Keep Your Courage Up

I love the fall.  I wake up each morning and let the cool air come in my window and great my warm lungs.  I let the smell of the season fill my nares and the changing colors brighten my eyes. Eden was never meant to experience autumn and I find it curious that I enjoy it so much.  I do not like the winter, the bitter biting cold that we have here in Iowa.  All the green disappears to grey, brown and white.  But the fall, the fall is wonderful.  It is like hating death while reveling in dying.

I spent the week thinking about Philippians 3:12-14.  It was our topic of discussion at Christian Pharmacist Fellowship.  I like the way the New Living puts it; “I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.” The idea is that this life is spent striving for something we will never achieve, yet we continue to strive.  That’s the way that God has always intended it to be.  God has grabbed hold and changed the direction my life was going. He directed me toward perfection.  The kicker is that I can’t get there, ever, at least not here. It’s not even one of those, “with God’s power I can be who He is calling me to be” type of moments. What God want is us to strive toward perfection, not to possess it now.  So I must ask why?  If sanctification was accomplished at the cross, why must I press on to possess that perfection?  The cross was just the start of it.  The cross is the door for me to choose to walk through.  Sanctification will be accomplished after this life.  If any of you have read through my past blogs, you know that I have struggled and continue to struggle with who I am and who I want to be.  That’s it, that is what Paul is talking about.  I want glory.  I want to be who I will be in glory. I get it when Paul says to live is Christ, but to die is gain.  To die is to possess what Paul spent his whole life as a Christian pressing on to achieve.  This week I have started to realize this.  It makes enjoying living a life that is short of what it is suppose to be a little easier because I know it’s the way it is meant to be.  God wants us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.  Realizing who we are and who we are meant to be and fighting for get there. Once this veil is lifted, and we experience the truth, we will finally have what we have fought for.  I don’t know why God wants us to fight for it.  It is not about salvation or heaven or anything like that.  It is just how He has structured the life of a person once they are a Christian.  I think it is because once perfection is gained in glory, He will be glorified that much more for our fighting and pressing on for it.  We will appreciate who He always intended us to be and what it took to get us there.  It is a lifetime of autumn leading up to a winter I won’t have to suffer. It is an eternity of spring and summer, life and beauty, joy and peace.   

The part that really gets me fired up is when Christians are the last people who can sin, or churches where it’s the last place where you can be a sinner.  It anyone should understand sin is should be Christians.  We should know the human condition better than anyone.  Yet we have churches all over where Sunday best is so much more than a summer dress, shirt and tie.  It’s like we are children playing dress up once a week and act like we aren’t who we really are.  We act like what we think we should be.  Let’s just be honest everyone and act like what we really are.  If we are all screwed up inside, shouldn’t the fellowship of believers be the place where we get that all sorted out?  Not in these Churches where sinners don’t seem welcome.  How backwards does that seem.  Church needs to be a place where we are encouraged to keep pressing on to perfection, not acting like we already have it.

I have really gotten into this band Mumford and Son’s this past week as well.  They have some great, soul grinding stuff.  I love it when music makes me feel that way.  I went to the Iron and Wine concert a couple weeks ago and it was like that.  If you get a chance, check them out or Grooveshark them. 

Saturday was a rough day for me and the rest of Hawkeye nation.  I was right up at the field in the student section hawks nest.  It was a crazy game and a ton of fun to watch, just a rough finish.  I spent the morning tailgating with my former boss Roger Maharry and some of his friends and family.  Roger is a pharmacist who is pretty close to retirement but he gets what is going on in pharmacy better than most and has so much wisdom I have been blessed to learn from him.  I know I am going to be a better pharmacist because of his influence on me and I thank him for that.  He knows many of the problems pharmacy is facing and wants the profession to move forward as badly as I do.  That is not something you usually find in a pharmacist who is in his position and his age. We are in a difficult situation right now.  Those of us graduating from pharmacy are over educated for the positions in community pharmacy.  The option is to take a job that pays too much for doing too simple of work, or get paid to little to do post doctorate work and get a job that actual utilizes the complete skill set of a pharmacist.  And while this is the situation now, as central fill, mail order, and automation become more popular, pharmacists will lose their jobs because we are too expensive.  Eventually those community jobs will become fewer, and likely even less clinical. I will do a post doctorate residency for many reasons, but one of them is I worry that someday I will need it or I will lose it to a robot vending machine.   I want to do more that what pharmacists are allowed to do today.  There are plenty of pharmacists out there that I wouldn’t want doing more though.  They have become complacent making six figures doing final verifications and reading monographs to patients.  In many cases that is fine, they have paid their dues to the profession and are content with their jobs. I just don’t want their existence to hinder the progress of the profession.  I really get pissed when new graduates are content with that as well because that will hold the profession back.  We cannot advertize that’s all we are good for. 

