The Faith of Children (in which I pay my respects to younger me and all the lovely large-hearted teens).

Sometimes, I get a little jealous of the enthusiasm that teenage girls bear.

It's cause I secretly love it. I want to be more open about that. Can we talk about this?

I love how everything means something to them, how engaged they generally are in their lives, their emotions and what they care about, whether it be for the better or for worse. As a result, I've harbored so much unexpressed outrage that these younger women have so many haters (although we can rightly be annoying at that age). But they have my respect. The girls have heart. They have so much heart.

They are one of my favorite demographic of people and I think part of it is because I was 15 years old when I decided to (as cheesy as it sounds) "give my heart to Jesus".

Sometimes, I want to stick my 16 year old brain-heart-thing in my body. I'm not saying so much that I want to go back and relive those days, because there's so many wonderful experiences I've learned from sense I turned the big 1-8 two years ago and crossed into adult-dom. But, I do wish that my teenage self had carried with her the vivid imagination that she was gifted with and her lack of creative inhibition. Somehow, those tools were a huge blessing to me, in my ability to express myself to G-d.

I didn't really care as much about being cool, even though I was insecure. I was just myself. I find myself struggling even more now with wanting to be cool, but I think my purer inner (child?) heart is trying to push me off that road.

For me it takes having a little less inhibition to take a mirror portrait and write a blog like this one.

And I'm glad about it.
I don't want to be hip, unaffected and cynical.
I don't want to be "over it" and dismiss anything that seems somewhat childish or simplified.
I don't want to pretend to be less excited about the things that encourage my heart. I want to have the courage to call out beauty when I see it and not be embarrassed just because it was written by this or that artist or said by this or that person. I don't want to dismiss the good that I was then in light of being "older" and "smarter".

I find that it can be easy to go on to the new thing and miss what was valuable about the old. As I've grown and discovered the complexity of the world, and even the complexity of my faith tradition, I wonder if I had unintentionally forgotten to protect my sense of wonder and imagination. I've been overtly encouraged by the sermons of Greg Boyd on imagination, which has played a huge role in his communion with Jesus as well as his longing for the Kingdom of G-d. Even though it may sound strange to use our imagination to commune and learn and experience G-d and what he is doing, I am not skeptical at all about this practice. It came so naturally to me as a younger one; I began to read the stories and imagine what Jesus was like from the accounts of him in the New Testament. (Maybe we can even argue that that is what little children do when they talk to and hang out with G-d: they use their imaginations!)

I miss the simplicity of my faith.
I miss my lack of inhibition and my creative responses.
I miss having my imagination in tune with my faith in G-d, my friend.
When I started listening to the Rocket Summer tonight, my heart leaped. Tears began to pour over my cheeks as I soaked the lyrics of "TV Family" in my then overtly troubled and running mind. I found myself extremely surprised how the lyrics still made such a huge impression on my heart, almost as if it had touched on some feelings and affections that I had long forgotten about.

I don't ever want to outgrow The Rocket Summer. There's so much in the music that communicates my heart to G-d.

The name of a Rocket Summer album.

I find that as I grow older, it is easier for my mind to try to "regulate" what I say or express to G-d. As if there are things that I shouldn't feel or think (and as if He didn't already know everything about me!) I find that I am more ashamed of what I share with G-d a lot these days. I'm so afraid to come off as childish, as "less" intellectual, as someone who isn't worthy of being taken seriously, so in my insecurity, I've developed a habit of stuffing my brain with all these academic books about G-d and then leave little room for him to be my friend and comforter in my alone time. It sucks. It really does. There's a place for theology learnin's, but, I find that I am extremely bogged down by my inhibitions. And my mind turns and stays a storm of angst and unrest because of it.

All I ever wanted was to use my voice to be loud and make a joyful noise about the hope that I have. I hope that through the gifts of those who inspire me, Christ will encourage me to do so boldly with the maturity of an adult, the passion of a teenage girl and the faith of children.