The Deluge and the Disillusion

by Amanda Taylor

It’s official; I’m quitting the interwebs.

Well, at least I’m quitting the news, on account of how much I hate it. My cranium aches from the incessant accosting of my poor sweet eyeballs with information about Syria, sumo wrestlers, Miley Cyrus, guns, Grand Theft Auto 5 sales, IPhones, Iran, the IRS, the NSA, Pelini, Miley, Pumpkin Spice lattes, Kardashians, little puppies, shootings, Miley, mental illness, fantasy football, tax evasion and beanie babies (yes, combine those two), Buzzfeed lists, rehab visits, and congressional posturing. I am so tired. And I think more dumber.

This proliferation of information overwhelms the senses and distorts reality, a deluge of chaos so tremendous that anything actually important is either dismissed immediately or covered so extensively that any pertinent details quickly become indistinguishable from the Forrest Gump bubba shrimp monologue. It’s all pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp stew, shrimp salad…

There was recently a devastating shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington – another shooting, another tragedy, more lives lost. But I already know too much. I know building 197 remains off limits, I know how many times Aaron Alexis cancelled or failed to show for appointments at the VA, how many times he filled or didn’t fill prescriptions, how many people he mentioned hearing voices to. I know he took a Beretta and with “no discernible pattern” wandered around the halls, hunting people, and ultimately murdering 12 innocent men and women.

Maybe I’m off base, but I don’t think I should know every detail of such a gruesome murder by semiautomatic. It’s painful, it’s horrible, and it’s discussed on the same page as low-cal breakfast recipes. I see “Visit the health section for a great low-cal egg-white torta to fight that belly fat!” in the same visual field as “A mother reacts to finding out her son is a cold-blooded murderer.” Wheat torta or Beretta; you choose, they’ll both impact you equally.

TOO much.

To better explain my exodus from the interwebs, here are some of the super important headlines that I came across trying to read the news recently. They are from several of the top news sources in America.

“Kate Moss to go full-frontal in ‘Playboy’” (Finally!)

“Harris says ‘expect no vomiting’ at Emmys” (Forget it, I’m not watching then.)

“How are olives stuffed? Ask USA Today!” (How are olives stuffed? And how have I lived this long without knowing?)

“Injuries on the rise from texting and walking” (I wish I had eyes for my eyes.)

“EVA’s ‘Hello Kitty jets’ take to the runways at LAX” (I just… I can’t… Here: it’s real.)

“Secrets of a Yacht Stewardess” (This turned out to be just a creepy article about a constipated-looking woman in an ascot.)

“Hot ‘Brady Bunch’ Hookups” (Greg and Marcia, Cindy and Bobby, even Jan and Marcia… thanks Fox News for this gem.)

“Pippi Longstocking’ actress Tami Erin changes mind, ready to release X-rated sex tape” (Surprise twist! Yep, this belongs in my sphere of knowledge. For sure.)

I hate how much I know, and how much I don’t know as a result. There are real issues at play that are overshadowed by my superior knowledge of Kate Middleton’s wardrobe. Literally. About three weeks ago I perused 278 photos of the history and present sensation that is her wardrobe. It ate up about two good hours at work. I also read a list about 15 celebrities that you didn’t know were black, learned Christina Aguilera got skinny again, heard Cher dissed Miley (but hate them both enough I managed not to learn details), and in an exciting turn, TJ Maxx is now going to let customers shop online! 

I know, too, that the House is gridlocking movement on the most recent Congressional budget approvals in an effort to repeal The Affordable Care Act, but what does that knowledge do for me as an average American citizen? (Ed. Note: This post was written before the government shutdown took effect, hooray for continued gridlock!) What’s the point of having this information about political posturing? 

There may be a point – in fact, I think there is, but I’m so lost in my distain for politics and politicians and the congressional genitalia everywhere that I can’t find that role as a citizen. What’s more, I’ve arrived at a place where I don’t want any more information, because none of it feels important, or contextualizes my place in society, or empowers me to participate in the world in a less reactionary way. The onslaught only serves to warp expectations, to assume that we are lifeless blobs waiting for more mindless information about dairy queen managers in Minnesota.

