Looking For The Long Ride

Sunday seems to be one of those new times for me to be creative. I guess this is because Sandi and I don’t attend a regular morning church anymore—thus allowing us time to sit around, drink coffee and process the week, month year, etc. All of sudden, after all those years of 10 o’clock church, we now go at 5 pm. Which is to say this is why I can sit at the computer Sunday morning and allow what needs to come out the freedom to do so.

This morning’s word is “simplify”.

Dictionary.com defines simplify as: to make less complex or complicated; make plainer or easier: “this move will simplify our lives”. The opposite of simplify is complicate.

That’s the skeleton—now I will flesh it out.

What got me here is the fact that we all have a tendancy to accumulate stuff—good stuff—pretty stuff—useful stuff—but stuff nonetheless. The problem with stuff is after it is replaced by other stuff, we have to have a place to keep our old stuff. And the plain fact is that our houses were designed to accomodate only so much stuff—they are not elastic and therefore a limit will be reached where there is too much stuff to fit. A crowded feeling then comes on—a feeling you can’t shake until you get rid of some of the stuff that is peeking out of every available space.

In our house, it is my wife that every so often gets the urge to simplify—it is a good urge, a Godly urge—but one that we are not always on the same page with. The fact is, I have more stuff that her and once she puts her stuff in order, then it is left for me to follow suit and do the same. I have to admit that I have a much harder time with the process than she does.

Point in fact: I am listening to a cassette tape right now that I probably found in an old Big Lots or Roses 15 years ago. I used to always hit the bargain music bins wherever I found myself—looking for musical treasures of some sort. First it was bargin LP’s when tapes became popular—then it was 99 cent bargin tapes when CD’s became the big thing in music delivery. And I found some beauts. As a result, I have hundred’s of cassete tapes of good music that I never listen to anymore.

As I was cleaning up yesterday, I found several that were dusty and perhaps had only been played two or threes times at the most when they were new. And now they are taking up space and I am conflicted as to what to do with them. Many have good memories: Christian artists that never made the big time and so thier stuff never was released on CD. Jazz stuff that only a few collectors would ever appreciate—and lots of wierd stuff that at 59 cents seemed like a realy deal at the time I found them.

And it is not just the tapes that I am dealing with—it’s the old magazines that had good articles or sermon notes that I will probably never read again but that peak my interest when I pull them out of the boxes where they have been stored all these years. I have copies of old e-mails that detailed our journey through many trials and tribulations. I’ve even got the bible on tape in several different translations. And let’s not even get started on the old computer programs and hardware that is slowly being disposed of when I finally come to the realization that what had value 6 months ago, is now dated technolgy that wouldn’t even be welcomed in a third world country anymore.

I am doing better—it just takes time to let it all soak in. I have several piles of “junk” to dispose of and boxes waiting for more as that determination is made. I really don’t want to live in the past: it was a good place to visit along the way but there is more to see up ahead of me. And the ride really is so much easier without all the baggage. E-Bay here I come. How about you?

Enjoy the day.

I started to write something the other evening and have not had the full unction to get it out of the oven yet. It simmers on yet another page waiting for me to figure out what it was I was feeling and trying to say about it.

So, rather than not write anything, I will tackle something I am sure I can finish in an evening. That, after all, is what this blogging stuf is supposed to be all about in the first place. A discipline of sorts—a place to get it figured out and move on to the next page.

The point of what I am writting is that for the past few days, Sandi and I have been in the places that we were meant to be in. Even when the place that we visited was not really all that we went to find—just the fact that we were in that place, an exchange that was needful took place. In the trip down the parkway of our lives, we shared a mile marker with some people and also got a glimpse of people at other mile markers. That analogy came from a friend of mine named Alan Smith.

I called him up the other day and told him I was still in the process of looking for my tribe—that group of people who know me and I in turn know them.

He said the mile marker thing was as close as he has gotten—and that it is a good thing when you can share that marker with someone else and also see people from a distance at other mile markers along the way. What he said was a little more profound but I can’t remember all the subtleties at this point.

