when i pray for rain... it pours

A few weeks there were rather difficult for me. I was beginning to feel that old troubles were returning, and I made up my mind to fight them with all I had.

I have the problem of being a timid, introverted perfectionist who has the need for reassurance. The combination of all these characteristics has led to some hard-to-handle times in my life. During those times when I most need the help of friends, I find myself too timid to ask for help, ashamed of the fact that I am not perfect and in need of help, and withdrawing further and further into myself because, as an introvert, I automatically tend to withdraw when I'm upset.

Last month as I struggled with the stresses of unrequited infatuation and near-certain homelessness, I found that many of the friends I would relate such trials to were unavailable. They had found other things to occupy their time and thoughts, or they were out of town, or I discovered that they were moving away soon, and I did not want to rely on them too much just before they left. I knew, however, that I needed the company of others to keep me from withdrawing into myself too much. I decided that I would use what was left of my summer to expand my horizons and to meet new people. And might I meet an eligable bachelor in the process? Well, it certainly couldn't hurt to try...

So I set out to meet people in the two ways I knew best - on the internet and at Church. After all, a good friend of mine met her husband on an online dating service - wasn't it possible that I needed to do the same? I then found a nearby parish that had a young adults' group and started going to that.

My first date, then, with someone I met online, wasn't too much of a surprise for me (I mean the fact that it happened). The second date, however, was a complete surprise. I went to the young adults' group and had dinner with everyone afterward and somehow ended up with a date for the next weekend. It was definitely a unique experience - first of all, that someone seemingly normal would ask me out just after meeting me - things like that just don't happen to me. I'm almost ashamed to say that my first thought was, "I wonder what's wrong with him." I also found it rather amusing that he drives a Lexus... and perhaps more amusing that I found this a bit of a turn-off. In fact, he came to pick me up in a Lexus SUV that he had while his car was in for repair, and I don't think I've ever felt more out of place in a car. Maybe my sister was right - maybe I am more of a hippie than I'm willing to admit.

Well, many email conversations and two dates later, I've decided I've had enough, and I'm reminded once again of why I don't date... It's not that there was anything wrong with the guys I went out with, it's just that once again I find myself confused about the purpose of dating. The way I see it, there are two possible reasons for such odd behavior. One, you are already friends with someone and are hoping for more, or two, there is someone you do not know who you would like to get to know better. This second possibility, however, often proves problematic for me. After all, what makes this different from just hanging out with someone? It puts on pressures and expectations that simply don't need to be there and, what I find to be worse, It tends to encourage growth of a "relationship" before the growth of a friendship. Perhaps my problem with this is personal rather than philosophical. This just isn't the way I tend to work. Yes, I may be attracted from the beginning, but just because a sexual attraction is there, that doesn't mean that it needs to be acted on immediately. I need a long time to develop a friendship, and I need to be friends before moving a relationship into other dimensions.

So what am I missing here? I certainly don't have a lot of dating experience, far from it, and from the outside looking in, it has always seemed wonderful, but from the inside, it is a completely different story. It seems contrived, a way of trying to force relationships to be what they are not.

Part of me seems to be saying that I should keep going, keep searching for "the one" in this, the way that the rest of the US has deemed best. But if this unrest, this dissatisfaction has shown me anything, it has reminded me that God's priorities for my life are probably elsewhere, and I should be focused on those priorities, not on my own.

So I discontinue my membership with the online dating service, and I try to be as truthful as possible with the Lexus Guy. I return to my state of singleness not with a reluctant acceptance, but with a renewed enthusiasm, knowing that what God has for me is perfect, regardless of whether I understand it.

After all, as George Michael says, "Oh baby I reconsider my foolish notion. Well I need someone to hold me, but I'll wait for something more, 'cause I gotta have faith, ooh, I gotta have faith."

lost coins

Yesterday at church, the homily was about the immense love and respect God has for each one of us. Yesterday was the feast of the Assumption of Mary - when, according to Catholic tradition, she was taken, body and soul, into heaven. The priest told us about how this was a sign of hope and a sign of God's great love for us - that God cares for each one of us so much, that He will bring even our bodies, the bodies which He also made, into heaven at the end of time. Our priest read a quote from C.S. Lewis saying that we have never met a "mere mortal."