I’ve just finished reading the article about Dairy Queen manager Joey Prusak, tireless hero to our nation’s visually impaired.

I’m quitting the interwebs until further notice.
 
Amanda Taylor works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
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• Babel, or Gods Is a Saboteur
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Babel, or God Is a Saboteur

by Amanda Taylor

A few weeks ago in Brussels I watched a man get bludgeoned nearly to death in the middle of a busy market street. He came bursting out of a side alley just ahead of me, and barreling after him came four or five large guys who, once they caught him, just started hammering him into the ground. He tried to break free, but blows came to the knees, on the back, in the head. It took all of them to wrestle him to the ground, his face flattened into the cold, hard concrete. He screamed at the top of his lungs the entire time he was being beaten, a time that felt like hours, until the police sirens could be heard in the distance and the crowds were told to clear.

Based on the few indications available, this man was a criminal and the men who captured him were undercover policemen, though they only displayed armbands suggesting as much toward the end of this excruciating display in the open street. 

I watched the whole thing. First in surprise, then horror, then sick fascination. I took a picture on my phone of the man lying in the street.

I took a picture. Looking back I hate myself for it, though I knew I would when I pulled out my phone. I just needed to verify that something so horrific had actually occurred right in front of me; that I had turned the corner at the exact moment he came barreling out, and that he was there in broad daylight, bleeding from the head. 

The worst part was that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. No one on the street seemed to know English and I couldn’t identify the languages passing in hushed whispers. I wanted to do something, to say something, to scream: “Do you see this?  Are you seeing what I’m seeing? What do we do?!” 

But we didn’t do anything. We just stood there and watched, like idiots. One girl even took a picture.

There was a disconnect between what happened on the street and the crowd who witnessed it, a disunion between that reality and ours. It felt so odd, but when the two realms don’t have any reason to depend on one another, to overlap further, they simply part ways. I’ve been thinking less of the violence and the crime than this idea of intersection, of community and communication among disparate parties.
How is it that we can be standing right next to someone, yet worlds apart? Communication is supposed to bring us back to one another, but what about the times when it doesn’t? Or can’t? Or perhaps when it shouldn’t?

Of course there are more ways to communicate than the combination of words and the use of syntax; language is only one of the infinite mechanisms we use to interact. Nothing makes this clearer than visiting another country or culture where you are an alien, a foreigner, without the ability to navigate direction, time, work, or people, and your only resources are your hands and eyes and intuition.

But why are things complicated in this way, why are we disconnected? In Genesis 11 we’re

told that things are this way because God was displeased with what we chose to do together as humans when we could communicate as a single unit. We didn’t appear to handle such capacity well, and God “confounded the language of all the earth.” He isolated us into pockets of humanity, confined by limited comprehension. He is and was a saboteur. 

Genesis 11 has bothered me for months now. Who is this God that “came down” and shattered the culture into irrelevant, splintered pieces? Who is the God that makes it virtually impossible to communicate with you, to know you, to empathize with you, to hear your words and know your children? Who is this God that made us strangers on the street?

N.T. Wright writes that, “The story of the Tower of Babel is an account of a world given to injustice, spurious types of spirituality (trying to stretch up to heaven by our own efforts), failed relationships, and the creation of buildings whose urban ugliness speaks of human pride rather than the nurturing of beauty.” That is a useful and concise description, yet I can’t help but think it sucks the life out of how complex and complicated the turn of events really was. We became foreign to one another, creating new realms and new communities that didn’t interlock. We lost something, and the story is a turning point in our participation in the development and construction of the future of this earth.

