deepsoil

Okay, so I could give more excuses about why I seem to only be able to post about once a month these days… and these days seems to be about the last two years, when I had been a faithful and several time a week blogger for years before that, blogging before most people knew what a blog was.

I could tell you how my husband and I have moved up to Nashville, and how we’re both starting new jobs, and how life is in an apartment with our four and a half year old Boxer…

And I could tell you that I’ve been busy… blah blah blah

But I’ve determined that I have a problem. Yes, a problem. I like to blame my life for keeping me from doing things that make me come alive.

Yes, I know. That’s stupid.

Jody and I were over for dinner last week with some friends from our now “old” church, and their son was there, who’s a freshman in college. He and I got to talking about movies and such, and there were several that he asked me if I’d seen that I hadn’t.

And I tried to explain to him that when I miss a movie in the theater, I sometimes never make it back to see it, even if it was one that I thought looked good or something. And then I made the pronouncement that made me start thinking along a track that I hadn’t really thought along before.

I said, “Sometimes I’m too busy with life to actually live.”

And then I thought, that sucks! But it’s true… Sad, but true. And how often do I do this???

Okay, I’m a perfectionist, and obsessed with “results.” I’ve known for years that I have trouble with simply “being.” (That whole “Be still and know that I am God” thing… I ought to like tattoo that on my forehead… then every time someone asked about the tacky placement, at least I’d have to remind myself of that!)

But it never struck me that all too often I don’t really live…

I’d been doing a series on the life that Jesus means for us to have with the youth group at the last church we were at, and yet I forgot to ask what that means for me.

What does it mean to live abundantly in Jesus every day?

And no, i don’t think that movies are the end-all in this scheme, it just happened to be the conversation trigger…

Then I started to ask myself why I played my keyboard so little. Why do I have a painting that’s been about 1/3 of the way finished for over a year, and I haven’t touched it? Why have I been neglecting the things that make me feel alive? Even blogging is a good outlet for me, lets me write just for the joy of writing, which, since it’s become part of my vocation, is even more important than before.

So, I’ve vowed to actually live, and stop worrying about being productive. I confess, I don’t know exactly how to do that because the insecure part of me screams that I must be productive in order to have value, and while I know that in God’s economy that’s a lie, it’s hard to shake that screaming little voice in the world we live in…

I feel perpetually caught in the middle of two worlds… knowing many things that should be and then jarred back into the reality of how they actually exist and yet are so broken, messed up, convoluted.

I drift off into the happy materialism that thinks the new pillows I just bought for my couch will actually make me happy, and then I’m faced with the reality of starving and abused children, people living in poverty who would think our one-bedroom apartment is a spotless mansion, heaven.

And I struggle… knowing how things are supposed to be and yet aren’t… I have no problems believing in the now and not-yet aspects of the Kingdom of God.

I see beauty and pain. I see the people who can be self-sacrificing and go so far out of their way to help other people who are suffering usually because of things inflicted on them by still other people who have done things I can’t even imagine and I cringe hearing bits and pieces of. I see war, and yet I see very few changes in how we go on living here in the states. We live better in this time of war than most other countries do when they’re at peace…

And I’m rambling, quite possibly setting records for blog post length. If you’ve read all the way down to here, you deserve some sort of prize…

I don’t have any answers… just more questions.