Writing my own life

The characters we write are imbued with our own lives, and the lives of those around us. When I get the gumption to write a character that is very much like me in some ways, one of the things I'll make sure I include is that he's a huge baby when it comes to getting sick. Those who don't know me will read it and will be in awe of how true-to-life it feels, while those who know me will probably feel cheated, like it doesn't give the whole whiny experience on the page. I'd make sure he did lots of slouching from room to room.

Something I've learned this week is that it's really, really hard to write while in the throes of a monstrous head cold. I almost wish I had a fever, because then the accompanying weird dreams might give me something to write on. Wait, scratch that. No, that's the last thing I wish. Like exercising, drinking lots of water, or paying some sort of attention to my list of things to do, I know that writing's good for me, even when I'm sick. Here's to giving it a try tomorrow...

Killing my old friend.

There is always truth in fiction. Like a child, containing his parents' DNA but still being an entirely different person, a story contains the author's experiences in some way while still taking on a life of its own.

I'm not particularly good at telling stories. I've got friends that are, and I envy them their seemingly natural gift of recounting events so they become meaningful to others. Maybe it's the process of synthesis that I've just never really understood. Out of the synthesis - that combining of other things to make a whole - of our memories and daily lives, in good and bad, come great stories; in theory, I have enough stored away up in my head from childhood alone to get me through at least three or four decent-sized novels. However, when moving those onto the paper, the emotional pull of those things seems to get lost in translation. It's been this way for quite some time.

Perfectionism and I are old friends. We've got this working relationship down pretty well: as long as I continue to completely overthink and agonize over every bit of output, constantly comparing my work with others' so as to avoid any possible real originality, we get along fine. Watch out, though, should I overstep those bounds; he's an angry drunk. You can even see it in my cooking style: I love the power of a recipe, and follow it with religious fervor. Don't you dare take it out of my hands. It's hard for me to synthesize anything of my own, but at least I do a good job picking other peoples' recipes, right?

This perfectionism I have carried with me everywhere for so long colors everything I do, like a bad pair of tinted glasses where it's impossible to know what things actually look like. Others can tell you about the world outside the glasses, and you can get the general idea, but with everything still being shaded you can't truly experience it the way they see it. This series of posts, I think, is the first step in snapping those glasses clean in half.

Looking into a mirror.

dystopia |disˈtōpēə|nounan imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of Utopia .
Generally speaking, I like dystopias.
Not that I'd want to live in one, mind you. But when I think about some of the most thought-provoking, gripping movies I've seen or books I've read, accounts of dystopia are a common theme. It's the science fiction nerd in me rearing his ugly, bespectacled head. To give you some examples, here are some of my favorite dystopian stories:

The Giver: The world of this book is one without risk, without unpredictability or color. It's not that things are necessarily bad here - everyone is provided for, and things are peaceful - but everything is under strict control; free will is essentially nonexistent. Love is nothing more than a concept. Memories of a time before this condition ("Sameness") are all held by one person, known as The Giver. The story centers around an 11-year-old boy named Jonas, chosen to be the new Receiver of these memories.
My seventh-grade reading class went through the book on audiocassette. Being the over-achieving speed reader that I am, I always brought the book home and read ahead. It holds the illustrious title of First Book That Majorly Creeped Me Out. Last semester, I took a Children's Literature class and we read The Giver again. I appreciated the book in a different way this time around, but still creeped out in parts.
V for Vendetta: I love Natalie Portman. Enough said?Okay, there's more to the film than that. Much like The Giver, the government in this story is a totalitarian one - that is, there's no limit to the control they exact over citizens' lives. Enter V, an anarchist determined to overthrow the government. It's a great story, and visually well done.











Children of Men: Like it says on the poster, the world has essentially fallen apart as people are struggling to deal with the fact that humans can no longer reproduce - nothing like knowing that the future is irrelevant to make people go crazy and have a total societal breakdown.
This 2006 film cemented in my mind the fact that director Alfonso Cuaron is a genius (he also was behind my favorite of the Harry Potter movies thus far, The Prisoner of Azkaban). There's an incredibly involved scene in a car that is one.continuous.shot. The first time I saw it, I was like "Wait.. no way! The camera's still rolling! STILL!" There's enough stuff going on that you hope they only had to shoot it once, because resetting would take forEVER. Trust me, you'll know when you see it.


