Limited

"...I asked him how his wife felt about all of this, thinking she must be excited to have her husband back. My friend looked at me as though he were realizing he hadn't actually said anything to his wife.


'You haven't said anything?' I questioned.


'I guess I figured she knew,' my friend suggested.


And that's the first time I realized that the idea a character is what he does makes as much sense in life as it does in the movies. I thought about my friend's story from his wife's perspective. She only knows what he says and what he does, not what he thinks and what he feels."
//from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller//

One of the things Stonestreet talked about was the fragmentation of man. We were separated in the Fall from God, from the earth, from one another, and within ourselves. What remains of the once intimate connections is a vast chasm over which we shout to each other, our words confused and garbled by distance, volume, and the echoes of the past that bounce back up to muddle the present.

I'm tired. And right now I feel like my heart got kicked repeatedly by a Clydesdale. For whatever reason, I write more when I'm in this variety of mood, so allow me to reiterate that most of the time, I am a fairly balanced, happy, healthy person who works a bit too much and reads far too little.

I hate that I am dependent on words to know, even as I love words. But in the separation, we all suddenly acquired a burden. Unless you are a hermit or so socially ostracized that you have perfected the art of life without communication, you know how hard it can be to say even the simplest thing. I live in a tenuous state of "to say or not to say," afraid that I'm being too needy or that I'm not expressing my need well enough, afraid that I will alienate or accidentally lean toward the unmeant flirtatious, afraid that this of the thousand chasms will suddenly find itself without even the fragile bridge of our conversations to bear me over it.

Who are you and what is making you tick? When you snap, I don't know why. When you are silent, I don't know why. Even when you are joyful, I don't know it because I know nothing. All I have is what you tell me, translation made all the more difficult by the missing 90% of facial expressions, twitches, stance, and whatever else make up body language.

I beg for grace because I am vulnerable in my ignorance. I am not a perfect person, nor do I ever hope to be one. Know that even as I hear you incorrectly, your tympanum also fails to perfectly interpret the heart and soul of the vibrations that tickle it. We are two people who are a world apart, who leapt that world for a moment and then found ourselves slipping down the lines of longitude once more. Have you the energy for a second try?