Leaves of Peace

I’m not a fan of the weather right now. Summer kills me. It’s way too hot to get the daily tasks done. Like breathing for instance. That’s something I don’t feel obligated to do at this point.

Call me crazy.

I haven’t been to relaxed for a while. I feel like I’m waiting for something. But at the same time, I feel like it’s passing before my eyes and I’m not reaching for it. I’ve just felt so discombobulated. I miss the fall. The fall is my favorite season. I would drive down my friend’s narrow street that has two rows of trees lined up.

This overwhelming feeling would take over. I would gaze upon all the fallen leaves and just drive real slow. I would always feel at peace driving by there. Whatever I was thinking before I got on this street would escape my mind and I would then be in my own world. A world where death doesn’t exist and goodbyes are just another way of saying, “I’ll see you again.” A world where medicine isn’t the “cure-all end-all.” A world where time stops.

I don’t exactly know what Heaven is going to be like. I know it’s not a place where some angels going to hand me a harp and I’ll have to play the harp for all eternity. That sounds like hell to me.

Call me crazy.

After getting out of my car, I would look around the yards that were raked the other day to get that fresh green lawn look. And I would see these yards covered with fallen leaves again and for some reason I can’t explain, that would always put a smile on my face.

                                                                                                                     Apoligies

                                                      

I’m an Idiot

OK.

My day yesterday was hysterical. And when I say hysterical, I mean I’m an idiot.

So I go to my college to get some stuff straightened out. I used my license to show I am the real me. Then I leave and go to a coffee shop to meet my friend. We hang out and then I get a phone call from my college saying they have my license. I don’t want to waste gas going back out there but I must. So I hang out for another half an hour and before I leave, a regular at the coffee shop that I know informs me that I’m whereing my church inside out.

I felt like a genius at this point. It gets better.

On my way to my college, my friend calls me and lets me know that I left my laptop charger at the coffee shop. I’m annoyed at this point. So I continue on my journey to get my license. After that I go back to the coffee shop to get my charger. I go home to relax for a little while.

I laid on the couch very uncomfortably. See, I pack my wallet with pointless reciets and it’s very uncomfortable. After I relax, I leave to my friends house and just hang out. That’s when I realize I left my wallet at my house…

…and I needed gas badly. So I go home and  relax again. I wanted to go back to my college to try and clear a matter with them about my GPA before they closed. So I goto get gas because I won’t make it there and back without getting gas.

And believe me, when I say “I won’t make it there and back” I mean it.

I have had my car die on me a few times for riding on empty. There are good stories from those situations but I won’t share them. I’m trying to keep myself going off random tangents.

So I make it to the gas station and that’s when I figured out that I forgot to grab my wallet even though the whole mission was to get the wallet.

Danget.

I went back to get my wallet and then I filled up gas. It was too late to try and make it to my school because they would be closed by the time I got there.

No worrys.

Will, that was my idiotic day. I hope you enjoyed it.

Probation and Lies

I did very bad on my first semester of college. They gave me a letter in the mail about being on probation or something like that. I don’t know. I didn’t exactly read the letter. I just finished the second semester of college. I passed all my classes and I felt great. Then I tried to register for summer school and that’s when it got interesting. I tried to register for a history class and it dismissed me. I tried it a few more times and still no luck.

Then I started wondering if I really did pass my classes second semester.

So I checked my grades on-line and everything looked good. That’s when I saw “NG” (no grade) in the row of grades. I slowly panned my eyes to the left to see what in the world it was. The class responsible for this “NG” was supervised tutoring. The only problem I had was that I didn’t sign up for supervised tutoring. The school must have given me that class after I did horrible first semester. They probably informed me in that letter I never read.

Kinda ironic.

I was pretty pissed off. So I leave my comfortable coffee shop to go to my college to try and get this worked out. On the way, I start thinking of ways to help me get back in to the school. The Latin word for this is lying.

But what do they know!?