Nineteen Eighty-Four: This book is in many ways the classic example of a dystopia. I just started reading it today. Late to the party again. The cultural influences left by this novel are far and wide, including this famous Apple commercial directed by Ridley Scott:


You get the idea. The masses are more or less enslaved, with every single aspect of their lives being policed and controlled, even their thoughts. Massive posters up everywhere with the phrase "Big Brother is Watching You" serve as a warning to all. The slogans of the Party: "WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
In the book, George Orwell imagines what England would look like three decades in the future, were Socialism to have caught on. In some ways, I think every other one of the above works owes quite a debt to this novel; the way government is portrayed in each is largely derived from Orwell's ideas.
Bringing us back to the beginning: I enjoy works such as these. Not only are they really good at drawing you into the story, they offer an interesting critique of our own societies. Could a scenario such as one of these really happen? Anything is possible; you know what they say about power corrupting, and all that. But politics isn't really my game. The thing that I really enjoy about stories like these is that dystopia offers the greatest potential for hope.
A scene from Children of Men floors me every single time I see it. Clive Owen's character is helping get a mother and her baby - the only one in the world - out of the country to a research lab, to safety. On the way, they're caught in this hotel in the middle of a firefight. People are dying left and right, and the place is literally being reduced to rubble while they're hiding out. Suddenly, the baby begins to wail. All fighting stops. The mother and child make their way out of the building, and there's a moment of extreme tenderness as soldiers on both sides let them pass; all hope for humanity's future is walking past them at that very second. Absolutely beautiful.
The point is this: when you are in such a messed up world, hope is in stark relief to all the darkness around you. When one has the sense that things are fairly Okay, one can be lulled into a life of quiet desperation and complacency. But when things are truly bad, hope and love carry a much deeper meaning, because they are all we have. Sometimes, there's nothing to do but believe that there may be a light, a chance that we may yet be saved. We connect with stories like this because in some ways, they are part of our story.
"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." John 1:4-5

Transparency and truth-seeking.

The writers I admire most are those who "lay it all out there" in a meaningful way. The things that have happened to us happened for a reason and there's no point in leaving them alone - they bring life to the words we put down. Anne Lamott describes the mess of life as fertile ground, where our creativity bursts forth, an idea I've visited previously. However, I don't think that just throwing all of my crap out here for anyone to see is what writing is about - it's where it starts; the crude oil that can be refined and turned into fuel.

If I'm working on my own story by writing parts of my life down, my perpetual hope is that I have something interesting to say or some fascinating pattern to pull out of these seemingly meaningless experiences. Also, I hope that pattern doesn't point to the near-certainty of a mental disorder. Most days it feels like that's the direction this is going.

I think that's a common hope, really: that our view of the circumstances of our lives is a clear one. That clarity is what we all seem to be seeking; we talk to others about "finding direction," or discuss our relationships with those around us, in a search to better understand. It's a measure of solidarity with each other, the reassurance that we're in this thing together.

There are prayers I find myself returning to on a regular basis. Many of them revolve around this same hope of increased clarity; for my marriage, my job, my music, my future. But what if I already know what I need to know? Maybe the waters can't become any clearer, since God is never done stirring them. My seeking of clarity can be an attempt to simply remove the risk from these areas of my life - a futile pursuit. If we knew exactly what to do, there would be no challenge or conflict to the decisions we make... making the outcomes of these decisions far less rewarding. Yet still I go for the safe route, all in the name of wanting to understand. In reality, real growth happens with the realization that that clarity may never come in this life, and we are simply supposed to trust in the One we know to be true.

Cars

The garage at my parents' house looks significantly different than it did when I was a boy. This one started earlier today at Caribou with Sarah, as we were trying to get some work done. It quickly became very different than what I had originally planned, like working on a story and seeing characters grow in different ways than you had originally envisioned. I thought it was going to be something about me trying to be a bohemian, and how I gave it a pretty good try for a bit before deciding against it. It seems like a pretty important part of my own story these past few years, so that may yet be revealed in a later post. What emerged from the work earlier was a picture of my family, through our cars. The brain can be fickle in the things it chooses to remember. I wish I had some say in what is held as important, but I really don't. However, I do think that the things we remember vividly aren't just there by accident. Whether we know it at the time, I strongly believe that each of these things will mean something and will be used, if they haven't yet already.

But I'll get there eventually. In the meantime, it's time to work on descriptive language, and the cars seem like a pretty safe place to start. Here's just about every little bit that I can remember about the vehicles. The earliest possible recollection I have of a car trip was sitting in the back of my dad's little blue car (I think it was a Plymouth Reliant), listening to the serpentine belt screeching on the way to church, unfamiliar with the noise but expecting the car to explode at any moment. That one didn't explode, but I can recall my dad still talking about it as the worst car they've ever owned, on account of all the money poured into the "blue toilet." From there, my dad moved up to an Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon. Again, the color was the light blue that seemed to dominate those types of cars in the late 80s, like something Jerry Lundegaard would have had in his car lot in Fargo.

But the vans: the vans are the things that truly defined our family. The first to come along was a 1987 maroon GMC Safari. This held special significance for my parents, as it is to date the only actual new vehicle they have ever bought. The van was bought with inheritance money from when my grandma passed away, so this most definitely was a big deal. It was not, however, a cool van: it was boxy, like a plumber's van, the antithesis of stylish. The Safari was our method of transportation around much of the country on family road trips to Arizona, Washington state, and the East Coast. My brother and I would claim the backseat and busied ourselves with action figures, Legos, and putting ice-cold cans of pop from the coolers behind us onto the necks of our sisters in the middle seat. In between the two front seats was the cassette tape case, holding all of my parents' Christian music. One time, when we were in Colorado on a trip, someone broke into the van with all of our luggage and everything, and the only thing they took as far as we knew was the cassette tapes. I still like to think the joke was on him.

