#10: hope/esperanza; y la Ke toca puras buenas!

Lately postsecret.blogspot.com has become a site I check weekly. Sunday, the day I go to church and review in my head all the awful things I've done all week and hear words of Christ's eternal hope that I won't always be like that, is the same day this weblog is updated with postcards from the utterly hopeless. Waves of people reveal secrets to faceless readers and to a mysterious person named "Frank" who moderates the postcards put on the site. All manner of confessions are here, although I'm sure some of the submissions Frank gets don't make it to the internet. I often wonder if the same conundrum presented to the priest listening in the dark of the confessional - whether or not to report someone who confesses heinous crimes to an ear the owner has vowed is a one-way channel - gets delivered to Frank's mailbox on a daily basis. What does he do when people write in that they've murdered someone, or that "by the time you read this Frank I will be dead and done being miserable"? And in the tiny, nearly illegible footnote to the message, of which PostSecret contributors are so fond, the admission: And if the pills haven't worked I'll have found some other way... What does he do?
At the bottom of the page is a number for HopeLine, a suicide help hotline. And I wonder, reading through the list of postcards dotted with confessions of disbelief in God or abuse at the hands of the church or even plain rebellious behavior, all edited as the week goes by with comments from members of the PostSecret audience affirming how helpful this website has been - vowing that their lives have been saved by checking this site and reading a tastefully decorated postcard and calling 1-800-HOPE in the middle of a dark night of the soul... what would a HopeLine operator say that could really help someone not to kill himself or herself?
Listening to the Latino radio station La Ke (The 'K' plays all hits!) after reading The Other Side by Ruben Martinez, a hopeless, hopeless book filled with movements that are constantly being redefined, creeds that are ever re-evaluated, and factions that reproduce rebellious clones of themselves at the prolific pace of cockroaches, all undependable, all shifting, and at the end of the day all meaningless as I watch the author come to the end of his 170 pages and still find nothing around which to wrap his palms and hold on, I wonder what is left in the world if there isn't Christ for you to believe in. I've thought of everything in his book a thousand times over in the past eight months, many times more in the first two than in the last six, and I know there aren't any solutions to the problems he's seeing. I didn't have to travel the world like he did to know it's a world of pain. I know not even art means anything when it's accompanied with rhetoric, not even suffering has redemptive value if nobody pays attention to people's struggles, and not even politics matters when nobody has a conscience. But when I believe there's more to it than this mean scrabble for scraps of food to keep our ungainly bodies moving, that there's something to put in the space after being born and dying, then there's a point. It's as if the greatest test is not to despair after seeing how meaningless a Christless world is, and to truly believe that a world with a Christ actually does mean something.
It has everything to do with your relationship to Him and nobody else, with your total trust in His plan and His power, and your realization of your utter weakness, and nothing to do with finding out the answers to your questions or how much more like Jesus you were with every passing day. Every evening He is asking you, "Did you help the hungry out of your own resources? Did you pray to Me for the sick? Did you treat the people you saw downtown or in the gas station with My kindness?" He is not asking you, "Did you save the world (because, you know, it wasn't enough the first time I did it)? No? Well, you're quite a waste of time."
There isn't much difference between the confessions of the people on PostSecret and myself. I couldn't call HopeLine because I don't think they could tell me anything to which I couldn't make an objection. Christ is that person to whom I can make no exception.
Jen calls me
"You're being a dork. And you're normal."
"You mean the same thing happened to you?"
"Yes. And we're normal. Remember, we're pretty alike."
Just when I needed Jesus, the friend who sticks closer than a brother, to actually drop by the pad and help a girl out, he sends me a transcontinental phone call to remind me that not only does he never leave me, he gives me friends who are as faithful as is humanly possible.
My wonderful boyfriend has been taciturn all weekend. I think he is realizing that I am a terrible girlfriend. I think we are both realizing he is a much better boyfriend than I am a girlfriend. My nearest approximation of a 'love expression' involved fish bones in pasta, an opera about an axe-womb of a princess, and a closed restaurant. Other all-star attempts have involved me cleaning his whole room, washing and folding all his laundry, or cleaning his kitchen, all things that make him feel bad when I do them, as much joy as it gives me to do yucky things for him so he doesn't have to do them. Also, as much as I love going to the grocery store to get him things when he's sick and keeping him company when he's under the weather, he thinks it's imposing on me. I wish I could find a good way to show him how much I love him, not just tell him.