I used to always want things to be hard.  Complex and unattainable.  So that once I attained them (and them was usually a him) I would…win a trophy?  Get a merit badge?  Or have a sense of accomplishment that only accompanies great effort and struggle and gives one a sense of justification.  And as previously discussed, the more untouched by grace I am, the more I need that.

I watch this Twilight craze unfold now, a craze I have bought into at least to the extent of reading the series and seeing both movies.  But there’s an extension of it beyond consumerism that taps into the identity of each participant–especially those who slept outside Rockefeller Center last week to catch a glimpse or even share a brief interaction with the human who gets paid to play the role of a vampire. Meanwhile, the one who wrote this story and created this world gives one interview on Oprah and goes largely unnoticed on any set or red carpet visits.  We sure do love our idols, don’t we?

I know I have.  Like most girls, I’ve always longed to be a Juliet.  The recipient of intense, complicated, rule-defying love.  “Star-crossed” always sounded so romantic to me–the idea that a love story could be so powerful as to surpass earthly description and involve the heavens.  Then I found out that it meant that both lovers are doomed.  Due to their love.  I watched as Romeo drank the poison then seconds later Juliet stabbed herself and no matter how many times I yelled at them to STOP and JUST WAIT FIVE SECONDS!, it always ended the same.  And I began to wonder if such a love could be…overrated.

It became so for me.  Wanting to be the one who changed the jerk into a sweetheart, the rebel into a saint, the Speaker’s erratic son into…well, if not reliable, then at least Republican.  Eventually, gracefully, I learned that the change I was trying to inspire had to happen somewhere else.

So I jumped out of a boat, literally and figuratively, and lost my footing and my control and the water started to close in.  And the strength that carried me to shore was not my own.  Which was what opened my eyes and stirred my soul and made me uncomfortable enough with what I saw, my comfort so far, to leave it a thousand miles behind me.

Four years later, I sit in a theater next to my love who is neither vampire nor werewolf.  The space once filled with drama now holds quiet confidence.  Some risks pay off big time.

Faith is what gets us to and through them.

The paradox that is my faith holds all the complexity (and, paradoxically, simplicity) that I have ever been looking for.  This faith, with its stories of strength from weakness and heroes from stutterers and life from death, has the twists and turns that every other relationship is incapable of sustaining.  The twists and turns that save me and answer me and ARE me.  My story held within the gloriously incomprehensible, graciously reachable greatest story.  A story that contains the heavens without crossing stars.