The maroon van also happened to be the first car I ever drove, at the tender age of 18. My less-than-stellar grades prevented me from getting my license in high school, which now I am very thankful for, since a big part of my life revolved around not having a license. When I finally did get my license, I hit the road in a big way with the '87 Safari; the two of us were so similar in age, we were like old friends. Over time, certain features of the van had ceased to work, such as the locks, the inside sliding-door handle, the back doors, and the transmission was a little temperamental as well. I cruised in style; the van was awarded the name "Clifford" by friends.

Thanks to all the road trips, Clifford had reached about 245,000 miles the winter of 2004. I had left on a high school retreat that weekend, leaving the red van in the church parking lot. When I arrived back at church on Sunday, the red van was gone. When my dad showed up in the other van to pick me up, he wordlessly handed me a picture of the red van, on the side of the road, with black smoke pouring out of it. Yes, our only new car went out in a blaze of glory.

The other vehicle after the station wagon was a brown Chevrolet Astro van; almost the exact same as a Safari, but with different branding. When that gave out, my hopes rose that we may, in fact, have a shot at getting something newer, cooler, with maybe a second door on the driver's side or bucket seats or maybe a CD player.

The Astro was replaced by a ’95 Caribbean-blue Safari.

We do have four kids in the family, I guess.

Saying it better than I could.

I never used to read the paper. Save for the comics, of course... I have a distinct memory of myself at about 9 or 10 years old, walking away from my parents while we were in Barnes & Noble to take a look at the Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip in the Star Tribune. My parents have always been big Pioneer Press people. As for myself, I didn't get it; as one who only read the funny pages, the sole fact that C & H was missing entirely from the comics section showed, in my mind, that philistines were running the show down in St. Paul. Then something happened.

The actual moment is hard to pin down, but roughly two years ago, I suddenly developed an appetite for good journalism. Ten o'clock television sound bites didn't do it for me anymore; now, my news was gathered in the morning, sprawled out on the couch with the paper after I returned from driving the bus route. Reading through the paper is a simple pleasure I don't often have the luxury of doing these days. I'd recommend trying it, if you get the chance - if nothing else, you learn that there's actual news happening in places outside the United States!!! Granted, the stories are usually single-paragraph blurbs on page A11 or something ridiculous like that, but it's better than nothing.

One of my favorite places in the paper is the Opinion section. This is primarily because the opinions expressed are not only the sole perspective of the author, with no assumed responsibility by the publisher and so on, but are generally much more well-reasoned than any other commentary on day-to-day events you could be reading. The variety of perspectives offered by the columnists who frequent these pages is like being at a party where everybody there is way, way smarter and well-informed than you are, and you're just content to listen. Today is a perfect example.

Yesterday's blog was the germination of an issue that will more than likely continue to show itself around these parts, namely sustainability and eating smarter. I don't know if I'll ever have anything really deep to say on the issue, but at the very least, this whole thing is helping me really think about why I believe the things I do, and putting them to the test by reasoning them out. Somebody said that the best way to know you understand something is to explain it to somebody else. Even if it's just mostly to myself, that's good enough for the both of us.

So, today I was reading through the paper before class, and I ran across Norbert Hirschhorn's column again. Dr. Hirschhorn is a poet/physician, which seems like an unlikely combination. (Then again, Wallace Stevens worked as an insurance agent for most of his life, which seems even stranger.) Dr. Hirschhorn lives in London, but taught at the University of Minnesota so the Press runs his column once in a while. This time, he happened to address the very issue I cracked into yesterday.

Please give it a read: "Have you eaten today?" In the article, the good doctor emphasizes the importance of eating as not only for survival, but the social and political impact that food has. "Food binds families, friends and communities," he writes. "In many languages the greeting is, "Have you eaten today?" In this time of cheap fast foods, single-parent families, long working hours and latch-key kids, we are in danger of loosening these ties, and thereby all become diminished."

As I've been writing more intently in the past two weeks than I ever have before, I've questioned what exactly I'm learning through this. My hope is that I'm growing, even though I don't feel it... maybe the growth is so subtle and the incline so slight that I won't notice it until much farther down. One thing I'm beginning to understand a little better is that writing forces you to observe much more carefully all that goes on around you and within yourself. This may be out of sheer necessity at first, but the human brain is a marvel in its ability to be trained in this way. This same principle is true for our eating habits: we can become more intentional about paying attention to what we eat and making a conscious effort to do so differently.

This is definitely an area I can grow in, as I'm sure others can as well. This has potential to be a case of information obesity, where I just read and read and read about issues like this and never actually do something with what I'm learning. Writing like Dr. Hirschhorn's column is inspiring, but reading something like that can give you a deep desire to affect change, but the movement required is something else entirely.

