Plant your OWN seeds!

A great story I once heard:

There was once a young minister who accepted the offer to pastor a church. In an effort to get to know his new congregation, the new pastor dedicated several weeks to visiting the homes of each of his members. The last stop on his trip took him to a farm at the edge of town owned by one of the deacons of the church.

As the pastor arrived, he was amazed to see the organizaton of the man’s farm. When they passed neatly arrayed corn fields, the pastor remarked, “God has truly blessed you with a terrific field of corn.” Next they passed the wheat fields. Again the pastor commented, “God has truly blessed you with a terrific field of wheat.” Shortly thereafter, they passed his apple orchard; filled with delicious and juicy apples. Again the pastor said “God truly has blessed you with a terrific apple orchard. Finally as they made their way to house, they passed the barn with all the animals and equipment. One last time the pastor commented, “God truly has blessed you wi…” But before he could finish his statement, the farmer interrupted him. “Pastor,” the farmer started. “You keep mentioning how God has blessed me with all terrific things. Well, you should’ve seen how bad it was when God had it all to Himself!”

The message behind this story is simple: While God does indeed bless us with the things we can’t necessarily provide for ourselves, we’re responsible for making certain things happen as well. The sun, the water, and the earth God provides is pointless if we don’t get out there and plant own our seeds.

“And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.” - Mark 4:26-29

- ACL

He is Risen!

Don’t worry about Jesus. He’s alive and well. His love for us kept Him nailed to the cross, while keeping his stay in the grave pretty brief.

 

 

Thank you Lord for overcoming death for a train wreck like me.

- ACL

Eddie Long: The King of Kangs

The other day on Facebook, one of my sisters and my homegirl both hipped me to the latest antics of Bishop (and I use the term very loosely) Eddie Long and this cult parish over at New Life. In some weirdly ostentatious event at his church, Fast Eddie appears to have been coronated by guest speaker Rabbi Ralph Messer. I can’t call this one, so I’ll just let you see it for yourself (it gets interesting and, uh, stupid at around the 4 minute mark):

Got that? Fast Eddie…yes…the same Fast Eddied subjected to highly publicized allegations of sexual abuse and coercion of four young men…is now considered royalty. I haven’t the words.

Actually, I do I have a few things to say, mostly of an inquisitive nature:

(1) I’m sorry. But how is this not exalting a person of God? And where is this justified in the Bible? I forget.

(2) I can’t help but wonder how much Fast Eddie and his church paid this so-called “Rabbi” to do this mess.

(3) If the whole sex with boys thing isn’t enough for people to stop going to that damn church, will this? My guess is, not likely. In fact, evidence by all the people cheering and marveling at this coonery, I’m pretty sure he added a few members. Sigh. I know.

(4) Do they really expect us to believe that’s a real scroll? They know good and damn hell well they got that mess printed at Kinko’s.

(5) Carrying a throne? Really? What kind of hot mess is this?

(6) I wonder if Fast Eddie got aroused during all that talk about foreskin and raising stuff up (at the 1 minute mark). OK, let me stop.

Apparently, Fast Eddie has apologized for the event, but not because of the “crowning” itself, but because it may have attacked certain Jewish sensibilities:

I’m not Jewish and I don’t know much about the practice. So I’ll defer to them on that aspect of this story. But I will say as a Christian (particularly, but not limited to, being a member of a predominately black church), I’m concerned about how dangerous it is that church members erroneously elevate many of these so-called leaders to the status of God Himself. None of us are sinless, I get that. And I believe God is able and willing to use any one of us to advance His kingdom, despite our shortcomings. But this display is nothing short of flamboyance, arrogance, and nose-thumbing at God. Whether or not this was a deliberately orchestrated event to “restore” Fast Eddie to the ministry and bolster his embattled status, this nonsense was still wrong on every level possible.

What the heck is in the [holy?] water down there?

- ACL

Turning the Page

Hello there, 2012. I hope this proves to be an adventurous year. But not too much. Let’s not overdo it.

As for 2011? It’s been real. I’ve had my share of fun times, difficult moments, successes, and failures. Some relationships have been destroyed, others restored. Some moments left me feeling completely engaged with the world, others left me wanting to hide from it. Like every other year, 2011 was one full of ups and downs. But by and large, particularly evidenced by the fact that I’m still here to even reflect on it, the year was dominated by ups.

However, 2011 is now in the past. Time to start looking forward.

So here’s the thing: given my love for reading, it’s only appropriate to use the following allegory. I see life as a book. Each action we take translates into a new sentence, a new paragraph, a new page, and ultimately a new chapter. While the existing chapters provide very necessary context, I think we need to leave them behind us and get on with the rest of the book. We can’t expect to move on to the next chapter in our lives if we keep our attention fixed on what’s already been laid down on paper. Somewhere down the road, we need to pick up the pen and get to work on the next part of lives.

