The Writer and the Phoenix

I'm one of those writers that has long periods where I write nothing at all, staring at a blank screen, biting my lip and wondering why I bother trying to tell stories at all.  I sink into deep bouts of discouragement where I can't escape apathy, dragged into a mood where I simply don't care about the words I create, I can't get a grip on my ideas, my characters, my prose, and I feel them slipping out of my mind into that black space at the back of your existence where all dead thoughts go.
At these points, I begin to question myself, I ask, "What if I'm not really meant to write at all?"  Because can you stink so low there is a point of no return?  I always ask myself -- though, for a 15-year-old to ask such questions of himself is indeed quite silly -- the terrifying question, "What if I have nothing left to say?  What if I have told all I have to tell?  What if no one ever did care or ever will care?"
But then, deep in my heart, something unfolds.  A match is lit, a spark ignites, a light erupts.  And suddenly bursting, bubbling up like volcanic lava, are my words.  And I realize they were always there, just out of reach, but still present in my being, like always.  My fingers fly over the keyboard as I write, desperate to get everything out of me.  I am filled with a wonderful, irresistible love for writing, and I must write every second I can.
During these times I can never understand how, just a few days ago, or in some cases mere hours ago I thought I could never write again.  During these times I feel like a writer, I feel some paragon emotion .  I desire an eternal circle of nothing but this feeling.
Yet, as I rise higher into that glorious writer's emotion, I fall again.  I am back to staring at a blank screen, biting my lip and wondering why I bother trying to tell stories at all... and worse, I think that if I only get such brief bursts of true love for writing, I'm clearly not a true writer.
But, again, a match, a spark, a light.  I'm up again into the world of my words, loving every second my mind is spilling them out onto paper.
Call me genius, I think I've discovered a pattern.

While I do believe every writer is different concerning the creative process, I think a lot of people go through the same vicious, glorious cycle I go through.  Writing doldrums to writing ecstasy, writing doldrums to writing ecstasy, writing doldrums to writing ecstasy.  And I think that's just the way it goes.
I think a writer is like the Phoenix of mythology.  The Phoenix is a bird of fire, and it obtains life by rising from the ashes of it's predecessor.  First it rises in a spectacular burst of flame and vitality and heat, and then it dies, sinking into ash and death.  And yet, it rises again, just as spectacular, and then sinks to ash again.  And it rises again.  And it sinks again.  It's a beautiful rebirth cycle, and I have found it to be an accurate metaphor for the way I process my creativity.
I think the thing to remember is the Phoenix always rises again.  It's a cycle, a process, and you can't have both  at once.  Fire cannot exist without ash, nor can ash exist without fire.  Out of our writing doldrums will erupt a great cascade of words, and that too dies, but to be replaced with a new waterfall of stories.  Sometimes the period of ash will stretch on for months, a bleak, ravaged landscapes that come with much pain and discouragement, and sometimes the period of flames and words only lasts an hour -- but it will always come again.
So, if you haven't written anything for months.  If you feel like I have, doubting yourself and your writing, just remember one thing.  One very important fact you must never forget. 
You will rise again.

            


Post Script - An Infinite Creative Journey
I mentioned this concept briefly in Discouragement and Creativity but I thought I'd expand upon it here.  
I imagine creativity like a road, an infinite journey.  A circle, if you will.  I'm one of those writers with the unfortunate tendency to compare myself with other authors -- "They write prose so much better than me," "Their plot is so much more development than mine," "Their characters are more likable," "How do they produce such beautiful words?"  However, not only is this unhealthy, it is unnecessary.  If you think of creativity as an infinite line of good ideas, bad ideas, words, pictures, underdeveloped concepts, developed concepts, over-developed concepts, a soup of brilliance and enlightenment, failures and shortcomings, then no matter where you are on that line it doesn't really matter.  As long as your engaged in active, raw creativity you are behind, ahead, and right beside your fellow artists.  This doesn't mean you don't have to learn the tools and tricks of your craft, but so do we all.  You mustn't judge yourself on where someone else is placed on an infinite line.   
I think that's a really beautiful concept, and one I find encouraging.  As writers, we're on a never-ending journey, so don't bother glancing over your shoulder at what other people are doing.
You're doing just fine where you are.  