So I get down there and I rush to the registration building to find it closed. I missed it by twenty minutes. That’s when I got really angry.

I was close to cussing up a storm.And not to myself.

You know those certain people you see who are screaming off the road and kicking their car as you drive by.

Yah… like that.

But none of the words came out right. And by none, I mean it came out like this;

gggggggggg.

It was like an unending gurgling noise. I was trying to damn everything in God’s name but I couldn’t get the right sound to leave my mouth.

So I walked back in to the building where the hallway is (that part of the building was still open) and I see a room across from the register room. I saw a guy in their and I wasn’t sure if he was someone that can help me, or the janitor.

He saw me and waved to me, so I walked in to the room. I told him my situation and he told me I should come back Monday morning and that it should get cleared up. I got back in my car. I was relaxed at that point and I just kind of reflected on what happened.

It’s times like this where a deeper and complicated meaning comes to my mind of how a sinner tries to be like Christ. Trying to be like Christ puts a damper on my parade. It’s just very inconvenient in my life sometimes. Lying can just be very handy. But I knew that when the time came, I would’ve had to accept responsibility of the letter and how I just didn’t read the thing and that with that information given to them, it would be their decision of what to do with me.

And when I say, “it’s times like this where a deeper and complicated meaning comes to my mind of how a sinner tries to be like Christ” I don’t even every once in a while.

I mean the daily inconveniences there are to following Christ. “Love the unlovable,” “deny yourself and take up your cross daily” “being obedient to the law” and so on and so on.

When a life like this is truly pursued, one of two things happen. An attraction, and a distraction. The attraction comes from people starting to see that theirs more to life than what meets the eye. Something that is real and authentic, and makes the hearts of man yearn for something real rather than another delusion.

The distraction comes from man also. Since there is something greater out there than what meets the eye. Then that premise would indicate that the worldly things we treasure so much to an extent, need to be put aside.

A wealthy man came to Jesus and asked, “ Teacher, what must I do to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus said to mind the 10 commandments. The rich man replied that he’s done that his hole life. Jesus looked at him and told him to give away all his riches and follow him. The rich man walked away very upset because he knew he couldn’t give all that up.
It’s funny because any time people wanted to follow Jesus, he always told them to stay in their towns and to not go on the journey with Him and the twelve disciples. But this is the only record in the Bible of Jesus inviting someone to come and follow him. This man could have very well been the thirteenth disciple.

It’s impossible to follow Jesus without giving in to the Holy Spirit. There are times where I’ve tried to follow the law without the Spirit and it just teared me up. That’s when I came to the point that I love Sin. I don’t intentionally love sin. It’s just in my nature. It’s like the Pinnocio movie when all the kids are having cigars and gambling and loving it. Then they turn in to donkeys and they’re not a fan anymore.

Like that.

Without the spirit to actually change your heart to see things the way God would see them and to feel the way God would feel, then it’s just a waist of time.

Without the Spirit, the only thing you can accomplish is another religion in the world. And if that’s the case, then you didn’t accomplish anything that is pleasing to God.

That, and life would suck once again.

Side note                                                                                                                        (These past blogs I’ve written have been very hard to follow. I’m struggling with ADD as I write.So, I apologize if I keep throwing off the groove of things)

Side Note                                                                                                                           (I read alittle of James today. It talked about taming the tongue. Read that if you find yourself in the same predicaments)                                                                                                                              
Side Note                                                                                                                             (If that guy was just a janitor and was talking out of his butt, I’m going to be pretty pissed)

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system….

                                                                                                        Apologies   

     
 

Improv and Phantoms

I had my improv final on Wednesday. The second to last day before my semester ended. It was such a blast. In one skit, I was a naked lama   …and my partner was a fully furred lama. We weren’t aloud to talk. Two other people to the side had to do our voices.  I was at first cocky. But then after the other lama commented how I was naked as if I were Adam and Eve when they first realized they were naked. I then started to rip off the imaginary fur that the other lama had and started licking it and slapping it on me. I walked away with my head held up high. …And then I was raped by the other lama.

