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.