Wild Animals are Scary.

This is my husband, Luke (who also named this post). This morning I took some pictures of him because he was doing some pretty weird, but very cute things. He said that it made him feel like a baby panda.


Lately I've found myself incredibly in touch with the common humanity in all humans. The kind of in touch that makes giving someone money for a pack of cigarettes seem normal, while killing someone because they killed someone seem silly. I think I pinpoint it to Valentine's Day when Luke and I went to the Holocaust Museum. For those of you who haven't yet been there, it is pretty intense. I found myself on the verge of tears throughout the entire thing, only letting them trickle down my face in the Hall of Remembrance at the very end of the tour. How can one group of people dehumanize another group of people so much that the gold fillings in their teeth are seen as being worth more than their life itself?


One thing that I found very interesting is that the term "ghetto" began first in Italy as the name for an island where Jews were required to live, and then during the Holocaust as a place to keep those of Jewish descent before they were taken to concentration camps. It was a place of separation. The term is derived from the Latin term jactare meaning "to throw" or "to cast" (thank you dictionary.com). Basically it was were the "unwanted" in society had to go to live. Is it any coincidence, then, that we call the poor, minority areas of the towns and cities in the United States "the ghetto"? Unfortunately, I don't think so. And I think that it is just one more testament to the racism and classism that exists in our country today. Even Merriam-Webster defines ghetto as "an isolated area; a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure."

I heard the song "Big Pimpin'" today and I almost threw up.

But I've digressed (sort of). What is it that leads us, as humans, to characterize people into "worth it" or "not worth it", label them as such and then continue on living? I sometimes find myself doing this as I sit in our living room and watch out the window. There is this one extremely angry woman who lives next door and yells at the people who park in the parking lot of her apartment complex. We've been yelled at...I think most people on the block have been yelled at. I wrote her off as a mean woman (well, to be honest, a word a bit harsher...), but as I've been watching her interactions with people, and watching the way she walks around, I've come to realize that maybe there is more to her than I realize. And as I watched her try to start her moped yesterday in order to get around, and watched her try and try again, unable to start it, and as I watched her give up, and, instead slowly walk towards the road, I began to wonder what her story is. And what our stories had in common. Or, almost more importantly, what they could have had in common had any of our circumstances been slightly different.

This started me on a path, I think, of wondering what makes people tick, and what makes people do what they do. Sure, I have been down this path before, but never with such a diverse population around me so many times a day. A lot of times on Metro I will watch the people around me. I look at their facial expressions, I watch how they act, how the interact and what they are doing. And I write stories about them in my head. Not in a judging way, just in a story telling way. About where they are going and what they are thinking. Sometimes their stories are so intense I am moved to tears...

And then I realize that by doing this I am probably diminishing their existence in some way...making them into a greater or more pathetic character than they probably are. It would be better of me to tap them on the shoulder and ask them questions about their lives. Never mind that 75% of Washington, DC is inaccessible due to iPods and Blackberries.

Okay, so maybe I do pass some judgement.

Point being, this. I don't think that it's a mistake that I feel things intensely, or that I am a pretty passionate and compassionate human being. I really think that it is a gift from God that I get angered at injustice, saddened by loneliness , exclusion and seclusion. I think that I'm just misusing this gift by telling stories of people in order to somehow identify with the people around me. Basically, this is a confession. Instead of becoming real friends with the people around me I pretend that I know them by making up stories about them in my head. I've been misusing the gifts that God gave me.

Nevertheless, slowly, but surely, I've been becoming more and more aware of what it means to be human, what it means to be human with others, and what it means that Jesus was (and is) God in the flesh. I'm learning what it means that Jesus loved us so much that He came down on earth and lived with us in the poorest condition God could be...human. Gross.

And I'm learning about compassion. I've been reading Leviticus and Numbers. And while I'll admit that sometimes I let out a huge sigh when it's time for quiet time, it is pretty amazing that before there were all these rules and now there are not. We don't have to sacrifice or wait many days to become clean. Jesus took care of all of that. Here is my favorite example of one law that Jesus took care of:

And the leper's clothes shall be rent, and the hair of his head shall hang loose, and he shall
cover his upper lip and cry, Unclean, unclean!He shall remain unclean as long as the disease is in him; he is unclean; he shall live alone [and] his dwelling shall be outside the camp.
Leviticus 13:45-46 (Amplified)

And a leper came to Him, begging Him on his knees and saying to Him, "If You are willing, You are able to make me clean."
And being moved with pity and sympathy (or, in some versions, compassion), Jesus reached out His hand and touched him, and said to him, "I am willing; be made clean!"
And at once the leprosy [completely] left him and he was made clean [by being healed].
Mark 1:40-42 (Amplified)

It was a huge deal for Jesus to reach out and touch this man. I want to follow Jesus into that. I want my reaction to the gift of feeling that God has given me to be a reaction of action...I definitely have a lot to learn and need a lot of help.

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On a quite different note, I also want my family to be like this after a vacation, only hopefully many more kids:
Yes, I do love Norman Rockwell.


Picture post coming soon.

And just for laughs (but also post appropriate):