Murderers of Love

I borrowed a movie from the library last week called Like Crazy. It's about a young couple who fall madly in love during their final year of college and then through various circumstances have to either end their relationship or attempt to stay connected from a very long distance. I brought the movie home and warned my husband that I didn't know if it was a happy or sad ending (he much prefers the former), it was an indie darling and looked interesting. Forewarned and curious we began our movie.

Stop now if you want to see the movie without me spoiling the ending, though I don't think it's worth your time, and I'll tell you why. These people are idiots. What happens in the movie is like a guide book for how to kill a relationship. And I was appalled. By the end we wished for the sad ending we had feared. Instead we were left with depressing apathy.

This young couple love each other "like crazy". Get It? Catchy title.

They meet in college, have a very talky first date and then travel through a falling-in-love montage. They graduate and it is time for the girl to go back to England because her Visa is about to expire. She decides to ignore it and stays through the summer so they can sleep in every morning and not have to suffer a few months apart. Bad idea. Rule #1:  Don't mess with the INS.

So, she goes home at the end of the summer and attempts to come back a week later as a "tourist". As she tries to enter the U.S. through customs, they stop her and tell her she's not aloud back in because she violated her Visa. Duh. Didn't her dad say this would happen? I know, you make bad decisions when you're young and in love.

Tearful airport scene and then attempts at getting new Visa fail. Girl gets job in London and begins her life without the boy. Boy starts his business in California, where a very sultry Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) happens to be his assistant.

He hops the pond to visit the love of his life, but realizes that her life is now, like England, foreign to him. They try staying connected on the phone, but the time difference is too much to handle. So, obviously, they sleep with other people. She has a conveniently attractive neighbor and little Katniss is clearly falling for our boy.

Then, they decide to get married because they can't be apart any longer. Wouldn't this have been a good option a few years ago? But, they still can't get past the Visa problem. He goes back home and immediately starts sleeping with Katniss, while the girl invites cute neighbor over to keep her depression at bay. The smitten neighbor proposes on the same night she finds out that her Visa has finally cleared.

Hooray! She can finally be with the man she loves! Who is also now her husband.

Oh, wait, they've both been living and sleeping with other people.

Oh well, they're married now, they must be together.

They greet each other cordially at the airport and then he brings her to his ramshackle loft. You can see it on her face, "I left a great job and lovely flat in London for this?" She says she's going to take a shower. After a long pause he says he'll join her. They awkwardly shower together while thinking about how they used to be all crazy in love and then the movie ends.

Seriously?

A different movie that I would recommend is called Dan in Real Life and has one of my all-time favorite lines in it. After Dan kicks out his daughter's teenage boyfriend (of 3 days), she runs after the car crying and screaming and clawing at the window and then turning to Dan (played beautifully by Steve Carrell) and screams as only a broken-hearted teenage girl can, "You are a murderer of love!"

Steve Carrell may have broken his daughter's heart, but these two characters in Like Crazy are the true murderers of love. On the back cover of the DVD it said that the movie was about the "intensity and fragility of love." I personally don't think love is fragile. I think it is the most powerful force in the universe, but we have gotten so careless with it that we kill it dead a good portion of the time.

I kept asking my husband what was wrong with these people? Who, when madly in love with one person, lives and sleeps with another? Did they really think they could go back to each other like nothing happened? Is that really how our culture thinks? I'm sorry, but that is ludicrous.

Love is priceless. A treasure. A miracle. When you find it you nurture it with kindness, you wait patiently for it to mature. You sacrifice your own comfort for it. And then you never let it go.

I have to admit that the acting in the movie was good enough that I was screaming at the tv as though these were real people. But the only thing crazy about their love was how they squandered it.

Easter Brilliance

I read something the other day that has struck me. I just happened to read it earlier this week and it happened to be about Easter. I've been reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope ever so slowly over the past few years (yes, years). It is not a light read, but it is brilliant. And I picked it up the other day and I think I have struck upon my favorite part.

Easter has always been my favorite holiday (read: holy-day). Not just to celebrate the risen Christ, but to remember the depth of sacrifice that Good Friday brought on our behalf and then to wake Easter morn knowing that He was miraculously risen that day - fulfilling all hope, conquering death, and promising us life eternal if we choose to take it.

I grew up without the observation of Lent as a precursor to this holiday, so it is a bit foreign to me, but in the last few years my husband and I have chosen to give up things in preparation for the Easter season. This year we gave up sugar in it's most obvious forms (it is hidden everywhere, so we didn't go much farther than to ban candy, baked goods, pop and chocolate). It has been good to sacrifice something that I crave constantly and depend on in times of emotional turmoil, so that I can learn that sugar, and chocolate in particular, cannot love me back, even though it seems, at times, like it must.

