Alone, or something like it...

Tonight the Brooks Hall Staff met to discuss the book, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. In it he has a chapter about being alone. Unlike most stuff that I read, I wasn't able to rip this chapter apart, come up with 50 critical questions and digest every sentence. I was barely able to get through it. I was so completley convicted by what he had to say.

In the chapter, he talked about what it was like to be without people, and how your world can begin to implode without others.

Hell yeah. Screw Thoreau.

I'm sure Mr. Miller said some more things, but I'm not sure I got much more out of it than that. I read the words, I remember what he said... it was like being in a sound-proof booth watching someone try to tell you there's ketchup on your beard. After a while you just give up and say "I'm saving it for later".

Last summer was the hardest of my life. I feel so horrible saying it when I had so many blessings handed to me on a silver platter. But it was true. I started my internship with Campus Living & Learning about 3 days after the Residence Halls closed. For the most part, everyone in my life went home for the Summer. Everyone was gone. But it wasn't that.

I started the internship and immediately began to enjoy myself. (Especially when we got the way-cool pager, printer code, office mail box AND outer Master door keys to the men's and women's Residence Halls. Oh yeah, baby!) I began to have weekly meetings with my mentor, Frank Shushok and my supervisor, Elizabeth Wallace. I was getting so much time, experience and effort put into me. It was great. But the work was hard. I was struck from the start by how perfect everything has to be. I began to be so proud of and yet despise the words "iterative process". I'd write a letter that I thought to be perfect and show it to Elizabeth. She'd then get out her "red pen of mediocrity" and proceed to mark out entire paragraphs of the page-long letter to the CL's I had just written and then say "It's really good, Neil! Keep it up!". I'd smile and walk back to my desk in dejection trying to see my words through the blood-red gashes she had just cut into my baby. But that wasn't it.

Then there was the fact that I lived with someone who was 5 times better equiped, prepared and ready to do our internship than I was. Living with Gary taught me a lot about competition (Its not a strength I posess) and a bit about being the crappy roommate for a change. But that wasn't it.

I got knocked down about fifty notches this summer. I found out I'm not perfect. [Dum Dum Dummmmmmm!] But that's not it either.

I was just alone. I wasn't making new relationships and working on old ones. I was alone. I think the single best relationship I made this summer was with a 3 and 5 year-old girl and boy (respectively) who lived across the parking lot from me. Playing with Dani and Drew Roseboom quickly became my life raft. I pray I'll never forget the day it rained and Deena, their mother, let them play in the empty parking lot between our apartments. I heard a knock on our door. Gary looked at me and opened it to see a two soaked, knee-high Rozebooms ask in unison "Can Neil come out and playyyyyyy?".

I'll now pause for you to say "awwwwe". (Trust me, I did.) Those moments were the chocolate chips in the ice cream that was my summer. We all know it wasn't that.

This summer I think I found out what it was to be "depressed". Or at least the closest this Baylor Bear has ever come to it. I totally began to internalize everything. I imploded. I tried to take all of this time alone to settle some of my issues with my Catholocism how I should best worship God, start my book, get better at parcheesi (easy to learn, but impossible to master!), and work on some French, what I really did was use all of that as an excuse to retreat into my own mind leaving only to lash out at others. I genuinely feel as if I lost a little bit of the knowledge that there actually are other people in the universe. I would get frustrated when others didn't see my point of view.

The book put it so correctly when it described how I had begun to see my life as a great Soap Opera. The princible character being me. Everyone else was an extra or perhaps a "guest star" and their main role being to glorify my character, or if lucky, provide comic relief.

When the school year started, I hate to think of how I was. I was a jerk. I'd lord myself over others. I was antagonistic with Eric right off the bat. I would be short with Brian. I think the only people I would show the least bit of deference to would have been Chad, Andrew or Steven. And in the end, it was they who came to me out of love and knocked me upside my fat ol' head. They told me how I was acting and that they couldn't believe that it was how I had intended for my actions to be perceived.

Thank you, Jesus, for those friends who are true enough to kick the royal crap out of my ego.

I guess the biggest lesson I learned is that no matter how alone I might feel, I'm not at all. When you break it down, its so incredibly easy for us to see ourselves as being simply imprisoned inside our heads. Only the prison is more in reverse. -We can see out, but no one else can see in.

But what God wants us to realize is that it is we who have the keys to our hearts and minds. He wouldn't have given us feelings if he didn't want us to share them. Just like he wouldn't have put a second controller port the SNES if he didn't want us to occasionally go 2 player on MarioKart someday.

God is constantly putting people in our way. I guess its up to you as to whether we're going to let them in or not. So c'mon, I'll be Bowser and let you be Princess Toadstool.