Quo Vado?

It’s been over a week since I’ve written. Since I’ve opened my bible. I worked to get home and all I’ve done since I got here is sleep and read. I don’t know what to do when I get there. Life in this house isn’t so different from when I was a kid. Little is said and everyone goes his or her separate ways. It’s so hard to explain to people in the kingdom what my family is like. How do I say that coming home is so easy yet so hard? Here the expectations I have of me are completely different than the ones I have in Atlanta. All that’s expected of me here is that I’m here. We don’t spend a lot of time together. We just are together in the same house and somehow that doesn’t seem like enough to me anymore. I don’t know how to do this.

There’s a part of me that decided to use this time at home to take a break from being a disciple. It’s as if mom’s house is the ultimate location for Kelli down time. The reminders of the kingdom aren’t here. There are no roommates to prod you, no one to call, no one to even think about other than my closed off family while I’m here. Life at home is amazingly quiet and uncomplicated. There are just so many people here to see and so many things to do. Life hasn’t changed much in this small town. It may have a million people but there are only four or five that I want to see. Maybe the reality is that I don’t necessarily need five days here – three would be enough. Like for next year, come in on Christmas Day early and leave on the noon Sunday flight.

Was I looking so forward to peace and quiet this year that I put the reality of what coming hoe means for me spiritually in the back of my head and didn’t think about it, or did I know exactly what I was going to do and came here fully looking forward to just vegging for five days? Or do I look to home as a place where I can do this and not get in trouble for it? That is the question isn’t it? Do I expect this behavior to be all right here when it isn’t back in the real world? Don’t I ask myself these questions every time I leave the confines of what is my “everyday” life?

1 Peter 4:10 “Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in various forms.”

All my skills and abilities are gifts from God. He wants me to use them to administer his grace – faithfully. God wants me to use the gifts he gives me trusting that he will take care of them doing what they need to do. My only thing is to give the effort - to continually give the effort without being able to see in my mind the designed or planned outcome. Walking in faith is like walking in darkness or, like walking on the yellow brick road and only being able to see the Emerald City at the end. God’s promise of eternal life through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus clearly lets us know where we are going, what our goal is, the final destination; but the path from here to their for me, as an individual, is clouded in mystery. I do not know the path I will travel. I do not know the obstacles nor the encouragement I will meet along the way. God promises to always be right next to me as I travel the path. God promises to never make the journey more than I can handle. God promises to pick me up and dust me off after I fall. He is not going anywhere. He can be all things to all people because He is the sovereign and omnipresent God. That is who he is, period.

Psalm 103: 1-5 “Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul; and forget not all his benefits who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”

Forget not his benefits isn’t that what I so often do? Forget just what God means to my life. Forget how much he has blessed me with. Forget who he is. Forget that he has died on the cross because I have and will sin and without the blood of his son to wash away those sins, I can never have a relationship with him. It is quite amazing really, God sent his son down to earth to be raised by humans, to live a perfect life only to be killed because I was and often am to blind, cowardly, fearful, rebellious, jealous, hurt, angry and vengeful. God allowed his son to be separated from him. Jesus allowed himself to be separated from God. God cut off his right arm for me. He removed a part of himself, if only for a short time, so that I could choose to have a relationship with him. God knew going in that I was going to balk, fight, rebel and in general try to ignore who he is; but he still chose the cross. What is my response?

I wasn’t ready to write or really think this morning after my shower, so I just packed the I-book up and brought it along with me to work. So, as I type this I’m sitting in the middle of my office just trying to figure out what is going on inside of my head. My eyes hurt and I’m coming down with this awful cold that I was trying to avoid. I need to remember to call Dr. Craig and see if I can take my inhaler with my current propensity for bloody noses. It doesn’t strike me as the worlds best idea.

Service last night was weird. I started out in the fellowship just fine, but after we started to sing, I just felt like pulling myself up into his little ball and ignoring the world. That Santa Clause song triggered something just violently negative in my heart. The rest of the evening became a laborious task that I had to finish before I could find the ‘silence’ of my own mind. Argh, I don’t know what is going on.