It’s going to be another busy week with plenty of busy work to be done and a couple of exams.  That’s fine though, it’s all part of the process.  I am just glad that it is autumn, that I can enjoy dying and enjoy fighting for perfection all along the way.  Love you all, take care.

Parasympathetic Innervations

“There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.”  ~ Blaise Pascal 

It will be a long time before this weekend is fully digested.  My thoughts continue to spin around the challenges I face, but I face them a new understanding.  I spent the past weekend going from Iowa to Seattle, Yakima, and back again.  It was too quick of a trip, but we made the most of it.  My only sister, Kole, was married this past Saturday.  There was lots of laughter, tears of joy and love being shared that at times could only be expressed in soul groaning.  My soul continues to groan now that I am apart from and remembering such joyous occasions.  There is a lot that can be said about the Harold family but there are two things I know to be true.  We know how to have fun and we love most deeply.  I expected this past weekend to be exhausting but I left feeling more refreshed than I had been for a long time.

I continue to struggle with what it means to be.  Evan and I had a great conversation on our way back to Seattle on Sunday; all while we hoped and prayed the 4 remaining gears in his ’94 accord would get us over the mountain.  We started the trip with 5.  

The best way I can describe it is as though I am walking toward a great pillar on the top of a mountain. I can see the pillar in the distance, and I can see the road in front of me, but I cannot see much of what is in between. I don’t completely understand what it will take to get there.  I have been thinking about how God wants me to be something better than myself.  I was thinking about how this will culminate when this time on this earth is done, I will die someday and then see what God intended for me to be all along.  As I wrestled with this I could feel an excitement welling up in me.  I get to spend this life perplexed by this dichotomy that is who I am because of sin and brokenness, and who I am becoming because of blood and grace.  They are mutually exclusive parts, non-overlapping, and always changing in magnitude.  But the end is the exciting part.  I will see the dichotomy ended and I will finally just be.  I will be the person God intended for me since long before. 

The thing that I am beginning to see is why that God made it this way.  He is letting me flesh out this transformation and for once I am at peace with that.  This may very well be my time in the desert.  I am more excited for the journey that I have ever been.  Don’t get me wrong, I am scared out of my mind too.

I think something has changed for me.  I want God more than ever.  There is an eagerness building inside of me and an understanding that had been missing. These thoughts have turned out to be more rambling but as I said before, there is lot of digesting that needs to take place.  Thank you Kelly for telling me 4 years ago that God hadn’t given up on me, I think I can finally say I believe you.

I move onto another week of therapeutic exams, MTM projects, case presentations, and all the while trying to figure all this out.  The good news is I have great company by my side to get me through it.  I will lean on my friends and loved ones, enjoy good music, and roll with the punches. 

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Not another doom and gloom Nate post.  After reading though my posts I can see where readers get that idea. Those who are close to me already know this and don’t worry quite so much about me.  Evan calls my posts “intense internal reflection.” And it is.  As much as I would like to think that I was writing these things down for all of you, I really do it for me.  It is a way for me to sort through the cacophony that fills my head and my heart though out the week.  It allows me to document where I am, what I am, and keeps me going toward who I want to be. As I realize those things it usually is a sobering experience but trust me I always feel better, more in control, and more at peace.  I am not a person who suffers from depression.  I have been around many people who do and know more about the DSM-IV diagnosis criteria than most of you.  I just don’t want you to worry about me.  I am ok.  I am moving forward.  Above all, I am trying to be the person I think I should be.  I hope this blog challenges each of you to consider the same.  No person, no church, no society can tell you who you should be.  That is something found between each person and God. I will try to refrain from using such words as despair, depravity, deficiency, melancholy, and any other words splattered though out my posts, but just this once.

This week I have learned that I am still the scared boy at heart that I was in the 3^rd grade.  The difference is that this week I have chosen not to let those fears dictate my daily life.  I have let my fears prevent me from too many opportunities in the past, but not anymore.  This was the theme of my week. This began with leading the first CPF meeting Monday morning.  It went well but I know that there is room for improvement.  There were about 8 of us who showed up and we spent some time sharing our backgrounds and I shared about inter-denominational fellowship.  We spent some time praying for each other and our faculty.  The idea is to figure out what it means to be a Christian who is also a pharmacist.  I say it like that because it is drilled into us to define ourselves by our profession.  It makes sense because we will be professionals and that is how it is done among professionals. I have a hard enough time just trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian, naturally, outside of what I am told.  So we are working on that.