Movement is how new things are built in us, and among us.

What you need to learn, you already know (part two)

How much of what we learn do we already subconsciously know? This is a theme that I will probably continue returning to, because I think that there is a deeper knowledge than simply that which we make a conscious effort to figure out. This facet of it, in particular, has been a big interest of mine. I'm fascinated by food, in particular how it's grown and the science behind it.

But first, it's time to rant it out. Here's how this whole thing came about:

Yesterday afternoon, I was in my Wellness class like usual. The topic for the week is nutrition. The professor teaching the class seems like kind of a joke. The publishing company responsible for the textbook we use has a website for teachers with PowerPoint slides put together as a teaching aid. Emphasis on aid - as in, not the primary focus of the entire class. Sadly, that's not the case with this lady; at 2:00 on the dot, with no greeting besides "Alright, let's...", she proceeds to go through the slides and essentially read off the bullet points. As fast as she can. Brief exposition, no attempts to make the material at least somewhat interesting, and the frantic speed at which we're writing notes trying to keep up seems to be lost on her. When asked to slow down, her response was to "do the best you can." A girl behind me asked her if she could post the slides online, to which she refused, saying that "then people will stop coming to class."

I'm a firm believer in common sense. Garage logic, as Joe Soucheray calls it. As in your grade being dependent upon the work and time commitment that you make to it. At this point, I think this professor should be more of a believer in common sense than to try to use the fact that we have to come to class against us, particularly as it's near impossible to follow along once you actually ARE in class. She's there to present the information we need as best as possible; what we as students choose to do with the opportunity is our job. If the instructor places such a high priority on students coming to class, then she should make it a point to make sure we actually are getting what we need out of the time. If a student decides to not come to class on a regular basis, they're potentially shooting themselves in the foot, and they alone would be to blame for it. It IS college, after all.

End rant.

Anyways, the thing with nutrition. It seems the more research that scientists do on food and how it affects our bodies, the more it just seems like a waste of time. The majority of the newest and best information has simply upheld what it seems that we already know: that natural food is better for you than processed, and everything in moderation is the best way to go about a diet. Our bodies really do know what's good for them, if we actually listen to them.

This reemergence of 'natural' food has been somewhat of a trendy issue in recent years, thanks to films like Super Size Me and Food, Inc. In fact, author Michael Pollan's entire philosophy about nutrition can be summed up as this: Eat food (meaning not lots of high-fructose corn syrup and other engineered creations), not too much (everything in moderation), and mostly plants (meat is great, but a plant-based diet is much better for you)...

A pastor friend of mine would call that a B.F.O.: a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. Can it really be just that simple? I think so. Somewhere deep down, our bodies know what we need, even if we don't consciously follow those leadings.

More on this later.

On melody and life.

There is power in a melody. A song that could be entirely uninteresting suddenly comes alive, imbued with sparks of life through a series of notes that, when strung together in some mystical way, makes it unforgettable.

As I said previously, the power of a melody to take a simple structure of chords to where it becomes potent cannot be overemphasized. Think about some of your favorite songs. I'll step out on a limb here and venture that melody has a lot to do with why those songs have that much power for you. For example, John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change": for the majority of the song, the chords are exactly the same, repeated over and over. It's that melody that the chimes play that pulls the whole thing together, giving it that vintage groove. Love it.

Or, to put on my worship leader hat, a lot of worship songs can be pretty flat-out boring. This is a whole different playing field, because worship is much more about connecting with God than about a show, but the music itself plays an integral part of worship. It's hard to worship when the songs are just blah, with each one sounding no different than the one before.

One of the worship bands I have a great deal of respect for is Hillsong United. The amount of worship that Hillsong Church has put out, particularly the last 5-6 years, is staggering. Granted, some of their songs can start to sound formulaic (the "Hillsong United sound") but their guitarists and vocalists have this great ability to come up with melodies that are distinct enough where you can immediately tell what song they're playing. The problem with these songs is that they're performed with a massive band - think 3 electrics, 4 acoustics, countless vocalists - and some worship bands don't have the horses for the job. When the melodies get lost, it can be hard to distinguish between songs, or even a verse and a chorus of a song.

Melodies can be the hardest thing in the world to come up with. There are plenty of musicians out there who are incredibly talented at their instrument, but will always flounder at the bottom until they find their melodies. I know this far more than I would like, as it's left me feeling completely paralyzed in my music. But, like any type of writing, if you keep at it often enough and long enough, things will start to form themselves. There may be hundreds of songs that need to be played in order to find just a piece of a beautiful melody, but it's worth it. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that playing it safe all the time will eventually kill your soul.

As a musician, I've experienced my share of ordinary, generic, safe music; I've listened to it, and I've made a lot of it. I've had enough of it to last a lifetime, and like an energy drink binge on an empty stomach, it's left a gnawing hunger for something more substantial. That's not a defense of what some may see as pretentious taste. Great music can appear in the most unlikely of places.