I remembered the secretary at my undergraduate physics department. She was one of the most caring people I have ever met, but along with her nurturing, motherly nature came a great zeal for bringing all those she met to heaven with her. I have often heard her relating her dealings with people who were not Christian or were unsure about spirituality or religion. Each time she described even the tiniest opennness to faith on the part of the other person, it was clear how much joy she took in that little drop of grace that the person had opened himself to. How beautiful it always was to see her exclaiming over God's work in these people, like a woman rejoicing over a single coin that she had searched so carefully for.

It is easy to find this excitement silly. Can that one word or one tiny action really make a difference? I don't think that rejoicing over such a tiny change is something that comes naturally to humans - it certainly doesn't come naturally to me. To truly find joy in this requires a great humility. It requires the meekness of making God's priorities my priorities, and the patience to see that when I don't understand the value of the tiny coins in my life, they still have great worth in the eyes of God, so it is only right for me to rejoice with him.

I used to think of words like peace, patience, meekness, and hope as passive words. To live them out, I thought, you just need to sit and wait and dream. The more I see of the world, the more I see the presence of despair, arrogance, and strife, the more I realize that peace, patience, meekness, and hope are four of the most dynamic words I know, describing not a passivity, but an endless striving for God's kingdom on Earth. This kind of work cannot be done by our own strength. When it is, it turns to pacifism or sloth (two things that I am very good at). Instead, this work must be rooted in the knowledge of God's great love for us and for our world, that as He rejoices over the re-discovered coins of our lives, so should we rejoice over even the smallest ways that He works His will in the world.

thinking and feeling

It's been a while since I last wrote in here. Thank you to everyone who kept our housing situation in your prayers. I now am (mostly) moved in to our new apartment and can begin to breathe now. Please continue to pray for my roommate as she recovers from her surgery.

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I started this post a few weeks ago and finally finished it last night as part of my post-moving, ignore-the-mess-in-my-new-apartment, internet-free quiet time last night...

A few years ago when I took a Myers-Briggs test, I tested as an INFJ (as a sidenote, I think the J is completely wrong… I’m definitely a P). I was very upset to be an NF instead of an ST - intuitive and feeling instead of sensing and thinking. According to the test, this would mean that I view the world internally through imagination and intuition (N) instead of externally through the senses (S) and that I make decisions based on emotion (F) rather than logic (T). I thought that as a scientist, I should make my decisions through cold, hard logic and not be swayed by emotion. Either the test was wrong, or I needed to improve this about myself.

Was the test wrong? Each time I must make a decision, I think it through completely, weigh each possibility, try to analyze every possible outcome. Sometimes I make a list of all the pros and cons. I decide which path seems the best one to choose. Then I throw out the list and go with my gut instinct. For a scientist, I suppose I am as analytical as I should be, but I certainly don’t act that way.

I just discovered a reason to be happy with this. The few regrets I have in my life are when I acted thoughtlessly in a way that hurt people. The big decisions I’ve made, the ones I’ve thought about endlessly for months (or maybe just hours), I have never regretted. This doesn’t mean that everything turned out perfectly as a result of those decisions. What it does mean is that I had thought out very well what many of the problems with making that decision would be, and I knew that when I made my choice, I was accepting the negative as well as the positive aspects of all this.

It is very difficult for me to let go of things. If I do something wrong, it eats away at me for hours, weeks, maybe years. If I made a decision based on a series of 10 points, ranked in order of importance, and later discovered that point number 8 was incorrect, I would regret my decision long after such regrets were useless.

This is something that is true of individual decisions, but it is something that needs to be true of my entire life. For example, I may not regret dating that boy or asking out this one, or not dating this other, nor am I unhappy about being single right now, but the problems come when I begin to listen to everything else around me. I begin to wonder what’s wrong with me? Why am I the only single person I know? Maybe I should have dated that guy… I didn’t really like him that much but he *was* a nice guy… I begin to listen to all the voices that say I need a “significant other” to be complete, to live happily ever after. I know this isn’t true, but it’s hard to remember sometimes, and like Peter, I begin to lose sight of what I am doing. My faith is like this, too. I do not doubt what I believe, but when I am in the midst of talking to someone, it is so easy to justify things, to back off a little bit from what I really believe in order to try and soften what I am saying. I know how to make decisions unapologetically, to be firm in whatever I decide. What I want to do is to live unapologetically, with my eyes fixed on my goal at all times.