Once again, it's been awhile since I've written anything. I feel like I say that at the beginning of pretty much every post. But I've been a little distracted I guess lately. When there's Greek papers to write, Royals games to go to, and laying around looking at the ceiling to partake in, it's hard to build up the desire to slave away at my keyboard for a few minutes. So I apologize.
And that's kind of what I want to write about today. Distractions. I've been thinking some about how we distract ourselves for a variety of reasons. Our minds don't have very good attention spans. We don't focus on one thing for very long at all. At times, we don't want to focus. At other times, we really desire to focus, but controlling our wandering minds is like caging a hummingbird hopped up on Mountain Dew. So tonight, I'm going to write about distractions. As per usual, I don't really have any conclusions or advice about anything. Just musings.
We don't like to feel bad. Possibly more than anything else, people desire to not feel bad. We want to feel happy. We want to feel content. We want to feel satisfies. But sometimes, life doesn't make us happy, content, or satisfied. It makes us feel the opposite. It makes us feel grieved, frustrated, and empty. And we don't like that. We resist it. It's like when you try to feed a baby some awful mashed vegetable that he doesn't like. He squirms and pushes and wails and does everything he can to prevent that dreaded spoon from being forced into his mouth. And when the world feeds us crap, we do similarly. We do everything in our power to keep the frustrations of life away. But sometimes they get shoved into our mouths regardless, and we have to figure out what to do about it.
So we distract ourselves. When something bad happens, we tell ourselves, "Oh, I'll get over it before long." When a friend is heartbroken, we vow to help him "get back in the game." When someone experiences the death of a loved one, we bring them a fruitbasket and take them out to a movie. When life hurts, we put anything else over it as a salve to distract from the pain. When there's a problem we can't do anything about, we sit in front of a TV playing Halo for hours. We pump music through our brains to drown out the voice of our own thoughts. We go buy some new outfit to rebuild our self-esteem. We sleep the day away because sometimes our dreams are more enjoyable than consciousness.
Thus, our problems are never really dealt with. They're just ignored. Those mashed vegetables for Baby might not taste good, but they're nourishing. And often, our problems and the bad things that happen in our lives are needed. But instead of swallowing, we spit it out because we don't like how it makes us feel. Maybe we're meant to hurt sometimes. Maybe it's good for us to realize that the world isn't all peachy. Maybe we need painful reminders that this life doesn't satisfy because it isn't meant too. I started reading Ecclesiastes yesterday. I don't totally understand what it's all about; I guess Jordan Reinhardt would be the one to ask about that. But in it, Solomon does a lot of lamenting about the meaninglessness of the world. Pleasure is meaningless. Success is meaningless. Work is meaningless. Even wisdom is called meaningless.
My heart echoes with Ecclesiastes sometimes. I look around and wonder what's the use of it all. So many things let me down. And it's usually not the fault of anybody. It's just how things are. And I end up going around generally hacked off at the world. If this is all there is, what a miserable existence it is. A great deal of the things we devote ourselves to don't last. Popularity fades, trophies rust, success is forgotten, and, unfortunately, even relationships don't always last. It's hard sometimes to wake up knowing that you have to undergo another day on earth, where "there is nothing new under the sun."
Minor shift in thought: In Luke 10, Jesus goes to visit Mary and Martha. As Martha scurries about trying to get the table set and dinner prepared, Mary, being quite the bum, chills by Jesus. If you've ever done any kind of service project in the church or with a youth group, you know what this is like. While you're busy working, someone else is standing around flirting with some girl or tossing a ball against the wall or whatever. So Martha, frustrated that all of the chores have fallen on her, complains to Jesus that Mary should be helping her, and he responds by saying, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
When I read this a few weeks ago, it was like getting punched in the face. Or at least what I assume getting punched is like, because it's never happened to me. The closest I've come is getting headbutted in the jaw playing Capture the Flag. Irrelevant.
But when this passage did punch/headbutt me, I felt like it was talking straight at me. It was a time when I felt especially burdened and weighed down for a number of reasons, and I could sense God saying, "David, David, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed." I'm not a very good Mary. I wig out about things all the time. I don't just sit at Jesus' feet and let him speak into my life. Like Martha, I get distracted. And we all do, I imagine. And our distractions are probably much less respectable than Martha's, who was busy trying to serve Jesus.
