Vulner-almost

I am one of those volcanic bloggers, the kind that lets the pressure build until I have no other choice but to spew out a steady stream of the burning within me. Hopefully, one day, the stream will flow freely, but for now I am what I am.

In the last few months, I have become involved with co-organizing a christian young adults "gathering" in my town, the purpose of which was to discuss the paradoxical issues that christians face today. The catch phrase of the group is something to the effect of "living the unexpected." This last Sunday evening, we met, and the discussion centered around freedom, the freedom proclaimed by Jesus. We discussed what freedom looked like, freedom to be ourselves, freedom from sin, freedom from fear, freedom from keeping up "good Christian" appearances, and freedom that comes from the revelation of the Truth of God.

In Search of the Most Amazing Thing

When I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64 computer...state of the art, let me tell you. Despite the fact that it was revolutionary in bringing the PC into the American home, for my family, it was the revolution in video gaming, totally left our Atari in the dust. I still get nostalgic about playing The Last Ninja, Kung-Fu Master, Wizard...but there was one game that stands out. My brother had a game called "In Search of the Most Amazing Thing." Honestly, when I think about the game, I don't remember playing it much, mainly because my engineer uncle messed up the programming trying to understand how the computer game worked, but it was a little beyond my level of understanding at the time.

Life is going to be the death of me...

Thought: Rhythm is everywhere. The bee hummingbird beats its wings 80 times per second, the sun chases down the western horizon once a day, my dog has to pee every ten minutes. It is an inescapable reality.

I suppose any new blog merits something of an introduction for those who stumble across its pixels and codes. As for this blog, although I have an intentioned focus, never will I pretend to limit the topic or claim to be an expert on what I write. My intent is merely to record thoughts, observations, musings, and hopefully to entertain and provoke myself and anyone who decides to read this.

I am thirty, I have a house, a truck, a dog, several successes and failures under my belt including a pending divorce: in other words, I am living the typical American life, or at least a typical country and western song. But, to be blunt, I am highly dissatisfied with life. Highly dissatisfied.

Finding satisfaction is not necessarily my goal. My dissatisfaction comes from knowing without a doubt that the westernized cultural life is NOT what life is about. Life is not about getting a job, amassing wealth and spending it on material things in order to tickle our psyches into believing we are happy because we are enjoying the moment. Nor is life about accomplishing anything substantial to leave a history behind us when we are gone.

So why am I here? I ask myself that question a lot, on several levels. I ask myself that question when I am in line at the grocery store, when I am at work, when I lay down to sleep, and especially when I get up in the morning. The only answer I have found is simple, but really hard to swallow.

I am a christian. I mean I really am a christian, not one of those typical Western "I am a christian because my parents went to church on easter" christians. I have really come to know God, His son Jesus, and The Holy Spirit. I haven't been convinced to profess Christianity, nobody washed my brain when I was young, I was given the choice to believe or not believe. I asked Him if He was really real, and He is constantly responding with resounding affirmation. I can't help but believe.

So back to my question, why am I here. I can only answer that question from a perspective of knowing the Creator God, and He says that I am here to be His friend. He put everything into motion, with you, me and your mom in mind, just because He needed to love us, and because He needed us to love Him back. That's it. No more, no less.

So with the knowledge that I am here for friendship with the one and only God of the Universe and everything in it, life as most people on Earth know it has lost its flavor to me. The modern world is settled into a rhythm of waking and sleeping, working and playing, buying and selling, gaining and losing, living and dying. There is a drum beat played by a collective cultural and societal influence, marking the rhythm by which man can pace his life, and that beat is a funeral march, and I don't feel like going to a funeral, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

I want to to walk to the beat kept by God's heart, that heart from which all life flows, that heart that is so saturated with love, that His slightest whisper creates a miraculously beautiful universe, and brings life into dust.

It seems impossible, but I believe in the impossible. I want to live an impossible life, a life in which creating universes is more certain than death and taxes. I refuse to resign myself to just biding my time with tasteless pursuits and lackluster accomplishments until my body fails. I may not have a choice in the matter, but I am not going down without a fight.

A river runs through me...