The next challenge was a lunch with the Dean of the College of Pharmacy and the President of the University of Iowa.  I was invited along with about 7 other students.  The salmon was delicious.  My stomach was turning the whole time and I had a diet coke which kept making me burp. 

Now for the big guns.  I set up a meeting with the Dean to discuss Rho Chi’s desire to fill any needs within the College of Pharmacy.  I really like the Dean, he just makes me really nervous.  He is a great guy to talk to, but he is still the Dean and I get that feeling like I am in the 3^rd grade about to head into the principal’s office.  I am the president of Rho Chi which is the Pharmacy Honor Society.  In the past it was just a way to pad your resume.  I want to make it into something that helps out our College and our community.  So I wanted to meet with the Dean to try and figure that out.

So why do I tell you this.  I would never have done these things nor had the opportunity to if I had let my fears get the best of me.  I am getting better at exuding confidence when I am freaking out inside.  I am sure I still sound shaky at times but I am getting better at it. Just like anything, practice helps. I want to encourage you guys to think about what things do you wish you were doing and what is holding you back.  I know it isn’t easy but if it is fear it’s not worth missing out on for that. This is all part of me trying to figure out who I want to be and how to get there.  I am learning and that involves failing at times.  I fail, I feel rotten, and then I usually write about it. This week there were some failures but there were also small successes. This week I decided to focus on the successes. 

The Con

I have challenged myself to be more balanced in this new school year. It is my last chance to get in right. I have committed to spending more time with my classmates and am involved more with the College of Pharmacy. I have committed to spending more time with Christians within the walls of contemporary worship. The commitment that I am most happy about is to spend more time re-establishing God as a priority in my life. I have gone ahead and worked it out on my own for the last couple of years and although I was successful in many ways, I have never been pleased with myself. My final commitment is to spend one day each week reflecting on this journey and writing about it here. If anyone actually enjoys this pathetic little blog, then you are welcome. I have also stopped eating potato chips and started eating carrot sticks. I have learned that you can pack away a lot of carrot sticks without feeling full.

So where is this coming from, where have I been? It’s been 4 years, 3 months, and 14 days since my last real blog entry. If you last read my blog when you were freshmen in college, I would now like congratulate you on graduation. Around the time I stopped writing, I began my journey into pharmacy school. I have learned a lot of chemistry, physics, biology, physiology, anatomy, pharmaceutics, pharmacology, therapeutics, medicinal chemistry, drug literature, biochemistry, and pathology. I have made little headway with my understanding of God and The Church despite my better understanding of the natural world and the human body. School provided a great distraction from my inadequacies. You see, I am really good at school. I get good grades and don’t have to work too hard for it; I get along with most people, and enjoy learning. I am not really good at God, and I am especially not good with The Church.

So why now, what happened? I don’t know. Nothing really happened that was good. I got hurt pretty bad and decided it was time to wake up and get it together. You see, I didn’t find any solace in the accomplishments as a student of pharmacy. I didn’t find any real solace from my classmates or college friends. I spent the summer dealing with this inside myself. I worked at it and resolved to overcome it. I did pretty good and could manage to go on but I wasn’t who I wanted to be. I don’t like cheesy Christianity because it is pretty close to face Christianity. I am going to be cheesy for a second; I wanted a God who loves me to lean on, I wanted to feel like he was there for me like all the songs say. I didn’t feel that. I don’t feel that. One of the things I really believe is true, like in the way you feel something in your bones, is that we don’t deserve an audience with God; it isn’t even something we can earn. I had a decision to make. I decided to try and be obedient. I decided to dig up the old passions that had been covered up with years of “other things.” I started by reading my old blogs and was burned deep inside by one titled, “Despair is the lack of the eternal.” It’s spooky how God works.

The article is about a dream my friend Allison had about me one night 5 years ago. I’ll give you an idea of the big points of the dream but if you get a chance you’ll understand better if you read the article. In the dream my real father had been in prison since I was an infant for some crime and was about to die on death row. He wanted to speak to me one last time before he died and I wouldn’t take his phone call. On the day of this punishment, I went to a lake with a box filled with letters and pictures from throughout my childhood and I threw them into the lake. I walked away alone and in despair. At the time I thought this dream was about our views of death. I displaced all personal connotations on some convoluted philosophy. I missed the point. “Despair is the lack of the eternal” was I titled I pick only because I had been reading Kierkegaard and I thought it sounded cool and deep. What I saw the other night as I re-read the blog after these many years is that I have a father who is not the man who raised me. That father is calling and called trying to get me to talk to him, think about him, relate with him. Years have gone by with my back turned to his attempts to get me back. And I was scared to think that there might me a day that it is done and I am left giving up on all we had at one time. I feel like I am getting close to that lake. I don’t want it to end like that.