And that's where this connects with the first part of this post. We get distracted from God by our problems. And as a remedy for those problems, we try to distract ourselves with whatever will take our minds off of the issue. We distract ourselves from our distractions. We're looking for a way to heal our hurts, when the whole time it's found in God. Only one thing is needed! But instead of allowing him to perform surgery on our souls, we stick a cheap band-aid on our wound and hope we'll forget about it. There are days that I think, "I just can't read my Bible and pray today. I just have too much on my mind." What a stupid, stupid thought. That's when I need to come to God most. I need to offer my problems up to him instead of hoarding them, hoping that they'll eventually just disappear or I'll forget about them.
Life seems meaningless. There are days when I have absolutely no motivation to turn off my alarm and roll out of bed. I wish I could just fast forward to the future, to a day when I might feel happy/content/satisfied. But that's not an option, so in the meantime I use whatever I can to distract me from how much life sucks, and I miss out on the one thing needed. I need a cure, not a distraction. And that cure is available. It's just hard to accept sometimes.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Van Ride
I was in Honduras a few weeks ago, and some of you may know. One of my favorite things about the trip was just getting to spend time with the different people there. There were a number of people about our age that helped out at the mission, so it was an incredible pleasure to be able to work alongside with them and to laugh with them and to speak fractured Spanish. On our last night in Honduras, our team climbed into the mission's 15-passenger van with some of the Hondurans in order to take a few of them home. As the van crawled through the uneven, broken roads in Tegucigalpa and the guys we had been spending all week hopped out to go to their houses, a sobering thought hit me. These guys were leaving. I knew that I would see them for a little bit a church the next morning before we flew back to the U.S., but for the most part, our time together was coming to an end. It felt like as they were exiting the van, they were exiting my life, and that's pretty sad, I think. It's similar to how I felt while on camp teams last summer. I absolutely loved getting to work with and build relationships with college students from other schools' teams, but it was always a little harrowing at the end of the week when we would part ways. You spend a week seeing each other every day and building memories, and then it's over. And I knew that I would see a lot of these people again, but it still bothered me nonetheless.
On that van ride in Honduras, I thought about how our social lives are sort of like a big van. The passengers consist of everyone within my social sphere at a certain time, and they are sitting at different locations within the van. There are people who crammed into the same seat with me, those with whom I am especially close. And the intimacy begins to decrease the farther people are from me in the van. And, just as in the church van on a Jr. High trip after a stop at QT, the passengers don't sit still. Rather, they move all over the van throughout the trip, constantly switching seats. So for a while I might be close to certain people, but then they move a little farther away and others take their places, and there is this perpetual ebb and flow of how close I am to people as the van drives along. And, perhaps sadly, sometimes someone gets out of the van altogether, no longer being part of my social circle in more than an acquaintance-level relationship.
As life rolls along, these relationships change for a number of different reasons. Maybe a person is sitting next to me for a while, but then they see someone else they want to sit by for a while, so they move seats, and after a while I seem so far away anyways that they just hop out of the vehicle. Or maybe a person moves away or dies, so it's like the van door breaks and they just fall out. Or maybe I just tick them off enough after a while, so they prefer to hurl themselves out the window instead of staying in the van with me. But not everybody leaves the van. There are some who have been in my van my entire life, and they will remain there till one of us are no more. Others joined up partway through my life, and they'll probably stay for a long time. Perhaps others were right next to me near the beginning, but then they found another seat slightly more distant and are now cozy there.
I feel like I'm making little sense. I was just telling someone about how, when I begin writing a blog post, I generally start with half an idea and hope that it forms itself into a complete idea by the time I'm done. I've just been thinking lately about how relationships change over time. It happens in all of our lives. Chances are that your best friend when you were seven isn't your best friend now. That girl you fell in love with in middle school isn't your wife. But on the other hand, maybe that dude you couldn't stand two years ago is now one of your closest friends. Levels of friendship are always in fluctuation. I've experiences this even in my three shorts years at Ozark. Thankfully, there are a few guys on my floor that have always been there, and they have provided with with a very sturdy relational base. But beyond that, things are always changing. People I hung out with a lot freshman year now only get an occasional "Hey, what up?" as I pass them in the hall. Guys on the floor get married and end up in that mysterious land where we rarely hear from them again.