(This blog is rough, so just giving you fair warning beforehand)

I just got back from my third annual Edisto River canoe trip organized by a couple friends from church, the local mama and papa of Hartsville. It was fairly successful as far as canoe trips a re concerned, I actually didn't share a canoe, but as usual I floated solo in a kayak down the river, bringing up the rear to make sure that nobody got left behind or stranded with an up-side-down canoe.

I am now in the market for a kayak, because I now have a place to keep one, and a place to go close by to use it. There are a couple friends in town that want to do this as well, so maybe it will be a good investment and a pleasant hobby. Now I just have to train my wiener (that's my dachsund) to be able to handle the black water swamps around here. He would most likely be prime alligator bait.

Leafy Purgatory

Have you ever seen a leaf floating in a pond or a small lake? It stirs around some with the breezes that blow, but unless a stiff wind comes up and blows hard, the leaf just floats in no particular way or direction, until it finally either saturates with water and sinks slowly or it haphazardly washes to shore and decays on the bank. Granted, the leaf was doomed to begin with. But there is something annoying about the stillness of a pond for a leaf in his or her final moments.

I gather from all the evidence that nature has afforded me that rivers and streams seem to offer at least a minimal amount of excitement for a fallen leaf. I can imagine a leaf falling into the water and wondering whether his or her stream meets with a larger flowing river, or if it flows into an unfortunate dammed lake. At least the leaf is kept guessing in this case. At least there is a hope of maybe having fallen into a river that ends in the glorious ocean, with a few rapids on the way for thrills.

Ponds do not offer hope. They are still and stagnant waters that offer a slow demise and a hopeless finish for any leaf unlucky enough to find itself floating across the surface.

What in the heck am I talking about?

Practicing my knots...

Yes, its time for one of those blogs that, although interesting to some, will more likely be some form of therapy for me. I have to warn all those who are reading that this blog may get personal for me...I tend to like to deal with my issues in a public or semi-public manner, otherwise I don't feel like I am completely honest with myself. When things are put into the light, they tend to be easier to deal with. Anyway, This is not a plea for sympathy or an attempt at finding comfort from friends, rather more of a way for me to vent my thoughts that otherwise like to swirl around in my head for way too long without being confronted. So, here goes.

Onomatopoeia and other simple solutions...

I do not consider myself to be a great conversationalist. I hate chit chat, and I don't like to engage in small talk about weather patterns I know nothing about, sports teams I don't watch or other such banter. I don't care if a person comes up to talk to me about the decomposition rate of baby diapers in America's landfills, anything is better than using the spoken language merely to break the silence, without being genuinely interested in what is being said.

It is common in the United States and even in other countries to use the phrase "How are you" as a greeting. After having dissected and evaluated this greeting, I have come to two very important conclusions:

1. This greeting is an interrogative, AKA a question.
2. This interrogative greeting is rather specific in its intent to require a response.

If you are not a hermit and have been in public recently, you probably have encountered someone who greeted you in this manner. How did you respond? Did you respond with "Good," "OK," "I am doing well," or did you decide to answer with a re-interrogative response such as "How YOU doin'?"

More likely than not, your response generally resembles the above samples. Tonight I asked this question, and for the first time in a while I got a genuine response. The person told me they had been at a funeral. From there we had an extremely interesting and engaging conversation covering a plethora of topics such as the value of life, alcoholism, heaven and medicine. Had this person merely said, "Doing fine," or some such response, I never would have had the opportunity to experience the depth of this person's thought on heaven. I never would have been able to help her pray for people she loves. I may never have really known those beautiful places inside her.

The point is, conversation is one of the most blessed things humans have. We communicate on a level that no other animal may partake in. If this is so, lets use it to talk about good and beautiful things, encouraging each other, and other such activities.

Again, I sometimes think I am not a good conversationalist. Mainly because I fall into the trap of using prefabricated phrases, questions and responses. So, I want to warn you in advance. I am embarking on an experiment. I will be using open ended questions instead of yes/no questions. I may even approach you with a one word interrogative followed by a long awkward silence in order to provoke you to respond genuinely instead of having a prefab response to a question. I am thinking about approaching people and using onomatopoeia to greet them. One example of this may be "Bang, bang (insert name here)! What say you my main ring-a-ding?"