Suffice it to say—Sandi and I continued our journey this past weekend. On friday night we attended a local school of the spirit sponsored by Morningstar church out of Wilkesboro. It was one of those evenings where they had a guest speaker and one guy playing the guitar for worship. The speaker had some good things to say but the focus of the evening, or why we were there was the guy doing worship. It was not audience friendly in the sence that he had an overhead projector with song lyrics or that he even sang anything that we could sing along with. The point is that he got into the presence of God and as a result paved a way for us to be there as well.

Getting into God’s presence provoked some good thoughtful meditation and we both came away the better for it. We could have stayed home and watched television, but made the decision to visit and even though the evening was not spectacular, it was used by God to draw us closer to Himself.

Saturday night I took part in what us Emmaus walk types call a “Gathering”. It is a time when the local Emmaus community comes together to share a meal, some praise and worship, a short talk and communion. The group was medium sized, about 45 people and felt really good that evening. There was just something in the atmosphere that bode good things. I lead the worship time and found a great deal of fulfillment in being allowed to use a gift that I have been given by God. I gave something of myself and received something in return. I was supposed to be there just as I was supposed to be at that Friday night meeting.

Sunday morning, Sandi suggested we head to Wilkesboro, North Carolina and take in the Morningstar service held there. It is only a 25 minute drive and as we pulled into the parking lot we were met by another couple from Boone who had also come for the service. They used to go to a big church in Boone but have been attending Morningstar for some time now. They looked a little surprised to see us and after a brief chat went their way.

The praise and worship leader was Leonard Jones from the Charlotte Morningstar church and as you can imagine things were very lively and very upbeat in that arena. The message was alright, but not the point of why we were there.

A couple we have known for a long time (I was born again in their living room in 1979) asked Sandi it they could pray for us before we left. So, after the service and some chitter chat with some other people we know—we were prayed for by this couple who have been somewhat pastorally involved in our lives for 25+ years. It was really one of those times when the heavens and the earth collide. What they prayed could not have been any more appropriate. In not so many words, they cancelled any bad stuff that has occurred over the past several years and released us into the good stuff—the stuff of our destiny in God. In oter words, it was meaningful and full of grace and understanding.

After the service we stopped at Subway and got some subs and then found a picnic table in a motel not far away to eat our lunch. It was about 70 degrees in the middle of March.

So we came home, enjoyed our afternoon and then went to our “regular” church meeting at 5 pm. We are a new church and still in the nomadic phase of our existence and so we meet at the local Best Western Motel. A husband and wife
couple from a sister church in Hickory come up to Boone to bless us with their praise and worship.

They sing and play guitar so I fit right in with my mandolin and djembe. And as I started this blog entry with: it was the place I was supposed to be. Lo and behold: I actually sang as I played the drum. This is not as easy as it sounds and generally I don’t sing when I play an instrument. But on this day I did. I enjoyed myself. Even though this is just a part of who I am and where I am headed. I don’t yet see my final resting place.

I remember a couple of years ago, Sandi and I attended a Friday evening School of the Spirit (SOS) meeting in Wilkesboro at the Morningstar church there. After the preaching, the people prayed for each other and Don Potter. one of the best worship leaders around prayed for me.

As he prayed, he held my hands in his and kind of massaged them ligthly as he prayed. What he prayed was interesting. He said that he saw that I would never retire. At the time I didn’t know what to do with this info and even thought that it might be bad. Not retire…that means I am going to die before that time.

As we were driving home, I had another revelation of the prayer. I would never retire because God was never going to be done with me—until I was no more. I was going to be useful the rest of my life—however long that was to be.

And finally—that is a good place to be.

May our rides take us to those places where we are meant to be.

Last night, As I sat listening to a musician play praise and worship music, I laid back and listened to what was going on in my mind.

It wasn’t like I was singing along with the words, since there was no overhead projector, power point or handouts that I could refer to. It was just this guy getting into the spirit—and as we were in the same room, we could get there as well.

So, during this time of worship, several thoughts came to mind—one of them being a fear that I have in my life. This being a fear of being “mediocre”. I wasn’t totally sure of what the word meant so I looked it up on my handy palm pilot dictionary. Mediocre means average.

I didn’t even know that I had this fear but as the guy played worship music I opened up my heart and mind and asked God to speak to me. And this is what I got: I don’t want to feel that I have lived my life as just an ordinary guy. I want my life to mean something—to have meant something when I pass on into glory and all that.