Part of what continues to bother me is that while we were decimated and scattered at that time we’ve entered a new era in the human history in which we’re slowly clawing our way back to one another. The world is “flattening” and shrinking and becoming ever more interdependent, and language barriers are diminishing. Google glasses, which can translate anything in the world into any language instantaneously, are about to hit the market, launching an onslaught of technological advancement that will very likely turn this world of nearly 7,000 languages into a world of one.

I think often about the implications of unconfounding the confounded, and what we think we’re building by uniting the world through communication. We were one, we were then made many, and here we find ourselves ever so close to one again. Is that what’s right?

The European Union is currently an amalgamation of 27 countries that speak 23 different languages, having been created for Europe to dispel any environmental forces that would allow for another Adolf Hitler and World War II. These nations have come together to avoid reckless, horrible violence and promote stability and longevity in their continent and the world. When EU Parliament meets, all 23 languages are translated instantly so that all countries will know one another and each distinctive culture can work in unison with its partners to build a brighter future for all. They are unconfounding the confounded, but it is with the best of intentions that they do so.

It sounds to me as though we are slowly building a larger world community that somehow looks alarmingly like a tower. Are we? To be clear, I have a healthy fear of technology, a healthy fear of unconfounding, and a general apprehension of believing too heavily in the capacities of man’s constructions independent from God’s hand in the work. 

Yet I want to know the stranger on the street, to be able to ask more than directions, to exchange culture and lives, to understand more of the infinite manifestations of this human experience. I want to build that knowledge together. 

Is it the right thing to do to bring together disparate worlds? To allow ourselves the privilege of exploring the extent of our capacities to do so? That, I have no current answer for, but I do know that in watching a man be brought to his knees in cold, brutal force, the geography of the incident had no overriding authority. Nothing about that experience was more or less human because I couldn’t have asked the man next to me what time it was. It was humanity at work and we all played a particular role in its warped expression, and my response to it has set about a curious reflection.

This conversation about the fallout of different worlds colliding and communication as a mechanism help us make sense of that and act together. Is it really about language or is it about something else entirely? 

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.  3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Amanda works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

You can also follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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• Jenga Tower of Faith
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The Jenga Tower of Faith

The true meaning of July 4th

by Amanda Taylor

Recently my world came crashing to a halt when I learned that the signing of the Declaration of Independence was actually carried out on July 2^nd, and not on July 4^th, the day in American society when we all lose our minds over the founding fathers and the beauty of this nation and fire in the sky and blueberry-strawberry sheet cake flags.

“…Nothing happened in Congress on July 4^th, 1776. (John) Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of (Thomas) Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer.”

Oh really? I’ve spent all this time and energy and reflection every Fourth of July meditating on democracy and boldness in action and depth of commitment and principles and complexities of citizenship all while making an inspirational freedom cake to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of ladies gloves?

Is that so?

I am incredulous. I am outraged. I am…already over it. The whole process of learning about this, then feeling some combination of betrayal, shock and confusion, before giving way to acceptance of this fascinating secret, seems to parallel the way I consume information about the Bible, as well as faith paradigms, their history, and countless other facts surrounding everything about religion.

I grew up learning about the rules of religion, facts associated with the Bible that all compounded to make a very genuine, very real story about the history and salvation of the world; various datum stacked one on top of the other to create a Jenga tower of truth. Over time it began to feel that if any one Jenga piece were pulled out and called into question, the whole tower might fall. Each fact needed to be true in its own right, layered among other truths that were dependent on one another to keep the entire story sound, intact, sturdy.

Nooooooo!!

If you’ve ever played Jenga then you have an understanding of the immense laser-focus needed to handle each piece with the utmost care, steadying your breathing, your body’s stance, and your nerves to move one of those 54 blocks to the top of the tower. Each is the most important block in that moment, until the moment shifts, the players shift, and a new piece becomes the sole focus of the game.

I wonder how much of my life I’ve spent studying faith in this way. Any given fact, any given element that serves to build the tower, is fundamentally tied to the truth and stability of the whole. Was the earth built in 6 days? Did a donkey really talk to Balaam the diviner? Did Joshua stop the sun from shining? What does this tell us? There is incessantly a temptation and a need to believe the finite, external meanings of these words in order to fold ourselves into the boxed tower they create. Then we ask ourselves if we are right. Or not. Will it stand? Or fall? Are these the building blocks of faith?

