I have decided to share my latest writing project in place of the normal “Today I Realized” posts. It is in the same vein and spirit as the original point of this blog in that it is about the biggest things that strike me about a particular day- only this time instead of ideas, it is solely about people. I interact with a lot of people every day and most days I can pick out one person who stands out because of what they did or said and it teaches me. I started writing these “super short stories” last week. I purposefully limit them to one paragraph and eliminate names. They remain nameless for many reasons. The most obvious reason is most of them are strangers to me. But they also remain nameless because I think many of us see these people in our daily lives and sometimes in ourselves, so we kind of name them on our own.

These are super short stories, and this is what life looks like.

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HOMELESS VETERAN ON I-75

My brakes groaned as I rounded the corner of the Salem Avenue exit. A figure stood there, shrouded in the shadow of the overpass. His stance was uneven, left shoulder cocked like a wind-blown scarecrow. A red lacquered prosthetic limb popped against the mute clothing and rain-soaked cardboard sign. Another car pulls behind mine. Then another. But there are two lanes. The one closest to him keeps vacant. We stay in the farthest lane, thinking the distance is enough to make us blind.

Today I realized I find a strange comfort in doubt, whether I would like to believe in its unchanging abiding in my life or not. Easier still than belief is unbelief.

I am yet again on the other side of something miserable only to find it didn’t have to be so destructive if I had remembered my undefeated record of survival as consolation.

Going through it– I call the phenomenon “it” because its face changes too abruptly and often to garner a true identity– is integral to life. “It” is universal and unprejudiced. What isn’t universal is trust.

Trust is inherent until broken. Children, in gracious naivety, trust everyone until they have their first run in with fallen nature. Similar, our trust in God is broken the first time our hearts suffer the same fracture. This only happens because we think God is to blame for every hole we fall in to. Then we want to know “why.” And then there is doubt. I have been there, in that hole dug deeper by doubt, many times before. Feeling forsaken when all along I have been begotten.

God is faithful. Every. Single. Time. Yet it seems I match every ounce of His honor with doubt. Lucky for me and the rest of humanity, for as much as my doubt holds fast, so does God’s faithfulness. He truly never changes–even though He has every right to abandon the Doubting Thomas.

Today I realized living a life on earth is both nauseatingly complex and frustrating enough, so simple.

Life’s complexity is a man-made invention, I believe, dating back to Year One. Living was not only meant to be “easy,” but incredibly fulfilling and joyful. Our only job and joy would be to commune with God.

The fall of man touches nearly all, if not every single aspect of our current state, but today I think about how it made life seem as if it were an endless and convoluted puzzle with no proper or tangible way to arrange the pieces. Sin’s conception made life seem hopelessly complicated. But the beauty of it all is, is that hopelessness is not reality. What seems to be is not always what is true. There is an answer, and oddly enough, it is the simplest truth there is.

Depending on who reads it, Ecclesiastes is either the most fatalistic and depressive writing in the Bible, or it is the most honest and ultimately hopeful. I am a reader of the latter. Here you have a man who is confronting life’s complexity and enacting every earthly power to reduce it into something understandable — yet even so, he finds all is vanity and meaningless.

“Everything is meaningless.”

We hope by the end of his thoughts he will have changed his mind — that he will have found something of meaning, but even through to the last chapter, all is still vanity. He may not have changed his language, but I see a changed heart. There is truth there because everything really is meaningless — because they are things.

When I step back from my life and look at it as an objective observer, I see a life that is complicated mostly by quarrels (internal and external) that ultimately come back to things. Life gets complicated when we think the answers are in things.

“Fear God and keep His commandments,” the writer of Ecclesiastes says at the closing of his thoughts.

This is life. Keep it simple.

Today I realized we look on the past with a certain endearment, yet for the most part, we are content to leave it in things remembered, far removed from things currently experienced. It is because we think things change. And some things do. A lot changes.

Sometimes mankind is lucky enough to leave most terrible things behind his heels and the thing never advances before him again. But unfortunately, some things stay in tragic sameness.

It was a perfect night to venture outdoors, so my mother, sister and I bent to this perfection and went for a walk along the river. We walked slowly, discussing everything from work to my parents upcoming anniversary and whether or not Dad made reservations for once. Suddenly the moment was broken like brittle glass.

A young man drove by in a beat up sedan and screamed “Nigger” from the dirty window. Some things truly never change. Some men will always choose ignorance over progress.

Some days, especially days like this, I wonder if racism and other social calamities like it will ever be done. Will they ever be nuisances we merely look back on? Will we ever have the choice of turning our backs to them and walking away resolute to never gaze on their ugliness again? Will things ever change?

It will change when perspectives change. It will change when attitudes change.

It will change when we decide it must.

Today I realized success is scary. When I was growing up as a child living in the beige landscape of the Midwest, I feared mediocrity. Mediocrity was like the pale Ohio cornfields and the Browns. So I started doing things. Read lots of books. Studied with intensity and vigor to achieve the best grades. Created without end as many drawings, poems and stories my mind could summon to paper.

But something terrible happened as I drew closer to a time when I would have to put preparation to pavement in “the real world” – unsheltered by the fortress of education. I decided I couldn’t do it. Sometimes we fear success more than medicrity– mediocrity is safe, familiar. Success is wild, risky, unpredictable. It upsets the emotional homeostasis we are used to.