If you have ever wondered what a person does when he passes the 50 year old mark—this is it. We begin to wonder if we have lived life to its’ fullest. The mistakes we have made begin to pale in comparison to the roads never taken—the paths we never wandered down.

Now, most of the people I know would never classify me as being average—most would probably say that I am unique and unclassifiable. But the feeling remains.

Another part of this thought process is this: what have I done during my life that is valuable and worthy and will remain after I am gone. And this is perhaps the essence of what I was feeling that night.

Where does value come from? What does it apply to?

To answer that question and really believe the answer is the goal.

Value as I am beginning to see it cannot come from without—it must come from within. In other words, if I base my feeling of worth on whether or not I have pleased you or made you happy, that is not “real” value or worth. I may feel good for a time but I am going to need my tank filled up again and so my self-worth becomes performance based. I perform—you affirm—I feel good for a while—I begin to doubt my value—I perform—you affirm. This begins a never ending cycle of superficial madness that is never quite enough to rest on.

But finding value in the fact that I was created in the image of God and that He finds me very interesting—interesting enough to send His Son so that I might have life and that more abundantly—this is the real deal.

This feeling of being valued is not dependant on whether or not I get all the notes right on the night of my big solo performance. Yet I still think of value and worth as being tied up into a performance based model of behavior.

This attitude was no doubt passed on to me by my parents and try as I might to eradicate it, probably passed on to my children as well. I once made the statement that no matter how good we have been as parents, our kids will nevertheless find something to react against or feel harmed by. They will blame some character flaw on us until they reach the time of true enlightenment and realize that things were not all that bad after all.

So the things that I felt my parents fell short on, I tried to shore up in my relationship with my kids. I know I wasn’t always sucessful but I did try to help them see that they had value and worth within themselves rather than in what they did to please me. I would tell them that I didn’t always like or agree with what they did, but that I always loved them regardless. I guess some of that was probably lost in translation or was negated by whatever dna vibe I was sending out at the moment.

But we do our best and if the truth be known, leave the rest for God to clean up.

I know I haven’t fully expored this train of thought but will have to put at least this part to bed and wait on further insight or revelation on the subject.

Have a good ride!

I guess I have always considered myself to be a romanticist—a person who imagines things to be a little rosier than they are—a person who looks at life in a somewhat simple or story-book fashion.

After all, I grew up watching Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and Gilliagan’s Island—what can you expect—I am programmed to think that things work out—that the good guy always gets the girl and so on. It’s not my fault—maybe I can blame Walt Disney.

Even reading Kafka, Thomas Mann and Albert Camus during my formative college years didn’t totally erase the idealism within me that characterizes a romanticist.

Dictionary dot com defines romantic as: …pertaining to, or characteristic of a style of literature and art that subordinates form to content, encourages freedom of treatment, emphasizes imagination, emotion, and introspection, and often celebrates nature, the ordinary person, and freedom of the spirit
imbued with or dominated by idealism, a desire for adventure, chivalry, etc.

I guess I can own that. It sounds so “ideal”.

Being a romantic certainly hasn’t won me any awards and may, after all is said and done, be a moot point anyway.

After all these years, I still believe that I was created to live in a community of believers—although I am beginning to suspect it will never look like the romantic ideal that was created in my mind when God breathed the dream of it into me shortly after I began my Christian walk nearly 29 years ago.

Sandi and I thought we had found it many years ago. We were a part of a group of people that called themselves the Manifested Sons of God. They had “endtime” communities in Alaska and Latin America. Traveling ministries would pass through our little church and tell us about the communities and how they lived their daily lives. How they had big meeting rooms where they would often eat together and how when one person from the “farm” would travel into town (they lived in the wild) they would shop for many people so as to save gas and energy.

It all sounded so “ideal”. We almost considered a move up north but both Sandi and I liked daylight and that move never happened. The group had a lot of truth but were way off in certain other areas of doctrine and after a time we drifted apart and moved to Boone and became a part of a local fellowship there. It was not an “ideal” match but the group met our needs for many years.