So as we wave our collective goodbyes to one year and welcome in the new year with open arms, let’s make it our mission not to focus on the past and move toward the future.

Random Person Asking Andre a Question: “Does that include forgetting about the crazy and unfaithful ex-girlfriend who treated me like dirt, despite me treating her like royalty?”

Andre: “Yes, it does.”

OK, OK. Fine. I’m turning a few of my pages too.

Peace and blessings to you all this year and in all your days!

- ACL

Restoring Broken Trust

I think it’s pretty safe to say I’m done focusing my energy on my ex. But I will say this: through I freely admit my wrongdoings against her, she was definitely wrong and inconsiderate for what she did to me. I tried to fix things between the two of us. However, she met my attempts at reconciliation with an unfortunate display of callousness and heartlessness. The end. Open and shut case. Nothing more to see here. So I promise this will be the last time I use any of my precious blog space on anything related to her. Frankly, the whole situation isn’t worth any more of my time, words, or sanity. It just isn’t.

But the introspective part of me considers it very important to examine a situation, muddle through the sordidness, and find an important lesson to extract. So what exactly can I learn from all of this?

I think if anything, I’ve learned both the difficulty and importance of restoring trust in people even after being let down. Over the past week or so, I’ve had great conversations with two of my closest friends; friends with whom I have ironically had broken/restored relationships at one point or another in my past (see here and here). In my candid but very insightful discussions with both of them, I was provided with much needed clarity and perspective about the dynamics of restoring/building relationships with anothers. This post is motivated by those conversations.

As much as I hate writing posts inundated with bullet points, I guess it’s pertinent in this case as I list a few important lessons I’ve learned:

(1) Actions are only specific to an individual, NOT to an entire collection of people: Admittedly, I have a very strong tendency to lose sight of this fact. It’s in those misguided moments where I would’ve taken the actions of my ex and formed general beliefs about everybody. “I loved her and treated her well. Yet she did me wrong. So I should probably expect this treatment over and over again” is how I typically found myself thinking. But labeling the entire world because of the antics of one person is disingenuous, damaging, and unfair to the other 6.8 billion people currently on this planet.

(2) People are…well…people: We’re all humans. As such, none of us are exempt from the frailties and limitations of being humans. Simply put, we ALL have the capacity to hurt and betray. I mean, if Jesus could be betrayed by some of the very same men He hand-picked to be His followers, why shouldn’t we expect people to betray our trust from time to time? Facing this pretty certain reality, does that mean we should stop trusting people? Of course not. In fact, I would argue just the opposite: we should do our best to extend ourselves to others even if/when they miss the mark. That’s the true indication of our character.

(3) Pick up the mirror every now and then: As much as I’ve been hurt and betrayed in my life, I’m really no better when it comes to how I treat other people. I’ve hurt people in the past and I’ve betrayed people’s trust (including my ex). It stands to reason that I’ll do so again in the future.  It’s about as certain of a thing to bet on as the Lions missing the playoffs (sorry Lions fans). But one of the things that I – scratch that we – can do is realize that our ability to forgive others for the wrongs they’ve committed against us is deeply rooted in being forgiven ourselves. You can’t expect forgiveness unless you’re willing to forgive. This was the hardest, yet most important lesson for me to learn.

As dear and VERY appreciated readers, my challenge to you is identify a situation you may be dealing with in your life requiring you to fix broken relationships. Try to reach out to the person/people involved in a spirit of humility and submission. Recognize your own faults while forgiving them for theirs. Make no mistake: I won’t guarantee success. Some people just can’t be reached, or are often too stubborn and unmovable in their jaded and selfish thinking. But in the end, peace will STILL be yours.

Holla at me!

- ACL

A Letter to JKD (Update)

Dear JKD,

What I’m about to say to you may seem farcical, given that I’ve only known you for a few years. You and I have been together for considerably even less time than that. And given the shortness of time in our relationship, I’d say it hardly qualifies as being epic.

Still, I have to admit: I’ve been exposed to more things being with you in these few short months than I have with any women I’ve been with up to this point. You’re a very special person to me. So special in fact, that I’m taking what should be a pretty intimate missive and posting it for the entire cybernetic community to see. Plus, I’m trying to embarrass you a little.

