Law v. Life

I believe

As a Christian, Easter is obviously a big deal.  I love Easter.  This year, the three church services I attended really reinforced the message of Easter, including what it takes to believe in the resurrection and what we gain from believing.

Last night, at 11pm, I attended the Easter vigil.  This was an intimate service, telling the story of the resurrection and focusing on what it is that prompts us to believe - is seeing believing?  Mary Magdalene wept when she discovered the empty tomb, but when she saw Jesus, she believed, and went and told the good news.  But was it because she saw Jesus that she believed...? Or is there something more or different to why we believe as Christians.  There had to be more for Mary because when Jesus told her that he was returning to the Father, that was something beyond comprehension and certainly beyond her ability to see, yet she believed.  At the end of the vigil, just after midnight, we went outside, singing, and greeted Easter with cries of "He is risen!"  In the cold and dark, it was such a wonderful contrast to welcome the joy of our salvation.

This morning, I was back at church at 7am for the sunrise service offered by the youth.  It was touching how much effort they put into the service, and encouraging to see so many young people who love God so much.  The message was about the amazing grace God offers us in salvation, and touched on the story of John Newton, the slave ship captain who wrote the famous hymn after he experienced God's grace in forgiving the sins he had committed against humanity.  It also incorporated a video about a father who has to sacrifice his own son's life to save the people on a train headed for death, which ultimately results in joy for the passengers and for the grieving father.  Hearing the high school girl who delivered the message speak about God's love and sacrifice and the grace that all people can receive through Jesus was a very sweet way to begin to celebrate Easter this morning.

Finally, I headed back to church one last time, for my regular contemporary service at 11am.  Although the lead singer is currently taking a break from leading us in worship, which means the music is not quite as strong or powerful as usual, nevertheless, it is in the songs that I am able to experience the most complete joy.  It is impossible not to leave filled with joy and hope and gratitude after singing out that Jesus has conquered death and redeemed us.

As I drove home, I was also thinking about the love and gratitude I will always feel towards my college boyfriend because he is the person who ultimately helped lead me to Christ.  Other friends played a role in readying my heart, but he was the one who helped me fully open my heart to the holy spirit.  We had never had a real conversation about religion, but one day he casually suggested that I read the Bible while he studied, and for some reason I accepted the Bible he offered me. 

As I read the Bible, at first just to make him happy, I was gradually overwhelmed by the knowledge that I believed.  It terrified me, but I actually believed what I was reading.  It wasn't because I could see God or had experienced any definable miracle, and it wasn't because I was persuaded that there was a particular historical accuracy or logical reason to accept what I was reading.  It just was.  I just believed.  And I couldn't deny the power of God and the awe I felt at God sending his son to die for my sins and give me new life.  As I explored what that meant and how I could allow my salvation to transform me, I experienced joy and peace and hope in a way I had previously never imagined.  I have been horribly unhappy at times in the decade since, but I have never been without hope and joy, because God's grace and love are endless and my eternal life was bought by Jesus long ago.

When you are in a relationship, or shortly after it ends, you think that person will always be a part of your life, or you will always remember them, or be affected by the time spent with them.  After three longterm relationships, and various other relationships, I don't generally think that is true.  You learn from each relationship and who you are is shaped by everyone who passes through your life...but you forget the actual people as they fade from your memory. 

For four-and-a-half years, my college boyfriend was my best friend in the world (and it was the same with the other two serious relationships).  We were together all day every day or spoke on the phone at length when we were apart.  No experience or thought was complete until we shared it with each other.  We loved each other's company, we respected each other's opinions, and we thought our bond was so strong it would never be broken even if we broke up.  Now, it is like I never knew him.  We are occasionally in touch, but it is like he is someone I once knew, not even like he is a real person.  I don't miss anything about him.  And I have no anger or sadness or any emotions towards him.  It just gradually faded away until it was like our relationship never happened.  Who I am was shaped in great part by the time I spent with him, but today, he could have been anyone.  My experience has been the same with each other relationship, that they gradually fade away until the individuals cease to exist.  Every relationship has taught me things, but where and how I learned what I know and became who I am is not tied to any specific person in my consciousness.  But my faith will always be tied to him, and for that I will always love him.  So this is me wishing him a happy Easter and saying thank you.

