A Prayer

Dearest,

Please break me from this shell I writhe in
Deemed fit a lonely hell to die in
And place not my body into the cold, hard ground
Until such adequate environments could be found
To reverse this decay I so endlessly suffer
From binding my soul not to another
But rather living, dreaming, in suspended animation
And breathing heavy in fastidious fascination
Of that to which I've unwittingly turned my nose
Breeding a heart beat that slows and slows
Until I become something beyond recognition
That walks this road decrepid, to perdition
So turn me, stop this dead in it's tracks
And forgive me, as I learn how to ask
Of that for which my heart doth pine
And wither these cracks, vesitges of time
Find me a road, a life I can strive in
Heal these ravaged bones, that I may feel alive again

Yours Truly.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

sock drawer epiphanies

this evening i was doing something simple. routine. boring even. putting away laundry. nothing exciting. i've been being pretty organized and clean lately (which is something that's completely huge for me, it's really never happened before). so as i'm putting away my laundry, i'm separating it out, and i come to socks and underoo's, which all go in one drawer. i open up the drawer and start stuffing them all in. and then it hits me. here i am, thinking i'm being super organized because my clean laundry is going into drawers rather than being dumped on the floor, and yet i look in this drawer, and it's complete madness. and whenever my room is clean, that's always how it is. clothes just stuffed into drawers, receipts, important documents and all sorts of riff raff and crap just stuffed into more drawers, excess stuff piled up almost waist high in my closet. but so long as the drawers are all closed and the closet door shuts, everything looks magnificent.

as i realized that's how i organize things, i started to realize that that single fact says so much more about me than i ever realized. i started to think about my life. lately a lot of things in my life haven't been going well. a lot of things have been going well, especially on the outside view of things. but my heart, my soul, a lot of those things have just not been doing well. and i rarely, rarely open that up to people. i started to realize that my life is a lot like my room. as long as things look neat and tidy and organized, and i feel like things on the outside are neat and tidy and organized, then all of the storms of crap going on is easily ignorable. ignorable by everyone else because they don't even know it's there, and ignorable by me because no one else knows it's going on. i've always struggled with this. always.

everyone always wonders why i don't keep my room more organized when it's clean and organized. i think i'm starting to get it.

who has self portrait epiphanies while putting their laundry away? i'm so weird sometimes. haha.

i've got a nautical themed cashmere afghan...

i have yet to stop laughing at this, so i'm going to let all of you laugh at it too.

signs of life

it's so nice to be able to sit at home. i've been out on the road for work the last two weeks straight, and since i'm pretty much out on the road by myself when i travel, it gets kind of lonely. so it was wonderful to come home to a nice clean house with my roommates last night and just relax. unfortunately i got no time off in between my travels. i was back at the offices downtown today cleaning up everything from the last trip. on the bright side, i hit 40 hours for the week at 1 o'clock today, so everything past that and for the rest of the week is overtime. scooore. i finally get to go back to youth group tonight and hang out with my boys, which i am soooo excited for. i still can't believe they're seniors and they'll be graduating here in just a few short months! ahh!! i've been with them since they were sophomores. i don't know what i'll do when i don't have revolution to go to on tuesday nights anymore. what will i do with my life? craziness.

i think my new resolution at the moment is to spend way waaay less time watching tv and movies. i made a pact not to watch any tv at my hotel all last week, which i was successful in. and it was so awesome. i got to get out and take pictures, catch up on a bunch of reading, and spend some good old fashioned time with god, which i have been really quite terrible at doing lately. i don't want to cut tv out of my life by any means. i think the office and prison break are two of the only things that keep me sane. but it's so easy to come home and flip on the tv and just zone out, when there's so many productive things to be done. i've forgotten that somehow over the last year or so. but not anymore, get ready to not get watched super expensive gigantic hdtv. maybe i'll even sell you and get a crappy tv so i have even less motivation to watch you. (just so you know, i'm sitting in the same room with the tv, i'm talking to it, i'm just also typing what i'm saying. yes, i have imaginary conversations with inanimate objects. frequently. get over it.)