So without further ado, I would like to share a few things I love about you! Enjoy:

(1) You’re a thinker. I know it sounds like I’m reducing this to a simple and nebulous abstraction, but you really do think. For all the silly and inane conversations we’ve had about how embarassing Flavor Flav is or about how ridiculous a certain pastor’s “pseudo-intelligent accent” sounds, we have also had complex discussions about some pretty delicate things. To my surprise, your thoughts and commentary weren’t nearly as viscerally charged and elementally emotional as most women I know. At the risk of sounding sexist (I swear that’s not my intention), most women I know – save the intellectuals I know in Academia - don’t approach issues with pragmatism. They rely solely on their emotions and their feelings. You represent another kind of creature altogether.

We still disagree on how/when to use non-verbal ques to convey messages, but that’s about the only time your Venutian thinking doesn’t line up with my Martian thinking.

(2) I love how bold and fearless you are on one hand, but how vulnerable and soft-minded you are  on the other. Your daily walk (work, school, family, church, etc.) leads you to be extremly tough and decisive. But you’re also the kind of person who is so indecisive that you can’t decide what to get rid of when you’re cleaning your closet. *Closets in a loft would be DEFINITELY be spacious enough for you. Just sayin’.*

(3) You’re a great listener. I can’t say enough how much of an attribute that is when being with a person like me. As you can imagine from the years’ worth of posts I’ve made on various issues, I’m a talker. So a person has to possess a great deal of patience and listening skills to tolerate me. But besides being a listener, you’re also great at asking the right questions and showing an interest in me…even if the subject matter would bore Ben Stein himself.

(4) You’re unconventional in all the right places: As a general rule (a rule I’ve never really agreed with, by the way), men and women are supposed to subscribe to certain behaviors. You don’t. You were the one who first approached me. You were the one who waited patiently while I sat on your offer for a full month searching for the courage to respond. You were the one who corralled me in. This kind of behavior is pretty untraditional with womenfolk, especially with a person who could have just about any other man she wants.

(5) I love how refined you are. You have a record player at your crib. A real, honest-to-goodness record player. You would probably scoff at me if I ever offered to take you to a Beyonce concert.  Meanwhile, you’d probably be my best friend for life if I offered to take you to the opera. One of your favorite albums is the soundtrack from Madam Butterfly. You play classical flute, for crying out loud! Additionally, I love how aware and astute you are. That kind of refinement is a rarity these days.

Now, I’m not calling you refined while parenthetically saying “…not bad for a black woman.” It’s more like me saying “I knew black women like you were out there all along. But why aren’t they around here?” Don’t get me wrong: I know plenty of women whom I’d consider exceptionally cultured. I’ve got amazing sisters, terrific friends, and I’ve even met some of pretty awesome women through social networking (my blog and Facebook, for instance) who represent style, class, and eccletcism in their own way. But mostly, they are either related to me or are people for whom there is no attraction. In a highly urbanized place like Flint, Michigan especially, it’s not too common to see women who are even moderately genteel and stylish. The ones who wear that crown have either left the city, hooked up with somebody, or both.

The Angry Independent – my blogging buddy from Mirror on America - once wrote a stirring referendum on datable black women who have lost their collective minds when it comes to selecting bad mates. Before I met you, I would’ve easily used this post as a template for the first few chapters of my memoirs. “Why are the thugged out, insensitive, mean, aimless, irresponsible, aggressive men getting our black women while the nice, successful, intelligent “corny” brothas are getting left out in the cold?,” I would ask. Now, my eyes have been opened a bit more.

(6) I love how great you make me feel…almost superhuman…when I don’t/can’t see it. I’ve dated people who have left me feeling inadequate, incomplete, and perhaps even unworthy of them and their time. But you have done nothing but the contrary. To the extent that I can actually sit back and recognize my worth, some of the credit belongs to you because of how you make me feel. To be sure, I’ve got an amazing supporting cast of family, close friends, etc. But I never quite felt that kind of support from a significant other. Until now, that is.

(7) To follow up on my previous point, I love how you accept my imperfections – and, yes, I do have them. Some of the same limitations and shortcomings that caused other people I dated to toss me aside, you have freely accepted (and in some cases, even admired). This certainly doesn’t put me in a place where I’ll stay content with my imperfections. There is always a better Andre to whom I will strive. But it makes my life considerably less worrisome knowing that you are waiting in the wings even if I miss the mark. Being accepted with little, if any, conditions is an amazing thing.

(8) I love your love for God. I believe that we are unable to build solid and healthy relationships with others until we have been able to build solid and healthy relationships with ourselves and with God. It’s pretty clear to me – and indeed, pretty assuring – that you’re a woman who has God residing at your core.

(9) I think above everything else, what I love most about you is how you’ve helped restore my faith in relationships and in people who are in relationships. As far as relationships go, my life has been filled with enough negativity to permanently scar the average person. At one point, I reached a level of cynicism so severe that I was prepared to hang it up for good. When I was ready to capitulate to my anger and frustration, you saved me from my blindness and the misguided truths I’ve created from my past relationships. You’ve kept me in the fight.