In some ways I think they are, so I don’t discredit or devalue their existence. The problem with the Jenga illustration is that you build the tower first. You weave it together into a stable entity, and then pick it apart at your leisure and entertainment to see what happens. I don’t think we build faith this way. It is my understanding that instead we stumble into it graciously.

When push comes to shove we have to start talking about what we believe in, what we think is real, and why. I avoid these conversations in most settings because I’ve found the process of defining the various amorphous components of faith to be imperfect, and I don’t like being bound to this inevitable shortcoming. In describing my truths, you will instinctively begin comparing them to yours, which is good, but if we lose each other somewhere along the line you start to become the other, which is bad. These disparities of belief grow increasingly exclusive, and we clutch our facts tight against the chest and peer outward, with a careful, vigilant eye.

Yet time and again the facts are called into question, and it’s the larger story we’re left with. Is it still real when we can’t understand the particulars that have built it? The insular practice of maintaining correctness in all forms is not only exhausting, but a direct path to stagnation and defense. Yet the flip side of that coin is to believe in everything, to avoid “correctness” and to acknowledge all faith as good faith, as truth. This is troublesome, too easy, and lacks the difficult aspect of religious submission that requires us to actually commit.

Happy Socially Accepted Day of Celebration

I don’t mind in the end if the Declaration of Independence was signed on the 2^nd or the 4^th, or a month later (when the majority of delegates signed it). Maybe it was signed on the 4^th after all, as Adams and Jefferson contended late in life, and history is confused. The document was signed. It is real, and it impacts my life and my country, and stands as a representation of fundamental principles of justice and humanity. These are the things I celebrate as I build my delicious flag cake. As a unified body, it helps us all to have a single day to stop and reflect, and the day that has been chosen is each Fourth of July. This, as a manifestation of recognition and indebtedness is good, and the celebration of the underlying truths is good, and lest we forget, our God more than anything, He is good.

Amanda works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

You can also follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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• Rule Number 1: Your Faith Lies
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A Little Crazy Behind the Eyes: The Bachelor and How to Date 15 Churches at Once

Apparently "Worth the Drive"

by Amanda Taylor

My parents packed up and carried off their three little girls to church every week, every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, and every Wednesday night for my entire childhood. Thirty-five minutes it took to get to the modest, small brown building on the left-hand side of North Court Street in Circleville, Ohio. Thirty-five minutes to get there, thirty-five minutes to get home, every week through the cornfields and past the paper plant to sit in the pew right behind the 85 year-old woman who’s had When the Roll is Called Up Yonder memorized since 1936.

“A Church Alive is Worth the Drive.”

What is a “church alive?” That phrase has continued to silently whisper in my ear, haunting me since its plastic black letters first appeared on the church sign out front 22 years ago. By many of today’s standards, this church was deadern’ a doornail. Small, both cramped and yet somehow drafty, adverse to change, enthusiastic about routine, skeptical of outside influence, a lover of How Shall the Young Secure Their Hearts.

It is as objectionable to me now as it is entrenched. The comfort, love, and safety I feel in that small Church of Christ setting is something that I am certain will never be replicated, but it is also confining, and limiting, and maddening. So where do I belong? How do I practice this faith in a way that will honor my parents’ commitment, as well as the great blessing and curse of my own?

After swim practice in the fifth grade a friend asked me what religion I was, and when I answered, “Church of Christ,” they told me that wasn’t a thing. Feeling bad for me, they asked if I was, you know, Catholic or something? I pondered, unsettled, and panicked and then asked my dad on the way home from church the next Sunday, Hey Dad? Are we Catholic? Only years later did I realize how incredible my question sounded to him, once it became a running joke through our entire extended family that I might be “the Catholic one,” but that I wasn’t sure.