Sometimes I get comfortable doing what I am doing simply because I know I can do it. I know what it is and that I am good at it. The thought of moving on to something bigger can be paralyzing. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know if I will be good at that.

Then I realize this is true. No, I don’t know that, but really I don’t know much of anything else in this world either. But that doesn’t mean these things unbeknownst to me are not truly magnificent.

“If we did all the things we were capable of, we would literally astound ourselves” – Thomas Alva Edison

It is so simple, the solution to this fear of success. We will never know what our hands can do if they are folded in our laps. We will never know what our brains can think if we are asleep. We will never know where we can go if we never leave.

I encountered a dear friend the other day, heartbroken by life’s circumstances. My heart grieved, and I sought to lift her up in words. I told her she was strong. I told her she was courageous. I told her she was beautiful. More importantly, I told her to lean on the One who understands and to keep her head held high.

I have written more encouraging words than I can recall, but when it comes to believing those words of affirmation in my own life– well, I lie prostrate in hypocrisy.

As a recent journalism graduate navigating the shallow hiring waters, some days it seems those jobs are like sparse droplets and I am fighting alongside thousands for that drink of steady vitality.

I kneeled beside my bed as the sun rose this morning, pleading for an answer to the multiple resumes and cover letters I have dispersed into publishing America. I told God I trusted Him. I told God I needed Him. I told God I knee He would provide for me. I told God I would go where ever He wanted me.

I felt my own warm breath on my skin as I lay there face down in the coarse carpeting, silent, listening for peace. My bones creaked as I rose to begin another day, a new day, apparently full of new resolve, new levels of faith. I will be ok.

About an hour following those bedside prayers, I received an email from an employer whom I had a lot of hope in. This was my top pick of the jobs I had applied for–at least that’s what I thought. Minutes away from my college town I had fallen in unexpected love with. One town over from the church family I had spent three years with and hoped to continue serving with upon moving back. One state away from home so I could visit my family quite often. In my world, it seemed to dwell among perfect things.

“After reviewing your background and qualifications, we find that you are not a match…”

I think my heart stopped. Then it wretched in my chest as I exhaled all of the breath in my lungs along with the hope I possessed only an hour before. I killed that hope before it could even live.

So I lay in hypocrisy. I remembered the words I had given to my friend. “Keep your head up and lean on the One who understands.” My head was in my hands and I was on the floor leaning on nothing or No One. How quickly I forgot.

This is not a no, but a yes to something else. I cannot do what He wants me to do if I am doing something else.

So I look on high, and I lean on Him because He understands.

Amen (let it be so).

Today I realized happiness is a choice. It is not inherited. We are not genetically predisposed to it. We all know by now it cannot be bought, but there are millions of people trying every day to create the electricity of happiness through the friction of swiping an American Express. No, it cannot be bought.

Happiness is not given in birthday presents and it does not reside under the Christmas tree. What we feel when receiving something greatly desired is not happiness but thrill. Thrill is adrenaline that makes us smile. Happiness is receipt of the love and thought behind the material. Thrill fades because it is focused on the material.

Happiness is not vicarious. Contrary to most words of well-wishing we have ever said to one another, it is quite impossible to be happy for someone. Of course we all know in our hearts what is meant when someone says, “I am so happy for you.” We are proud of their accomplishment. We rejoice in their rejoicing. We find peace in their blessing. But if someone is not happy, I cannot graft my happiness into theirs. The discord within them will reject that foreign mass every time.

Happiness is a choice. It is the decision to focus on all the ways life is saying “yes” to you instead of dwelling in the defeat of the “no”s. It is treasuring the small things which never fail, instead of the big shiny things which almost always fall. It is loving every second like it is the most precious thing, because it is.

Happiness is a choice. Now, if only more of us would exercise our free will.

On the subway this week, some cohorts and I encountered someone who was looking for a little compassion among a tough crowd. A rough-hewn man got onto our subway car and as the sliding doors clicked shut he began to speak.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I am not homeless. I am not a bum. What I am is a U.S. Veteran who is a victim of a system. My benefits only allow me to either pay rent or pay for food. And as I do not want to live on the streets, I choose to put a roof over my head.”

I remember noticing how surprisingly articulate and graceful he was in comparison to his appearance. He went on to ask for either extra food we might have or a monetary donation to his cause– his life. As he finished, I along with everyone else in the car sat in silence. I was conflicted.

Encountering the homeless and other down-and-out segments of society is commonplace to most of us. The first time I encountered a homeless man I was immediately saddened and I wanted to do something, anything for him. Then came another first that completely changed everything. The first time I saw a homeless person buying booze and cigarettes. How could someone violate that compassion?

This common experience is probably what inspired that collective silence in the subway car. Many must have assumed the worst of this man, and didn’t want to potentially waste their money on someone’s destructive vices. There was no way of knowing if he was being truthful or not. Yet there is still a tinge of regret in me that tells me I should have done something–anything, for this man.

Because of that little tinge, I must settle on the fact that for me, compassion is never misplaced. Sure, many have violated it in the past, some violate it presently, and there will be many others who violate it in the future.

But all of this violation is worth it for the one time my compassion is validated.