There is a great deal assumed in how I approach life. It's not that I must have the answers. I feel like I must always be making progress towards whatever the goal may be. If I am distracted whether it is boredom or exhaustion or a mix of both, it presents a particularly difficult problem. I must have some solid ground to work off of to make my way down the road. I have a need for some terra firma.
General satisfaction, or what some might call happiness, is not so much about the amount but the quality of life. I'm not entirely dissatisfied but I feel like I am accomplishing less with more time. I see my failures and I cringe. I continue to get the same hands. I'm treading water.
What do you do when you start treading water? Do you stop? Or do you change your approach? Of course you don't stop. You can't stop...else you'll sink to the bottom of the lake. You've got to adjust and make changes.
As a kid, we'd have at home what was generally called a "junk drawer." Everything that either didn't have a place or was frequently used went into that drawer. Eventually that drawer would be too full of literal junk and it would need to be reorganized until it could be remotely functional. It seemed like everything this semester went into that junk drawer for me. Relationships. Classes. Projects. Work Plans. Future plans. Current plans. Yesterday's lunch. Tomorrow's future.
Why can't I shake this funk? Why do I feel so ineffective? So useless? Yes, a flattering self-portrait, one to garner many admirers... No. I can't shake this funk because I have put everything into that single drawer. There's no organization—at best it's cluttered organization.
Why is it so cluttered? Old baggage. Old expectations. Debts, dreams, and distractions. Why? That's what I am asking myself now. Why? Why isn't the future clear?
Well, the future is no murkier than the past. The past has the tendency to crystallize the best... Ever heard of The Judd's country song Grandpa, Tell Me 'Bout the Good Old Days?
Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good old days
Sometimes it feels like this world's gone crazy
And Grandpa, take me back to yesterday
When the line between right and wrong
Didn't seem so hazy
Did lovers really fall in love to stay
And stand beside each other, come what may?
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say?
Did families really bow their heads to pray
Did daddies really never go away?
Oh, Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good old days
Grandpa, everything is changing fast
We call it progress, but I just don't know
And Grandpa, let's wander back into the past
And paint me the picture of long ago
Did lovers really fall in love to stay
And stand beside each other, come what may?
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say?
Did families really bow their heads to pray
Did daddies really never go away?
Oh, Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good old days
Oh, Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good old days
I have a tendency to not allow for the positive outlook for the future. It ends up being that I look to the past either as better or that the future isn't good enough or that I haven't done enough to justify the past or warrant my future. Odd, I suppose, but it's me. Like I said before, I need to feel like I've made progress. Or else, this might show that I have a great lack of patience with myself, if only at times.
And sad to say, after five years, I feel as though little if any progress has been made on my behalf. I just see a larger stack of papers in a never-ending game of shifting bureaucracy that's my life at present.
I am surrounded by friends. But I don't feel their touch as much any more. Any progress made in this area is lost to the feeling of being alone to myself in a crowded room. This is not because I don't have a lack of important things to discuss or a fervent desire to care for the other in my midst, rather it is because I am completely incompetent to order this task promptly and thus proceed with patience. I push myself back in circles. I am now back to where I started five years ago, no more and no less.
And what do I have to show for it as of late? An Aggie Ring, yes. But not the satisfaction that I am going into a future I am pleased with. How could something so good go so horribly wrong? Poor management? Poor willpower? Poor desire? I don't think it's any of these three. Maybe it's a combination but not just any one of these three.
How can I focus on my personal matters if I can't first solve my academic/financial ones? It's the basic order of needs that comes to rear its ugly head. Shelter and food are first, all other needs follow behind.
I think the "easiest" decision **on paper** for me right now would be to get my degree and go to the seminary. Financially this makes sense for what I'm looking at. Spiritually it is okay. Academically it would be fine...I love to learn things I am actually interested in... But there is a chink in my armor of surety here, too. It's almost as if God has decided to put an anti-hubris device in the models coming off the assembly line when I was born. There's always another fault that comes forth to break the assuredness of any situation.
However, that is not what I want. I will not be a priest. There, I've said it. I won't go as far as cannot, just as Thomas (of Doubting Thomas fame) could not himself say, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." I just as well might make the same demand now for my own personal belief in His plans in my case.
I am not emotionally fit to be a priest. I know there is something deep within me, that's been there for the longest of times, where I feel the underlying need—no, compulsion—to give my all to another—my attention, my wealth, my understanding, my compassion, my love. You probably don't know what it is like to have this well inside only to be made, in essence, to learn in exercises of patience that God—and therefore love—requires it.
Yes, both priest and husband require such a self-giving sacrifice, but it is in the latter that I see myself most clearly, even if I don't see my future as clearly as I once did. It is in the latter I see requiring the greatest patience and, for me, the greatest love. For if one freely chooses God who has loved him since the beginning, is it not merely a return of the favor? However, is it not greater that one chooses to love someone who has not loved him first? Is this not a mirror image of God's love of each of His creation? And so I must emulate the One who has loved me first, bringing what love I have been given to another. For we do not know love until we are first loved. And it is in knowing His love for me that I shall have to not only return the favor but bring that love to others as well.
And so this compulsion requires that what wells inside of me be nurtured and tended to even though the garden remains fallow and untouched. That the brambles be trimmed back, even if the guest does not arrive as planned or even if she makes plans and then promptly runs away never to return again, for a garden elsewhere, one more distant and greener than can possibly be cultivated in the taxed soil of the garden's surroundings.
Why should you care about all of this of all of this timid psychobabble? I don't have an answer for that. But what was once private now is public, and even so, I am beginning to feel some peace and satisfaction on this stasis I am experiencing right now. I am simply saddened I have gotten myself into a cynical wheel of sorrow.
Dreams rarely come true, especially when one cannot keep those dreams—and wishes of happiness—straightened out for longer than five minutes. After those five minutes the world comes crashing back down, saying to me: "you stupid boy." If only I would learn and be at peace more often. If only, but there is still hope ahead. If there is anything at all, there is still hope, hope for solid ground.
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