Everybody laughed.

That same day, there were a number of people who wrote their own solo play about their life and personal experience. They couldn’t show the hole thing, only a small piece of it. Like I said, they wrote a full on play. Gifts like that just amaze me. There were six people for the first show that was from 4:00PM to 5:30PM and seven people for the second show that was at 7:30PM to 9:40PM. The difference between them was the first one was along the lines of a young to old age group of people.

I was amazed at how amazing they were. To see the talent and skill that these students have. See, I love improv. Improv, for those of you who are not familiar with, is to perform with no format given. It’s spontaneous. The only heads up you would have is when the audience is in control of stating the plot and characters and setting. Then you have a few seconds before you start and the magic begins. Taking this improv class has really opened my eyes to how deeper and complicated improv really is. It has helped me see how much of an art it is.

The rules of improv are very hard to grasp because without understanding the rules, the skit that is being done will just stink. But when you do understand the rules, that’s when you can bend and break them.

It sounds very contradictory and to an extent, it is. But once you see this idea being done, you start to realize what I’m talking about it. For instance, you don’t disagree with your partner. When you disagree with your partner, the scene tends to not go anywhere. You can’t build and run with an idea that gets branched to another idea witch gives birth to a new idea and then before you know it, you and the robber are playing in the ball pit at McDonalds.

That’s right.

But then you see the clip of the Monty Python’s film (I know that’s not too helpful, but I don’t know which movie exactly) when the main character goes in to the complaining service room and all they do is go back and forth arguing. The theme was to disagree. Another rule in improv is to never ask questions because it takes away from the scene rather than adding information that you can work with. I don’t know how one could brake that. I’m obviously not doing a good job explaining improv, but I hope I was able to give you a general idea without confusing you. I obviously did a crappy job explaining the hole “once understanding the rules then you can bend and break them.”

Apologies.

But like I said, I love improv. Yet, I also have such a deep respect for those that performed because of the skill it takes to not only perform a solo show, but write your own show. I don’t think I could ever do that. The concept that I treasure about improv is not preparing before time and just running with ideas as you go. The impulsive reaction to it all just drives me.

The second show was for an adult age group audience. If it was rated, it would be a little on the R to NC-17 side of things.

They all stood out to me in their own way. Their were a few however, that stood out to me in a way I won’t soon forget.

There was a girl I recently befriended and she was the second one to do her solo. She talked about how she had the two greatest friends of all time. How she felt so complete with these friends and how they meant so much to her. She talked about how one of them died and the other disassociated himself from her. She talked about how she loved him and how he simply denied even her friendship. She talked about how she would make herself throw up so she could be beautiful and that her friend would accept her.

She went on saying of how she went to watch this play and how she had a really good time. These two guys were on stage saying sex jokes towards one another and when one went to kiss the other, the one man screamed “Stunt Double!!” Then, there was a man that was next to her that wanted a kiss because he chose her to be the stunt double. When she leaned in to kiss him, he turned his head last second, so she kissed him on the lips. The audience was in an uproar of laughter. She didn’t know how to react. When she came home, she found him on myspace and befriended him. He was old enough to be her dad. They started talking a lot and he told her to come over one of these days.

That’s when she continued on with the story about how she was raped.

Her last line before she ended was, “I stared at the mirror and told myself that I was a woman now. And  a part of me inside wished I could go back to being a little girl.”
Hours ago, I pretended to be lama that was raped. There was no laughter from the crowds this time. Only dead silence. A little part of me died that night. I know things like that happen in life but…

…I wish I wasn’t five feet away from a girl retelling her rape story                                             …I wish I hadn’t gone that night to the second show                                                                 …I wish I had the guts to tell her about the love of God                                                         …I wish she wouldn’t reject the message and by in to this cultural moral relativism crap.         …I wish I could’ve helped her.

