Way to go Lana.

About Lana.

Knowing who Lana is is important to this story, as well as in general.  Watch her story

About me.

I am a Christian.  And this video broke my heart into a million pieces. 

Before you tear me down or cheer me (depending on what side of the fence you are on)….hear WHY. 

I live a life of surrender to my creator, I mess it up more than I get it right, I am mystified and beloved and beleaguered by my faith more than any other aspect of who I am.  I attend church, I worship with abandon…I also swear sometimes (more than I should) and forget to pay bills, but somehow find a way to not only fund but go to grad school and Mexico to build houses in the same year.

About tonight.

This evening, I discovered that one of the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix trilogy fame) was now a sister named Lana, with ravishingly fantastic dreds (the colour of my fushia hanging basket of blooms in summertime). 

My curiousity drew me away from the riveting annotated bibliography I was carefully crafting from very long very intellectually stimulating journal articles (about how organizational communications are impacted by crises and social media).  It was a topic that seemed to really matter 5 minutes before…and that was due in 3 hours and 37 minutes. 

I began watching. 

I had to stop, not because I didn’t want to see, but precisely because I did want to see.  I wanted to hear.  I wanted to know.  I wasn’t 100% present because the clock was ticking.

I wrote the paper.   I submitted the paper. 

I returned to the video.  I watched.

(More) About me.

I, like Lana, long to climb ladders into places previously unknown to me.  In the past several weeks I’ve asked myself a question, of what to research, what to examine…of what I would leave grad school with as an area of deep knowledge.  And I feel lost. 

Because these things have schedules and processes that are foreign to me I methodically put one foot in front of the other, meet the deadlines, fabricate questions that someone has surely examined before.  That will matter to someone, and might offer me the opportunity to look intelligent before an audience of strangers….or if I’m very fortunate peers. But is it enough?

No. 

There is so much I have examined and learned and yet the things that matter most to me I fear.  

Like Lana, I wander, not between my gender and my world, but between my profession and my passions, my faith and it’s religion.  Not with my sexuality, but my identity, not as a communicator or Christian even, but as Tara.  Still…discovering who I am. 

I know this:  I am a child of God.

About God.

But who does God say I am?  

…someone who believes that Lana too was created in His very image.  Her humility, her truth and her love beacons of His very character.  Her hope and quirky joy a gift and inspiration in the quiet hours of my evening.

We live in a broken world, where nuns beat confused children, and strangers on subway platforms have the power to save their very lives. 

There are things I’m afraid of.  Lana Wachowski is not one of them.

God created me to love.  And tonight I felt that power, it stirs something in me that both confuses and excites me:  That I can see Lana and not feel hate, or pity, or condemnation.  Only love.  Not, as she so beautifully put it:  in spite of who she is, but because of who she is. 

It’s not the love that confuses me…it’s the people that say who she is is wrong.  The people I am connected to by a common faith, a love of God.  It confuses me that their passion for what is “right” before God in their eyes seems as very fierce as the truth that I see before me.  It begs me to ask God….”Who is right?!” or sometimes, “Why don’t you just smite the people who have it wrong?!”

Or more seriously and quietly “....just help me to love you more”

Love.

Not for Lana specifically, because that makes me sound like a creepy celebrity stalker. But something holy going out to another child of God making their way in this crazy confusing world. 

I don’t know how Lana feels about God, but I suspect that I know how God feels about her. 

Love.

Not: get-straight-get-clean-get-right-get-it-TOGETHER love.  

Just: LOVE

About God sized power

Several nights ago I was explaining to some friends about what it means to me to be a Christian.  That the idea of the holy spirit had been such an obscure religious concept, until one of those (what is now many) moments in time.

It was when I discovered the power God had IN me, when faced with the worst betrayal of my life I looked at my betrayer and felt nothing but compassion for their own brokeness.  I could have written it off to denial or some sort of psychological break, except for the fact that there was this thing within me like the crazy alien (remember V people?!) that tries to wrestle it’s way out of me full of rage….and instead I could feel the lifeforce being sucked out of it AGAINST MY WILL!  

I was mad. 

The little raging alien baby in me wanted to rage, but instead I felt nothing but compassion (and anger at God that I felt compassion).  Yet, when faced with ultimate cosmic power, resistance IS futile.  Tears of gratitude for who God made me to be began to flow as I began to pray for someone who had once been my friend who had left me broken, confused and lost. 

I also figure if I still feel compassion years later, and sorrow that they are still broken that it's safe to say it's a God thing and not a psychotic break.

About questions that matter.

How do I come to know myself better.  How do I find a question worthy of answering…

In communications we often talk about the “Why” as the most important question…

• Why will anyone care?
• Why do you do what you do?
• Why will anyone buy what you are selling?
• Why do you get out of bed in the morning? 

Why am I here?

In less than two weeks, I’m having this tattoed on the inside of my left arm (once I get a spellchecked version from the kind people who are fluent in reading it)…

ובקשתם אתי ומצאתם כי תדרשני בכל־לבבכם׃ וקראתם אתי והלכתם והתפללתם אלי ושמעתי אליכם׃

For those of you that grew up Jewish, and can read Hebrew, it says something a little bit deeper and a little bit richer than this: 

When you pray, I will listen. If you look wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you,” says the Lord.

About why I'm here.  

That’s why.  To find God.

Not just for me, but for Him. To fix what was broken.

I’m here to manifest His presence in this broken world.  So I will look at a doodle on my left arm and remember, to pray, to seek him with all my heart and to find Him.  

In the meantime:  Way to go Lana!