Enharmonic Interval

An Enharmonic Interval is when there are two notes that differ in name, but that are actually, the exact same note (C sharp and D flat.) They have the same fingerings, the same sound, they are on the same place on the staff. They are the same thing just with a different title. 

I'm going to get pretty honest with you here today. Probably because I realize that nobody reads this anyways and that it's pretty much for myself more than anyone else.

I have become an Enharmonic Interval, without even realizing it. I thought that I changed notes, even changed my title, but my life hasn't really followed suit. 

What do I mean by that?

I have given myself this title of Christian, and now I find myself wondering if I've really changed anything at all, or just what I've named myself. 

I've never really understood the enharmonic interval. I've always thought it was a little weird, and a little stupid. Why would somebody give one note another name? It just complicated matters, and makes me second guess myself when trying to play my sheet music. 

I don't really understood why I've changed my title and not my life either. 

I feel kind of like I'm going to throw up because I realize what I'm about to get into right here, and I've added some music that reminds me of my past to add to the dramatic effect. And it's working. 

Well--here goes I suppose. 

I write this blog behind a persona. I'm "The Trumpet Player". I glamorize my life so that none of my secrets leak through to the internet and some predator comes and takes me away, and so that I can seem like I'm something I'm not. Which I'm actually really good at. 

Do I play the Trumpet? Sure. Are all the stories I tell true? Absolutely. But do I know any of the music terms I title my posts with without looking them up in a musical dictionary? No. Did the "Bible College" I go to consist of more than fourteen people in my church and half days for eight months? No. Am I as recklessly zealous for God like I try and convince you that I am? 

Definitely not. 

And that's probably one of the scariest things for me to admit. 

Here's who I really am. 

I'm a nineteen year old who lives with my parents and is hopelessly afraid to go to college because I think I'm making the wrong decision. I'm extremely insecure and have no real friends outside of my seventeen year old "Flute Player", younger sister, who I'm actually wildly competitive with. I come from what anybody would describe as a "broken  home". My Mom raised me as a seventeen year old in University, and my biological dad left when I was probably three. I don't really know the details of it, don't really care. He's back in my life now but is grew up Catholic and seems anything but open to the idea of God, and I'm too freaked out to really talk to him about Jesus. 

Great Christian hunh?

Oh, but it doesn't stop there. 

I used to be completely enraptured in role playing  Me and my best friend gave ourselves up to it and concocted warped stories that I would explain in a little more detail if I weren't deathly afraid that somebody I know might stumble upon this blog. We acted them out day after day after day, with--and without--each other. The reality I had made became more appealing to me than the reality I inhabited. 

And I'm still kind of like that. Not in the same way, but I recede into my head to turn over stories I'm writing on a regular basis, and my reality bores me. I daydream, I watch movies, I read books, I write, I draw. Anything to escape this boredom. Nothing is particularly wrong with my life, I have a family that loves me and food on the table, a good church, and stuff. My problems are all my fault. My problems. 

The role play thing has made me really good at telling stories, and really good at pretending. And so I pretend. I think I even fool myself. 

I get up and read my Bible, listen to Mark Clarke podcasts, pray, every morning for an hour. I go to church, I tithe, I know the appropriate place to shout "Amen" in a sermon, and I studied under all the Pastors for eight months so I know them, in a sense. 

I'm also extremely introverted and shy, so they don't really know me. 

I know the things not to include in my testimony (I just allude to the role playing, the swearing, the denial of God, the immorality), I know the music I shouldn't listen to (and I don't listen to it), I know the shows I shouldn't watch, the games I shouldn't play, the drinks I shouldn't drink, the people I shouldn't associate with. 

And I follow every stipulation to a 'T'. I don't have any tattoos, I haven't smoked, drank, my ear piercings have even gotten infected from every piece of jewelry I've tried to put in so those have grown over. 

I've brought a couple people to Christ, though I haven't discipled them so I have no idea what their walk with Jesus is like because it doesn't show outwardly. (Though mine does and that doesn't mean my heart is changed so take from that what you will.) 

I am prideful, and I judge other people because they don't do the things that I do that make me seem Christianly. 

"You only read your Bible five minutes every couple days? Well--looks whose a heathen now."

I'm mean to people when they make me uncomfortable, and stupid around the people that I want to like me. I'm shallow, I'm selfish. I want other people to fail so that I look better. And for a little while, I feel better when other people aren't as good as me at something. 

My sister is my biggest rival. She's extremely nice, people like her, she's smart, she's talented, she knows where's she's going with her life. (EMR, on her way to being a paramedic. How noble is that?) She doesn't like school, which has always been my one-up on her, but with her course now she's doing extremely well and I feel like my identity is being robbed because that's what I found myself in. How smart I am, how good I am at everything I put my hand to. If I don't have that, I don't have anything. 