         

An Orchestral Metaphor

I walked, and by my side a man, shining in white robes, guided me with a gentle hand.  We came upon a great cliff, overlooking an endless expanse below, a space that stretched out beyond eye's capacity.  Below, an orchestra covered the ground, blanketing it like heavy snow.  It sprawled, so sheer in size it made tears well up in my eyes and my whole form huddle with wonder.  Instruments, all that are known to man, were being played, from the harps to flutes, violins to bass drums.  I watched the musicians, anonymous faces furrowed in concentration.
My gaze wandered in fascination over the scene, but indeed, most wonderful of the picture was the Conductor, set on a platform high above the orchestra.  He shined, and I realized that no sun shone here, and everything I saw was by Him and His radiance.  The orchestra below performed solely by His light.  He held His baton, poised with natural precision, and conducted in inconceivable, spectacular movements which never wavered and held such a position of logic and divinity as to be paradoxical.
The Conductor smiled, indescribable, as if every one of the players He conducted was His child, one who He delighted in above all.  It filled my heart, my very soul with ecstatic, fantastical joy.
"My Father," said the man beside me, gesturing to the Conductor.  "The Great Conductor."
It was at this moment I realized a curious fact.  Surprised, I gazed down again at the uncountable number of instruments, all in use, fingers on strings, pressing stops, mouths blowing through reeds.
"Why!" I exclaimed.  "There is no music.  None at all."
"There is music," said the Conductor's son.  "You cannot hear it, for it would destroy."
"But the sound," I protested.  "The sound must be incredible."  I looked with longing at the orchestra, and at the Conductor, for anything under the guidance of Him must surely be perfection.
My guide looked on me with love and compassion.  "I will let you hear a small portion, so that you will understand," he said.  He placed his hands to my ears.
I listened, holding my breath.  First, silence, but then a note swept into existence, long and clear, bowed from a violin.  All at once, the music crashed in around me.  Whatever I had expected, it was not what I heard.  The music weighed on me, an unbearable yoke of sound.  The flow of the melodies moved like liquid over me, saturated with such sorrow, despair, and loss that my entire body began to tremble.  The great pitch of sound swelled, louder and louder, deafening and defeating.  Through it all, from melancholy harmonies to tragic rhythms, I could hear instruments harsh and out of tune.  The screech of a wayward violin, the wobble of a dissonant oboe, the shrill squeak of a cracked flute.  Notes rushed in, their voices quick and fleeting, and notes were held far beyond the time they were meant, drawn out to long disarray.  My very existence could not cope with the vast, woeful sounds.  But for all its ugliness, it captivated something inside me, deep within me something surged up.   
It was horrible, but it was beautiful.
My soul sang with it, and I wept into my guide's shoulder.  He took his hands away from my ears, and the music faded away.
"How does He bear it?" I cried, staring at the Conductor, standing in the midst of all that terrible, wonderful sound.  "How does He bear it?"          
"Because He loves.  My Father loves each one of those players, unconditionally and forever.  He has written out a Part for each and every one, He has delicately structured their instruments and He wrote the Great Score for them.  But they try to rewrite it, or change it, or play their own melody entirely.  Most of them do not even look up to see that they have a Conductor, and they perpetually play the Broken Song.  If they would only look up...
"But my Father knows the plans He has.  He will create a New Score, soon.  For the melody heard is nothing compared to what is coming - the melody both heard and unheard, where Perfection shall play in the Heavens, and even the unbound stars shall sing."
I looked again on the endless sea of faces down below.  Everywhere, heads turned down and away from the Conductor, and I realized, with an ache in my heart, that many of them wept at the ground with dark eyes turned away from the light.
And above it all, the baton swung in divine motion. 
As I watched, the Conductor turned and looked at me, directly into my eyes, and I found my surroundings melting away.  I was in the orchestra, a violin in my hands, among the grand and sorrowful melody, contributing my own soul to the Great Score.  But I kept my eyes on the Conductor, and I let His hands guide me, and I played for Him.  I magnified His melody and it brought me joy surpassing all understanding.  This was but a practice, a preparation for the New Score, for a much greater melody, written by the Conductor for all who sought to play in the Orchestras of Heaven. 
Behold, this is true love.    

Christianity Clichés ~ Part 1 ~ "Jesus Saves"

~Here's an overview of what I'm attempting to do here with this blog series.~

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." - John 3:16-17 

"Jesus Saves"

 The foundation of the Christian doctrine.  The pillar of the New Testament.  This is what I see most quoted among my Christian peers, pasted on to email signatures and bumper stickers and t-shirts, which is very good...  However, some Christians seem to only go that far.  They tell you "Jesus Saves!" but they don't answer the following questions.  Why does He save?  How does He save?  And why do we even need saving in the first place? 

A Brief Explanation and Exploration of Free Will and Human Nature

For most of my life I did not understand free will.  In the back of my mind I always wondered why evil was in the world, why God didn't just create "good beings."  Free will is something I feel is glanced over by most Christians today, not fully explained, and maybe not even fully understood.  Yet free will is quite simple, and it is the basis of everything we know and feel in the world today.  Free will is the beginning of "Jesus Saves."

C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, explains it eloquently:

God created things which had free will.  That means creatures which can go either wrong or right.  Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating.  The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures in the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free.

