Tag Archives: faith

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Signs Just Aren’t That Into You

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I caught part of the movie He’s Just Not That Into You on television last night. I’m a sucker for movies like that. Invariably in movies like that, there’s a guy who thinks he’s deromanticized the whole pursuit of love. He thinks that love is just about being with people who you like being around. At this point in the movie, he’s actually correct. Invariably, said guy ends up realizing that there is a huge romantic element to love and begins to think that he was originally wrong. Hilarity and such ensues, and the happy ending comes when he finally conforms to the romantic sign-driven love of popular culture.

The problem with these movies is that they are lies. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a romantic element to love. There is. Just not in a Wuthering Heights sort of way. Movies like HJNTIY teach us to wait for signs and to look for signs where there aren’t any. If there’s anyone guilty of waiting around for signs, though, it’s definitely me. I love “signs.” I love dissecting every little thing that goes on around me, wondering what it means. And I ignored a relationship with God for a long time because I was waiting for a “sign.”

I have a friend who doesn’t buy into the whole sign thing. And he’s great. Instead of sitting around, waiting for an answer to a problem to come to him, he keeps himself busy. He chases all of the paths he’s interested in until it becomes strikingly clear what the right decision is. I asked him once how he discerns God’s will. And like most people, he said he prayed regularly about things that were bugging him, but he also moved. It’s hard to hear a lesson when we aren’t doing something. You can read about math in a book, but if you never actually worked the problems, you would never learn how to use it.

I think that’s how life is. We expect God to divinely inspire us, but the people who are living great lives are also the ones who are risking great mistakes. As time goes on, it becomes easier to figure out what the right, godly decision is. But it is very rarely simply handed to us.

Where are you moving?

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Impressive Revelations

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I used to be the kind of person who had a lot of ideas about the world. I liked to take people to book stores because I thought that if they could see how smart and original I was among all of the book titles, they would most definitely like me. When I was still in high school, this worked out alright. I thought the “discoveries” I was making about the world were truths. I thought that I was moving to some better, more noble end.

Then, I started to be wrong. It started out with small things. Like someone would ask me if judgment was spelled like judge-ment and I would say of course so. Because that just makes sense. Or someone would ask for a book recommendation, and I would give them my favorite book, and they wouldn’t like it. And all of this seemed really strange and unforeseeable.

Then I started to be wrong about bigger things. I would misjudge other people’s emotions. I found myself regularly overhauling my philosophical ideologies. If you ask some of my closest friends, my most used phrase is “I realized” or “I had the realization that.” I constantly think that I am having revelations. And maybe I am, but chances are I’m not “right” about them, if they are happening so frequently that it takes me more time to tie my shoelaces than it does to decide I’m a “new person.”

I thought that all of this was really unique to me. And then I started learning about Alfred Adler in my psychology class. Adler was really into impressionist art. He thought it told a lot about the world. In class, our professor showed us a picture of an impressionist painting, and he asked us what it would look like if we had our noses pressed up against it. All it would have been is seemingly random brushstrokes of color. And then he asked us what it looked like from where we were sitting. We told him it looked like a stream in the woods, but that’s about all we could make out. Everything else was blurred and beautiful.

"Soleil Levant" - Claude Monet

And I started thinking that God must think we are really funny. Some of us spend our whole lives with our noses stuck to His painting, sure that we know exactly what that random brushstroke means until we are bumped a little and we have to figure out a new random brushstroke. And then some of us think that we are better than those other museum patrons, thinking that we are seeing the full picture. But even those people aren’t able to say more than if the painting generally resembles a stream or mountain or pond.

I think we can see whatever we want in that painting so we should make sure it’s beautiful.

What do you see?