If despair really is the lack of the eternal, then I need to grasp the eternal. I don’t know how that is done. If I do figure anything out though, I’ll let you know. There may be many things in this blog that could be heresy. I am just a young man that wishes he had the wisdom of an old man. I have a lot to learn and have made many mistakes. I really don’t want to offend anyone. I will be critical; I will be illogical at times. I’ll try not to though. I’ll try to be positive. I’ll try to be helpful.

So here I am, it’s a Sunday night and I am at Java House. Tomorrow morning at 7:30am I have my first Christian Pharmacist Fellowship meeting, one of those things I thought God was asking me to do. I don’t know if 2 people with show up, but that’s ok. I’ll pray for my classmates alone for the hour and be at peace with that. That said I am a little scared. I did a high ropes course today, that wasn’t scary. Both the Hawkeyes and the Seahawks won this weekend. God might still have a plan for me. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

One last thing before I go for the week. Sorry I have been a poor friend to most of you. I know you understand, but I miss you and wish I could go back and do it all over. I will leave you with this. I was talking with a professor this past week and I realized something about my priorities. Pharmacy doesn’t need to be on top like is has been. Faith, Family, and Pharmacy is the order I need to work on and establish. Thank you for being my brothers and sisters for these many years. It’s time to get back on this winding dirt road. I hope to see you around the next bend.

Hang me out to dry

To the four of you and my mother who read this blog, I have more to come. Thanks for not giving up. There will be more very soon.

Sparks

“And if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

The ancient text haunts my very existence. I have found myself crushed beneath its colossal truth and left prostate, not in humility, but in submission to its gravity. I run down so many, so many avenues in my life and never find a destination. I have told myself many things of love. I have convinced myself of many things of love. I said that I would never love a beloved unless I knew that beloved, and then I convinced myself that knowing is loving and loving is knowing and the lines become so blurred that all cognitive understanding is demeaned and therefore recognized as lost. I have become convinced that love is closer to hate then we might first realize. They are like close sisters who kiss on the cheek whenever they meet and yet live completely separate lives. They respect each other. I find that when I love, I tend to hate many thing about myself. I hate the way I love, I hate what love does to me, and I hate what this love does to those around me. In this sense, love is very close to hate. So why are we nothing without love. Why is love so critical and how does love remain the antithesis of hate. This ancient text doesn’t end there. It goes on to describe a love that is totally absent of any quality one might remotely associate with hatred.

“Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous, love does not brag and is not arrogant. Does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”

I think that God must be a bit of a helpless romantic himself. The whole story of redemption is a very cliché love story. The sort of things you’ve seen done in a hundred movies. The only difference is that its not real. That sort of love story doesn’t happen. We look up to it, we look forward to it. It never happens, not like that at least. We begin with a character. He is lost in his life, broken in his passions, and without, empty. And then we have the girl enter the seen. At this point I will intentionally start sounding cliché. The girl enters the scene, she is the exact thing that the Man has been wishing he was. Every shortcoming found within him, is completed by her. This dark emptiness becomes filled with her light and he is suddenly a different creature, a new man. The two are wed, and the union lasts forever. Its simple, its glorious, it’s also impossible. If it were possible, it would not be divine. God constantly proved himself by being the impossible. And a love that is all of these things is impossible, and by that, it is not simply that God gives us or has for us this kind of love, its that God is this kind of love. God is love is not the same statement as God has love, or God loves. We are not love, we are so much more hatred than love. We are the lover of the one sister, and therefore a distant relative of the other. We, by our very intrinsic depravity, are closer to hatred than to love, and yet we are constantly compelled to attain something we never can on our own. We are not Gods, we are not even children of the Gods, we are not sparks of light in this universe. We are the void, we are the emptiness longing to be filled. We are impatient, we are unkind, we are jealous, and we are arrogant and very unbecoming. C.S. Lewis wrote a book to explain such a disaster. He argued that unless the Gods give us identity, they will never look down upon us. We are not like the God’s and in their greatness and majesty. It’s is a greater insult to for we to make an appeal to them than for a beggar ask for a kings crown. And here is where the love story resumes. Where the incomplete lover finds his completion, his identity, is within his beloved. His beloved doesn’t simply assimilate his identity, but the lovers identity, that is his areas of deficiency, are conformed to the adequacy of his beloved and now the lover may commune with the divine, because he is like the divine in that he has not simply aroused feelings of love, not simply demonstrated acts of love, but has become love in as much as God is love. As I said before, this is impossible. And therefore, it is God’s doing, it is his love story, and it never occurs outside of him.

