: are you lonesome tonight :

self-admitted guilty pleasure = the bachelor.

a. as Lauren Angel says, it's a reminder of how distasteful crazy girl is. blech. spit that out.
b. affirms my theory on the curse of Eve ... women having a tendency to surrender themselves to at times relationally incapable men
c. awkward + drama + tearful train wrecks = entertaining {it's simple math}

the more i pursue things like authenticity, integrity, congruence, i am starting to see little sproutings of balance and discernment. something i've been thinking of lately is the marriage of freedom and accountability. case in point : the bachelor.

if i had a nickel for every time i yell at the computer screen, "girl, you signed up for the bachelor. goodness gracious." i have slight empathy because i know my own capability to be clingly/needy/subservient/spineless. however my strongest emotion is frustration. these women walked into the disaster of the bachelor. {interestingly, they are all "catches" by societies standards. why so single and primed to surrender self?} the whole thing screams of fear : fear that manifests itself as over-analyzing, crying, manipulation, anxiety, blame, self-centeredness, insecurity, scrambling, hopeless attempts to control everyone and everything ... all yucky. bigger picture, it's my guess that many if not most of the girls that signed up did so at least in part because they were afraid of being single - in the present or forever.

i'm not on the bachelor but there are many times that i forge into territory that only promises disappointment and maybe disaster. and then i feel like the victim to what is only natural consequences to my decisions. no doubt there are inviting aspects of the bachelor : come make out with a hottie, sit by the pool all day, travel, have pillow fights, drink champagne all the time. seems to promise to make every girl the queen bee ... but ... how is that possible? the bachelor is set up so that one girl stands at the end, but then again there's the possibility that the dude choses no one ... or that he chooses someone and the "relationship" turns into the most dreadful experience of a lady's lifetime. side note : those producers are heartless.

such things in life promise to make us princes and princesses. and then they leave us looking like suckers. what's that thing Isaiah says to Israel when they are grieving the fact that their ba'als aren't answering them? "They say nothing, because they are nothing -- sham gods, no-gods, fool-making gods," [isaiah 41:24].

i'm contrasting this whole corrupt situation with a different kind of darkness. There's a book I got for Christmas that i've finally made time to read. It's called, "I Loved Jesus in the Night." The second-title part is, "Teresa of Calcutta, a Secret Revealed." listen to this : i hate reading. but i can't put this little thing down. I love Paul Murray for writing it in short-chapter form. Here's the profound and impossibility of Mother Teresa's soul condition - she was overwhelmed with darkness. "To be in love and yet not love, to live by faith and yet not to believe. To spend myself and yet to be in total darkness." She was overwhelmed with a looming sense of a terrible co-existence of a longing for God and the feeling that he had abandoned her.

unlike those bachelor babes, Mother Teresa faced the darkness with honesty, petitions, commitment, diligence. her exhausted and wrung-dry heart moved forward into a calling that came from a God she at times doubted even existed. "The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable ... I have no faith -- I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart -- and make me suffer untold agony ... If there is a God, please forgive me ... When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul." um.

and further contrary to those other ladies, Mother Teresa is described by those who encountered here as radiant. RADIANT. i look at those ladies on t.v. and the word that comes to mind is pitiful. Mother Teresa seems to have made some peace with the tension of the soul. She was moved by the words of John of the Cross : "This dark night is an inflow of God into the soul." Or as Paul Murray says, "Rather [the darkness] was the shadow cast in her soul by the overwhelming light of God's presence : God utterly present and yet utterly hidden."

in a time of serious illness (June 1983), Mother Teresa wrote, rather prayed, "Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being. I have given Him all, even my sins, and He has espoused me to Himself in tenderness and love."

she walked into a calling ... into uncharted territory ... into darkness ... into tension ... into being ... into honesty ... into fear ... this was not a manipulative way to get her love cup filled ... but that seems to be exactly what happened.

amen, and amen.