This has been one of the theme songs for our life over the past few years.
Maybe its because I have now lived in California longer than I have ever lived in one place.
Maybe its because I have been waiting for 3 years to be able to start thinking about my next step, and this is the summer when that happens.
Maybe its because I am planning trips for the future, and wish the future was now.
Maybe its because I suddenly found 60+ friends from the past decade or so on Facebook...my friend total is currently up to 318...these friends range from old neighbors and acquaintances, to childhood best friends, to friends I made in a summer in high school, to college roommates, to mentors and coaches, teammates, work associates, and even a few old "enemies." They have pictures, and lives I know nothing about...but they stir up nostalgia like something crazy within me. This new surge of connections has excited me so much that I am fairly certain that most the people I have had contact with recently believe I must be a facebook addict...I'm really not...I just get really excited about finding old friends!
Maybe its because I had been hoping to be doing one of the things I love next year...and now it looks very like I will have to keep on keeping on where I am at, for at least another year and a half. Thank you California, for spending so much that you are actually laying off teachers, even while complaining of having a teaching shortage!
Maybe I have Restless Leg Syndrome...
Maybe I am just a restless person that needs to learn what peace is.
The bottom line is, I am restless.
I suspect the answer is not to ruminate on the possibilities I am not/cannot partake in at present. Actually, the best solution I have found revolves around less real action. Taking more time to read, more time to find catharsis through writing...more silence.
This is one of the few things that music does NOT help, which is difficult because I really like music...listening to music gets me through my day of data-entry. Still, there is no denying that music is extremely emotional, and each song only conjures more memories, more dreams, more restlessness.
So, I need silence. Now the question is...can I allow myself to have silence?
Showing posts with label Rumminations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rumminations. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2008
Monday, September 10, 2007
Nostalgia
So I entered the world of Facebook over the weekend.
Its been interesting...I have been made a Zombie by a friend from middle school...I have poked friends that I can poke in real life on a regular basis...who knew that all this and more was just waiting on the interweb...my wife laughs at me, and then performs the obligatory eye-roll-groan and tells me I'd better not spend too much time on this new distraction. As if I spend too much time on this poor blog of mine...
There was a moment, when I was asking everyone I found to confirm me as their friend, that it occurred to me how sad it would be if I was rejected. Who gets rejected by even an acquaintance when they request to be confirmed as your friend on something as trivial as Facebook? This thought urged on a real, albeit momentary, panic...
"I will be the first person everyone denies knowing. My friends have 500 friends...but I am not one of them...*You've been confirmed as X's friend*...YES!!! I have friends!!! I am officially cool--I bet other people had to wait for hours, even days, for their friends to confirm them, but my friends, they accept me instantly, even the ones that haven't seen or talked to me in 7 years...I'm accepted, important...cool."
I need more sleep, obviously.
The other odd thing I experienced was a major wave of nostalgia. I suppose its to be expected...in the last 24 hours I got back in touch, so to speak, with people that knew me when I was 11. They knew me before I was a teenager. I am now 25, have been married for 4 years, and have a son that is about to turn 3. Not only have they known me since before life began, somehow almost none of those people remain near to me...which is, honestly, a difficult thing. One of the greatest blessings of marrying the love of my life is that she "knew me back when..." She remains one of the few touchstones I have to 18 years of life that hold no permanence in this world.
This sounds rather dramatic. Sorry...a friend just gave me a Michael Buble album, with the song "Home" on it...and its probably not helping me avoid the dramatic presently.
So, I was reflecting on my lack of having a home, and started wanting to travel. Which struck me as the oddest of all possible desires when one is wishing for a non-existant home...until it occured to me that this has always been my response when this desire rears up inside me. And I think that the reason this is so has something to do with the ideas Chesterton mentioned in Orthodoxy; the concept of a familiar adventure, the practical romance. See Chesterton identified the need within us to be at once at home and yet to feel the thrill of adventure. Well for me, I think in some ways, the only way I feel at home is when I am moving, traveling, or am somewhere else waiting to get to where I am going. In fact, once I leave, I can begin to miss the place I was, or await the arrival at where I am going...which is as close to being at home as I get, in some ways.
So...now I have to figure out how to travel...preferably to somewhere with good friends...
Its been interesting...I have been made a Zombie by a friend from middle school...I have poked friends that I can poke in real life on a regular basis...who knew that all this and more was just waiting on the interweb...my wife laughs at me, and then performs the obligatory eye-roll-groan and tells me I'd better not spend too much time on this new distraction. As if I spend too much time on this poor blog of mine...