Leaves of Grass

Today was a hard day for me. I rolled out of bed with a heavy heart. There was no reason why at that point that I should be wrought with such melancholy, I hadn’t even seen the sun, and the sun didn’t shine today. Instead, I welcomed the melancholy with a quizzical humor. I did not embrace it, I attempted to ignore it. I spent the better part of my afternoon with tears streaming down my two cheeks. I cant remember the last time the I ever cried about something so worthy of my tears. As they soaked into my sleeve, my heart continued to be consumed with melancholy it became imprisoned by it, and each time I thought the sun might shine through these prison bars, there was only rain. Little Courtney "bean" Davis was remembered this afternoon. The life of a little girl with more strength of faith than I have ever had, was remembered. They stood up there and recounted the days of her short life, and I felt alone. I was never apart of her life. I never enjoyed her laughter, her smile, her spunk, or her angel eyes. Her family stood up there and shared a stories of a life too hard to imagine, and yet a life lived with more love for God than I have ever seen. And it wasn’t the fake facade sort of show that I was used to seeing where these people talk about how they stuck with God though all the hard times and you sit they wonder, either these people are super Christians who don’t feel sorrow like I do, or they are lying. This family stood up on that stage and touched me with their tears. They had faith, they had faith beyond the absurd, they had faith enough to weep for a beloved and stay curled up in that corner dark with sorrow, faith enough to take the pain of cancer upon themselves so that their daughter could find comfort in the hands of a living God. Comfort that we all are in desperate need of, comfort that she needed more then any of us. Cindy said that she is glad to carry the burden of loss if it’s what it takes for Court to not feel pain again, she said that we all are carrying the pain of her cancer now. It’s a pain that I will bare only take part of in the smallest measure compared to those who were close to her, and my tears too will join with the rain. This day was fitting for me. I have been too happy for too long. And I don’t want to suggest that my sorrow compares to that of those who loved her. But I loved her, I loved her memory, I loved her smile and her eyes, I loved her spirit, I loved her and I never knew her. She is everything that I am not.

Finding Oil

Why God? Why do we begin there, and why do we always come back to this point. Why, if he exists, does he tolerate our, and by our I mean my, wavering faith...my daily wavering faith. I used to have this small, weak sort of faith, but I always passed it off as something great, something solid, because I wanted to be seen as solid. Who wants to be seen as weak, wavering and scared. But then I realized that there was no point in trying to pass off my faith as something great, because what's the point anyways. It seemed to me that trying to convince myself that my faith was something grand did nothing to actually give me a grand sort of faith. So instead, I embraced the weakness of my faith, and left God to become something very small in my life, sort of like my faith. At least I was honest. But still, it's not the best. Because, now, I don't force myself to see God as he really is, or how he makes himself out to be, greater than my perceptions. This world sucks, this body sucks, this life sucks, this stupid struggle sucks. I really miss seeing God as bigger than I would honestly admit to actually believing. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I started out going down a lonely dirt road and I found myself chasing roads that I only led me in circles. Now listen, I am not saying that mainstream Christianity has the answers, no, not at all, no freaking way. What I am saying though is that I am so reactionary and I want to get so far away from that way of thinking, that I loose some of the greatest qualities I once possessed. I used to think God was so big, so involved, so there, and I was deep with people, I lived for a greater purpose than myself and this life, and I felt secure, not in Christian culture, but in knowing that what I did wasn't for myself but for God. I have thrown the baby out with the bath water it would seem, those priceless qualities became lumped together with my abandonment of conservative Christian practice...religiosity if you will. Now I want it back. I want it back so bad that I am almost willing to take it all back just to experience that sort of comfort with God again. I still have a small sort of faith, I still don't see God as grand as I ought, but if I can just LIVE in the knowledge that HE IS GREATER than the faith I have in him, I might be able to find that comfort again. Maybe I can start letting loose again.

