will do all of the above (and buy a bike).

A lot of people (if we use the population of my official followers) have been asking me if I'm closing the blog. I'm not sure what that means but yes I won't be writing in it anymore - this is the last entry. My Blog has served its purpose - to let readers know what's been going on in my school life. And as strange and addictive as it may have been, I've enjoyed writing it and I hope you have enjoyed reading it more than I do. I'm on to other things, some say bigger things but they're definitely better things. And for those who came in late I'll post the stuff I have sent as e-mails before the crossover to the blog so that there's the full experience written; but this will always be the first post you see when you enter the site. So that's it. No more rambling.