Joscelyne's Facebook profile.

Yesterday morning, I nearly choked on my coffee. The near-choke came while reading "She's Still Dying on Facebook" at The Atlantic by Julie Binton. The story recounts the last days of Binton's former BFF Leah which is on display in perpetuity on Facebook.

I’ve been obsessed with Lea’s Facebook profile since January 2006, when she joined, just a month after I created my own account. In high school, we had a consuming friendship—together we did things we’d never do alone, like skinny-dip in Lake Michigan while rolling on Ecstasy. In summer, our sleepovers lasted weeks. At 1 a.m., we’d sneak out and trudge through the woods to a field, where we smoked cigarettes and got blackout drunk on wine stolen from our mothers. We talked a lot about getting wasted and breaking out of dead-end northern Michigan; anthems of small-town girls. We called ourselves unbreakable without a hint of irony. Our friendship took place entirely offline—which is strange, because for almost 10 years, most of my interaction with Lea has been with her Facebook profile.

A few months ago, motivated by the purchase of an iPhone 5, I refreshed all the apps on my phone. I barely use any of them—Chase, Twitter, Groupon, Facebook, iPeriod—and normally wouldn’t bother upgrading unless prompted by some breakdown of functionality. One of Facebook’s newer features is a change to private messages, so that they’re less like email and more like instantmessaging. Now, if you visit someone’s profile and click on the messages button, a circular icon containing their profile picture appears on the screen, and with it, the entirety of your mutual correspondence.

On March 2, more than four years ago now, Lea died of substance-abuse-related liver failure. June 10 would have been her 27th birthday. This time of year is when she’s always most on my mind, and I’m sure that some Facebook technician who keeps track of what we all do on the site would report that my visits to Lea’s profile increase exponentially as the weather gets warmer. I don’t know how, exactly, I managed to open up my old messages with Lea. I want to say that Facebook put the messages there—that I didn’t click the button, that they just appeared, Lea’s face popping up because she had something to say, she wanted to chat. But I must have clicked. Maybe by accident. Still, I can’t ignore the pull of my bookworm’s interpretation, arguing that technology is the closest human beings come to magic. I know nothing about the way the Internet works. I still half-believe the Internet is simply air. So why isn’t it plausible that Lea’s messages appeared in response to how much I miss her, to my own guilt about her death.

...

My freshman year, Lea’s status updates were consistently funny and weird and her. A year later they’d become disjointed: Hallmark quotes that the Lea I’d known would have made fun of, misspellings, late-night fragments that had clearly been posted after a hundred drinks and who knows what else. Her profile pictures changed too. Early-on, she was Lea at the beach, grinning through a sunburn. Later, she was Lea 30 pounds thinner than I’d ever seen her, her cheeks squirrel-swollen, staring at something beyond the camera. When I went home to Michigan on winter break, I’d bump into her at bars and parties, or get incomprehensible calls from her in the middle of the night. We’d grown apart swiftly and irrevocably. I might drink too much with my high school friends over the holidays, but in New York I was living the kind of life Lea and I had imagined for ourselves, if only we could escape Michigan. At 19, I didn’t understand what her life had become, and why she hadn’t grown up with the rest of us, why she couldn’t get it together.

 

...

The last message between me and Lea was sent on February 21, 2007, and it’s from her to me. But it’s a message I hadn’t ever seen until I updated my Facebook app a few months ago—seven years after Lea sent it, four years after she died. Right after Lea’s funeral, I spent one terrible afternoon going through a shoebox full of old notes we’d passed in class and crappy photos we’d taken with drugstore disposable cameras; I didn’t think about what Lea might have left for me online. When I saw the message years later I stopped breathing. For one disorienting, searing second it was like she’d died again in that instant. I experienced an almost physical sensation, as if I’d clumsily dropped something fragile onto the floor and watched it shatter. The worst part: It wasn’t the only unanswered message from Lea to me—there’d been more, along with many that I’d answered with pretentious, dashed-off notes about life in New York, glib acknowledgments of her stint in rehab, of the fact that her dad had moved out, of her depression.