Escape from the end of our day

I sometimes ask myself, "Nathan, who are you, are you really the person you want to be? Should be?" and I look at myself and say, "You know self, not really, not even really close to who I want to be, and yeah thanks for reminding me again that the rocks toward the bottom really are that sharp, now I am going to get a beer." It’s kind of like when you get up and go to work and a completely random person comes up to you and says, "Hey, are you feeling ok?" in a compassionate tone. Where are you might have been feeling fine one minute, simply by their statement, you feel sick the next.
I am feeling a little bit sick right now. The confusion and uncertainty of past decisions has left me feeling overwhelmed. I recently packed up my car and drove 2000 miles east to a town where I know almost no one, all the time attempting to convince myself that God was with me on this, but not very sure at all.
I am not happy with this life I have found myself. It is true that this might be a temporal state of dissatisfaction, but I am not convinced. I spend much to much time thinking about how things used to be, or what I would be doing right now if I were else where. I have the third most boring job in the world, only beaten out by envelope stuffing, and being a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I am a lift operator at the smallest, most pathetic, ski resort I have ever seen. I sit in a little box for eight house and make up stories in my head, draw fake maps for no reason except it passes the time, and day dream about being any where else, which I tend to do a lot of anyways outside of work. What happened to me? It wasn’t suppose to end up like this.
I have been living in a state of dissatisfaction since I left Moody Bible Institute, not that Moody gave me satisfaction, no far far from it. It’s just that I was on a good road, it lead to a concrete destination, and the traffic was one way. Now I never know when this road is going to dead-end and leave me hurling off a cliff, or worse, stuck anywhere. You see, that’s what my greatest fear in all this is. That I will be stuck, anywhere. If I didn’t have a lease on this place here, I would sell my car, fly back home, start working crazy hours while living at home for three months and pay off the rest of my school lone. Sign up with some crazy missions organization that only requires you go with them to the ends of the world and back again 6 times over and then I might be satisfied again, well maybe for a couple of days. The rest of the time I would probably complain about why my food looks and tastes like it was found on the bottom of my shoes, and why my bed is hard, and better yet, why I got myself into this in the first place.
Why did I move to Dubuque? Part of me was running from a few things, getting stuck in Yakima was one of them. But now that I have considered it, I would rather be stuck there than here any day. I have people who love me there, not just say, oh Nathan we love you, but the sort that when you see them they come up to you with open arms and hold you, they hold you and let that feeling of warmth and euphoric comfort fill up in you till it spills out with a deep sigh. I haven’t had that in ages and you know what, that really @%*&$# sucks.
So you might be thinking, Nathan, why do you sound almost angry in this little missive, and my reply would be yea, I am a little angry. I am angry that I have left all of you to be only sidenotes in this story of my life. I am angry that I have left so much to gain so little. I thought that I would find something, and I think I have, I have found myself out. You may have done it long ago, but if not, here we go. I am Nathan the ever dissatisfied, emulator of Thelyphron, except I have given my nose and ears so I could be more like the humiliated, because I thought it would make me significant.
Give me back everything I let go. Ohh... it doesn’t work like that. Will I ever find something that makes me lighthearted, or will the ruminations of the past weigh me down forever? Will I feel like I belong again? Will our story ever continue like it used to or is it too late for that. Even in asking the question I know the answer.

The Shadowlands

"I don’t know why I let go, I want to be your friend." -Ryan Adams

I have had a very entertaining couple of days. It’s been refreshing considering my work load has increased. For the 3 people that actually read this blog, I am sorry to say that this is undoubtedly predestined to be one of those less constructive entrees, I am sure you will forgive me.

On Friday I realized that God still believes in me. That may sound a bit foolish to those who might not know my current circumstance, but to those who do, I hope it makes perfect sense. Let me build my case. I am moving to Iowa in a month or so. My parents have been using my car for the past 6 month while there’s has been in a constant state of limbo at the dealership/mechanic’s place. It all gets a bit messy, from there. I wanted to take my car out to the mid west, but I sort of hate conflict, not so much that I avoid it at all cost, but I do a lot to avoid it. So yesterday I asked my father to call up the place and see what he can find out. The response from the dealer was most unexpected, the car was ready. After 6 months, out of the blue, right in time. I haven’t seen much of God lately, wether that’s because I have been keeping my eyes closed, and I cannot tell you, or hope to convince you, how I wish and hope and pray that’s the case. Or if we are just playing this ever complicated game of hide and seek. I know that sounds crude, and you might think that God and I aren’t on speaking terms at the moment, but that’s not the case. I don’t speak to God in half truths anymore, I tell him exactly how things are with me. Sometimes its hard, sometimes it sounds like a lot of heresy, but most times its refreshing, even though it seems a bit one sided. So when this happened, in the way it happened, it was like God had opened up the clouds, if only for a moment to yell down to me, Nathan, I still believe in you. It’s exactly what I needed to hear. I need to know that the effort I am putting forth in figuring this thing out is not at the great cost of what I hope I had with God. That intimacy may be lost for the moment, but I hope when this is done, we will be closer then ever, not built upon what I have been told is true, told what God is like, and told what I have to be like to be with him, but built upon what I have found true, what God shows me he is like, and to be myself with him. I think the former form of intimacy is easy, fixed, and cheep, I know the latter is painful, difficulty, and discouraging at times, but it is more real. God, thank you for not giving up on me.