There was a moment, when I was asking everyone I found to confirm me as their friend, that it occurred to me how sad it would be if I was rejected. Who gets rejected by even an acquaintance when they request to be confirmed as your friend on something as trivial as Facebook? This thought urged on a real, albeit momentary, panic...
"I will be the first person everyone denies knowing. My friends have 500 friends...but I am not one of them...*You've been confirmed as X's friend*...YES!!! I have friends!!! I am officially cool--I bet other people had to wait for hours, even days, for their friends to confirm them, but my friends, they accept me instantly, even the ones that haven't seen or talked to me in 7 years...I'm accepted, important...cool."
I need more sleep, obviously.
The other odd thing I experienced was a major wave of nostalgia. I suppose its to be expected...in the last 24 hours I got back in touch, so to speak, with people that knew me when I was 11. They knew me before I was a teenager. I am now 25, have been married for 4 years, and have a son that is about to turn 3. Not only have they known me since before life began, somehow almost none of those people remain near to me...which is, honestly, a difficult thing. One of the greatest blessings of marrying the love of my life is that she "knew me back when..." She remains one of the few touchstones I have to 18 years of life that hold no permanence in this world.
This sounds rather dramatic. Sorry...a friend just gave me a Michael Buble album, with the song "Home" on it...and its probably not helping me avoid the dramatic presently.
So, I was reflecting on my lack of having a home, and started wanting to travel. Which struck me as the oddest of all possible desires when one is wishing for a non-existant home...until it occured to me that this has always been my response when this desire rears up inside me. And I think that the reason this is so has something to do with the ideas Chesterton mentioned in Orthodoxy; the concept of a familiar adventure, the practical romance. See Chesterton identified the need within us to be at once at home and yet to feel the thrill of adventure. Well for me, I think in some ways, the only way I feel at home is when I am moving, traveling, or am somewhere else waiting to get to where I am going. In fact, once I leave, I can begin to miss the place I was, or await the arrival at where I am going...which is as close to being at home as I get, in some ways.
So...now I have to figure out how to travel...preferably to somewhere with good friends...
Sunday, August 12, 2007
I Don't Want to be a Millionaire
I have been thinking a lot about finances recently...perhaps the result of having few finances...and I revisited a discussion I had about a year ago with God concerning money.
See, I assured Him that if only He'd bless me with millions of dollars, I would use a large portion of it to honor Him--do mission work, fund ministry, help good people that shouldn't have to worry about money before they do the good things they do. Of course, this is a naive outlook towards money...for a variety of reasons. That discussion concluded with the realization that God has not asked me to come up with the best plan I can think of for how I could do amazing things with resources from Him...but He has asked me to do what I know I should be doing today.
It was a humbling but important reminder of the most basic lessons of the scripture..."He has shown thee, oh man, what is good an what the Lord requires of thee; to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with thy God." To be told that all ambitions, all dreams, all aspirations are in fact not what the Lord has called us to pursue, and to see the simplicity of a righteous life enumerated in plain and obvious terms is both liberating and challenging. The honest truth being...I am so frequently distracted by my desires for more that this simple lesson is completely forgotten.
The most recent discussion on this topic has built on that old lesson. I have frequently heard from men that I respect that they wouldn't want to be millionaires. This has always been hard for me to understand, and the men being good men, I cannot believe this to be false modesty or eccentricity speaking...but I have also not comprehended what it was they found undesireable about having the means to accomplish whatever they could want. The other day, I was having a discussion essentially about that same simple lesson I had been reminded of once again, and my friend and I began to discuss the nature of our desire for certain types of employment and financial security. We speculated on how this desire seems to come almost completely from our desire to have the solution to our financial problems. We want to know that we have a plan to fix the problem, and the means to do so. As we both said the same thing, almost at the same time, we reflected on how that sort of goal revolved around a desire, if not directly, still unquestionably present, to remove ourselves from the constant dependence on the provision of the Lord. We want security so we don't have to ask the Lord to provide what we ourselves cannot.
From this realization, we began discussing the nature of tithing, and how it can be such a challenge to give, especially when you live as we live, where 10% is a sizeable and important chunk of the monthly budget. But we also both noticed how when we were faithful in honoring the Lord with our finances, the freedom we experienced when it came to our budget was amazing. Its an act of commiting our condition to the hands of God, and trusting that He will provide what is needed (if that is not always what we want).