In the beginning God created Adam and Eve in their proper states - in a direct, personal, and unveiled relationship with Him.  If you have ever wondered why God didn't just make "good beings"... well, He did.  But He also made free beings.  A free thing must be free to be good or bad, to go right or wrong, or it isn't free at all. 

In the Garden of Eden there was the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  If God created the pre-sin world, why did he create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  It was Adam and Eve's free will.  It was their possibility of going wrong, and as harsh as it seems, it was necessary.  God did not want clockwork people.  Adam and Eve could have never had the full joy of God otherwise. 

So, when Adam and Eve were tempted into eating the Forbidden Fruit they unlocked in themselves their own sinful human nature (which is the inclination to do wrong), thus separating them and their future descendants from God.  Adam and Eve exercised free will and disobeyed God, which caused humans to be veiled from God.  It gave them the need to be forgiven, to be "saved."

A Life, A Death, A Resurrection - A Savior

Enter Jesus.  He came as God in a human body, tempted and tried but never sinning.  Out of every person in the world, he, of course, was the absolute least deserving of death and total separation of God, yet that was what happened.
God, being a Perfect Existence, cannot be in the presence of sin.  As fallen humans, in our sullied state of human nature, can in no way can ever be in the presence of God, no matter how hard we try to resist our free will.  So God sent His Son to live a perfect, blameless life, but after it all He made Jesus suffer on a cross, suffer pain none of us will ever be able to imagine and total spiritual separation.  Why?   Timothy Keller, in his book The Reason For God, puts it like this:

"Why did Jesus have to die?  Couldn't God just forgive us?"  This is what many ask, but... we see that no one "just" forgives, if the evil is serious.  Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy's renewal and change.  Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself.  Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears.  

We are sinners.  We are unforgivable.  The human nature inside us makes an uncrossable gulf between us and God.  But God forgives.  God sent Jesus.  Jesus absorbed (or perhaps the better word is "bore") our sin - all of our sin, yours, mine, the world's, future and past - and suffered in death.  But sin, being only a product of free will, has no power over God.  God raised Jesus from the dead, and, in essence, defeated human nature and, it could be said, free will.  We, in all our humanness, made an unbridgeable divide between ourselves and God that no human devices can span, but Jesus "saved us."  He made a Divine Bridge out of the cross, one that he allows all people to come over to True Love and heaven.  

"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit." - 1 Peter 3:18

Closing Words 

 How do we get saved?  Well, Derek Prince in his book The Spirit Filled Believer's Handbook says it plainly:

Let me now state... [the] basic facts of the gospel and response which each person is required to make.

1. Christ was delivered by God the Father to the punishment of death on account of our sins.
2. Christ was buried.
3. God raised Him from the dead on the third day. 
4. Righteousness is received from God through believing these facts.

If you have read this far and have not made a personal, direct commitment to Christ as your Lord and Savior I urge you to do it now.  Jesus saves, but you must reach out and take His Saving Grace.  He's standing right beside you, gently guiding you toward His Love and His Mercy.  Sometimes, even if someone claims to be a Christian, they do not fully understand the simplicity of the act of salvation.  They get so caught up in "being saved" they forget to reach out and take the saving.  

Have you believed the facts stated above?  Have you made a direct and personal response in your own life?  If not, I ask you to do it now.  Pray with me, these words: 

Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that You died for my sins; that

You were buried; that You rose again on the third day.

I  now repent of my sins and come to You for mercy and

forgiveness.

By faith in Your promise, I receive You personally as my 

Savior and confess You as my Lord.

Come into my heart, give me eternal life and make a child of God.

Amen! 

^(OvO)^

          

 

Christianity Clichés ~ An Overview

An Overview
I often wonder how my non-Christian friends view me.  I'm not very open about my faith, and while that's a problem, it is because I am frustrated.  I've noticed something, among Christians - myself included.  We've begun "hiding" behind slogans.  I see many of my Christian peers plastered with "JESUS SAVES!" and "God is love!" and "God has a plan for you!!!"  While there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, what frustrates me is a lack of deep understanding surrounding these statements.  I feel we've become dependent upon the sayings, not the meaning, and this rubs off on the society we're trying to impact.  More and more, I find Christianity treated as "the religion for folks who need to 'believe in something.'"  We've become regarded as the people who plaster on smiles and sing songs of hopes when everything in crumbling around us, and then proclaim to the world, "God loves you all and has a plan!!"  That's why I have trouble talking about God with my friends.  I feel like everything coming out of my mouth is a cliché, easily expelled as a simple "need to believe something" to bring me hope and comfort in a harsh, meaningless world.   
So, I am going to embark on a blog series.  As a blogger just getting to his feet, this should be an adventure (for the both of us, I hope).  I'm going to attempt to delve a little deeper into the slogans and sayings of Christianity that have become so cliché in our society, and explore where they came from and what they really mean.  I do not know how many parts this will be, and I might do a few posts in between parts, so stay tuned!          