that's pretty much it for now. nothing terribly intense today. my mind is numb after sitting in the office doing paperwork all day. i hate the office and i hate paperwork. i'm excited to get back out and hit the rtd project again tomorrow. i'm off to do laundry and clean my room and do all the stuff i should have done last night but was too tired to. end transmission.

p.s. i am sooo in love with this album right now. i forgot about it for a while and rediscovered it while i was in florida. sooooo good. listen to "fly low carrion crow" in particular. that song blows my mind. if you don't have this album do yourself a favor and go pick it up.

change

Can I just say that politics are not really my thing? I really could care less. Honestly. I just feel that no matter who gets elected, republican or democrat, the heart of Christ will not be chased after in Washington. From what I can see, whoever gets elected just gets in office and argues with whoever is in office in the opposite party, and another elections worth of empty promises roll's on by.

Today I've been in and out of airports, flying home to Denver. There have been press conferences on the tv all day of president Obama holding a conference on fiscal responsibility in government. Can I just say that I think that's cool? For him to get up and say that every member of his cabinet will go through every line of their budget line by line to eliminate wasteful spending, and it's all going to be done in open, with the knowledge of the public so we can see where our money is going. I think that's neat. I voted for Obama, but I honestly could have cared less who won. Today, I am kind of stoked I voted for him.

I just wanted to say that. If you don't like Obama, it's cool. I'm not really holding a lot of hope that this kind of stuff will last all 4 years. Haha.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

currently being jammed:

not pictured - greasy keyboard (thank you, domino's)

breathe

so i've begun taking pictures again. i need to get back into practice. and i need to get a digital slr, so i don't have to take film to walgreens to get them to put it on a cd. haha. but i got the chance to snap some photo's today, and i picked a few that i liked. like i said, i need to get back into practice, don't laugh.

conversations

so i'm sitting in a hotel room in ft. walton beach, florida at the moment, and believe it or not, i managed to find some time to contemplate my life this evening. i feel like i haven't taken the opportunity to do that in a while, which kind of bums me out. i've been taking some time at the hotel this week to catch up on some much needed reading, and i'm into some really good stuff right now.

as i was sitting and reading my book, i got to thinking about the circumstances of my life in the last 8 or 9 months. lots of hurt. lots of pain. lots of regrets and questions and little or no relief or answers. in the last month or so all of these things have immensely intensified, and i have literally just been hating my life. crying myself to sleep 3 or 4 nights a week. i've been so hurt by certain events that have been happening that i've come terrifyingly close to letting go of god in everything. i'm just having trouble finding a way to hold on when things are soooo bad. up until very recently my faith has never been something i've struggled with, and so i think this experience has had a pretty profound impact on me. i think i've been going through all of the normal phases and emotions that are common to experiences of deep pain and suffering. questioning god's existence, his ultimate role of good, whether or not he is loving and truly caring. etc. i've come dangerously close to turning my back on him several times in the last month or so because i'm almost certain that's what he's doing to me. and i really just can't take that kind of rejection from a god who professes to be good and to be my true father.

so as i'm sitting and reading, it hits me. i am way, way too wrapped up in myself. the minute we expect god to conform to us and wrap around our lives like some kind of security blanket that will protect us from everything bad, is the exact minute that we take god out of his role as the deity of the entire universe (which for the record, is much, much larger than i am), and put him into a tiny box that we can wrap our simplistic minds around. and the minute a god who is much to infinitesmal to fit inside a tiny box created by a simple mind is put into such a box (well, i shouldn't say put into a box like it's actually possible, but in our minds put into such a box), he will begin to move and creak and groan against that box. creating discomfort. creating disillusion. simply because we've deluded ourselves into thinking that he should fit into that damn box, why isn't he?