 

Lea died the first time soon after she joined Facebook, when I witnessed her transformation into someone she would have mocked and pitied. She died again, a smaller death, a year or so before her real-world one, when she basically stopped posting altogether. On March 2, she died publicly, her wall turning into the memorial it is now. To me, she’s died again and again since then. The posts remembering her are fewer and fewer, months apart sometimes. When I rediscovered our messages, she died again—in a different way, because I’d come face to face with how I failed her. Facebook has made her death a sort of high-concept horror movie. How many more times will I grieve her? How many more details from my past, from Lea’s past, are buried online, waiting for me to uncover them?

I've had that experience, seemingly a million times over with Joscelyne's death. Mutual friends tagging her in some picture or status update and it showing up in my Newsfeed and triggering an immediate rush of emotions- bewilderment, fear, hope and sadnesss. Jos has died so many times now. This has also meant a continual death of part of me, too- I'll never be anyone's big sister again. 

Yesterday was also Jos' daughter Sophia's birthday. It's a wonder I managed to keep that coffee down.

(Source)

I read a good post at Today's Christian Woman that I wanted to share, because quite frankly, I can relate. I've had a few conversations with my married Christian girlfriends lately on the same subject. Sex. Specifically, why is there a veil of shame or secrecy around sex to the point that even grown, married friends feel uncomfortable discussing it? The saddest part is flash back a decade ago and we didn't feel squeamish, although none of us were hitched. It's like the Christian Culture curtain descended and our sexuality was to become hidden. Hannah Nitz writes:

As my friend's wedding day approached, a group of us got together to celebrate with a pink and girly bachelorette party. I put on my high heels, slapped on some red lipstick, and ran out the door, looking forward to a night of laughs and pre-wedding nerves. We started with a beautiful dinner, ran all around the mall in a scavenger hunt for wedding night necessities, and ended up back at the maid of honor's house for some presents and games. All of the women were giving our friend wedding-night advice when one of the bridesmaids said, "I feel wrong doing this. I don't think we should be talking about sex." The atmosphere of the evening abruptly changed as this group was reminded that "good Christian girls don't talk about sex." It felt like something out of a movie, where the air was popped out of our balloons and the music came to a screeching halt.

 

I watched the hostess of the party sit down, feeling slapped across the face. The bride started to fidget in her seat, obviously uncomfortable with the guilt that had just been poured into the room. Quickly, my mind began to race with questions. Questions like, Why is it that we can gush for hours about the colors of the wedding, the songs to dance to, and the bride's dress, but are afraid to give sexual encouragement to our friend? Didn't she pursue purity so her marital intimacy would be that much greater? Isn't this the time we are supposed to talk about sex?

 

With a shaky voice, I took a deep breath and said, "God created sex for us to enjoy with our husbands! Why wouldn't we want to encourage our friend with advice and excitement?" Other girls in the room agreed, but the rest of the night still didn't feel right. The celebration was taken out of my friend's giving herself as a gift to her husband and was replaced with question marks.

Growing up, I always understood that there were two different camps when it came to sex. The first side talked about sex and flaunted it! In college I would often run down the dorm room hallway and pile on my best friend's couch to watch Sex in the City. This show featured beautiful, independent, and wealthy women who talked openly about sex, different positions, and pursuing men. I felt a small piece of guilt for watching the show, but I was pulled in!

 

On the other hand, the Christian women in my life definitely approached sex differently. The only words I heard about sex from them were "purity" and "don't look like the world." I saw these two sides and understood that as a Christian, I wasn't supposed to talk about sex, think about sex, or watch things with sex (sorry Carrie Bradshaw!). Sex was just plain wrong. And sadly, as I walked into my one-flesh union with my husband, I still held onto that belief.