Looking back (idealistically), we had community for many years. I can’t remember all the people who had us over for dinner during the early years of our relationship with that church. As we grew a family, the invites became fewer and fewer but we fellowshiped with other familes in what we called home groups. We would meet weekly and do desserts and get to know one another. Sometimes we’d discuss a sermon or a book or what was happening in our lives—then we’d pray for one another and in this way were sustained in our lives as Christians.

It’s looking like more of a community the longer I reminisce.

So…there is the “ideal” and then there is always the “reality” of the ideal.

We are told as children to just be happy with what we have. Yet within us is that thing which tells us that we will only be happy if we have something that we don’t already posess. We start collecting stuff to scratch the itch that man created.

I think community is an itch that God created. I think living together and laughing together and sharing food together is something that at the most primal level is good for us….it is community.

And until something else comes along to take its place….lets enjoy what we have and not hold out until what we don’t have comes along—if it ever will or does.

It is Sunday morning in Boone. There are snow flurries in the air that dip and swirl in the steady breeze. It was about 61 degrees in the house this morning when we woke—it’s about 65 now. My goal is to get the temperature up to 70 before we leave for a friends house for lunch and then church afterwards.

Bessie, our little puppy is playing with a very large pooch in the backyard. She is all over the older golden retriever who just lays on the ground and lets our little puppy lick its face and bite its ears.

Hundreds of birds, mostly finches and the like, flock around the bird feeders in the front and back yards. It is just that type of day when I guess it is cold enough that the feeders are easier to find than food in the wild. That’s what they are there for—not that I feel at all like that saint who had birds eating out of his hands—but they do bring a lot of joy to my day.

The birds are everywhere—almost like the snow flurries—they seem to fly around and catch themselves in mid-air and then either find the feeders or float back into the surrounding trees. It is a sight to behold.

All this said, it is an amazing thing where words can take you. WIth this in mind, I will share a poem written by Rudyard Kipling from a book entitled “If and Other Poems” that my wife found among some other books when she was arranging stuff for a yard sale back in the fall. It is an interesting bead on life and the experience of it.  Enjoy.

[IF]

The weather was fair and about 48 degrees in Boone today. A perfect day for a bowl of soup at the Hunan Chinese Restaurant.

Mike and I went and ordered from the menu: House Special Soup for Two and a bowl of steamed rice for each of us. The waiter looked slightly confused so I said “Two for Two” as he headed to the kitchen to place our order.

Several minutes later he returned with two bowls of steamed rice and one bowl of soup—soup for two but really for only one. I pointed out that we wanted another bowl and he seemed to understand and said share for now and I will be back.

He had also forgotten the hot oil, which I always ask for and which hardly ever comes until you ask for it again. Cindy, the Taiwanese lady who used to own the restaurant would always bring the hot oil without being asked. Well, not always but often enough for the purpose of this illustration.

I watched Mike eat his soup figuring that I would wait and that way there would be no confusion as to who ate how much and so forth. I am glad I did—my soup had more stuff in it—more shrimp and scallops and vegetables. Sometimes it works out that way.

Anyway, I eat faster than him and I was soon caught up to where he was and we continued to talk about our good choice of lunch between spoonfuls of soup with extra hot sauce.

Ours was a healthy choice—we could have had chicken with garlic sauce or general’s tso’s chicken—great tasting choices but full of calories and all that.

You know—we are over 50—and everyday we have to make choices about what to eat and how to exercise in order to stay young and healthy.

It costs a little more to to this but the dividends are great. When I returned to work I took my blood pressure and in was 118 over 78. Not bad for an old guy who didn’t always make the right choices. I still like Hagan Daz ice cream a little to much but don’t go in that direction to often—maybe once a month with a malt in between during the summer months.

My wife recently traveled to Greensboro with a friend to shop at an Asian market. She brought back all the herbs and spices to make a Vietnamese soup we both really like. It’s the kind of soup that warms you up on those still chilly early spring days in the mountains of North Carolina. I am getting hungry just thinking about it.

All this aside—it’s almost time for dinner—and then a gallery opening after.

A nice ride for a Friday evening. Hope your ride is as well.

After many years of avoiding it, I have finally allowed myself the pleasure of learning a new software program. It’s called Dreamweaver and it is used to create and publish pages to the world wide web.