If there is one immutable truth in the universe, it would be the idea that human relationships can either destroy a person or build them up. For me, you’ve done the latter. I’ve been blessed to be with a person who has presented me with a fresh and healthy perspective on things. Instead of falling in the same, traditional cookie-cutter experience, you have forced my hand and challenged me to build an “us-ship” in ways I never have before. In short, you make me want to be a better me.

Some people who read this (because I put you on blast. lol!) might think I’m jumping the gun a bit here. To a large extent, they may be correct. The truth is: I don’t know what the future holds for us a year, two years, or fifty years down the road. All I know now is that I’m thankful for having you at this moment and at this time. For now, that’s all I can do.

No matter what happens in the future, thanks for what you’ve given me now.

Um, yeah. Never mind. I forgot what I was gonna say.

- ACL

Accepting Pains

“Weeping may endureth over night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

- Psalms 30:5

“Joy may come in the morning, but you best believe weeping will endure through the night.”

- Me

Though I feel I’m making terrific strides in overcoming the challenges of my recent breakup, some of it is still a little difficult to easily pass over. Without going into all the specifics, my ex committed some SERIOUS infractions on the heart, infractions for which I can’t necessarily blame her entirely, but which also don’t make the situation any less painful for me. The greater society will have you believe that men have an obligation to withhold our feelings – as emotional expressions are typically accepted as a lack of “manhood.” I say that’s bullshit. Humans in general, not just women, were bestowed by our Creator with emotions (good and bad) which define our humanity, not limit it. Those grounds rules being established, I present my final thoughts (at least cybernetically) on this issue.

The motivation for this post, I suppose, lies with a recent conversation I had with a friend regarding my breakup. Before then, I only shared my experience and all of its sordid details with a few of my closest people, and a few of my ex’s (and even that was only to provide the full context of what happened. I recently discovered she was openly giving people an imbalanced account of what happened. I was setting the record straight with those I could). Anyway, during our conversation this friend of mine urged me to focus on the good that came out the relationship and concentrate on how the experience – though ending horribly – helped in shaping my character. I could certainly see and appreciate his perspective. In fact, to an extent I also tend to subscribe to the notion that accentuating the positive things in my life help to assuage the anguish of the more painful things. At the same time however, I would be foolish not to realize that doing so is like trying to pour sugar on a lime. It may be sweet for a moment, but at the end of the day, it’s still a lime.

I’m often quite fascinated by how motivational-types can flash smiles and quote scriptures that successfully lure us from the difficult places in our lives. I’m impressed with their abilities to touch large groups of people and convince them that their real problems have somehow dematerialized right in front of them. I especially appreciate the fact that many of them (but certainly, not all) have a genuine and motivated interest to help people in the healing process. But sometimes I wonder if that’s what we really need. Rather than cheering us up, I sometimes wonder how successful the motivational types would be if they spoke about experiencing the hurt of losing things/people. How different would the message be?

This begs the question: do we really need to discover the cheerful fix to our problems, or should we face our pains head on?

Don’t get me wrong: I think it does us a great deal of good to concentrate our hearts on the good that can come out of our struggles. But I also think it’s dangerous and unhealthy to ignore, reject, or try to sweeten the pains we feel. Instead of flashing our smiles and pretending not to feel hurt, maybe we need to stake claim to the things that hurt us. Our pains, after all, are what make us people. Real people.

Are we to keep our tears set aside until the midnight hour when everyone’s asleep? Do we bottle up our pains until we can release them when we’re all alone? I think so many of us are afraid of sharing our pains because we’ve become disconnected with our sorrow. If a sad song comes on the radio, we change the station. If a sad movie is on, we pop in a comedy. We find more interest in a romantic marriage than we do a messy divorce.

To be sure, I’m in complete support of finding the silver lining in the dark clouds. As I quoted earlier, the Bible reminds us that weeping may endureth for the night, but joy cometh in the morning. But let’s not pretend that just because the morning’s on its way, we get to somehow bypass the night. Pains, I’m learning, will come. There is nothing even remotely therapeutic about keeping it to ourselves, or veiling our pains out of fear of public reprisal. There’s nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to embracing and releasing our pain; particularly if it serves a precursor to our healing. Oppositely, I would argue that it’s our inability to express our pains that is more harmful to us than anything else.

So, I’m laying all my cards on the table now. A full recovery is on its way for me, I have no doubts about that. I’m a strong person and I have an amazing supporting cast of friends and family (including you all, my e-pals). But no point in concealing it: I was hurt. No more denying that.

Thanks for all your support, especially through my healing.

- ACL