He made me feel beautiful

It always amuses me that when the visits to my blog spike, people mostly read the dating posts.  So, to satisfy the masses, I'll do another "dating history" post.  So far, I have covered my three official boyfriends from high school, except the one who I dated for two years.  We'll leave him for some time when I'm feeling more masochistic, and skip forward to my first college boyfriend.  Let's call him Casper.

I met Casper the first weekend of college when a group of us were hanging out in the common room in our dorm.  He and I ended up talking for hours, and as we shared our stories of model U.N., I gradually grew attracted to his wit and intelligence.  I was impressed by his knowledge of wide ranging topics and his maturity, being a sophomore and all.  Late at night as we discovered we were now alone in the room once filled with other students he asked if I would slap him if he tried to kiss me.  I told him to find out.

So then we were dating.  It started off well enough, with us going to the dining hall together, him having me listen to music I just had to hear, me dragging him to plays, us watching The Simpsons in my future boyfriend's dorm room with my head on Casper's lap, and both of us growing to like each other well enough.  Things were going fine, but I remember one day we were talking about several of the other couples that had paired off around us.  Casper explained to me that those other relationships wouldn't last the year, but ours could potentially last through college because there were "no feelings involved."  He didn't mean it how it sounds; he was just stupid.  But that was a wake up call.  I wasn't remotely in love with him, but I realized I definitely didn't want to fall in love with someone who thought it was good not to feel. 

When I finally decided to break up with him after nearly two months, it actually took me close to 48 hours to get him to make time to see me, which considering we lived in the same dorm and had no obligations in life, was also a bad sign.  I think it was because he knew it was coming, but still.  When I told him I thought we should break up he said "okay," we talked for a couple minutes about random stuff, and I left his dorm room and went back into the common room to hang out with our other friends.

My friends still make fun of me for dating Casper, and I don't blame them.  There are so many easy things to mock, although he was basically a decent guy.  When the following fall he made a drunken attempt to hook up with me because "he had been thinking about me all summer," it confirmed that I had absolutely no interest in him anymore and didn't know what I had been thinking in the first place.

But he is the one guy who has ever truly made me feel beautiful.  Lots of guys have thought I was pretty enough or been attracted to me, but Casper was the only one who ever called me beautiful like he really meant it.  I was his "first," which meant we spent a lot of time together with him being extremely grateful.  I remember one day he looked up at me when I was wearing this red lace bra and said, "God, you're beautiful."  Normally, in a moment like that, nothing a guy says can be believed, but in that moment I just felt how much he meant it.  The way he said it and the way he looked at me have never been repeated with such conviction.  Sure, he didn't treat me like I was beautiful basically ever except for that one time, but I still remember that feeling.

The first guy who tried to impress me

In the fall of my sophomore year of high school, there was a boy who liked me and actually showed it in a way that is terribly cute looking back.  I'm not sure if anyone has been so sweet since.

Being oblivious, as always, I didn't realize he liked me at first.  I was in a play, and he was somehow involved with the crew or something; I just know he hung around a lot.  The play coincided with my birthday, so I had a birthday party/cast party/maybe surprise party, and he was there.  There were lots of people at the party, and my two best friends were spending the night afterwards, and he hung around a really long time after everyone but they had left until my father finally told him it was time to go home.  And he brought me a present.  It was a stuffed animal that related to the play I was in.  And I'm almost sure he brought me a single rose, too.  I, of course, thought this was simply because I had hyped up my birthday so much.  When he left that night, my friends and I may have wondered about his behavior, but I still didn't realize he liked me.

Within the next week or two, he asked me out on my first real date ever.  I was completely freaked out, but somehow I said yes.  I remember the anxiety that accompanied asking my father if I was allowed to go.  I think I got lectured about how my date's car was unsafe.  Because it was a Ford Tempo, which sounded similar to a Ford Pinto.  And yes, my father knew the difference just fine.  But he let me go.  We saw Aladdin.  I think that was the most romantic movie I ever saw.