I have been involved in print media for the past 20 years and so software programs and I are not strangers. I have learned most of them. When the desktop publishing revolution began I was bi-lingual—which simply means that I used both an IBM PC (PC=personal computer) and an Apple Macintosh to do layout and design and get things to the printer.

As time went on, I became a mostly Mac kind of guy and have never looked back. Windows Vista, which is getting a lot of hype and advertising these days, is in my mind nothing but Microsoft trying to catch up to what the Mac has been about all along—fun to use. But that is another story.

Dreamweaver allows anyone who takes the time to learn it, the ability to put web pages up for everyone to see and interact with. As I learn to use it, I am once again being stretched and in the process being excited and entertained by the technology all around us.

During the ice ages, when I was a disk jockey for a college radio station in Michigan, I made the comment that top 40 radio represented only about 5 percent of the music that was being made in America.

The same can be said today about music and the internet. There is so much good music out there that we will never hear on the major radio stations or ever see advertised for sale in the local cd shops.

Many artists are actually publishing their stuff in MP3 format and uploading it to a web site where we can sample it and buy it and dowload it if we like it. You then load this stuff on an MP3 player like an Ipod. What I have found is there are hundreds, maybe thousands of music blogs that actually have reviews and samples of songs and links to the artist websites all tied into one.

As in writing blogs, music blogs can almost take over your life in the fact there are so many interesting ones. This is a technology that is getting bigger and bigger as the days go by.

In America, we don’t make shoes or steel anymore—we publish web pages and serve fast food. This has certainly been a transition from the industrial age when we made everything and sold it to everyone. From farm to factory to service economy in just a few short decades. And now I am a part of it.

I buy books and software and hardware and vitamins on the web. I do Amazon dot com and pay pal and ebay. And now I am finally learning to create the pages that are used to serve me and give me the information that I need and want.

More can be said about all of this…but I will end here and go back to bed. Instead of counting sheep, I guess I will count my blessings.

It’s four am in the morning and I am up and sitting in front of the computer because I don’t want to keep Sandi awake. It’s another one of those nights where my mind gets stuck on something and I can’t find my way clear to relax and go back to sleep.

Sleep eludes me this morning, as have many in the past, because of some work related situation— a situation where I can’t remember if something that was supposed to get proofed and corrected before being sent to get printed—actually did. It’s not like this is a new situation—there have been numerous times in the past where I will wake up in the middle of the night and remember something work related and not be able to get back to sleep easily until I figure out whether something has or has not been done.

I can say that most times, the work has been done and corrected and this is just a way that the enemy of my soul (the devil) has of tormenting me. The foothold that he has in me is my basic insecurity and the fact that life often moves to fast for me to keep up with and process correctly. So things in my mind are not correctly closed out and finished and are left for me to deal with like an open file on a computer. And if the devil can’t find and bring to my rememberance a few open files to worry over, then I can probably find a few on my own.

Put this work related stuff together with the rest of what is rumbling around inside of me and what do you get—a partially sleepless night.

So today, I will take a much needed day off from work and begin to tackle the garden which, due to many circumstances this past fall, is a mess and needs to be cleaned up before any spirng stuff can begin. I still have corn stalks in the ground and lots of dead stuff to remove, pile up and burn. I am actually looking forward to it—it’s been another one of those open files which needs to be closed properly and saved to the hard drive of my mind.

Also, the weather forecast is calling for a 55 degree day today and I will just have to force myself to take that bike ride I have been missing these past few weeks of winter and very cold and windy conditions.

In the meantime I will get what needs to be downloaded off my mind and hopefully go back to bed by five.

As I think about open files, I remember another thing that was going on in my mind before I woke up. I was in the process of forgiving a friend who hurt my feelings the other day by being a little more than rough with his words to me as we ate lunch in a restaurant with several other people. In the process of releasing this hurt through forgivness (closing the file) I was also reminded that I needed to ask for forgiveness for my reaction to his hurful words and my subsequent attitude towards him.

This one is between me and God as I will probably never have an opportunity to address this with the person involved. I can change my life through forgiveness and perhaps in this process I will also release this friend as well. I guess that is what we call grace. The person who builds his house on the good foundation is the one who hears the word and does it.

And this reminds me that I probably need to take a few more days off in the weeks to come and work on closing some more files. The basement really needs my attention and then there is my closet and then……