No polish on this one.
Blogs can be a little squishy, right? I mean they can be a little less perfect, more immediate, more personally revealing and less polished sometimes… Come to think of it, has anything I have written so far seemed polished really? I suppose not. But that is okay for now; at least I am writing and putting it out there. As I type this, I am in no mood to write something more considered or reflected upon.
For the past few weeks I have been feeling like a man sitting on an expanding balloon.
On a spiritual level, something has been building beneath me, lifting me up, and also expanding inside… an undeniable passionate desire to… to just spend every damned minute living significantly, living for what matters, for what life is about!
I also feel sometimes like a cartoon character whose legs are pumping, feet furiously pounding the pavement while his torso remains in place!! It is a wonderful feeling, believe it or not, albeit a bit restless…
So I bought some books today, mostly spiritual, my odd habit of routinely collecting paper containers of knowledge that I barely make time to read, as if the mere possession of them would transfer by osmosis to my brain and change me! LOL!! What a hoot! If only…
It has been said that the person you will be five years from today is shaped by the books you will read and the people you associate with. If that is true, I feel satisfied that I am, at least, trending in the right direction. God help me.
Security, pleasure and power, that triumvirate of worldly goals, has been on my mind a lot lately, synchronisticly popping up in books and magazines and conversations I have been having. I want so desperately to leave that dirt behind me. It is such crap, such nonsense, so unworthy of the attentions of an eternal soul and yet so damned compelling! All the self-help stuff I spent years devouring is so centered on that.
Oh sure, all the gurus of fulfillment and personal growth tip the hat to “spirituality” and to humanistic acts of kindness, condescension to the poor, dirty guy on the street corner. And even that is all about patting yourself on the back and feeling good about yourself; it is almost never really about that other person and their essential worth. They’ve no idea how to even describe essential, intrinsic human worth or where it might come from, building dishonestly on the borrowed capital of a Christian worldview they tacitly reject.
What have these feelings of mine, these recent thoughts been adding up to? As I sit here, searching inside for an answer, immediately I think “Death”. Death. I have to die. I want to hurry up and die. I am in a rush to die.
No, no, not suicide or a premature, unnatural end to my life in a human body. Death in the way that it is described in the bible, death to myself, my ambitions, my overwrought concern for all the crap I wanted to accumulate. And I do not only mean physical possessions either. I mean respect and respectability. I mean craving that I be well thought of, patted on the back, liked, told what a good man I am. Do you know how hard it is to do truly good things with no thought, none whatsoever, of hoping that someone else will notice it and appreciate it?
The burden of all that, the sticky-icky muck of it all… It all just eats away like a cancer at the spiritual and emotional and physical calories I have to burn on God’s concerns, eternal concerns, the stuff that matters.
Yeah… that balloon keeps expanding… and my thoughts about it are still coalescing, coagulating, building eventually into conclusions and actions and attitudes of mind and spirit… I know this much: I need to read the Bible more and really pray about it and really meditate upon it and let the Holy Spirit speak to me through it and change me…
And there – RIGHT THERE – my knee-jerk thought reaction was “Oh, Tom, don’t start speaking Christianese, don’t get all Jesusy and Bibley or you’ll lose the interest of the few people who read your blog and ain’t into all that!” Well fuck it. Sorry, but that is exactly what I am talking about! I have got to get over that, I have to… If I am dead to myself, really dead, how could the disinterest of those people hurt me?!
A man has to have the courage of his convictions and stick to them and stand up for them whatever anyone else will ever think of him or his ideas. Do I have to follow that up with a disclaimer like, “But of course, I have to be open to input from others and changing my mind too!”? Duh. Yes. When it is right to do so. But a man will never know when that is before he has had the nerve to take a stand. Before that he is just poser, a hope-so, an almost-ran.
What a sorry way to live. Cowardly, ungodly, unworthy.