In the coming weeks, we went Christmas shopping together, went out for pizza, and talked on the phone a lot.  For Christmas, he gave me a Claddagh ring.  I remember standing in my parents' kitchen when he gave it to me.  He explained to me how it meant different things depending on how it was worn.  He told me that one way meant I had a boyfriend, and he shyly asked me if I would like to wear it that way.  And I shyly said yes.  Now I would fully enjoy that moment in a way I was too afraid to then.

Now, we had not yet kissed.  And let me tell you, I really, really wanted to.  My friend and I came up with an elaborate ruse to facilitate the first kiss.  We decided that I had to seduce him.  Keep in mind I had just turned 15.  So, my friend spent the night at my house and we called him and told him he should bring us breakfast in bed in the morning.  Somehow we arranged it so my parents wouldn't be there, so he was supposed to "come on up" when he got there.  I bought a silky nightshirt.  He thought we were kind of crazy, but did as he was told.  It's a little blurry, but I think basically he came upstairs, my friend and I were both sitting in the bed, with me in my silky nightshirt, and then we all went downstairs and watched a movie together.  I don't know what it was I thought was supposed to happen when he came upstairs.  He held my hand under the blanket while we watched the movie, which was a step in the right direction, but disappointing.  It was a very bad plan.

Not too long after we became "official," the touring production of Evita came to town.  I loved Andrew Lloyd Webber.  I loved Evita.  I had to go.  But my father said no.  He said I wasn't going to a show glorifying a fascist sympathizer by an overrated composer.  But my sweet boyfriend knew how much I wanted to go.  He bought box seats for us, he cooked me dinner at his house beforehand, it was perfect.  No guy has cooked dinner for me on a date since.

Oh, and he wrote me a poem once.  My friend and I memorized most of it, and still occasionally quote it.  It had such classic lines as "My heart is home with you.  It doesn't want to leave." and "Please, pretty please take good care of my heart."  Oh, how we mocked him.  I would still mock a guy for that, but I would appreciate the effort more.

I broke up with him shortly after we finally kissed for the first time.  I have good reason to believe he is gay (for example, our later conversations where he enthusiastically told me how hot Brad Pitt was and that he would sleep with him...this was around the time of Thelma & Louise and A River Runs Through It), although I know that he was dating a woman a few years later.  He was a significant improvement over my first gay boyfriend.

First passion

Well, now that the link to this site is being passed around the ABA, I better get to posting.  I saw that apparently people are far more interested in the dating posts than the law/work ones, and since I can't post any details about work anyway, I've decided it's time for the second "dating history" post.  Especially since those are at least historical.

I met this boy when I was about three.  I was two days older.  Other than the fact that his mom babysat me for some brief period of time, my memory is a little hazy.  I didn't see him again for many years.  Until the first day of sophomore year.  He was a freshman, and he was in my gym class.  And there was an instant connection.

During that school year we hung out a lot and the chemistry between us was undeniable.  At first, I would massage his neck and head while we sat in the theater, and it was often more than he could take.  I was fifteen and just knew I had power, although I really didn't understand how I could make him respond like that.  At some point that spring, the tension between us had been building, we ended up alone in our theater director's office, and I decided it was time to make something happen.

I asked him my favorite question.  A question that, when I ask it, is never a trick question.
"What are you thinking about right now?"
"You."
"What about me?"
"What I want to do with you."
"What's that?"
"Kiss you."
"So do it."
So we kissed in the director's office.

And it wasn't a very good kiss.  In fact, we never quite learned how to kiss each other right.  It was like we didn't fit or something.  But we sure weren't very good at not kissing either.

We dated briefly.  We broke up.  I was cruel to him, in a fifteen-year-old kind of way.  Actually, that's one of the only things in my life I truly regret.

He started dating someone new.  So did I.  And we still couldn't be in the same room as each other without feeling that pull.  For a while nothing happened though.  When we were near each other, we felt it, the heat between us, but nothing happened.  We would look at each other in that way, but we stayed far apart.