Don’t think I just showed how irrelevant God is in mankind’s hurt and suffering. The only thing I accomplished in showing you is how shallow my relationship with God really is.

If it were Jesus instead of me that night, He would’ve embraced her in His arms giving her a hope that would last forever. Sometimes I feel like I’m a mere phantom of Christ. What I mean by that is God has invited us to be apart of His body. To be the hands and the feet and the mouth and the legs and the arms. And like the shadow analogy that  lots of Christians know, (Death is only a shadow, it can scare you, but like a shadow, it can’t do any harm) I feel like I am only a shadow of who Jesus is a lot of the time. Enough to tell who I’m trying to impersonate, but not enough to even give me a second glance.

There was a book I read about a year ago called, “Flashbang,” by Mark Steele. In his prologue, he talked about how there are two kinds of grenades. There are the grenades that explode and do a lot of damage, and then there’s the flash grenade that make a whole lot of noise and light, but no impact. Mark claimed that lots of Christians today (including himself) suffer from being like flashbangs. They would make a whole lot of noise and sound for Jesus to grab everybody’s attention, but in the end, there was no impact that was made.

Nothing more than an illusion.

I don’t wish to be a flashbang, and I don’t wish to be a phantom. There is so much suffering in this world and so many questions left unanswered. I may not have all the answers, but I know who does. And I will never receive all the answers on earth, but I don’t serve a God that I completely understand. God does not function inside the box. He isn’t a being that can be figured out. If we served a God that could be completely figured out, then we’d be in trouble.  

I am on a journey to follow Christ. What is in store for me, only God knows.

…And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
                                                                                                             Apologies

I Wonder…

This is my last week of school. Finals are very stressful. However, I have learned a trick to finals. If you do really well the hole semester, then you should do good on your finals. And if you don’t do great on your finals, it won’t matter as much.

The only problem is I never apply this trick, and because of that, I’m stressing right now for finals.

Mostly just Englsh. If I don’t do good on the essay I’m about to turn in, then I may not pass English. If I don’t pass English I might get kicked out of my school.

So here I am, studying for math, and I began to have a random thought. Naturally, when I’m suppose to be focusing on something big like a final or project and I get a random thought, I have to grow that thought and sidetrack from the priority things that need to get done.

I started to wonder about flying. There are so many people who get so stressed out to the point where they would like to drop everything and fly away. It sounds so majestic in it’s own way.

But then I thought about Superman. That’s right! The Man of Steel himself. I thought how amazing it was for him, the first time he started to fly. Then I thought about the episodes of where he doesn’t even notice how spectacular it is that he’s flying.

I know I just compared a cartoon to mankind, but I’m tired and like I said, I have to branch out from this theory to see where it leads me.

What if the everyday person, you, me, that old lady that has a few dozen cats down your street, don’t really know what we want. It’s as if we play cat and mouse with are dreams and if we finaly do catch it, we open are paw to find a dead mouse.

If we could fly everyday, it wouldn’t be are dream to fly anymore. Are dream would be to play golf on the moon. And if we were somehow able to manage that, then are dream would be to travel through time. And if we somehow managed that, are dream would be…..

What if mankind didn’t really know what it wanted? The idea of not being content in the Wonderland that we are selves like to create.

There’s got to be something out there that would be awe-inspiring the first time to infinity.

I believe in God and so many times, I grow tired of it. But I don’t grow tired of God. I grow tired of the God I created in my own image. The God I created in my own fantasy. It’s as if I’m following God, but then I take all these detours and I somehow end up in a museum didicated to Hitler (Rat Race).

For a God to be the same yesterday, today, and forever is quite the statement. The idea of an infinite God. That means that if you were to start in the middle of this infinite God and walk one direction for infinity, you would be no closer than where you started.

That’s pretty overwhelming if you stop and think about it.