When I was hanging out at a friend's cabin one fall weekend in sophomore year of high school, bored from all the free time to do whatever we wanted, we decided to look through the VHS tapes in the cupboard below the 13" color TV, and found a copy of Runaway Bride, with Julia Roberts. 99% of the movie was entirely forgettable, but the first 2 minutes blew me out of the water.

"I have climbed highest mountains,

I have run through the fields,

Only to be with you,

Only to be with you.

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..." When I heard that song, and that rhythmic guitar sound as Julia Roberts rode across the field on that horse, I knew I had to watch through the end of the credits to the soundtrack, a practice I now associate with really good movies. It was a band called U2, and I'd never heard the name before. Now, of course, anybody who knows me at all is aware how I feel - "I'm in love, I'm in love, and I don't care who knows it!!!", to quote Will Ferrell in Elf.

Everyone has a song, a melody, that inexplicably does 'it' for them every single time they hear it. For me, it's always been "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Or "Where the Streets Have No Name." No, actually, pretty much all of The Joshua Tree album. Or their whole catalog. You get the idea. The reason why U2 is the longest-lasting band on the planet is because of each member's innate grasp of melody. And when a band knows those melodies, really feels them, sometimes you can feel it too, and join in.

Melody and the nature of all things.

When you talk about melody, you might as well be talking about life itself, which may lead you to believe that I might be biting off more than I can chew. However, I'll attempt to actually take this someplace meaningful. At life's most basic level - DNA and the like - all we find are structures. Patterns of repeating code. Some are simple, some are elaborate and complex.

In the same way, this is how a song begins. You have twelve notes to pick from on a chromatic scale. Those notes combine in different intervals to form chords. Depending on the song, chords in the same key will be used to form a progression. This is the structure upon which a song is built. When you break down the chords into their individual parts, you'll find patterns of 'code' that repeat no matter what key the song is in. But when you have this structure, you have only gotten started.

Just as our genes and DNA don't actually make us alive, a song is nothing without its melody.

To be (legitimately) continued tomorrow.

Melody, part one.

This came out of a conversation that my brother Jordan and I were having earlier this afternoon. Jordan is a musician; he plays at church once in a while, and in a band with a bunch of other really talented guys.

So recently, Jordan's been getting pretty good at the guitar, as well as songwriting. He expressed a desire to write more complex songs, that he's "growing tired of the same four chords." My challenge to Jordan was to see beyond just those guitar chords and instead see a framework that can be built upon.

When I was about 15, I watched this movie Amadeus, a film based on the play of the same name. The film revolves around two classical composers: Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Most people know the first name, but few are familiar with the second. The movie starts with an elderly Salieri in an insane asylum, telling a priest who he is. He plays a couple of his compositions, but the priest doesn't recognize them. He then starts playing a piece by Mozart, which the priest immediately recognizes and remarks on its beauty. Salieri laughs bitterly, for once again Mozart's true genius is shown while he remains unremarkable - "the patron saint of mediocrity," as he calls himself at the end of the movie.

There's no doubt that Salieri was an intelligent musician, with a talent for piano. But what was the difference between these two composers, the thing that elevated Mozart to greatness?

Melody.

In my mind, the melody of a song is the most crucial part. Ultimately, it's the thing that sets the piece apart from everything else that's out there. A strong melody brings everything else in the song together; it unifies all the different parts and somehow makes them better in the process.

Thankful.

I ran across an old box of letters

While I was bagging up some clothes for Goodwill.

And you know I had to laugh, that the same old struggles

That plagued me then are plaguing me still.

-Derek Webb, "Thankful"

After thinking a bit about what I wrote a couple days ago, I realized again that all the frustrations and problems I deal with are not from me having been dealt a bad hand, or being wronged by somebody else. They're rooted deep within me. Sounds weird and a bit melodramatic, but I know it's the truth.

There's a translation of the Bible written by Eugene Peterson, where he set out to put the Bible into everyday language. I don't enjoy reading all the time in this version, mostly because the language can feel like the longest sermon ever written. However, it offers a fresh and often intriguing look at the Scriptures. In the book of Galatians, Paul is writing about freedom, and encouraging the church he's writing to to live differently. If they believe that Christ has set them free by dying on the cross, then it should show up in how they act towards one another. Mind-blowing, I know. However, when looking at this particular chapter, it stuck out to me how the things that I wrestle with are very much the stuff that Paul is cautioning this church against - the earmarks of selfishness.

For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

That's the kind of stuff these roots in me lead to. The ugliness of what that looks like above the surface is frightening. As I look at the list of all those things that are so familiar, I know that Paul is right when he said that being really free and being selfish are complete opposites. By wanting my own way and trying to do the things that will benefit me most, I'm really only shooting myself in the foot.

So, that's my condition. It's our condition, actually. That's what we're naturally born into. Pretty messed up, if you ask me. Paul isn't done, though - there's a huge contrast following that verse:

But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.

