behold

Isaiah 49:16 "Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands..."

forty-five years prior

Yesterday, on Easter, I was with lots of friends and family when I decided that I simply must leave immediately and purchase a pair of rollerblades, so I ventured toward Wal Mart in hopes of finding some for an affordable price. They unfortunately didn't have any in stock at that particular store, but the rollerblades aren't really the point. I'd turned off the main road and was turning to pull into the parking lot, and I noticed a couple of scruffy looking people sitting on the grassy area between the side-road I was on and the parking lot. They had big backpacks, the kind people take on big camping hiking climbing adventures, and one of them held a cardboard sign that I didn't read because I thought I knew what it said. I ignored them because, like most people I think, I've been trained by my culture to believe that they're fakes and probably alcoholics and of I stop they're going to laugh later while they're buying booze and cigarettes about how they suckered some little girl into giving them her spare change with their strategically worded cardboard sign meant to draw out the sympathies of the weak minded. They were probably dangerous or insane or stupid.

I went inside and learned that there were no rollerblades, but that I could find some at a sporting goods store across town. I purchased some rolls my mom had requested and left, again driving past the pair of hobos.

I gave them a better look this second time. It was a man and a woman, maybe late forties. He was holding the sign, which said something about how they'd lost their jobs and foreclosed on their house and they were living on the streets and they'd appreciate any kindness. She was eating what looked like ice cream or yogurt or something out if a white tub, and they were talking to each other. I don't think I saw anything indicating it but I was sure they were married. They seemed far less threatening than most homeless people I'd avoided. I pulled around past them and stopped at a red light that seemed to keep me trapped with my thoughts for far longer than I was comfortable with.

I fidgeted with my cellphone and looked at the bag of rolls and thought about turning around and giving it to them. But then I'd have to go back and by more, and if I was going to do that I may as well buy them more groceries than just a bag of kaiser rolls. I thought it would be so interesting to just talk to them, figure out how they got here with their backpacks full of another life, holding a piece of cardboard while hundreds of people just like me ignored the words one of them had written in sharpie. I figured that, even if they were homeless because they had lost their jobs, they were obviously not tried hard enough to find new ones. Panera is always hiring, I thought, or McDonalds, or this very Wal Mart. I wondered where they'd come from, if they'd walked some great distance, and if they were going anywhere. I wondered if they had families that hated them and refused to take them in, or if they hated their families and would rather beg in the Wal Mart parking lot than lay down their pride and go to them. I wondered if they even had families. I wondered where they'd been born some forty-five years prior, if they'd grown up with two parents who loved them or if they'd had brothers and sisters. I wondered how they met and fell in love, and how their life together was while they had a home. I wondered if their marriage was healthy, if they yelled at each other and nitpicked and got angry when the lid wasn't on the toothpaste or if they worked together and were a good team and if they loved each other. I wondered if he still told her he loved her and if she still treated him with respect. I wondered if they had kids. I wondered if the woman liked what she was eating or if she was just eating it because it was something to fill her up. I wondered if they really were alcoholics, but more than that I wondered how they got to that point. I wondered how these two humans with souls and lives and feelings and dreams ended up deciding to sit on the curb with a sign asking people to be kind to them.

The light turned green and I drove away. I haven't yet shaken the feeling of desperation I felt in my heart to know the answers to those questions. Like a need in my soul that had not been met, a deep starvation. Who were they? Twenty-four hours later and I cannot stop asking.

I knew God wanted me to stop, and I didn't do it. It was God. I know it was because I thought/prayed "God, this is not funny. Leave me alone so I can buy rollerblades. Those people are just some hobos and I am a little girl in a beat up SUV with a bag of kaiser rolls. I'm not going to give them anything because that would be stupid. Just stop." and he very obviously ignored me. If you'd been in my head you'd have known that it was obvious. "I love them, Mara, go talk to them and learn who they are. Give them food or don't give them food, but go talk to them for even just five minutes. Go be interested in them, know them, be their friend. Go!" he told me, and I said no thanks, and I drove to the sporting goods store where I didn't even buy any rollerblades because they were way too expensive.

I'll never know how that conversation might have changed my life, or their lives, and I regret that.

Don't be like that.

sacrificing one thing to gain another

If you know very much about my life in the past year, you know that last fall I developed an obsession with Ohio. Specifically the Columbus area, as many of my dearest friends live there. That place is like a Mara magnet, and sometimes I feel it pulling me back, even after only having spent a couple of spur-of-the-moment long weekends out there. I don't really know why. It's weird and crazy. I just love the place, and I think part of me stayed there when I left.

I once planned to move there. I prayed through it and told God that I'd hold it with an open hand, being available if he wanted something different from my life, but ultimately feeling that, if my circumstances remained the same much longer, the best thing I could do would be to pack up and leave my old life behind.

Not long after I prayed that, God threw some things my direction that made it pretty clear there was more life left for me in Des Moines. That meant giving up on Ohio. I'd known it was possible things would play out that way, although I really hadn't thought it to be likely. It was surprisingly not that hard, because there were some new and exciting things happening, but every once in a while I have moments of doubt, and I consider whether or not going to Columbus for a fresh start would have been the adventure I'd imagined.  Whenever I start to think that way though, I remember that I chose to stay here, and I remember why, and I realize that I may have sacrificed a good thing but in the end I got a pretty good thing in return.

