Chapter 4 - Everything Changes

I am wondering if there is a time in everyone’s life when responsibilities outweigh the simple pleasures. Somtimes when I think about what lies ahead I get this feeling like a ball of concrete forming in my belly. Some might call it dread, some might call it fear, some might call it an ulcer...but i think it might actually be something I’ve never dealt very well with: reality.

There are mice in our house right now. The pest control expert says that traps don’t do anything. Sure, he says, I might catch a mouse now and then, but it won’t control what he called a population explosion of mice in my house. To be honest, I didn’t really like the sounds of that. That sounds like a lot of mice. The reality of the situation is that there may well be a lot of mice. I don’t really want to find out. The only thing that works, he says, is poison. They have this really powerful poison that dehydrates the mice so badly that they dry up and crumble into dust. Ouch.

So there are many things going on inside me right now. It’s like standing under a tree full of monkeys dodging banana peels. Look up, move, look down, step, look up move, etc. I feel like I am searching for this gritty, real thing with my faith right now, my family is only just gaining complexity with some interesting new situations, and my life has two beautiful redheads that require my attention and affection from time to time. How do people do this? Eventually I am going to step on a banana peel. Actually I think I am smeared with banana pulp already. Whoosh. Down I go. Again. Just when I feel I am getting my feet back under me enough to deal with some of the backlogged life-waste, I get broadsided with something new. Is this what life is like? Is there some other way? I am looking for a manual or something that tells me what to let go of and what to hold onto for dear life. I have friends who seem to know how to live like this. One time we visit them in Edmonton, Alberta, and the next we get an email from them and they are teaching english in Korea. When you move that much, you learn to live with what you need and not one thing more. I have never been so transient. I hate moving. When my friends move I try to arrange it so I am out of town or sick. Not only that but I am sentimental. Memories attach themselves to things and I think I should keep this, it reminds me of my first band...or my first car...or that time I went for a walk downtown by myself...mostly really inane memories, really.

In a spiritual sense, I am the same way. I have a difficult time sorting through the mire and deciding what I need to keep and what I should throw away. I often find myself thinking I might need that someday, i’ll come back to that thought and so I write this stuff down, or file it away. You know how the scientists tell us that we only use 10% of our brains? It’s a lie, the other 90% is landfill. Useless fact storage, like those huge warehouses deep in the catacombs of the Pentagon that have crates of files and military weapons projects that never quite worked. Why keep it? We might need it someday.

How do I decide now what I might need in ten years? This is a very difficult question to answer when I am dealing with bits of personality and spirituality. In a conversation with my friend Graham the other day, we were discussing church services, mostly protestant, and how we have nearly exorcised them of meaning. The protestant church has gone through great pains over the last decade or so to cast off all the trappings of tradition in an attempt to contemporize the message of Christ. It’s not about the medium we said...It’s about the message. The problem is that in doing so, we have cast off the meaning associated with those traditions, such as liturgy, ceremony, and silence. It is true that the message of Christ is not about the medium, but with out medium, the message has no meaning. What do we have left that has a real thought-out meaning? In my experience, services are more often geared to comfort than meaning. Now that I have come to know Christ enough to know I am lost when I am comfortable at church, I long for meaning and challenge.

In the same sense, when I am comfortable in my own skin I start to get complacent about sorting through the junk. When the junk piles up higher, it is harder to get to the core. The bigger the pile, the bigger the backhoe, if you catch my meaning. My problem now, I think, is that I have let the pile grow much bigger than I can handle myself. I can no longer get my bearings because the horizon and the sun are blocked out by my mountains of crap. I can no longer remember the criteria by which I evaluated each piece of junk and cast it onto the keep pile. There are these mice that are running around nibbling at things, leaving half-thoughts and poorly worded prayers and holes where once had solid truth or doctrine. I need help. I need some spiritual mouse poison. I am not sure where to go from here, but I don’t think there is a better place to start as i turn and face that reality:

O God, I need help.