Crucified at the Crux

We are a culture and a people of extremes.

Obese or anorexic.
Unshutupable or brick silent.
Dramatic or dead pan.

When I go to my work twitter or Facebook and read all my students posts, they are full of the feels. Just...all the feels. All screaming, "Notice me notice me notice me!!!"

They post about:
Loneliness
Not fitting in
Feeling stupid
"Love"

I am not saying their posts don't reflect their reality, but I think they make us believe that we're seeing the total reality.

Because the kids we're hearing from are the ones we expect to hear from, because they're the ones who never stop whining about how lonely they feel instead of wiping off some of their makeup and trying out their own skin. A lot of times, it's part of their identity to be misunderstood.

Don't get all huffy; I'm not being a jerk. If you find me offensive, it's probably because you were once one of those kids. I work with kids, I was a kid, I am a kid. I know kids. Let me talk.

What we don't get is the honest look at the structural identity of other human beings.

We either stigmatize to the point of normalcy or we cloister problems into oblivion.

Let's have an honest discussion about what happens when you come to "the crux."

"The Crux" has been on my mind today because we have been going through our promotional material for re-vamping. Several of the smiling faces on our shining boards are students I knew very, very well.

And they aren't here anymore.
They didn't graduate.
Their cruxes crucified them.

That doesn't make them lesser people, and that doesn't make them failures. They just lost that one particular round of mental monopoly.

Yet there they are, smiling, holding a stack of books, pointing to a white board, reading with friends, about to sing another original song.
They are literally our poster children.
I'm sure they can think of nothing more ironic.

In one sense, it's the perfect example of "putting on your church face".
We obliviate their stories with glossed on smiles, whether that's our goal or not.

At the same time, I don't find it ironic at all for them to be our poster children. I actually love that we didn't choose all the seemingly perfect students. Because that's not who we are. We're all broken people. Their "cruxes" just made that more obvious.

"The Crux" is the moment when what you have been taught and raised to be drops off, and you have to grow new skin all on your own. The Crux is when you are faced with something so personal, so intimate, that 20 years of "life lessons" are insufficient to suffice for an answer.

We search. 
We listen.
But who do we listen to?

Though we would like to say, "God", like a good Sunday schooler, often we can't.
It's hard to admit, but we can't listen to him. We aren't ready.
More than that, maybe we truly do not yet have the capacity to hear the decibels he's speaking in.

Who do we listen to?
Them.
Whoever our "them" is.
And we "run to the things they said could restore [us]//restore life the way it should be".

And it doesn't work.
It doesn't work and doesn't work and doesn't work, and we're trapped in this horrible Dante-esque second circle of Hell running running running .

It breaks us.
It broke my friends.
It broke me.

Brokenness is ugly and unspoken.
In our shame, we hide because that's what feels correct to do. Because a snide "nobody loves me" comment on Facebook is one thing, but the genuine vacuum in our hearts, the kind that feels unrecoverable, isn't one you can post.

We publish the present.
We present the version of ourselves that we feel reconciled with, even if we don't love it. We can deal with it. We can stand by it.

The intimate pain is something we can't own because its muchness has too much muchness. That means, when we are sucked under the current, drop out of school, overdose, attempt suicide, no one sees it coming.

In times I have felt the most alone, the most broken, I have ached for someone to tell me they've been there too and not another God-awful repetition of Jeremiah 29:11 or a "I felt sad once, but I'm better now".

I wanted to read someone else admitting, with humor, hope, and honesty, that they were there as well.

At the same time, I am most usually unwilling to be that person for other people. The closest I've ever come to it is attempting to speak the truth of myself in my posts.

We're broken, but we retain such a capacity for forgiveness, for partnership, for love, and for redemption. We are capable of connection, to make pain into partnership, to turn someone's "I hope I can do this..." to "We can do this. I know we can do this."

How often do we opt to halt our thinking about our public images in deference to thoughts of how we can love other people through letting them in on the truth of our pain and of our regrowth?

We need the in-between.
That's what we're missing.
No more attention-seeking, connectivity-defying Facebook statuses of how nobody understands but no more hiding either.
Rather, with patience, with humility, and with discernment, let us all practice letting people join us where we stand. Or sit. Or kneel. Or are crawled up in.
Let's practice letting ourselves be seen.