A little crazy.

Perhaps this confusion about belonging burrowed a little too far into my heart and mind, because now I wonder all over again “what I am.” I must go to church; I have gotten this far.  But the decision of where that will occur is another matter entirely. I find myself, having watched The Bachelor a time or two, seeing parallels between my pursuit for a church community and the latest Bachelor’s quest to date 15 women at one time. Every single option is beautiful, though it carries with it the subtle suspicion of crazy behind the eyes.  

For the record, I don’t think it’s normal to date 15 people at one time. The idea of getting to pick your soul mate while chaotically making out with as many people as you can get away with in the meantime is insanity, which I presume is why it makes for such good television. The human emotion on display is very raw (reference ugly cry here) but it’s expressed in the midst of an entirely orchestrated and fake environment. How do you honor what is real within a production?  

Doesn’t church educate me about what is true and eternal in this human experience through the mechanism of a production? Are churches focused on creating an environment that draws you in and convinces you of their authenticity and relevance, in a great bid for relationship? If The Bachelor is how we are normalizing relationship building in society, is not the church susceptible to similar whimsical and fleeting ideas of commitment? I don’t know how to date 15 churches without inherently judging them all and committing to none, and I’d appreciate being able to blame reality television if at all possible.  

In participating in all these competing religious environments however, I’m struck more by the similarities than the differences. I notice the love and the passion and the cold indifference, coexisting in foldout chairs and velvet-lined pews. I see and experience comfort in the routine, and feel resentment in our complacency. I feel music wash over the body gathered, the rhythm of the words fusing the masses, the repetition calming and steadying, and maybe the drums, either loud and accosting or beating out any worry and tension we’ve brought with us that day.  

The uniting of many for the glory of one is very powerful, and critically important to the practice of faith. We humble ourselves before what is perfect in the hope that we may rest in it, for just a moment, to carry away to the corners of our world whatever remnants are gracious enough to linger.

Person or symbol?

Watching the black smoke turn to white this week, I found myself humbled by the Catholic faith, connected to it. This is the uniting of many, centered, focused on who will lead them in pursuit of the glory and honor of one. This is not political posturing or parochial strategy or a statement to society as much as it is the body of Christ, a church alive.

The press surrounding this important and significant changing of the guard is chilling; it’s analytical and manufactured, yet it reminds me too much of my pursuit of a church community. We have already stripped Pope Francis of his humanity and understand him instead as his geography, his routines, his Jesuit background, and his political implications.  

The Catholic faith quickly becomes a body we review as we would another social psychology case study, peering in upon its internal strife and posturing, labeling so much as scandal and tawdry. We turned church into The Bachelor and asked ourselves if our favorite contestant won. How perilous to think of faith as something that can be contained by policy and bureaucratic refinement or understood by the world’s standards.

In the end church is a production of sorts, an orchestration of people, ideas, action, and relationship, to say something to the world and to the individual about the Creator. It is inviting us to see its relevance and look past its flaws and, more than anything, is asking for participation, for faith, to just show up to own version of a modest, small brown building on the left-hand side of North Court Street.

“It is to provide an example that submitting to the practice of worship and the leadership of those in charge is a Christian teaching about humility and submission to God.” My dad said that.

Amanda works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

Faith As Measured By Camels

One of these is furthest away.

by Amanda Taylor

Listen to this nonsense. The most distant galaxy currently known to man is called UDFj-39546284 and is approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away from earth. Google informs me that that’s one hundred septillion. Apparently we know that it’s blue in color, signifying young, hot stars, and that it’s twenty times smaller than our own galaxy (which is the Milky Way folks… and with that single tidbit you’ve seen the ceiling on my scientific prowess).

If we took off in a jet plane at the average speed of about 500 miles per hour, it would take us 5 million years to reach the closest star outside of our galaxy, and if we traveled in the fastest rocket ship ever manufactured on earth, the trip would last 100,000 years or at least a thousand life spans.