I don’t know where all this came from, but I hope you were able to take something out of this and enjoy it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                       Apologies     

Scapegoats

Well, I finished the semester and passed all my classes. ( at least I think) I’m very relieved to not have to worry about school for a little while. I can read and relax and just breathe. At the same time, I feel as though I finished the semester with some things unsaid that still preoccupy my mind. Since it’s too late to articulate those thoughts to the source, which is the school, I’ll use this instead.

The last essay that we had to do outside of my English class was on high school. So, we read an essay in are English books and the essay we read just went off on how high school and how pointless and inadequate it is these days. I agreed with most of his points accept for a couple. We had a class discussion about those certain points. It came down to a few of the students in the classrooms stating how high school is the cause of the cruelty that goes on in many other students’ lives. This didn’t settle well in my stomach so I intervened against that. I didn’t express much of what I’m about to express now, but the majority of the conversation felt like they used school as the scapegoat of the bad experiences students have like bullying and such.

I don’t think high school makes students cruel towards the students at the bottom of the social chain. First off, features such as those were found more in Jr. high in my experience. Not so much in high school. Secondly, man has had  this sensational gift since the moment man ate from the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.

BLAME.

When affairs go on in a marriage, who’s to blame? When a husband cheats on his wife and the wife finds out, who should she blame? It would be easier to blame the woman who took away her husband, or even go as far as to blame the opportunity of when the husband cheated on her with this outside woman. But let us be reasonable here. If the husband didn’t cheat on his wife with that woman, it would’ve been some other girl. Any fool can see that the one at fault is the husband. The problem was not the outside woman, or the opportunity of the affair happening.

Those only play a small role.

The problem was the husband. The problem was that his heart was not in the right place. See, the wife could follow the husband and be everywhere he goes and know in detail every women he is in contact with, whether it be from the coworker he sees to the woman that hands him his coffee. But that doesn’t change the fact that his hearts in the wrong place. The marriage would still lack and fall apart.

When the heart is derailed, it’s only a matter of time before a divorce. And even if the divorse never comes, you just end up witnessing the most unhappiest time on earth that two people could spend together. But when the heart is where it should be, you see a man put restrictions on himself of never being alone with a woman besides his wife…and I guess his mom.

He can trust his mom.

He would go as far as to getting a friend to keep him accountable in the matter. He would limit as much opportunity as possible for cheating to even have a chance of happening. And the opportunities that do fall on his lap he knows to walk away from those right away.

 It’s a test is what it is.

It’s the same thing with school. You can’t blame school for the cruelty that goes on. School is an inanimate object. That’s like a car crashing in to a building and the driver getting out of the car to curse the building. It’s foolishness.

School is an opportunity for cruelty to take place. That much is certain. School tests the hearts of the young. When a student is tested and ends up bullying a kid with lower social status, he is failing the test. But something happens if a student passes these tests. There is an attribute that grows within these kinds of students.

It’s called character.

You could home school a child all you want. But like the husband and wife analogy, that doesn’t fix the root of the problem and that’s if the hearts in the right place. By no means am I attacking home school.

I just think blaming schools is kind of ridiculous when all it does is reflect what kind of people we are.

At heart, we are sick.

It’s because we’re missing something, so we strive to win that feeling back. To feel better about ourselves, we have to make others feel like dirt. That way, we could feel more important and valuable.

To an extent  this is something you’ll see more in Jr. High and maybe sixth grade. Not so much high school in my experience.

But at the same time, you see it in life. Everything in life is a comparison to be better than the other.

Like I said, we’re missing something. I believe we lost it when the fall happened. That feeling of being right with God. 

“The feeling was that if we were last on the social ladder, or near last, we would be facing some kind of torture. Though it sounds absurd, it felt true, as though there were a spirit in the air directing our passions. It was incredibly important to climb this ladder, and the closer you were to the top, it was believed, the easier you could breathe because at the top people loved you and cared about you and gave you a little bit of the thing God used to give you.”
   

                                                                                                        -Donald Miller