All that to say, I feel like lately I've learned that to live means to give things up.  Things you might really want.  Things that might legitimately be a good option for your life, or things that may be fairly inconsequential but nevertheless must be sacrificed.  Sometimes life throws a lot of possibilities at you and they all seem to be really interesting and beautiful, and you may pray for direction or for a sign or for whatever it is you think makes sense, and then it still never starts to clear up.  Life is full of possibilities, and I knew that because I'd seen it cross stitched on pillows and such, but I don't know that I ever fully appreciated the fact that sometimes you have to decide what you're going to do, and that means giving up a lot of other things that you might also want to do.

Giving things up isn't very fun, I've learned, but I think that life gets a lot more terrible if you're focused on what you've given up instead of what you have in front of you.  I could choose to focus on things I can't know, like whether or not I'd have been able to do tons of music or be part of a hippie house church or get a cool job doing something awesome had I started my life over in Columbus, but that really only makes me discontent with the life I have in front of me, which is, quite frankly, a pretty beautiful life.  I have a job that I love doing every day, I get to play music in a little restaurant for two hours a week, I have a fun roommate who steals my shoes and doesn't care if I leave my dishes sitting around the house, I have a total crush on an amazing boy who loves me and my crazy bloggy ramblings and thinks I'm smart and beautiful, I pay my own bills and buy my own food and I still always have money left to grab coffee with a girlfriend or two every so often, I have lovely people all around me in my life, and I could continue.  I have everything I want and more here.  I will never know what I gave up to stay here, but I know that what I have now is beautiful and magical and amazing and worth it.

All this is probably kind of just a blur of words combined to make crazy run-on sentences, but I hope you know what I mean.  Maybe you've learned this already, that life requires you to say yes to one thing and no to another before you can move forward.  It isn't exactly news, I admit that.  It's been on my mind though, and I want you to know that whatever choices you make in your life, or whatever God puts in front of you, you can always choose love.  Love is always the right choice.  It bears all, believes all, endures all, and we could all use to give a little more of it.  In life, I want to choose love over all else, because I believe love changes the world and turns hearts away from themselves and towards Christ.  So whatever you choose, whatever you give up, always do it in love and for love and because of love.  It's really the greatest thing.  I learn this more every day, when I see others choose it or when I choose it myself or when I see God choose it in everything He ever does.

Sincerely,

Mara Tenille, Butterfly Child

a new phase in the metamorphosis

This blog is like a reboot. The domain has been used by me for years (thebutterflychild.blogspot.com) to blog and share my life and my mind and my ideas. It's been a faithful friend, an outlet for a ghastly amount of pent-up creative energy, and a place to pour myself out and be met with the legitimate honesty of only those who cared. Blogging seems trivial to lots of people, but to me it has been somehow filled with meaning and purpose and intent.

When I started cheating on Blogger with Tumblr I think I thought I'd magically become more artsy, since Tumblr is kind of all about artsy people and sharing highly intellectual photographs and commentaries and articles with your artsy friends, but instead I realized that I am just an awkward fit there. Despite having a fairly prominent streak of hippie in me, I'm also almost completely logical in my assessment of things. I often roll my eyes at those melodramatic hipster barista pipe-smoking types and the way their open-mindedness is often so short sighted and their intellectualism so frail. It frustrates me. I want beauty with substance, not false meaning derived from conjured up emotion.

I could prattle on for paragraphs and paragraphs about it all, but I won't, because it's not the point.

After a while, I decided my affair with Tumblr was unfulfilling and what I was really looking for the ability to have a real dialogue with people who also wanted the same things out of life-- art and music and meaning and love and growth and butterflies. Just on a practical level, Tumblr was not the place.

I decided a long time ago to dust off the Blogger and continue with that, but I went back to see those old posts and photos and I felt out of place, like I'd grown out of my own home. It was the same feeling you get when you see an old friend for the first time in years and you realizing in talking to them that neither of you have any clue who the other is anymore, and you are both trying to have a conversation with the memory of a time that doesn't exist. Reading those words from not that long ago, I felt like I'd somehow grown a hundred years and was looking back at a person who was mostly a stranger to me. It was weird and I couldn't convinced myself that it was okay to just pick up where I left off.

I'm not sure what made me feel so different from that girl. I've had some life experiences, both good and bad, that I know I grew through, but I hadn't ever felt that I'd changed so drastically. I talked the same, cared about the same things, had the same group of friends. I still can't put a finger on it exactly, but I will say that I have never been a person who looked back at the past and thought "Wow, look how far I've come!" I have never seen myself as a person who has changed tremendously over time, and in fact I usually feel that I've basically stayed the same since I was a small child, down to my favorites colors and most of my hobbies. I've mellowed out in some ways, sure, but that always seemed like it was supposed to happen eventually as you got older and turned into an adult.

As I skimmed the thoughts and habits of this other Mara from year or so ago, I realized that whether I'd noticed or not, I'd entered some new phase of life, of my metamorphosis, and I don't really know what to call it, but it's different. Maybe it's being an adult, or maybe it's just the result of some more grown-up life experiences, or maybe it's a result of my ongoing spiritual journey, or maybe I'm just being a drama queen. In any case, it was clear that while I still felt very much like the butterfly child I've always said I was, it was a new era, and with it comes a new blog.

So, welcome to my little journal, and feel free to stay and subscribe and comment and ask questions and wonder aloud and argue and muse. I'll be here.

Sincerely,
Mara Tenille
The Butterfly Child