The road of life necessitates change. And many of those changes occur in the relational realm. Maybe we need to recognize this. A lot of people try so desperately to hang on to the same social position they had in high school, so they never mature or meet new people or expand their boundaries. But at the same time, perhaps we treat too many relationships too flippantly, not willing to put in the work to sustain a good relationship.
If you somehow liked my metaphor of the van, I have another metaphor that relates to social life: the ski lift. However, that one will probably remain unblogged, but for the right price, I might tell you about it if you ask me. Depending on where you're sitting in the van.
On that van ride in Honduras, I thought about how our social lives are sort of like a big van. The passengers consist of everyone within my social sphere at a certain time, and they are sitting at different locations within the van. There are people who crammed into the same seat with me, those with whom I am especially close. And the intimacy begins to decrease the farther people are from me in the van. And, just as in the church van on a Jr. High trip after a stop at QT, the passengers don't sit still. Rather, they move all over the van throughout the trip, constantly switching seats. So for a while I might be close to certain people, but then they move a little farther away and others take their places, and there is this perpetual ebb and flow of how close I am to people as the van drives along. And, perhaps sadly, sometimes someone gets out of the van altogether, no longer being part of my social circle in more than an acquaintance-level relationship.
As life rolls along, these relationships change for a number of different reasons. Maybe a person is sitting next to me for a while, but then they see someone else they want to sit by for a while, so they move seats, and after a while I seem so far away anyways that they just hop out of the vehicle. Or maybe a person moves away or dies, so it's like the van door breaks and they just fall out. Or maybe I just tick them off enough after a while, so they prefer to hurl themselves out the window instead of staying in the van with me. But not everybody leaves the van. There are some who have been in my van my entire life, and they will remain there till one of us are no more. Others joined up partway through my life, and they'll probably stay for a long time. Perhaps others were right next to me near the beginning, but then they found another seat slightly more distant and are now cozy there.
I feel like I'm making little sense. I was just telling someone about how, when I begin writing a blog post, I generally start with half an idea and hope that it forms itself into a complete idea by the time I'm done. I've just been thinking lately about how relationships change over time. It happens in all of our lives. Chances are that your best friend when you were seven isn't your best friend now. That girl you fell in love with in middle school isn't your wife. But on the other hand, maybe that dude you couldn't stand two years ago is now one of your closest friends. Levels of friendship are always in fluctuation. I've experiences this even in my three shorts years at Ozark. Thankfully, there are a few guys on my floor that have always been there, and they have provided with with a very sturdy relational base. But beyond that, things are always changing. People I hung out with a lot freshman year now only get an occasional "Hey, what up?" as I pass them in the hall. Guys on the floor get married and end up in that mysterious land where we rarely hear from them again.
The road of life necessitates change. And many of those changes occur in the relational realm. Maybe we need to recognize this. A lot of people try so desperately to hang on to the same social position they had in high school, so they never mature or meet new people or expand their boundaries. But at the same time, perhaps we treat too many relationships too flippantly, not willing to put in the work to sustain a good relationship.
If you somehow liked my metaphor of the van, I have another metaphor that relates to social life: the ski lift. However, that one will probably remain unblogged, but for the right price, I might tell you about it if you ask me. Depending on where you're sitting in the van.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Irrelevant Semantics (or, We're Gonna the 'Ship!)
I woke up at 6:45 today. And today is Saturday. That doesn't happen very often. Or ever really, unless I have a very, very good reason for doing so. And today, that reason was Rapha Run! Rapha House is a ministry in Cambodia that ministers to girls rescued from human trafficking and the sex trade, so today there was a 5K run to raise money for the mission. I had never run anything measured in kilometers before. I had never really run anything that wasn't measured in several dozen feet. As part of my training for the event, I went running with a few other people on Thursday. At the time, that was probably the farthest I had ever run at one time, but it was less than half the distance I did today. My goal for the 5K was just to run as far as I could and then walk the rest, but I ended up running the whole thing without stopping, and I feel very proud of myself, though I hope not in a sinful way. But accomplishing something you've never done before and doubted that you could do is a pretty good feeling. However, I never did receive that "runner's high" that they always talk about. All I got was "runner's intestinal pain."