Scientists today study galaxies so distant that their light has traveled through space for more than 13 billion years to reach our telescopes. This means when that light finally arrives here, we’re seeing it not as it exists now, but as it existed 13 billion years ago.

I can’t fathom such distance, such time. How could we possibly know this? More importantly, how sure are we that it’s “blue” and not, as I suspect, actually more of a gentle violet? How do we try to incorporate the unfathomable, the inexplicable, into our modern reality, knowing full well we can’t comprehend what it is we’re putting words to?

I often think of faith in this way. It’s not meant for scientific verbiage, for classification and numeration, or for oversimplification for our own digestive sake. It’s simply too big. It’s right here, it’s in the fibers that comprise your being, so it’s right there, but it’s too much. We must find a way to marry heaven and earth, but what can do it justice?

The lens through which we see.

You are both physical and spiritual, together temporary and eternal. You are entirely insignificant and the most important person in the world. Your story makes you lonely, but it’s the tie that binds you to our shared humanity. That great, vast sea of isolation is still the water from which we both drink. You will only ever comprehend the world through the lens of your own eye, but sometimes, when we’ve shared some version of truth, I’ll catch a glimpse of what it is you’re looking at, and perhaps taste the water for a moment as you taste it.

I want to understand enough about faith to feel comfortable talking about it, explaining it, and making it meaningful and digestible to others; digestible for my own intolerant palate. It seems as though if I can control its message, I’ll find ways to share it with someone else in a way that makes sense to both of us. There is this small voice in my head telling me that if I just have a bit more information, read just a few more books, I will know enough to speak of the gospel without the fear that grips me now. How is it that I have arrived in this place, where the thing I am most connected to is the thing I look upon with the most confusion and such frequent disdain?

What kind of crack was Paul smoking when he appealed to us, his brethren in Christ, to “all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought”? Surely this is an impossibility? But so too might be the existence of UDFj-39546284. It’s too far, too incomprehensible, yet it’s also sitting right here in this text, full of life and materializing before our very eyes. For one moment that understanding is real, that shared unity is clear, and then it passes. It’s so simple that it just is, but we can’t seem to figure out what to do with it. We are together temporary and eternal.

I view science as a medium to explore the incomprehensible, to create avenues for digestion of the unknowable. Perhaps too, we can think of the Bible as a scientific text, meant to baffle and befuddle, and then in an instant wipe clean any confusion or doubt only to replace it in the next breath. We are not God, nor should we ever think ourselves big enough to “control” the conversation. “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”

Yet I am not free to throw my hands in the air and plead ignorance, leaving the conversation because I don’t have control of it. It may sound truly ridiculous at any given moment and I must sit with that absurdity, cradling it in my arms. We did not always know the size of planet Earth, or that it rests as only one, in a vast abyss of unending planets. We came to this, our newest reality by way of studying, pushing our knowledge forward on the shoulders of those before us invested in the pursuit of ever more understanding.

Ancient rulers

In the third century the astronomer Eratosthenes, a geographer who ran the Library of Alexandria, was the first person to accurately measure the earth. He did so by estimating how far camels could walk in a day, and created figures using those measurements. He came within 15% of the modern measurement using camels as odometers. In his good sense to use what he knew to explain what he didn’t, he found the edge of something unknowable, something too big for anyone at the time. He arrived at something then that was both 13 billion years old and brand new.

Surely my small, insignificant piece of the conversation isn’t irrelevant, isn’t too small to transform history. I am, after all, the most important person in the world.

I am not on this earth by chance. I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply all my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy… I am a small and a lonely grape clutching the vine yet thou hast made me different from all others. Verily, there must be a special place for me. Help me. Show me the way.

-Og Mandino, 1968

Amanda isn't big on flowers for Valentine's Day. Flowers are great, and she sincerely regrets the effect this may have on future Bachelorette contestants, but Guinness and a collection of Presidential autobiographies would be better. You can follow her on Twitter @tayloram03.