It was at this point that a thought occured to us that surprised and challenged me. The joy of tithing when it is difficult to "justify" doing so is the dependence on the Lord that it inspires--which is exactly the thing we had just acknowledged trying to avoid, in a way, through our quest for security. So, we wondered, how could a millionaire ever appreciate that sort of dependence on the Lord? How could someone like, say, Bill Gates, ever feel the complete and total dependence on the Lord's provision that the widow with the pennies felt when she gave everything she had to honor the Lord in the temple? How can the man with everything feel the same complete need for the sustenance of the Lord? How can someone that has wealth to provide for his grandchildren's grandchildren behave as if every moment of every day, every cent that he owns comes soley from the hand of the Lord?
Its not that I doubt a millionaire could understand that dependence...its just that I suddenly realized for the first time how difficult that must be...since I don't understand that dependence even when I don't have almost any money. To grasp that, when you have almost no needs on a regular basis...that must be nearly impossible.
Hence my conclusion...I don't want to be a millionaire. I don't think I could handle it...I remember when I asked the Lord for money to do all sorts of things, I imagined feeling the freedom of giving so much because I didn't need any more...but that isn't what we are called to offer to the Lord. The first fruits belong to Him--the hardest to give, the best of the season...but the most liberating to offer, because when we offer them, we are free from the burden of trusting in our own means to provide for ourselves.
Regis...you can keep the money...I'm gonna walk.
See, I assured Him that if only He'd bless me with millions of dollars, I would use a large portion of it to honor Him--do mission work, fund ministry, help good people that shouldn't have to worry about money before they do the good things they do. Of course, this is a naive outlook towards money...for a variety of reasons. That discussion concluded with the realization that God has not asked me to come up with the best plan I can think of for how I could do amazing things with resources from Him...but He has asked me to do what I know I should be doing today.
It was a humbling but important reminder of the most basic lessons of the scripture..."He has shown thee, oh man, what is good an what the Lord requires of thee; to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with thy God." To be told that all ambitions, all dreams, all aspirations are in fact not what the Lord has called us to pursue, and to see the simplicity of a righteous life enumerated in plain and obvious terms is both liberating and challenging. The honest truth being...I am so frequently distracted by my desires for more that this simple lesson is completely forgotten.
The most recent discussion on this topic has built on that old lesson. I have frequently heard from men that I respect that they wouldn't want to be millionaires. This has always been hard for me to understand, and the men being good men, I cannot believe this to be false modesty or eccentricity speaking...but I have also not comprehended what it was they found undesireable about having the means to accomplish whatever they could want. The other day, I was having a discussion essentially about that same simple lesson I had been reminded of once again, and my friend and I began to discuss the nature of our desire for certain types of employment and financial security. We speculated on how this desire seems to come almost completely from our desire to have the solution to our financial problems. We want to know that we have a plan to fix the problem, and the means to do so. As we both said the same thing, almost at the same time, we reflected on how that sort of goal revolved around a desire, if not directly, still unquestionably present, to remove ourselves from the constant dependence on the provision of the Lord. We want security so we don't have to ask the Lord to provide what we ourselves cannot.
From this realization, we began discussing the nature of tithing, and how it can be such a challenge to give, especially when you live as we live, where 10% is a sizeable and important chunk of the monthly budget. But we also both noticed how when we were faithful in honoring the Lord with our finances, the freedom we experienced when it came to our budget was amazing. Its an act of commiting our condition to the hands of God, and trusting that He will provide what is needed (if that is not always what we want).
It was at this point that a thought occured to us that surprised and challenged me. The joy of tithing when it is difficult to "justify" doing so is the dependence on the Lord that it inspires--which is exactly the thing we had just acknowledged trying to avoid, in a way, through our quest for security. So, we wondered, how could a millionaire ever appreciate that sort of dependence on the Lord? How could someone like, say, Bill Gates, ever feel the complete and total dependence on the Lord's provision that the widow with the pennies felt when she gave everything she had to honor the Lord in the temple? How can the man with everything feel the same complete need for the sustenance of the Lord? How can someone that has wealth to provide for his grandchildren's grandchildren behave as if every moment of every day, every cent that he owns comes soley from the hand of the Lord?
Its not that I doubt a millionaire could understand that dependence...its just that I suddenly realized for the first time how difficult that must be...since I don't understand that dependence even when I don't have almost any money. To grasp that, when you have almost no needs on a regular basis...that must be nearly impossible.
Hence my conclusion...I don't want to be a millionaire. I don't think I could handle it...I remember when I asked the Lord for money to do all sorts of things, I imagined feeling the freedom of giving so much because I didn't need any more...but that isn't what we are called to offer to the Lord. The first fruits belong to Him--the hardest to give, the best of the season...but the most liberating to offer, because when we offer them, we are free from the burden of trusting in our own means to provide for ourselves.
Regis...you can keep the money...I'm gonna walk.
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