I think I would like to take this time to attack one possible assumption, that after reading the above account, I would also be inclined to make. It may sound like I am only allowing myself to enjoy God’s friendship when he does what I want, and thus my eventual aim is only to acknowledge God when things are going well in my life, and despair is his absence when things are not going so well, and in conclusion, I should never hope to ever have God do anything good for me because of what it says in James 1:6-7. I would agree if all the premises were assumed to be true, that with neglecting the fact that God is gracious (not that we ever do), this conclusion would in fact be valid with a very literal interpretation of that passage.. My attack is on the assumption that I only acknowledge God when thing are going well. I strive harder than ever to find God when his voice is not so easily heard. The difference is I don’t act as though I hear it when I no longer do. I concur with David’s cry...

"O Lord, you know all of this. Do not stay silent. Do not abandon me now, O Lord. Wake Up!"

I wonder who called David an apostate for telling God to get off his divine bed and do something - the audacity of David!

Despair is the lack of the eternal - Kierkegaard

My friend Allison told me about a dream she had the other night. Allison is a good friend of mine whom I have had the pleasure of getting to know over the summer of 2005, she is also my boss, well, sort of. I met her when I began working at Starbucks coffee co., Allison was my first real friend there and has been a good friend for the past 6 months and she has never, ever dreamt about me before, or at least she never told me about it. We were driving around down town Seattle when she said to me,
"Nathan, I had a dream about you the other night."
"Really Allison, has this been a regular occurrence?," I asked
"Well, not really, well not like the other night at least. You see, the dream was centered around you. We were all living together in this enormous house, sort of real world style, and this man was trying to call you. He said that he was your father, well your real father, and that he was dyeing on death row and needed to speak with you before he died. The man who raised you really wasn’t your father, he had married your mom after this man went to prison for killing a man when you were two, and you knew that. In fact, you knew that this man was your father all along but you were ashamed about it, you didn’t really want any one to know. You hadn’t seen or heard much from him before, only stories that your mother told you when you when you were young. And you know how you get when your frustrated about something, how you get really quiet." She paused for a response.
"Um, yeah, I suppose I do"
"Anyways, you were like that for most of the dream, just sort of avoiding people, the phone call, and even me because you knew I would bring it up. I could tell it was really hard on you, but I couldn’t get through to you. While all this was going on, we as a house were throwing a huge party for an African friend who was dying of aids. He knew that he was going to die when he went back to Africa. This would be the last time that we would see him again, so we threw this big party to celebrate his life before he went. So the days continue to come, and your dad, your real dad, keeps calling and calling and you, you just never answer the phone and never talk to anyone about him. You seemed really bitter, and angry, but sad also. So the day of this party arrives and we all find out that it’s the same day as your fathers execution, you know it, we all know it. Everyone is planning this party to celebrate the life and death of this one man, and at the same time everyone is trying to neglect the fact that your dad is going to die. The dream climaxed when a man came to the door of our house with a box of your dads possessions. There were his clothes and a few small objects of his, but then there were these letters that you had written him when you were young, and pictures that you had drawn for him when you were only a young child. Pictures of you two when you were together. You left the party with this box and headed to a lake behind the house, I followed you. You walked to the end of the dock and dumped this box right into the river. The sounds the party were so loud behind you but you were lost to it all. There were this torches burning in the background, a huge bonfire to celebrate our African friends death, and the images of you and your father, the letters, and the pictures you drew for him were floating out into the lake. You turned around and saw me standing there. I was silent, and solid. You walked towards me, shed a tear, and walked away. The dream ended there, in this dramatic fashion. The water, the fire, the life and death, emotion and numbness."
I told her that was an amazing story, a most impressive dream. It was poetic in a sense, I think it would be a good frame for a movie someday. It makes me think about how we view. We live in a society of competing philosophies on how we should view death. Atheist take comfort in knowing there is nothing to worry about. Agnostics take comfort in acknowledging that there is nothing we are able know about it, Christians take comfort in thinking they have it all figured out. There is just one problem, each competing group suffers from the same difficulty. They all, despite their philosophies, seek comfort. We need comfort because no matter how you view death, everyone is in agreement on this one fact. It’s a separation from the living. And for that we will all continue to seek comfort. Although we can find some conclusion and debate as to why we die, where we go, and when we shall arrive there, nothing satisfies the pain resulting from the separation caused by death. The only factor that softens the sharp edge, is time.
But what do I really know, these are only a young mans ranting about older mens fears. Death touches me only on the shoulder, from a far outstretched arm, I have not been wrapped completely around by it as some have. But when that day comes, I hope to embrace is much better than I do today.