And then my boyfriend cheated on me, for the first of many times.  I am pretty much the best girlfriend ever.  Until you cheat on me.  I went to school upset, told him what my boyfriend had done, and soon, we stopped resisting.  Everything that happened is a blur, but it is a blur of sound booths and dressing rooms and costume closets and parents' minivans and empty houses on school days and every opportunity we could find to be together when neither one of us felt too guilty or too confused.

Over the next year and a half there were times when we kept our distance, and times when we just couldn't.  I don't think we were ever in a room together though without feeling that connection.  I left for college.  He got married.  I don't remember if we even said goodbye.  Nearly ten years later, we ran into each other in a restaurant.  He looked very different, and at first I didn't recognize him at all.  But he came over to my table, he said my name, he looked at me, and he just kept looking.  I looked at him, into his eyes, and I couldn't look away either.  I said his name, and for a moment I felt that connection again before the introductions began and the past was the past again.

I never could explain it with him, and I still can't, but I definitely remember that passion.

First kiss

I was trying to figure out how to consistently have things to write about, and I realized many bloggers occasionally tell stories from their past.  And except for occasional allusions to the sociopath ex, I realized I've never really given much back story.  So I decided to re-visit the guys who hold some sort of special place in my past.  It might be the first guy I loved or it might be the first guy who made me feel beautiful.  Someone I went on a couple dates with sometimes is just as vivid in my memory as someone I was with for several years.  Anyway, here's the very first guy in my dating history.

In middle school, I was so jealous of my friends with boyfriends.  They were "in love" and would call each other every night and have kissing contests during recess to see who could sustain one kiss the longest.  I really wanted a boyfriend.

When I got to high school, I wanted a boyfriend even more.  One of my friends was dating this cute guy we knew from theater, and so somehow we decided that I should date his best friend.  One night, my friend and I got on the phone together, and then somehow with call waiting we got him to also call her, and then we went back and forth with "Do you like her?", "Do you like him?", "Do you want to go out?", and fifteen minutes later, I had my first boyfriend.  We talked on the phone and sat together during play rehearsals and hung out on the weekends with our friends after theater class. 

At some point, he took me to a dance at his high school.  I remember it was "semi-formal," so he and his friend both wore jeans with tux tops.  They thought they were so clever.  I wore this skin-tight black dress with cut-outs.  I can't believe my parents let me out of the house.  Actually, my father almost didn't.  Well, once we were at the dance, he didn't want to dance.  His friend kept trying to get him to, but he wouldn't.  His friend told him that if he wasn't careful, someone else was going to steal me from him.  I wasn't nearly as offended as his friend was, but I really did wish he would act a little more like my boyfriend.  He wouldn't even hold my hand, so his friend actually tied our hands together with some sort of decorative ribbon.  I think at some point we did dance.  It was fun, but not quite as romantic as I had imagined high school dances to be.

Sometime after that, we had been dating for a couple months and I decided it was time for us to kiss.  I was fourteen and felt entirely too old not to have had my first kiss.  I don't remember exactly how, but I let him know I was ready and expecting it.  This may have included telling him, and then when it didn't happen immediately, telling several of his friends, and them telling him that he better do it soon or I would break up with him.  That might be how it happened.  So, one night in January, we were at play rehearsal, and he came and asked me to go outside with him.  I knew what this meant.  So I promptly told my best friend.  She said she would be waiting inside for me.  So I went outside with him, and we walked around the building.  There was a light dusting of snow, which in that moment was incredibly romantic.  When we were back behind the theater where no one could see us, he took both of my hands in his, and leaned forward and kissed me.  He used tongue.  It probably lasted thirty seconds or so.  Afterward, he held my hand and walked me back inside. 

I ran to my best friend and told her it was the most disgusting thing I had ever done and I never wanted to do it again.  I broke up with him the next week.

He came out about a year later.  We remained friends throughout high school, and he would actually tease me about it.  One time, a couple years later, I walked into the green room where he was sitting with a bunch of our friends and he pointed at me and started declaring, "You, you did this to me!"  But it was never actually a big deal to me or to him, just good fodder for my friends' jokes.  I know plenty of women who claim to have dated gay men, but generally this is really just their suspicion or explanation, unless they did theater.

So my first kiss was with a gay guy.