This afternoon I went to Josh Negron's and Ashley Davis's wedding, which was fine. There was quite the Ozark crowd there. The cake was good, but I didn't get to eat any of the cheesecake Hershey kisses because Charlie and Caitlyn stole them all. Then after the wedding was the Michigan State/UConn game, which Michigan State won, bringing joy to everybody who's anybody. Championship game on Monday. Watch it. And if MSU wins, celebrate and buy me a present. And if they lose, leave me alone.
So here's what I want to write about today. This is a thought that came to me during the worship songs at chapel on Tuesday. I've decided that "gonna" should be it's own word. When we hear the word "gonna," we think of it as a contraction of "going to." We're lazy Americans, so we seize every opportunity to join our words together. After all, it's so laborious to pause between words. However, saying "gonna" instead of "going to" only makes sense in certain situations. What I've noticed is that we can only say "gonna" when it is followed by another verb in the sense of "I'm going to do something." We can say "I'm gonna play basketball tomorrow" or "I'm gonna marry David someday, I hope." But there are other times we say "going to" in which it would be nonsense to say "gonna." This would be when we talk about going to a place. For instance, I can say "I'm going to Chick-fil-A for lunch," but we can't say "I'm gonna Chick-fil-A today."
So "gonna" is something more than a mere contraction of "going to." So I guess it should be considered as its own word. I'm not enough of a linguistic expert to advocate that "gonna" should receive its own entry in a dictionary. Maybe it already does; I don't know. But if not, and some dictionary decides to put it in someday, I'll write the entry if they want me to.
Announcement for all you Joplinites: Chelsea Luckett and several other students are working on putting together a bake sale to raise money for a ministry (House of Hope I think, or something similar). But anyways, if any of you have the talent and resources and desire for baking, you should get in touch with her, because I'm sure she would very much welcome the help. I would bake something, but when I was a high school sophomore I was forced into partaking in a bake-off for the school newspaper staff, and my pineapple upside-down cake took dead last.
Sorry for wasting your time today. If you've read this far, I hope you'll read one of my other posts that has somewhat more significance to it. Even if you've already read them before, reread one of them. And then go to www.myspace.com/worthyprisoners and listen to "The Fight." And then go do something productive to make up for all the lost time.
This afternoon I went to Josh Negron's and Ashley Davis's wedding, which was fine. There was quite the Ozark crowd there. The cake was good, but I didn't get to eat any of the cheesecake Hershey kisses because Charlie and Caitlyn stole them all. Then after the wedding was the Michigan State/UConn game, which Michigan State won, bringing joy to everybody who's anybody. Championship game on Monday. Watch it. And if MSU wins, celebrate and buy me a present. And if they lose, leave me alone.
So here's what I want to write about today. This is a thought that came to me during the worship songs at chapel on Tuesday. I've decided that "gonna" should be it's own word. When we hear the word "gonna," we think of it as a contraction of "going to." We're lazy Americans, so we seize every opportunity to join our words together. After all, it's so laborious to pause between words. However, saying "gonna" instead of "going to" only makes sense in certain situations. What I've noticed is that we can only say "gonna" when it is followed by another verb in the sense of "I'm going to do something." We can say "I'm gonna play basketball tomorrow" or "I'm gonna marry David someday, I hope." But there are other times we say "going to" in which it would be nonsense to say "gonna." This would be when we talk about going to a place. For instance, I can say "I'm going to Chick-fil-A for lunch," but we can't say "I'm gonna Chick-fil-A today."
So "gonna" is something more than a mere contraction of "going to." So I guess it should be considered as its own word. I'm not enough of a linguistic expert to advocate that "gonna" should receive its own entry in a dictionary. Maybe it already does; I don't know. But if not, and some dictionary decides to put it in someday, I'll write the entry if they want me to.
Announcement for all you Joplinites: Chelsea Luckett and several other students are working on putting together a bake sale to raise money for a ministry (House of Hope I think, or something similar). But anyways, if any of you have the talent and resources and desire for baking, you should get in touch with her, because I'm sure she would very much welcome the help. I would bake something, but when I was a high school sophomore I was forced into partaking in a bake-off for the school newspaper staff, and my pineapple upside-down cake took dead last.
Sorry for wasting your time today. If you've read this far, I hope you'll read one of my other posts that has somewhat more significance to it. Even if you've already read them before, reread one of them. And then go to www.myspace.com/worthyprisoners and listen to "The Fight." And then go do something productive to make up for all the lost time.
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