The chorus from that song at the beginning of this post is fairly simple, but it offers a profound truth to us in our current situation: "So I am thankful that I'm incapable of doing any good on my own." When I try to work my way out of this state I'm in, it helps to remember that no matter how hard I try, it's no use; solutions that come from me and my own will are completely useless to fix this mess of myself. Furthermore, by trying to always put myself in competition with others, I'm not acknowledging my own originality - the spark of the divine in me. What I'm essentially doing in my selfish ways is making a mockery of what God has put in me for a good reason.

When I was in fifth grade, my parents had taken me to see a child psychologist, because I had a hard time connecting with my peers; that's another thing I've taken with me throughout life thus far. His name was Bill, and he was a pretty good guy from what I remember. Everyone should be so lucky as to have an environment like a psychologist's office: warm, comfortable, with someone who provides you an open environment to talk about whatever you want, and, most importantly, a pretty decent selection of puzzles and toys. Anyway, during one of our sessions, Bill was asking me about the way I looked at life, and I don't exactly remember what I said, but he asked me, "and don't you think that you might be selfish?" I started to cry, not because I was hurt, but because he was right on. It was the type of hurt like he had just ripped off a fake mustache I'd stuck on with spirit gum, exposing me for what I really was. I had never seen myself as being selfish up until that point, but the writing was evidently on the wall.

I think when you go through the normal decision-making process, your initial gut reaction is to choose the selfish way.However, when you look at the end results between selfishness and living in freedom, God's way, it should completely change the way you operate on a daily basis. We don't know from the Bible what actually happened to the church in Galatians after Paul laid it all down for them, but I'm willing to bet they thought much differently once this was made clear for them. My hope is that this realization in my life will bring about that same type of change Paul talks about.

Foodlove

This week has been a killer. I've been up at 5:15 for work every day, something that I haven't done in at least two years. Even now, looking at the clock knowing that I'll get five hours at best again is making me wish for a different situation. That might not even make a difference, though; I haven't slept well in some time. No idea why... maybe there's something I'm needing to do, like in the Bible where if God wants to get ahold of a guy, He doesn't let up until He's got his full attention. I'm hoping I can listen up soon, if that's the case - I could use the shuteye.

The previous post wrapped up earlier than expected on account of two things. First, extricating complete thoughts on the subject was proving to be more difficult than usual; again, probably the sleep thing. Second, the crazy schedule of both Sarah and I being back at our respective schools has meant that our time together is way diminished. We've seen each other for about 3-4 hours a day the past week, and I needed to go hang out with my girl.

Tonight was a bit better. Sarah and I headed down to Grand Avenue to pick up my tux for the wedding this Saturday (!). Since we were down there later on and neither of us had eaten, we ate at Punch Pizza (I feel like their name warrants an exclamation point in there, or even two: Punch! Pizza!), where the only parking spot in the lot was being taken at that moment by former Senator - and probably the best hope the Republican Party has for the gubernatorial bid - Norm Coleman. He had his "I'm just here for a pizza, like you" face on, so that was that.

It was my first time eating there, and only my second time ever eating authentic wood-fired oven pizza, but it could easily become one of my most favorite things to eat in the world. There's something so primal about the wood oven, and the simplicity of the pizza: mine was the Margherita, which to them is just hand-crushed tomatoes, mozzarella (flown in from Naples the day after it's made - how sweet is that?!) and fresh basil. There was absolutely nothing left on the plate. If it's something extraneous that doesn't add to the meal, I'll try it, but generally will leave it at that. Pizza crusts are a perfect example; they're ordinarily nothing special. However, the super-crispy Neapolitan crust had this perfect balance between the crackly, charred outside and the soft doughy inside... like a baguette, only even better. It takes a lot to make this guy eat his pizza crusts, but I had no trouble doing so this time around... a sincere compliment of the highest order. Punch Pizza, I'll see you again soon.

I had originally planned to delve much deeper into what I had begun yesterday, but once again time goes way too fast, and the morning comes way too early. It'll still be rolling around up in my head tomorrow, most likely.

Playing catch up

I'm young for my age, and it will always be this way.

What this means, literally: I was born in late July of 1984. A good year for the Mac, a not-so-good year for Winston Smith. However, since the 'rents thought I was ready for school, I started with the class of 2002. This meant that while everybody else was turning 18 during senior year, I had to wait until the summer after to do all the cool things everybody else was doing once they hit that magical age. Actually, I still have no idea what I missed out on, but that's beside the point. It probably doesn't matter.

What this means, figuratively: I have this chip on my shoulder from feeling young and inexperienced, always trying to catch up. This has been a huge influence on the near-entirety of my development as a person. Most of it has been a subconscious drive, although there are times when I'm very much aware of it. It is the persistent feeling that in all areas of my life, I've come to the table incredibly unprepared - like, on a colossal, "how could you have MISSED this?!" scale. I don't know if the ADD thing caused me to miss some crucial bit of information that would have gotten me set up to function better, or what. Sounds like third grade stuff.

I hate the way it makes me feel, and what it does to my relationships with other people - always viewing others as competitors, trying to get to this point just up the road that somehow never comes any closer.

