I was talking to an online friend, Nicole. I'm so glad she IMs me still. I never know what to say to her till she IMs me with her questions. I feel like I'm here to help her some way, any way. I really do enjoy talking to her and trying to help her figure her questions out. She really does think and consider other sides. For being only 18, she sure has critical thinking skills down.

She's had a rough time with friends. This is her story in brief: She lived in one state, made some friends there, moved to another state, her friends stopped talking to her, she got really lonely and sad, started dating a guy and suddenly her friends talked to her--but only to be critical of her relationship with this guy.

Sometimes when I'm talking to her, the things she says makes me wonder, "Is she ever going to realize that people are imperfect, untrustworthy?" But when I think about it more, I think she does realize that, and that's the very problem. She needs to trust someone. If you can't trust anyone, why live?

We didn't get anything really resolved tonight, but what she really needed was someone to vent to, to listen to her. I can be that person. :)

But I was thinking about the whole people being untrustworthy, unreliable. Every person that has ever lived on this planet has lived selfish lives. Everyone has thought, "I am right, and no one else is." There's something in that. Something in that fact that I am imperfect, that everyone is imperfect. Something I'm missing and something everyone is missing. Because people always stay the same, even though they always think they get better. Progress! we say. Life is much better than in the old days--whether the "old days" refers to 10,000 B.C. or 1950 A.D. Progress! is our battle cry. We fight to become better, in whatever ways we can. Yet crime remains. Yet pain and hurt remains. Yet selfishness, that inward thought of "I am right, and no one else is" remains. The world is still broken, in some way we can't understand but try our best to fix. This goes way beyond nine-year-olds being insecure about their weight, way beyond teenage boys trying smoking to be tough, way beyond young adults desperately looking for someone to "complete" them. This brokenness finds itself in all the pain of all the world. Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz) said it in this way:

I knew, because of my own feelings, there was something wrong with me,and I knew it wasn't only me. I knew it was everybody...It showed itself in loneliness, lust,anger, jealousy, and depression...It was as if we were cracked, couldn't love right, couldn't feel good things for long without screwing it all up...A kid will think there are monsters under his bed, or he will close himself in his room when his parents fight. From a very early age our souls are taught there is a comfort and a discomfort in the world, a good and a bad if you will, a lovely and a frightening. (Blue Like Jazz, p.14)

My thought is that if there is a loving God, as so many people on earth say there is, then he must be the answer, the solution to the something we're missing.

But first I want to know what it is we're missing.

-Stephanie

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