my lengthy adventure on friday the 13th

Warning: this is super lengthy with a lot of my random opinions.

You know where I woke up? In the little tunnel of the neighborhood playground, the one where you have to crawl through to get to the other side. Well. Yesterday night, at around three am. I decided to go outside and see if I could catch any meteors. Unfortunately, the street lamps were blinding, and my backyard was creeping with loud critters and frightening noises, so I decided to give it ten minutes before I went back inside. The door happened to be locked. I don't know how that happened, but all I knew was that I could not get back in my house at 3:10 am. So I went to the playground, laid on the bench for an hour, got restless, and moved to the tunnel of the playground. And I slept there until 6:30, when I woke up extremely cold and gross. My excuse is that I wanted to live the life of a hobo for a night.

Nature is very loud. It hisses at you, and it coughs up every unnatural noise that could very well make you piss in your pants. I lay there frozen in that tunnel, pulling my shirt over my legs and bunched in a ball, listening to that strange and eerie sound of some unknown animal. It might have been a sick deer. And I listened to the croaking crickets (crickets croak?!) and the buzzing frogs, and that's when I knew I was getting tired. Then the owls started whooping, and the birds started hooting, and so I burrowed my head into the hard plastic and tried to make it go away. What an exhausting night.

Then I got out of the tunnel at 7 am because a sick man started coughing near the playground, and I wanted to avoid all human contact as possible, so I jumped out of there and walked away as calmly as possible. And I went to my backyard and sat there until my parents left the house at 8:30.

You know, benches are not comfortable at all. I always thought they looked alright, especially when I saw the homeless all bundled up and cozy. What a joke. It's mid-August, and I still felt so cold out there. And no, I did not get to see any meteors, because I was trying to fall asleep. It's such a strange sensation, to think about all the normal things you did during the day [eat at waffle house, make some money, watch a movie, drink beverages from mcdonalds], and then find yourself sleeping on a bench at three in the morning. But it was okay for me because I knew I could just go back to my bed in the morning. Homeless people have to live every day knowing that there is nowhere to go. It's not like they have a go-to bench, or a more homey plank of wood. It's not like it's a temporary one-night thing.

And I hate it when people think it's their fault. Admittedly, some are to blame, but as I was thinking about my views last night in the cold, I finally realized who I am and what political categories I fall into. I'm morally conservative but fiscally liberal. There. I decided that that's that. I am not going to be swayed anymore. I don't believe in legalized abortion or legalized gay marriage (sue me, but that's what my God commands), but I'm for taxing the wealthy more than the poor. Ah, screw it all though. I hate politics. Sure, I support the government, but I don't know why everyone needs to be so torn up- even Christians. Let me copy and paste something I wrote:

what if we just didn't care about politics? i'm not saying to ignore it, of course, but why do you think it's important to focus on politics when there's still so much to fix about ourselves? we protest gay marriages while divorcing at the same rate that non-christians divorce at, we oppose the government and its secrecy while reveling in our own slander and greed, we ridicule abortion while holding hate in our hearts; why are we focusing so much on the laws of the land and the actions of others when we are in desperate need of fixing ourselves? I feel like Jesus talked more about our hypocrisies than he did against the government; he never talked of things like liberalism and conservatism, and he never straight out bashed Caesar. our job is to be the body of CHRIST, his people- not a nation. admittedly, i do believe that we should have federal laws against abortion, but i don't believe in all this energy that's being used to so adamantly protest this and that law, because i really don't think that's our purpose, especially when there's bigger problems (even down the street) than politics, starting with ourselves. abortion and homosexuality are clearly sins, but that doesn't mean that the government needs to be involved with it all. lying is a sin, as is adultery, and worshiping any other god, but the government does not make laws about those. i just feel like all this talk about politics is unnecessary, because honestly, we've got to look at ourselves.

So now that I've made my spiel about politics, let's move on, haha. I don't even know who's reading this. I feel like blogs died and revived in tumblr form. Which is really addicting, by the way. I can't get enough of it. Anyways though. As I was sitting in my own backyard waiting to go inside, I couldn't help but to think, gee, knowledge comes with so much responsibility. When you grow up and gain experience, everyone just expects you to take responsibility after learning of the things of this world, of the good things and bad things. If I were a kid and had found myself locked outside, my mom would've understood, because hey, I was just a kid. But at sixteen years old? My mother would've thrown a fit. You know better than that.

That's the same with religion though. I ran across this quote the other day:

"How much do you have to hate someone to not share your faith?"

And it's true. Because if you really realize the seriousness of heaven and hell, and that your best friend could very well be eternally damned, then why wouldn't you share your faith? Screw the whole "i-don't-want-to-offend-him" mindset; who cares? This life is temporary. If you really believed that the person sitting next to you in school or on the bus could go to hell, why wouldn't you try to save them? I wish we all didn't feel it so necessary to not be offensive. The beauty of it is that the quote was said by an atheist and outspoken opponent against organized religion:

"how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? how much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"

I'm not going to pretend anymore. I know I can't control anyone, but as a Christian, the least I could do is share my faith, not stand aside and pretend to be okay with other choices. It's not that I'm intolerant, or that I hate you, or anything like that. It's a sincere belief in my religion and in my God, and a desire to bring you along with the ride.

Because I do need to stop acting like everything's okay. Christians shouldn't be of the world. We should be aliens.

And there it is.