At some point, I'd like to stop feeling this way, if it's possible.

Evolution of evaluation.

It has been said that "art does not live in a vacuum," meaning that one cannot just throw oneself headlong into simply 'making art', whatever that looks like... it must be balanced out with other pursuits that will, in turn, inspire and challenge the artist to create more.

My sister Christa and her fiancée James are getting married this weekend, and they had the bachelor/bachelorette parties this past weekend. I have the privilege of being in the wedding, so I was out with the dudes Sunday night. One of James' and my mutual friends in attendance was a guy by the name of Phil Nelson. Phil was the worship leader at my home church when I was in high school, and a couple years back we had a band together where we would perform at youth camps for retreats and the like. Since then, Phil's been the lead guy at the church plant Christa and James attend, so we're in different spheres.

So, Phil and I were out on the deck at Brit's Pub in Minneapolis and Phil wonders when we'd get a chance to play together again, and I consider the same thing.

"To be honest, I haven't really done as much with music as of late," I confess, "what with the getting married thing and school being really crazy." "That's ok," Phil says, in his usual mellow way, "all that stuff is good - it's healthy, if it builds up what you do with your worship leading."

That got to the core of it. For some time, I have been wrestling with a series of changes in my commitments. God remains first on the list, but getting married means that Sarah has shot right up several places to a close second. Then there is the journey that school has brought me on, figuring out who I'm becoming in light of all the new things I'm learning. On top of that, my voice has been giving me trouble recently; definitely not a confidence booster. There are several other factors as well, but those three have been the biggest. These have left me wondering where my calling as a worship leader fits. Was it "just for a season," as is often said , or is there a much bigger purpose? Since I've got a vague idea of the scale difference between God and myself, I'm inclined to believe the latter of those two options. However, I have no real idea what I'm meant to do with it now. Thankfully, I'm not alone in this.

Sarah played tennis all through middle school and high school, and eventually became captain of the team. She would probably have played all through college and would most likely still be coaching at the middle school where she teaches, if it weren't for her wrist getting fairly messed up. That put an end to her aspirations of doing more with tennis. We were talking about this a bit yesterday, on the eve of things getting insanely crazy again during the school year, and God's will came up. Was it God's divine will that my wife's talent for playing tennis be all for naught, leaving her with only a bum wrist, fond memories and a full letter jacket to show for it?

Or, was He about something so much bigger in her life than just her excelling at a sport? By her playing tennis, she learned quite a bit more in other areas of life, as I'm sure other athletes can attest to this fact as well. Her leadership and work ethic are just two of the things she learned that she puts to use every day as a teacher.

When you think about that, it makes a lot of sense. God desires our obedience, no matter what. We have what we think is a clear cut view of how all the pieces of our lives fit together, but we only see things from a very limited plane, and it turns out those pieces are way more multi-dimensional than we had originally thought. When we give those pieces over, particularly the pieces we're particularly fond of keeping protected, things will look quite different than we would like, but ultimately much better off.

The way we evaluate our lives needs to evolve. When big changes come, instead of worrying about 'losing' what we had, we should be led to acknowledge God's sovereignty and that He always has something much better cookin' up.

Digging.

What is necessary in order to find purpose? Only this: the acknowledgement that nothing good can come from one's own self, as it stands. This goes against what we are typically taught, that if we dig deep enough inside, our picks and shovels will strike something hard and, through careful extraction, the artifact will be revealed. Not so; this presupposes that there is anything to be found there in the first place. But when the dig is abandoned, that is a step in the right direction.

Each person must arrive separately at the point of total surrender. It is not a journey that can be taken together. Most often, what can be viewed as personal security is but a different form of solitary confinement. While these walls are, in essence, a part of our existence since birth, the choice is ours as to what to do with them. Each of us is faced with this same choice. To find oneself is to dismantle the walls between us and the rest of the world, allowing light to flood in to every single part of our small cell. This is not a once-and-done task; no, this is what is required for us every time we wish to have a real, human interaction or speak honestly and truly.

There are a thousand things that will present themselves to you as immediate and necessary the moment you set out to accomplish anything worthwhile such as this. Your mind begins its endless parade of distractions: what is in the news, friends who need to be called, idle chores that really should be attended to... all very captivating. Before you know it, the hour is late and the day is coming to a close, unfulfilled.

So it goes with a life. Deep down, that is one's worst fear, that at the close of the final day we will be found still voiceless, with life grasped for but still not yet found.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

-Seamus Heaney

2:45 a.m. (nothing good is easy)

It is the false self that is so alluring, yet ultimately destructive. The false self is the one convincing us to go the safe route, to do or say what somebody else successful has done or said that served them well, in hopes that we will meet with the same success. Indeed, it is entirely possible we will have some luck in our strivings to become who we are not. It is a sham, simply bad advertising we offer to the world in hopes of validation.

