Category Archives: Thoughts

Found

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I found this written down, and I’d love to hear what you guys think it’s about.

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I catch myself looking for you. I don’t mean to, but I find myself looking in the faces of the people on the street, in crowds at the supermarket, in the car next me on my drive home just to get a glimpse of your face. I expect to see you on the other side of Wal-Mart, when I stand in that one spot that you can see from one side of the store to the other.

I know I’m not supposed to look for you. I know you’re not going to be there and it’s breaks me each time I think I do see you. It’s not you, it’s never you. I don’t know why I look. I don’t know why I open myself to such pain. It’s stupid. I know better. I’m not sure I’d even recognize you if I even saw you; your face is a faded memory, almost an ethereal dream that I keep trying to force in this harshly lit life.

You’re my world. You’re my life. I feel like half a man without you here by my side. Everyday seems like a shell of itself. Even these phrases seem cliché and powerless. They don’t convey the feeling or the longing or anything.

Nothing is the same without you. Watching a movie isn’t the same without you there, to snuggle, to laugh with. Dinner is such a lonely time. There’s no one to talk to, to discuss the deeper things of life, to share an anecdote with. Just me alone with my food. There’s one plate. One glass. One fork and one knife. Each one taken from its kind and used, alone. Then discarded dirty. It’s like even my dishes recognized this loneliness, this disparity of eating by yourself.

But I press on. It’s what you would want. To be strong. To live my life and be happy. I hold this tiny, flicking flame against this darkness and against despair, knowing that one day we will be together.

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So what was the author saying? Who was he saying it to? How did it make you feel? Why does this seem like an english prompt?

The “bug”

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So Friday night and Saturday I went hunting. I think I might have caught the bug. The only think that stopped me from going to the store and buying a compound bow and its ilk was the amount (or lack of) sleep I got the night before.

This morning I woke up and was thinking about it still. Then I remembered the email that I am supposed to be getting later this month, and the one in February; the emails that will start my first foray into bike racing.

Biking and hunting. Both activities are on my goals list and they sound like they would be compatible, but my resources are not well developed enough to support both of those “hobbies”.

Money:
Let’s be truthful – those things could be pricy. Racing means that my bike needs to be maintained better (spare parts, things breaking), I need to spend money on nutrition (energy food isn’t cheap… or tasty), and I will have to travel to the majority of my races (extra gas money, hotels, food on the road). And hunting? I own a hunting license and that’s about it. I will need a bow (and arrows), some hunting clothes, knifes, and some targets to practice on. And practicing! That leads me to my next point: time.

Time:
TIME! I’m yet to be a multi-millionaire with a butt-load of passive income, so I have to do what everyone else does and work a wonderful, amazing 40-hour a week job. That’s 40 hours out of a the 5 day work week that I can’t put towards either of these “hobbies”. Subtract another 40 for sleeping, another 10 for eating and showering and all that jazz, I’m left with only 20 hours during a 5 day week to put into practicing. Now while I’m not starting at zero with my skill in either of these “hobbies” (I know how to ride a bike and shoot a bow), I’m not at the level where I could “compete” with other riders or hit a target at more than 15 yards.

So I have either 20 hours to put into shooting arrows into a bale of hay or 20 hours to spend working out and riding. Not to mention all the other things I need/like to do during the week: Church, hanging out with friends, other projects that I’m working on.

And the weekends! If I have a race, that means that weekend I can’t go hunting. And if I have them back to back, that means that I might not get to hunt, or not get to race.

So. To sum it all up, I’m going to focus on bike racing. I know I have a habit of jumping from one activity to another, which ever one holds my interest at the moment, and I kind of wish that I didn’t. Bike racing called dibs by being what I was excited for last month, and something I’ve already focused on and I just can’t “drop it” cause something newer came along.

Plus, I hunting seasons over soon. And there’s always next year.

Truth and Belief

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I read a blog today from a husband of friend. It was about truth and belief. Here’s a link.

His post made me think. And I’m not writing this as a rebuttal or to pick a fight, it just made me think.

He made the point that truth is truth no matter what you believe. That I agree with. You can’t float away if you stop believing in gravity. And just because you believe in something doesn’t make it true. Believing in Santa Claus doesn’t mean that a fat man come down your chimney every Christmas.

With his post (Matthew, his name is Matthew) , Matthew started me thinking how belief and truth are actually quite related and how important belief is in affecting reality. (I’m departing his context and moving somewhere new).

Belief puts truth into action. It makes truth solid. It can’t change the truth, but it is how you interface with the truth.

Examples: The truth of gravity. If you don’t believe in gravity, you will be living your life in such a way that shows it. Say you’re an engineer and you have to design some sort of machinery. And in that machinery there are parts that need to move up and down. If you did not believe in gravity, you would not only build the machine to push the part up, but you’d have to build the machine to also pull the part back down. You can’t just leave the downward motion to gravity, cause well, it’s been flaky and unreliable. So because of your belief, you suffer (with extra works and costs).

Or take Santa Claus. Your belief in a benevolent entity that really just wants to bring you presents validates you to revel in the fact that something good is coming your way, and it enables you to treat your family well and put in the effort to be on your best behavior. Your belief benefits you and those around you. Your beliefs change your reality (being good = more presents, being bad = less presents) despite the lack of truth backing it.

So, then to bring this back home, how are your beliefs affecting your reality?

My back hurts. That’s my reality. A hardtail mountain bike on rocky trails don’t mesh well with my lower back. Now there are two parts to my reality equation: the truth and my belief.

The truth is I have a God who loves me, and not only can He heal my back, that He WANTS to heal my back.

So why didn’t I get prayer for it earlier tonight when I was with people who know the same truth?

I guess all I’m left with is this: I don’t believe it.

Sounds horrible, I know. I could break it down further and say that I do believe that God wants to heal, but it’s only a little pain and I can deal with it – but that opens me up to things like “I deserve to be hurting” and “God’s too big and important to care about me” which are whole other topics that need to be discussed.

Bottom line is this: belief defines which truths you create your reality from, and which ones you ignore.

Five or six little birdies

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At church today, the kids were all excited about some swallows. A pair of swallows made a nest with three little chicks, cute as can be, just outside the door where everyone can see them. Every minute or two, a parent would come swooping in like a bullet, would hover for a second, depositing food into the chirping mouths of its offspring before rocketing back out for more. It was quite entertaining and a treat to see.

When I was in my car driving away, I started to hear some funny noises. I stopped at the end of the driveway and looked in my back seat, and what do I find, but some other type of bird in my car. I’ve never had a bird trapped in my car before. I don’t know what it was doing there, the windows weren’t cracked much, and it was probably very warm from being parked in the sun all morning. So I opened all the windows and doors and chased it out.

But that got me thinking. God likes talking. He’s always talking. And sometimes he talking in unusual circumstances and coincidences.

So birds, eh?

And just writing this down, I’m remembering that the passage that we read in church today mentioned birds briefly.

So here I am. God, I hear you speaking, I just am trying to figure out what you’re saying.