My Hope
I am not a theologian, I am a teenager with a blog, and not an excessively brilliant one at that.  But I am a teenager who takes tries to take the time to exist.  Because really, that's what proves it for me. Existence.  Some people believe the world was made through random chance - I do not know how they can think this and exist.  Surely they must realize the vastness of their own minds.  You can dive into your own consciousness and fall forever, though the thought is terrifying.  Knowing this, I cannot believe we are creatures of oblivion.  Surely we can only be creatures of Eternity, we are something more than these earthly bodies.  Out of our Existence stems the beautiful and ever-present evidence for Something More, a Creator, a Forever.  My hope is that I can share some of this with you through these blog post.
I want to get you to delve farther into your own Existence and find Truth there.
  
^(OvO)^

        

The Ending of Innocence

From the moment I was born, I began to suck from the world my human needs.  It took most of my childhood to realize the world requires something in return for what it yields.  As I drain it, it drains me.  We are caught in a two-way act of vampirism, the Universe and I, as we bleed each other dry.  And the Universe will always claim our innocence in the end, until the End of Time, when the Lord shall return and restore to us a Perfect Unity.  But until then, we are engaged in our wars against the world.
Everyone, no matter what age or religion, is struggling to retain their innocence.  I think maybe it starts as children, when we can first understand death as a concept, or realize that we are merely the tiniest particle of dust on the outskirts of a chaotic sandstorm waiting to be enveloped in the whirling winds...  Maybe we all have that one definable moment in our minds, that moment when we find we have Innocence, something almost substantial, and something so easily breakable, so easily lost.  Our terms of when and where Innocence begins and ends might shift from person to person, religion to religion, but deep down inside we all have our undeniable, unalienable Shame, that Counterpart to Innocence.
I've reached a point in  my life where I have seen so much, too much, and yet I have seen nothing at all.  "Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt," cries Hamlet.  And I'm inclined to cry with him.  Sometimes I wish I could cover myself, that I could shield my eyes and plug my ears and protect my skin all at once, in some pitiful ball, hoping the Universe will forget me.  It never does, though.
Whatever it is, the never-ending cycle of what you see on the computer screen and TV and the screaming roadside billboards, the conversations overhead, the enslaving desires of the flesh, the wars and rumors of wars, the touch of death and sickness, or a betrayal of trust... losing your innocence hurts.    To say a person "is broken" has become somewhat of a cliche, but it is true.  As fallen humans we can, and will, break.
I think I'm beginning to break.  Whatever shell of naivety I had around me is falling away.  It scares me, as if I am standing at the edge of a precipice with the world behind me, urging me to jump.  If I do not jump, will I be pushed.
I think most people my age, maybe most people in general, feel this way.  What I'm finding out about my time of life, is this is when you find out if you're someone who jumps or someone who must inevitably be pushed.  Because in life, we all must go through some irrevocable fall, but maybe we have some control over how it happens.
This, obviously, is a terrifying fact.  It is everyone's secret burden, hidden in little chambers of the heart.  We shove our broken pieces deep within us so the world cannot see them, and it seems we let the jagged edges cut us even more.
I've been thinking a lot about the shame we feel, as we grow up, as we lose our innocence piece by piece.  Why?  This is one common burden shared by humanity.  The person sitting next to you at the bus stop, the cashier at Walmart, your best friend, your worst enemy, the great masses shifting through the earth like quicksand.  We all know.  We all feel.  And we all deal with it differently.  Our books on tape, our lustful pleasures, our beauty magazines, our antidepressants, our sports channels, our casinos, our parties, our movie theaters, our Doctor Who marathons, our junk food.  
My only thought on this stems from my faith, that as Christians we should take this brokenness, this loss of Innocence, to God.  He is, quite literally, the only one who can heal your jagged edges.  I do not think He will put you back together, per se, but more that He will fill those broken parts of you up with Him, making you so much fuller than you were before.  That is why I find a certain beauty in brokenness.  Through God, as cliche as it sounds, you really can become whole again, and not only that, but much more.  Through Him, you can become Complete.
You may put your trust in the Universe and get betrayed.  It is more than likely.  You will get scarred, you will get scraped and burned and lost and found and hurt and touched and loved and hated and you will cry and you will laugh.  And you will be exposed, terribly exposed, to this ever-shifting mass of life.
I believe in something more, though.  There is Someone who will never change.
I want to go back to my fantascised childhood, I want to go back to some time before my Innocence began unraveling.  I can't.  I'm at this precipice and there is no turning back.
I think I'm going to jump.  But I do not think I will be jumping alone.  I have faith in my God.  He will not let me fall, but He will let me soar on eagle's wings.
That precipice isn't so scary anymore.  
      
^(OvO)^