In actuality, this pursuit of something temporary will ultimately drive us farther away from our ultimate goal. It may last a little while, but once we possess it, we find that this fake success has a very short half-life. This thing we look to for a boost, a 'leg up', does exactly the opposite. Hopefully we realize our futile strivings, abandon this persona, and set about in search for who it is we really are called to be. This is a process that will take much time, and much effort - indeed, it will demand everything of us - but when that crossing is completed, we then possess something of infinite value: self-knowledge.

Solving myself

When you get married, it helps to marry a person who possesses many of the qualities you do not. When you look at it in the grand scheme of things, it makes a lot of sense. It is a really beautiful design - there is a person in your life that is truly your ‘other half’ and you balance each other out, allowing for each others’ weaknesses because usually they are your strengths.

It also drives you crazy, because, conversely, there also are the things at which they will always be naturally far better than you. These are often things that will be publicly exposed so everyone who knows the two of you is aware of what’s going on. Just God, doing His thing to keep you humble.

An example of this occurred while getting ready for this weekend. When getting ready for a camping trip, I’ll usually need to make a comprehensive list of everything that I need, and even then there’s a good chance that I’ll forget something inconsequential like the tent, or forks. I hate lists, or at least the process of making one. However, this time I didn’t even take the time to make a list. Thankfully, we got everything we needed for the weekend... or so I thought.

One of my favorite parts of camping is getting to cook outdoors. I’m not at the point yet where I can effortlessly whip up a soufflé using a rustic cast-iron skillet over a campfire, but I can do pretty well using my Coleman 2-burner camp stove. Breakfasts are my specialty - eggs, bacon, chocolate chip pancakes, et cetera (hey, if I’m not backpacking, we do it up right!). So we had the stove packed up with all the necessary utensils, and worked the All-Star Breakfast into the daily meal plan. My father-in-law woke me up this morning asking if we could get that stove set up - the guys were ready for getting their eat on. I start to pull things out of the trunk of the car, and that’s when I realized that we were sunk. You see, my camp stove usually has this little piece of metal attached to the back that connects the propane canister to the burners. This oh-so-useful part was currently lying in a box of other camping equipment down in the basement, where I didn’t even think of looking when packing up. Thankfully, we punted by building a slow fire that actually turned out pretty dang good pancakes after about 3 hours.

I am not a born list-maker.

Sarah, however, could do it in her sleep - she enjoys making lists because the crossing-off is so satisfying to her. What’s more, it’s easy for her because she’s just wired that way, methodically, systematically going through the different categories in her mind and organizing as she goes along. Methodical and systematic are two of the last words people would ever use to describe me. There are times when I’m really glad when my brain works the way it does, but there are also plenty of times when I feel so handicapped. You see, I organize externally the way I do internally, which is to say there are about 500 things going on all at once, and I have no idea how to sort them out. Ah, life as an ADD sufferer.

Without a doubt, my lack of ability to organize was my downfall in school. In third grade, I had an assignment to do on Minnesota, using various landmarks to show what I’d learned about our great state. We’d had a couple weeks to work on it at home; it was due the next morning, and, of course, I had nothing to show. In tears, I begged my dad to do it for me, and like all good dads, he refused. I stayed up as late as I possibly could, and finally got it done sometime before midnight. Not my best work, to say the least. Something like that makes an impact on my 9-year-old self, and I vow never to let that happen again.

Fast forward to junior year of high school: it’s my Honors English class, the beginning of 2nd quarter. My teacher, Mz. Carlson (“it wasn’t our business whether she was Miss or Mrs.”) hands out the sheet detailing our anthology project, a huge book that was to be handed in the week before Christmas break. This was about late October.

It’s December 17th. At 5:30 a.m. Guess where I am. If you said the local Kinko’s with my friend Dave, getting the binding put on our book, our other friends having gone home to sleep hours ago, you’re right on. Again, I swear vehemently that this will be the last time I let something like this happen.

You get the picture.

Like I said, I do think that it’s pretty sweet that Sarah and I balance each other out the way we do. When she’s really stressed about things, going over those lists in her head and concluding that there’s no possible way she can get everything done on time, I’m the voice of reason, calming her down and taking her mind off all the minutiae. Sometimes, though, it feels like God looked down at me like I was Adam, saying “It is not good for man to be alone, because I’m pretty sure this guy lacks the essential ability to manage on his own.”

No man is an island, but sometimes couldn’t I at least be a peninsula covered mostly by water?

How does this continue to occur? Am I missing something, or is it truly just the way I’m doomed to function in life, ‘letting it happen to me’, if you will?

Instead of paying attention to my strengths, I continue to want what I don’t have, wanting others’ abilities to do this or that instead of being thankful for my own gifts that have been given to me for a reason. Maybe that idea of ‘letting things happen’ to me is key to figuring this out. When I’m aware that there are these weaknesses, I should be factoring those into how I respond to situations. Letting something happen denotes passivity, not activity.

I don’t know how this one resolves, actually, because I’m still in it figuring this out. What would life look like if I were actually better at doing this? Come to think of it, how does my view of self compare to the way God sees me?