Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  –T. S. Eliot

One of the reasons I have nearly abandoned blogging is an unshakable feeling that no matter how articulate or understanding I am, in reality, nothing is going to change because of what I say or do.

Another way of saying this is a gut feeling that no matter who I vote for in the upcoming election of 2012, life will go on much as it has for the past decade or so.

I am of the firm belief that no politician who tells the people the truth can be elected in the United States of America. And certainly it would be political suicide to explain to the American people what it is really going to take to get the country out of the debt it has allowed itself to get into.

We are in a world of hurt and there is no realistic plan by either the republicans or democrats to get us out of the hole that we are in. The only plan I see is to tell the people what they want to hear and then at the end of your four year term tell them you need four more years to fix what the other party kept you from doing the first term. Your hope being that gas prices are low and that unemployment figures are only single digit.

I guess what I am trying to say is that this perception of mine has left me wondering if anything I do outside of my friends and family unit has any real lasting effect.

A friend of mine has often said in conversation over the past several years that people don’t change: God changes people. This with the implication that change does not necessarily happen just by living out our daily lives but in relation to our allowing God to access the areas within us that need modification and re-creation.

We have to really desire it.

I juxtapose this with the old saying that: Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

In my reality, the day to day and hour to hour stuff, there is more thought-life going on than I feel I have the capacity to unleash. Combine this with the lack of patience to gather these thoughts into cohesive threads and you have one frustrated cowboy.

For thirty years I attended church every Sunday with the understanding that I was a part of something bigger than myself only to be eventually wounded by the very people I thought I was a part of. Even this simple thought opens up more neural pathways that need to be explored before I (or you) can fully understand what I am really trying to say.

I still believe in the concept of the church or more appropriately the “body of Christ”. I am however wary of what people and denominations have done with this. Church buildings liberally scattered over the landscape of America that since Row vs. Wade has seen 55,519,520 (as of 7:04 pm, 10/7/2012) innocent lives lost to abortion. According to one internet data bank, in 2010, more than four in ten births (41 percent) were to unmarried women.

The truth of the gospel hasn’t changed, we have. We have lost our saltiness and our light as we build bigger and bigger buildings while the nation seems to be between a rock and a hard place spiritually, economically and politically. And thus my angst.

“Angst, often confused with anxiety, is a transcendent emotion in that it combines the unbearable anguish of life with the hopes of overcoming this seemingly impossible situation. Without the important element of hope, then the emotion is anxiety, not angst. Angst denotes the constant struggle one has with the burdens of life that weighs on the dispossessed and not knowing when the salvation will appear.” –Urban Dictionary

Gotta love the internet when it comes to finding definitions.

But we are an unusual people, humankind.

I was asked at lunch today what I was living for and after a brief pause said my wife, my family and of course my grandchildren.

My one desire is to spend my time with them and not waste whatever is left of my life on things that don’t really matter. Of course I have not yet reached perfection and am still prone to slightly disengage for the rest of the evening when the clock strikes five o’clock.

Having said that or this, my hope is that I am a little farther along the path of understanding why I feel the way I do and well on my way to my next “long ride”.