Getting back to NT Wright, this little excerpt from his book has filled me up to bursting with the need to celebrate Easter anew, though I'm not quite sure how to go about it just yet. Let me share with you some of what he said about how the Church could celebrate the risen Christ more appropriately:


"Easter is about the wild delight of God's creative power...we ought to shout Alleluias instead of murmuring them...we should give every man, woman, child, dog, cat and mouse in the [church] a candle to hold; we should have a real bonfire...

...But my biggest problem starts on Easter Monday. I regard it as absurd and unjustifiable that we should spend forty days keeping Lent, pondering what it means, preaching about self-denial, being at least a little gloomy, and then bringing it all to a peak with Holy Week...and then after a rather odd Holy Saturday, we have a single day of celebration.

Easter week itself ought...to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems...

...if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again - well, of course. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative...the forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving.

It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might make you wake up in a whole new way. And that's what Easter is about."

Every time I read this it makes me want to have a party and dance in the rain and soak in the sunshine. It reminds me that we have something to exclaim to the world that is particularly wonderful.

Not only did Jesus die for our sins, but he rose from the dead, bringing new life and hope to the world. 40 days of celebration after 40 days of sacrifice. That sounds like something Jesus would delight in.

So, for the next 40 days I am going to celebrate, have a piece of chocolate after dinner, hug my kids, kiss my husband, maybe even walk in the rain and soak in the sun. I'm not sure what it will entail, but that I will remember that I have reason to rejoice.

Something New

Strange things are afoot in my house. Our time in the in between, wandering in circles in the desert and wondering if we'd actually ever escape, seems to be coming to an end. Hope is drawing near. An end is in sight and we may actually reach the promised land.

My husband and I realized that we would need to leave support-based campus ministry 5 years ago. After many tears and prayers and trial and error, Joel got into grad school. He was going to become a counselor, do the favorite part of his job full-time. A few problems loomed: 1) my husband has dyslexia and hates school, 2) We had no money to pay for school, and 3) we had 4 kids and not a lot of faith.

But here we are. My husband will be graduating with a master's degree in mental health counseling on April 28th. And Joel, the guy who feared school more than anything, will likely be graduating with a 3.7 GPA (one tenth of a point higher than my undergrad score, he likes to point out). I could not be more proud of him.

His teachers and classmates have thoroughly enjoyed his unique perspectives and wisdom from years of ministry experience. The supervisor of his internship has literally begged him to take a job there after graduation, and other job options loom on the horizon. An improbability in this economy. And so, I've begun to feel something for our future that I have not felt in quite some time. I think it's called...

HOPE.

We officially left the ministry just a few months ago and have wondered what it means to live a life outside of full-time occupational ministry. After almost 16 years, it had become a lifestyle. Everything seems new and strange, but not.

Somehow it doesn't affect my love for Jesus or need to be in His Word, it hasn't lessened my desire to tell people how much they are loved by their Creator or to bring hope and healing to their hearts. It's just no longer part of our resume. It doesn't really change the way we live as much as I thought it would.

But being done with school will. I can't imagine getting my Saturdays back. Getting to have family time all together, without Joel heading out for 5 hour study sessions. Or sitting together at night after the kids are in bed, instead of him in the other room on the computer finishing up another assignment. Or his 45 minute commute to class in all kinds of weather.

Other things are happening, too. This full-time working mom thing is not all it's cracked up to be. The pay check is certainly nice, and getting a new professional wardrobe has been fun, but trying to keep all the plates spinning causes something akin to insanity. The house continues to get dirty, dinner still needs to be cooked, groceries need to be gotten and birthdays need to be celebrated. I just don't have the time to do those things anymore. Not when there are four children with varying degrees of neediness and homework nipping at my ankles.

Things have fallen through the cracks. There have been assignments missed, science fair projects not turned in, kids not picked up (they did make it home eventually), and a puppy that rarely goes on runs anymore. In short, the life I worked so hard to create seems to be falling apart at the seams.

But here we are, my 13-year-old transforming from boy to man like some wild science experiment before my eyes, my daughter with her first best friend whose opinion is beginning to matter just a little bit more than mine, and two other boys who still love to run wild, but cling to me when I'm home like I may ship out to sea at any moment.

It's not pretty, this life that I'm living right now. But it's my life. And while I look forward to what comes next, maybe a little respite, a vacation or two? I rejoice in the moments of laughter I share with my kids and the fact that there is no one I would rather travel this road with than my husband.

Life is hard, but there is no denying that God has been oh so good to me...and whatever I may be lacking, I do have this...

hope.