Except Jesus. And that doesn't seem to be enough for me. Because here I am wondering, do I really have Him? He would be enough if I did. I know that, because all the knowledge I have of the Bible lets me know that Jesus was enough for the people that were whipped, beheaded, put in prison, because of Him. He was enough for Paul, the Pharisee who was converted on the road to Damascus, and was put in prison, persecuted, stoned, and eventually killed for the message of Christ. He was enough for Gideon who took three hundred men into battle in the dead of the night, and for Elijah the Prophet, who called down fire from heaven to challenge hundreds of worshipers of Baal. 

Some of that information might be inaccurate. I know my Bible but not perfectly, and apparently not enough for it to change me. 

I mean--I changed. At first. I feel like it was real at first. Or at least--maybe it was?

I don't know what my decision was motivated out of. Here's the readers digest version of my conversion. (How'd you like that little rhyme thing I did there?)

I grew up in a Christian household, like a thousand other people out there, and had a relationship with God. Pasting memory verses on foam castles in children's church, and raising my hands during worship. But then something happened and I decided that I thought this whole schtick was stupid. I didn't want to be a Christian. It was a myth, a fictitious tale, much like the story I was writing with my friend about our role play characters. And then that myth became more real to me than God did. I used new age philosophies like "the secret" to try and manifest those characters into reality. I almost cut holes into the back of my shirt so that when my wings sprouted, I could slip them through the fabric. (Have you ever read Maximum Ride? Yah, I wanted to be genetically engineered to have wings just like the flock.) 

I know there was demonic activity working in my life, and if you think demons are something Christians make up to scare people into this "Jesus stuff" I'm going to tell you you're wrong and I don't care what you think if I talk about them. They're real. 

I wanted to run away from home, just so that I could get picked up off the street in the black Lamborghini of my main character. 

And the crazy thing? I was so good at lying, so good at pretending, that my mom and step dad didn't even realize that I wasn't the good Christian girl I was putting on the mask of. Smile, bat your eyelashes, say things like "fellowship", "Redeemed" and "Our Heavenly Father", and you're fine. 

Then we moved. My step dad was posted because he's in the military and I had to freaking go with him. What the heck was with that?

I rallied against the idea, and still continued to role play with my friend over the internet. Then I found people just like me. 

See that's the thing, you'll always find someone to participate in your sin, so you can't ever run from it. You have to give it to God, and that's what I'm so desperately wanting to be able to do now. 

But back to the story. 

I kind of role played at school, though of course, not with the characters me and my best friend had created. No, I did other things. Conformed to their patterns, while always pretending to be some character or another. If it wasn't the immortal teenager with drinking problems from my stories, it was the good girl at home, or the person who didn't care that they were drowning in the confusion of moving while I was at school.

I had this journal thing that I wrote in. That's always kind of been a consistent in my life. Not that I consistently write in a journal, but I always seem to come back to one method or another of journaling because writing seems to be a good way for me to process stuff.

Well my Mom found this journal, and in it I berated her, I swore, I talked about my characters, I ranted about how I hated everything--life itself. 

She didn't realize I was so messed up, and when she flipped out on me, something inside of me broke. 

Sort of. 

The rest of me balked. I decided that she couldn't control me, and that I was going to do whatever I was going to do anyways. 

And she read my journal again, weeks later!

And that time was the first time I ever really considered killing myself. 

You see, I'm going to get a bit psychologist on myself here, but I think because my Mom has always been the only consistent authority figure in my life, I value her opinion more highly than anyone else's. So when she said how badly I had hurt her, threatened to send me away, stuff like that, I felt more cut to the heart than ever before. I crumpled on my floor, and sobbed after she had left. 

I don't know why I suddenly cared what I did to her. I certainly didn't before, when she had first gotten angry. I didn't when I critiqued her, and said terrible things about her in my journal, and otherwise. But I did, and then I got scared. 

Her brother had gotten run over by a truck when she was young, and died during surgery for a couple of minutes. And he explained this scenario about going to Hell and having Satan standing in his hospital room, puking and saying "I've got you now," or something like that. And Mom had told me that story before and I suddenly felt convicted and like Hell was waiting for me. 

Turn or Burn philosophy, right?

I have to interrupt the story here for a second to say that I know it sounds weird. I'm not naive, I don't think that it's normal for people to have this idea in their head. I don't know how it works, but I know that it's real. Whether that's some kind of distorted, drug induced idea of dark, supernatural activity or a legitimate encounter with the devil, I don't know, nor do I particularly intellectualize about it. Something evil is out there, and don't pretend it's not. You know, deep down inside, that people that torture individuals for pleasure, and burn babies, and kill people of a different race because they are "inferior", are doing something wrong. 

Well that something, that darkness, freaked me out. And so did Hell. And I knew that Jesus was this ticket out, and so I asked Him for a "Get Out of Hell Free Card." Which--isn't being a Christian, and maybe that's a shock. Being a Christian means giving yourself to Christ, not asking to be saved from Hell. See, Hell isn't for people, it's not this incentive to be a Christian. It's punishment for the powers of darkness, and was never intended for us. But when we decide that we don't want God, then that's what we get. Separated from Him. 

And you're like "Oh well, if God's good then why wouldn't He just let us exist in this 'so called' afterlife, without Him? Why this Hell place?"