Why are you looking at me like that?

I've been listening to a lot of Jars of Clay lately. I have turned their album, The 11th Hour, into my very own worship album. The thing I appreciate about their music is that it seems so honest. It doesn't sound like they are trying to please anyone, or even worse, tailor their lyrics to an ever intrusive Christian music industry. You don't hear songs like; Where Are You, Something Beautiful, I Need You, The Eleventh Hour, and my personal favorite right now, The Edge of the Water, on the Christian radio stations or in any church I've ever been to. But these songs for the past few months have been the most honest thing I could say to God. I have not figured out why I feel this way with God, Jars of Clay doesn't really offer any answers. What they do though is express a most difficult and humiliating fact in a passionate way. How many times in church have you sung, " God I have no idea where you are right now, and I am a little angry, but mostly just lonely and tired of waiting. I thought you would never leave, is it you or me or both. God I miss you. Can I still pray, can I still seek, when I cannot even see? Are you who you said you are?" I haven't. Now I sit in churches and listen to songs like, I Exalt Thee, You are Holy, I Give You My All, and I Stand in Awe, etc. etc. I cannot sing. It would be a disgrace to God for me to lie to his face and say words that I know I don't mean. I remember a sad story of a close friend of mine who had to speak at a conference about God's movement in her life, but at that time there was no movement that she could see. She felt lost, alone, and so confused. When she told the people in charge the told her, strait face, to just fake it. I was on fire when she told me this. It's pretty hard to get me angry, I was so much angry for my sake as much as for the impression those words have on our understanding of Christian spirituality and individual spiritual integrity. When things seem at a loss with God, just fake it, is a piece of advice that I could never believe would come from the lips of God. There is not justifiable reason for such a suggestion. I cannot fake my experience, or lack there of, with the God who has promised so much to me, including the promise to find him! That is why I don't sing in church anymore, at least not when I cannot mean it whole heartedly. If a song like, "Where are you" was to actually be presented at a worship service, there is no explaining how passionately I would sing out in an appeal for God's presence. If a song like, "Silence" were to be played, I would scream the words out in a cry for God's movement. But for now, I only have this one choice. Sing out something I cannot mean and fake it so my "Christian" friends stop starring at me, or I listen and wonder. Seeing as how I would rather die that fake anything with God, I will sit and listen, longing to say something meaningful to God.

My first thoughts

I started a new blog today. I was, and am, working on a book about all my random thoughts about God and Christianity, well, Life, the Universe, and Everything really, and the answer is not as simple as 42. I have this problem though, I cannot seem to get over the intimidation of a blank page before me. I long to write beautiful, challenging, meaningful words, but all I can think is, well Nate, your about to post up some more of your crappy writing (In my head I sometimes use stronger language depending on the day). So I remembered something, when I was taking art classes we use to get this strikingly white pieces of sketch board to do our work on. But when you have that clean, bright white page in front of you, its really really hard to be satisfied with any mark you put on that page, no matter what you do it's like your taking away from the beauty of that blank page. So my teacher would have us throw, quite literally, our sketch board on the tile floor, and then check to see if we had any gum, or worse, on our shoes, and then we would walk on that bright white, clean, board. When we were done, the page had scuff marks all over it, it was still white, but not as white, not so intimidatingly bright, and perfect. It was no longer the case that any mark made on that page would take away from the beauty it already was. Now we had nothing to worry about. Any thing we did would only improve the page before us. This is my dirty sketch board, metaphorically speaking, and if something truly beautiful is made here, it will find its way into my other blog, the not so messy one, the important one. But if your interested in my not so clean thoughts, (that sounds bad, but you know what I mean) than please read on.