Lets use language to talk, and quit using it to avoid each other. Engage someone, you may be surprised to find out they have something good to say, or that you say just the right thing that makes their day a little brighter.

All work and no play...

You know, work really can be fun. I have been working as office/business manager for a local builder since the beginning of the year, and it has had good days and bad. But the good generally outweighs the bad.

This blog is NOT, however, about my job. This is about work. In the course of my week, I spend a pretty hefty, sometimes unhealthy and almost always unproductive amount of time at my friend's coffee shop, and I talk to people. It is just one of those places, and this is just one of those towns where people talk to each other. Well, after spending two years in this town, I have talked to a lot of people almost all of whom have lots of good ideas.

The Father, Son and Smoking Joe Smith

Until yesterday, I had never been approached by a member of the church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. Thats a mouthful. Lets shorten that to Mormons, as they are more properly called.

It went down like this. I was pumping gas at the Sunoco station, and out of my periferal vision I saw a bicycle helmet float over the hood of my truck and swoop around the back, where the full body of a mormon greeted me in the name of the "Church of Jesus Christ" and asked me if he could share a message of Jesus with me. I love Jesus, as a matter of fact, I am one of his favorite people in the world. So of course, I wanted to talk about Him, and I expressed as much to the cycling missionary.

Too pooped to pop

The biggest burst bubble in my life has been my 2 year marriage.

Today, I sent the divorce papers, wedding band and a few other sentimental trinkets to my wife in Spain. From the moment that I decided to end this marriage until now, I have felt pretty cold hearted and almost brutal about the whole thing. Sending off the papers this morning, I wrote her a final good-bye letter. All the emotion that had been hiding behind that veil of cold callousness came out in the letter, and the dam broke in my eyes. I cried this morning like I have not cried in a few months.



Nonetheless, I don't write this in order to strum on the sympathetic heart strings of my readers. The end of my marriage is also the beginning of another adventure, the greatest adventure I know of. So in fact, today is the beginning of a new chapter in my life, and I am excited to find out what comes next. 

What comes next...

The thing about adventures is just that, what comes next is usually something challenging (a.k.a. hard), often unexpected, and usually something new. I feel like an unprepared student at an exam.



Good thing I was a champion BS artist.

Spiderwebs in my popcorn

So I saw Spiderman 3 tonight. I liked it. I hear that the reviews have not been great, but what do you expect from a comic book remake?

Anyway, the first dream I remember ever having (i was 3-ish) consisted of me watching Spidey and the Incredible Hulk chase each other around a phone booth in which I was trapped. I don't know why that dream has stuck with me all those years, but it has. The important thing here is that the movie reminded me of the significance that superheroes have had in my life.



The sound of many waters

Rain is a funny thing.

Even though we shower every day, we run inside to get out of the rain. Rain almost always has negative connotations at the time it is falling. 

Today I was running a PA system for a friend's daughter's outdoor wedding and there were huge looming black clouds moving in quick. As soon as the ceremony started, so did the rain. I started thinking about this rain thing while I was breaking down all the sound equipment in the pouring rain. What I faced at that moment was a choice between two opposite reactions to my immediate situation. I could either be angry or upset that I was getting soaked while I was getting the equipment to safety under a tarp in the bed of my truck, or I could enjoy the moment.

Where is the top of the hill?

It is officially over. As of today, I can no longer blame my mistakes or irresponsibility on youthful whimsy or eccentricities. I am 30, the age of regular adulthood. Yes, I know that 18 and 21 have their claim on that position, but still, any age with a 1 or a 2 as the first digit are still considered "young" adults. Now, the young is dropped, and although I cannot yet be deemed middle aged, I am "getting up there."

Adventures of the hairless

What is it about being emotional that makes men feel like the bigget girl ever, in the history of ever. I slept in this morning (until 8:30) and got out of bed. After turning on the TV and fighting the temptation to beat the next temple in Zelda: Twilight Princess, my channel surfing lead me to this infomercial about children with cancer. 
This mother was on camera talking about her 3 year old son, who had some sort of cancer that had attached itself to one of his ribs.