BECAUSE GOD IS GOOD! SO YOU'RE EXISTING OUTSIDE THE PRESENCE OF GOOD! YOU'RE LEFT IN THE PRESENCE OF EVIL! 

I'm sorry. Except that I'm really not. I'm finally saying (typing) what I feel like typing without freaking caring about what other people are going to say or think! I'm not perfect! I get it! I don't deserve heaven, and I'm not claiming to. I'm saying that Jesus allows us to enter heaven when we say "Take me!" And that's what being a Christian is. It's loving God, not because you're afraid of Hell, but because you're in love with Jesus. You don't love you're spouse because you're afraid of being alone. You love you're spouse because you love them, and that should be enough. 

Which brings me to a point I haven't made yet, but should have. 

I don't know if I was really *saved when I became a Christian because I was afraid of Hell. 

*Being "saved" is just the Christianese word for the moment you decided to accept this Jesus stuff as being worth giving your life to. 

I started to do this behavior modification stuff. I had this big thick binder filled with pictures (albeit poor ones) that I had drawn of my characters, torn up, bloodied and bruised from their encounters with tortuous experiences I had decided to "put them through". Pictures of them with weapons, with needles, with sharp teeth and fangs. It was screwed up, and so, I ripped them up. And I started to read my Bible, and pray, and stuff like that. And whenever I tell this part of my testimony  everyone gets really excited. That's because this testimony is a lot different than the one I tell other people (and it has ended up not really being the readers digest version anyways.) And when I tell my story to other Christians, this seems to be the turning point of my life. I started living for God. 

And maybe I did, I don't know. But where I am right now tells me that I was just changing behaviors  Pulling up my moral bootstraps by myself, and deciding that I was good enough for God now. 

But we never are good enough for God, it's by His grace that He chooses us to come to Him. And He says "Hey, by the way. I died so that you could be saved from how messed up you are." I'll never be perfect, but Jesus always was, and He stands in front of all my failures so that all God sees is His perfectness, not my lack of it. 

It's hard to explain, and hard to understand, and I want to understand it but I don't really know that I do. Because here I am doing the same stuff I was doing four years ago, and no one is any better for it. 

I follow all these religious rules, and say "Hey! Doesn't that make me a Christian?"

Except that's stupid. Because Christianity isn't even supposed to be a religion. It's supposed to be a relationship with God. A friendship, a marriage, a father and child, a servant and master, all rolled into one. So here I am doing religious things for a not religion. It's like me saying that I should be married because I can cook. Maybe I can do something that's in some roundabout way involved in a marriage, but it's not the central aspect and it doesn't have anything to do with having a relationship with someone!

Okay, so praying and reading your Bible and going to church all bring you closer to God. If you already have a relationship with Him. If I'm doing all of this and I don't love Him with my whole heart, and am not doing it to know Him better but to be good enough to get into heaven--well. That's like calling someone you don't know everyday and saying that you know them because you call them everyday. 

What you fail to mention is that you're leaving a message on their answering machine everyday, not talking to them. 

That's what it's like. 

And I want to get out of this place! I want to stop leaving a message and I want to go over to God's house, knock on the door, and come sit down for supper. GET TO KNOW HIM! Not know about Him. Not read His magazines, and memorize his stats, brush up on the latest gossip on God. I can know the Bible inside, outside, upside-down, and have know idea what the person that authored it (God) is really like. 

I'm reading this booked called "Not a Fan" right now, and every chapter I read just reinforces that I'm a fan of God, not a follower. I know a lot about Him, but I don't really know Him. I wouldn't give up everything for the creator of the universe, even though He gave everything for me. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid! 

I can't do it on my own. I can't do it at all. I just need God to take over, and I don't even know how to go about asking Him to do that. 

I don't want to obsess over my weight, trying to find my identity in those stupid numbers on the scale, getting frustrated to the point of eating disorder when they're too high. I don't want to sabotage my sister to feel better about myself, or die internally every time someone says something bad about me because I'm so dang insecure that a word of rebuke send me spiraling out of control. I don't want to care so much about what other people think about me and what kind of "Christian" that I am, that I don't share the gospel, God's good news, word about Jesus, with others!

I have became this fake, plastic, porcelain, Christian doll. Nobody sees what God does in my life because I don't let Him do anything. And I'm fake. When something happens I spew out all these Christian-isms, I give them the "right answers" so they don't think I'm a bad Christian. "All things work together for good", "I just need to trust in God", "Pray for me." None of these things are false, none of these things are bad, but they just become so ritualized that they don't come from the heart and we don't mean them. 

Fake. Plastic. Doll. Who am I going to bring to Christ? Who wants to be like that? I don't even, and I'm trying to convince others they should join me in a pew to pretend everything is okay?

No. I'd say that this changes now, but I'm not even in control of that. God needs to do it, and you'll know it when He does. I pray He does. 

-I am the Trumpet Player and I want to be a Christian. A real one. A follower of Christ, no holds barred, love with abandon, don't care what others think, Christian.