Where the heck does that even come from, anyway? Let's stop and ponder this. Do you think the secrecy is okay? And if not, are you contributing to it's prevalence by remaining silent like most of the bachelorette party guests in the story? Do read the rest of the post here. I'm so thankful to my friends Giddel, Keyia, Kandi and Naomi who I can talk to without fear of condemnation (or worse, disgust). Do you have friends you can be real and open with, even accountable to (yeah, that last one IS hard, but hey, this Christian life is not meant to be lived in a bubble!)? Discuss!

From Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, this adorably sweet post chock full of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang:

 

The Peanuts series by Charles M. Schulz endures as one of the most beloved cartoons of all time, partly because of Schulz’s gift for capturing the great, tender truths of human existence through remarkably simple, sometimes poetic, often humorous, always profound vignettes. Hardly does it get more profound and poetic, however, than in Schulz’s 1965 book, Love is Walking Hand In Hand — an utterly lovely tiny treasure, in which Lucy and Snoopy and Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang define love through the simple acts and moments of everyday life.

 

Check out much more here. You can also see some more illustrated cuteness at Brain Pickings from Maurice Sendak here.

A painting I did last week of my heart through shards.

Last week Rod Dreher posted a link to a story giving advice to Evangelical pastors on affairs:

Paul Levy, writing at Reformation21, an online magazine for Evangelicals in the Reformed tradition, says he knows a couple of pastors who have recently destroyed their ministries and lost their families, apparently through marital infidelity. He offers advice to pastors on how to deal (and how not to deal) with that temptation. I found this article through First Things‘ David Mills, who says it’s good advice for us all; I agree. I especially liked these two parts:

 

- accountability doesn’t work - If you’re going to sleep with your brother’s wife, you are probably going to lie to your brother about it. I’m not convinced about men meeting up in groups to keep them accountable. There is a need for good friendships between peers, having older men you turn to and couples who share your life. Do you have someone who, if you fell into sin, you could honestly tell and they would rebuke you. If you can’t think of that person you’re in trouble. Are there people who you can share struggles with? Last week a good friend asked me that question and I was so encouraged that he was brave enough to ask me that.

 

I hope I would have someone who would treat me that way. But I have to wonder: would I treat someone else that way? I really don’t know. I mean, I think I would, but I can’t say for sure. The only instance I can think of in my past is when one spouse left the other apparently out of boredom. I was friends with both of them, and sided personally with the abandoned spouse, but didn’t say anything to the one who left because I told myself one never knows what goes on inside a marriage, and besides, I want to be friends with both. I still don’t know if that was the right thing to do, and ended up drifting from both people, for reasons unrelated to the split. Mind you, I wasn’t in church with either person, but they were friends of mine, and reading this Levy piece this morning makes me feel slightly crummy that I didn’t at least try. Then again, I am absolutely confident it would have done no good.

That got me to thinking... especially after reading a number of the comments under Rod's post. Many people shared that they, like Rod, didn't say anything when one of their friends confessed to stepping out on their spouse. Thing is, I have spoken up when friends told me they were doing dirt. In fact, for a couple of them, I tore them a new one. But that was only with people I'm extremely close with and only after I was asked for my opinion and advice. Our friendships didn't bust up. Actually, we are even closer.

Now, I'll say this. I do have a way of separating out people's actions from the person making them. I'm not perfect at this, but good enough so that I can go on loving and respecting someone who is screwing up. As I've said it before, I'm comfortable living in shades of gray. It's not that I don't believe there is wrong and right, or black and white, because I do. It's just I realize when it comes to people, the colors blend and blur so much that if I can only accept purity, then no one, including myself, will be good enough to love.

Have you ever spoken up? Or did you hold your peace? Why or why not? On the topic of cheating, do you think it's ever justifiable? Or at least understandable? Is it an automatic relationship ender? Or just par for the course?