I was wondering earlier today why I react so badly to what I see as over promotion of Christmas. It feels like every time I turn around there is Santa Clause, or Christmas songs just bombarding me from every direction. It seams like it’s just too much. I wonder if people are overcompensating for the emptiness inside of them. It feels fake and forced, as if we’re on stage and have to excaudate everything so that the people in the back row can understand what is going on the stage. The world is not out to get me. Christmas doesn’t have to leave me feeling like it’s Kelli against the world. We really did this one holiday as a family. Christmas Eve service, driving down town to check out the lights, special present opening in the morning, gathering in the afternoon, playing cards together, it was all about the family and unlike other holiday’s we weren’t relegated to the side, or just expected to behave. We were a fundamental part of the season. That’s what I miss about the holidays. It wasn’t for long, it wasn’t always about what I wanted it to be, but it was very much about being a family. That’s what I miss.

So yesterday wasn’t such a great day. I got lost in the morning trying to get to my meeting at Winter Construction; and then when I got back working solidly on one project seemed to be the last thing that I could do. It was rough. So, I left early and planned to come home and do the Christmas wrapping, but that didn’t happen. I ended up trying to see how I could access my e-mail from just one program. Which it turns out is harder than it would first seem because the mail programs I usually use are web based and not POP based which makes it harder to access them. Bummer.

Today, I’m going to read a bit more of Gordon Ferguson’s book Romans: The Heart Set Free. After this, I’ll just refer to his comments/thoughts as GF in book on Romans.

GF: The sin of self includes self-gratification, which results in becoming “undisciplined, unorganized, unproductive, unfaithful, and certainly unfulfilled.”

The above description definitely describes me these last several weeks. I have been ridiculously all of those ‘un’ things above. Especially at work where I cannot seem to get anything done without some major big self pep-talk kind of thing. And the product is extremely unfulfilling. I come home every day discussed that I didn’t really get anything done at work. It is not a sign of work becoming boring, but of my need to make it all about me. I need to stop doing that life is not about me and having a conversation with someone isn’t really listening if I’m consistently trying to point out where I am in life. It would be good if I could become less 'woe is me' and more interested in others lives. Stop trying to make sure that everyone knows how my experience parallels theirs, or is worse than theirs, or different than theirs. I need to learn when my experience is irrelevant and come to understand that others don’t get to know me when I’m trying to interrupt their stories.

GF: “ Relationships are all about giving and not receiving.” See section on living without selfishness in Philippians 2:1-11

This morning I woke up not being able to breathe so well. It was weird. As I tried to go back to sleep, then my bladder started to let me know that it existed. So, for only the second time in two months I’m actually doing my QT prior to heading off to work. It is interesting to be the only one up before the sun comes up. There is quietness to this time of day that can make it scary to face. My goal this morning is to start a daily journal that just deals w/ the issues that I have. For now, there is no word requirement, no minimum length, just writing to express who I am and what I am experiencing.

Yesterday, after some consideration I purchased the I-book that I’m writing this journal in. It’s cool and great to finally be able to do computing from the comfort of my own home. Even better is that now I can compute from the comfort of my own bed, which of course makes me very happy. It is comforting to know that I now will typically have a computer available to me most all the time. Its as if this little box of chips and wires is a security blanket or a stuffed animal that I can count on to keep my secrets. It's crazy that in order to be comfortable with my thoughts and with recording them that I have to no that they are being received by something other than paper. Why is actually writing things out in longhand for so distancing. Typing things out is just plain easier. Maybe, typing out the ideas is easier because disposing of stray and random thoughts is quicker and doesn’t involve blatant destruction. With paper, there is always the off chance that someone might see that you’ve thrown something away. Add to the ease of erasing a way of correcting your spelling and grammatical mistakes on the fly so that the page looks perfect when your done and I’d say its every perfectionist dream of a place to keep thoughts.

Last night, I had his conversation with Tosha about what friendships are and mean and how you truly build them. It would be good if I could give her some great examples from the bible. That’s my homework to myself for this week, to come with biblical excellent examples foe friendship to encourage her to study out. Life is way to short to let the fear of being left behind dictate how I’m going to live my life. Isn’t that the conviction therapy is bringing me to? My fear of being left behind or forgotten causes me to shut people out and force them to stay at arms length. So, my fear of something happening is, to some degree, propagating the activity happening. From here then, I guess, my focus needs to be on relying on the fact that God is going to always be here for me. His promise is that I will not be left behind. Others may have what appear to be bigger issues, larger difficulties, but God can give all of us his attention. That is what being omnipotent is all about; because he is God, there is no such thing as spreading himself too thin. Think on that for a day or two.