Just a question
Are you in control of your life or is your life controlling you?It’s late. The lights are low and i am trapped within the walls of my mind, having just read a buddies blog. Reading how he has struck out on a mission with the Peace Corp, a dream I too shared not so long ago. And it brings me into this place where i question the realities of life, consumerism, purpose. As i read his posts one after the next it reminded me of selling everything I owned as i struck out on a spiritual journey throughout Australia a few years ago. In the very same way it brings me back to the 1st century church and has me thinking about the apostles and how things we so different from the world we now know.
He (the other guy) is volunteering throughout Africa’s costal towns and it just makes me feel that, although scared, he is living something right; that he is living a better story as Donald Miller would put it. Not that i am comparing lives, I’m not. But it does make me take pause and think what if there is something we’re to be accomplishing in the here and now, something large that we are not to miss, yet we’re not sure what that thing is. And the business of the lines on the roads and city lights make us lose track of searching for that thing we don’t yet know we are missing.
“You can hardly hurt a Saint”
However, i am not one…
I never much liked Mike Tyson. Don’t get me wrong he was a killer in the ring but i never much cared for him as a person. That was until I caught a clip of him on CNN being interviewed by Opera. In the interview he reveals much about him self, his struggles as a pro boxer, but more so as a human in a real world.
As a child Tyson suffered from being bullied, and from this he developed low self esteem which led him to drug abuse and a determination to never let himself be hurt again. His persona developed and he was determined to protect himself in all avenue of life. What I like so much about watching this interview was that here was a man who had lost everything, his money, career, house and two marriages and was jailed for 3 years.
And being all of this, of being stripped of all he was, he was forced to face himself. “Tyson” is a movie that Sony released about his life and experiences. But What really catches my attention is how I identified with him, with his struggles and putting up a defense. In some ways my life was not all that different a story from his. Having experienced similiar abuses as a child I too had put up a defense, a coping mechanism to help yourself feel protected, so that no one will hurt you again. The problem with this is that often times it makes a person more sensitive to life. All in all, the interview was great, if you get a chance to check it out, do.
And for me not liking Tyson as a person, well I have to say that this has changed because i can see the defense he’d put around himself and see the humanity behind that very defense. And this make me like him all the more.
Have you ever walked a path so long that you forget where it is you were walking too? I think of Hansel and Gretel leaving behind breadcrumbs to find their way back home, forgetting just how temporal they were. I think this is how life can be at times, we forget just what it is that makes the journey worth remembering. We lose our way home.
However in story it is just at that moment, when it looks like the children are doomed in the gingerbread house that we remember why it is that finding our way back home, our way out of the mess we find our selves in, is so important. Light breaks at the windows, a foreshadow that the story has changed and that hope of finding home is once again possible.
The thing about life is, is that there are many paths we find our selves on, many places we walk, things we see. But what makes a difference in story as in life is there is often a climactic happening, a struggle which leads to a resolution of story. The protagonists find hope when all seems lost. read more…
Today in the shower I started thinking about light, how physicist can’t really explain light and how many great minds have postulated theories about it’s existence, but mostly, they are about how light reacts, reflects, travels and refracts. Over coffee I was thinking about how light reflecting off the moon travels to earth at a speed of about 299,796,000 m/s it takes about 1.2 seconds to reach earth.
I started thinking of how God describes Himself as light and how in nature we see a natural order of things and how the presence of light opposed to its absence (darkness) is a metaphor between good and evil. It is amazing to think about things like this, how without light and heat from the sun we would be a planet of popsicles; frozen in darkness.
Do you believe there are metaphors in the natural world?
I was recently struck with on odd realization when I heard someone mention they needed to work for happiness, On the TV that is. And while I listened and engaged in this listening of the conversation the other party involved in the TV conversation said that this is a contradiction of terms, this “Working To Be Happy”. And I wondered about this.
Questioning the validity of the point, must we work to be happy, in relationships, in life, in our careers, is this a truth, that we contradict the very meaning of happiness by engaging in things that perhaps are not worth engaging in? Must we try to influence ourselves and others around us as to attempt a little joy? And this becomes the work. I further questioned the value of having to work at something so hard, a relationship, a job, a goal. Indeed, we must work hard in all things to get the best results, but what I am questioning here is if the end result we are wishing for is happiness, shouldn’t it come naturally and with joy, as to not have to label it as “working to be happy”.
And at what point do those things that require us to “work to be happy” become worth pursuing and overbear us to give up?
Sometimes it feels like i am a tightrope walker, in a circus,
with hundreds of people looking on from the crowd. Watching to see if i will fall... 