so i stepped back a pace or two to ponder my situation. i started to remember that god is not some cosmic slot machine, whose cherries or sevens align when we pray the right prayers or do the right things. god is a living, breathing, adapting being, and one that is actually grafting each one of us individually into the greatest story of romance and redemption that has ever been written, and is in fact, still being written. i started to remember that god is romancing me. always. because he loves me. and as i started to remember that fact, i thought to myself, maybe all this pain isn't god's way of punishing me or putting me through "hard tests to instill character." what churchy bullshit. i started to think of my story as part of the larger story, one of romance. one of redemption. i thought of love stories, where the lead character estranges himself from the pursued character, much to the perturbment of the pursued. she (or in my case, he) doesn't know why the lead character is distancing himself. feels pain, feels hurt, feels betrayal. but she (i) can't see quite yet what the lead character (god) is doing. she doesn't know that he is planning one grand swooping gesture of love and romance as such to knock her clear off her feet and into a love deeper than she has ever known. i started to think that maybe god loved me enough to orchestrate such an event for me.

i can't say that any of this is certain. but i think i'm at a point where i'm hopeful. i just know that somewhere along the way, i completely forgot that i trust god. and if i trust him, then why would i ever believe that this pain would be without purpose? i don't know. sometimes i get backwards.

after all of this thinking and complete rearranging of the lies i've been developing in my heart the last few months, i decided to step out onto the patio for a cigarette. and as i sat there, i was startled into a conversation with an old friend that i wasn't really expecting. an old friend whom has been estranging himself from me for several months now, as i just mentioned. we talked for a few minutes, sharing a light hearted conversation. you know those conversations you have with your closest friends? the kind that always come late at night, often for me around a fire. not terribly deep conversations in the amount that's said. just going around in a circle posing the deepest questions a man's (or woman's) soul burns with, not really looking for an answer, more just looking for an affirmation that someone else ponders the same questions. questions about life. about god. about infinity. about everything and about nothing. no answers are really given because no one is really looking for answers. mostly just more questions designed to make you think about life's purpose. i had one of those conversations with my friend jesus this evening. it was wonderful. he's the best at those kinds of conversations you know. the first few minutes we just caught up. i'll try to give you a basic rundown of how things went, i don't remember exactly, so don't hold me to this. haha.:

me - where are you?

god - (instantly) right here.

me - you startled me, i didn't expect you to be so close!

god - what did you expect?

me - i don't know, it just seems like you've been so distant lately.

god - relationships are a two way road you know.

time out this exact statement has been a recurring theme in my life lately. irony? or sarcasm? if you didn't know, god likes to be very, VERY sarcastic. or at least he does when he's talking to me. haha. continue.

me - oh good one, like i really wanted to hear that right now.

god - so you expected to never put any effort into our relationship whatsoever and just assumed that all the problems were on my end, and instead of seeking me out to try and fix these problems, you just wrote me off?

me - well when you put it that way it doesn't really make much sense.

god - haha no, no it doesn't.

me - what do you think about all of this?

god - i don't really deal with life in questions, questions leave too much room for doubt and pain when they go unanswered,. i only deal in love.

me - what does that mean?

god - that i love you. but if you ask me what i think of all this, what i will say is this. sometimes i just do not understand you people (humans). i can't understand why you live your lives having to question everything, it only leads to emptiness and pain.

me - but, you're god, aren't you supposed to understand everything?

god - yes, the universal deity side of me understands everything completely. but you're missing the point. i'm not interested in that side of me, i don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with that side of me. that's not the side of me that's talking to you right now. the side of me that's here and now is the side that loves and feels and desires. and this side of me can't understand why you would ever let unanswered questions and doubts take the place of meaningful relationships in your life. all i've ever known is love and relationship, and that's all i've ever tried tos how you of myself. it makes me sad to see you living your life in such a way that your relationships are replaced by pain and suffering and doubt.

the conversation went on to other area's that i won't dive into here, but needless to say, this was one of those conversations that just rocked my world and completely destroyed what i thought i understood about god. i feel like what i tried to type down is not really an accurate portrait of the way things went, but i wanted to try and help you understand. and all of this conversation happened rather quickly. over the course of my cigarette. but it got me thinking. got my heart pumping again. feeling again. feeling love. asking myself questions without answers rather than asking myself questions that i've already formulated negative answers for. more than anything it just reminds me of a god i used to know, a god i've let slip away. sitting there and smoking a cigarette helped me relax enough to get in touch with god. and after that conversation i wiped my cigarette on the stucco wall to put it out. now every time i look out on the patio, there's an ash mark on the wall that reminds me that god is here, now, and he loves me very very much. i think that's neat.