God has a plan

Before I start: I really hate being shy. The worst thing about it is what my body does. The only way it knows to comfort itself is to get all sharp and start pointing out at strange angles. Sometimes I end up just having to hold on to the wall or a piece of furniture. How am I supposed to ever get people to like me when I'm doing all this stuff? It's just impossible. I'm a strange talker, but especially when I'm nervous, I start making all my words as small and dense as possible, like "okay" becomes "key" and I get even harder than usual to understand. I'm considering adopting some kind of fake accent which would maybe take all my energy and keep me from doing the other stuff.

Anyway, what I was going to write about is the idea that God Has a Plan. I mean, God obviously has a plan, but is it realistic to think that we can identify God's plan? I think it probably isn't. We see but a poor reflection in a mirror. We just want to lose 20 pounds or have someone fall in love with us, we want to not be disabled, we don't want the people we love to die. So if someone says that they're in remission from cancer, therefore God has a plan, I find that kind of cheap. What about people who die? Aren't they in the plan? Did He only remember to include you, Remission Lady?

Sometimes it's hard not to say, yes, I can see God's plan, which is probably stupid, and maybe when I say that it just means that I'm marveling at the narrative, how sadness turns into advantage. If I didn't have all this stuff wrong with me I would not know God at all. If everything had been easy, I would be a harder person. I was thinking about my friend, who could confide in me because I was one of his only friends who wasn't close with all the people he was upset about. He knew I couldn't tell on him because I barely saw those people. Previously, I had been really depressed when I stopped being close to these people; I had felt really lost. I'd especially been sad about losing him. But then we became good friends again, and the fact that I had lost those other people made me almost the only person he could vent to when things were going wrong.

In high school, I knew a girl named Clara who had a secret blog. We were secret friends. In the week before she started at my school, Clara went to training camp with the soccer team and it was hell. Because she spent the whole time watching this other girl be teased and whispered about for supposedly being in a lesbian relationship, so from almost the first moment Clara knew that the school was a bad place if people thought you were gay. Clara had learned that she was gay and was only beginning to feel calm about it, and this was after being at a school that felt safe. She was scared and overwhelmed.

But she also met the girl who would be her best friend for the rest of high school, and wouldn't stop being friends with her after figuring out Clara was gay. Clara wrote about this on her secret blog, I still remember, and she had it up as some kind of parallel. It seemed meaningful to her that in the middle of all this fear, she also found something undoubtedly perfect and durable.

When I think about history, my own and other people's, everything looks in my head like colors on a page. Things stand out. It gives me chills to see which things come out of other things, the sudden transubstantiation, the emergence. I know it's silly to say what I want to say, which is kind of what Clara said in her post; that this is God's plan. Because if we can see it, it isn't God's plan. But, for me at least, when I see how beautiful and strange everything is I almost see God.