Intro - We have people for that.

I am writing this thing out of desperation, really. I may as well be honest. I have made it to what I feel is not the midpoint in my life, but certainly a midpoint. I am at that stage of life where I make the decisions and set the patterns for the rest of my years. Here is the fire in which I forge my future. Here is the storm to which I set my compass. I am 31 years old, married, one child, two cars, a small yellow house in a nice small town in a beautiful area of Canada. I have a career that I like, and wish to stay in for a while longer. I have a double garage and more projects than I can reasonably accomplish in one lifetime. I have come to the time in my life where I see the value in paying someone to finish my half-finished projects. The vintage scooter in the garage needs some engine work. I love working on engines, but I think now that I will love riding the scooter next spring more than I will love tinkering on it this winter. I have a file full of furniture designs that I have wood cut for, and the wood has already been waiting for almost half a year to be assembled. I have a ‘71 beetle out back that needs the tranny pulled and put into our ‘74 beetle that pops out of first gear...that was supposed to be a summer project. Unfortunately I couldn’t do it because the extra stall in the garage is taken up by nearly 1000 board feet of custom-cut timbers for the studio I was supposed to build for myself by mid-fall so our 6-month old son could have a room in our two bedroom house. My office currently fills one. I have one wife to whom I wish to stay married for a good long time, and a son who I would like to recognize when he walks into the house at age 16 and asks to borrow the keys to the beetle.

I also have one lack-luster faith that needs some serious elbow-grease and so far no-one else has volunteered to handle the job of fixing that, so again it falls to me. Many projects: I am ProjectMan. But there is hope. As my friend Steve says: We have people for that. Reading backwards along that list, I realize that the order of priorities is nearly inverse to the way that I have listed them, and if I need to start fixing something, it should probably be my faith first.

You see, I am a man trained in the word. I have a degree that tells people i should know better. I lived, learned, then worked under the protection of my Alma Mater for nearly 8 years all tolled, and now that I have a job far away from daily enocouragement in my faith, a lot more responsibility falls to me. That is what time of life it is: the Alot More Responsibility Falls To Me time of life. It has been a few years since I have felt challenged about God, and it has been about the same amount of time since I have challenged myself to do anything about it. I am finding my life thin, anxious, frustrating, and tiring, and I don’t think it is the scooter in the garage that is causing the problem...oh I hope not. And so now, as I start to write this, another project that has been no more than an idea in my head for six or seven years, it is not to impress you with wit or knowedge, nor is it to fill you with metaphors and flowery prose. It is a desperate attempt to dig back to a spiritual past that felt a lot richer than it feels now. It is a knot on the end of a long rope, and my burning hands are clinging to it with the conviction of the damned...or at least the nearly damned, if there is such a thing.

I feel close to an edge. Some of my scrabblings have cast small pebbles into the precipice of faithlessness, and I didn’t hear them land. And it scared me. Last week my wife said to me for the first time I want my mike back and at that moment I lost some footing. I always swore I would never let myself lose myself. My days as a bachelor were spent living in small basement suites in Vancouver, playing in art-rock bands, and taking whole summers off because I could. I did little more than indulge in my addiction to self-examination. I wrote songs about myself. I thought about myself. I filled small notebooks and margins of school notes with the iconography of inner struggle: Knives, faceless bodies, wings, boats, and eerie eyes peering up from the deep. I wondered what it all meant. Sometimes an image would come to me on the edge of sleep and I would draw it out the next day and pour over it, seeking to understand it’s mysteries.

I have no regrets about that time. I would recommend it for anyone. A bit of navel gazing does a body wonders if the end result is that it makes a person more balanced, truthful, and self-aware. As a warning to those wishing to move to the next stage of their lives; that much self-time can get a bit dicey. Move in then move on. But I digress.

At the edge of this precipice, I have caught myself thinking things like am I still a christian? and is it really worth it? and do I really believe the same thing as these nuts? The answers have been coming back more and more vague and the truth is: I no longer know what I believe. For a guy who has discussed the intricacies of feminist hermeneutics, disected the word dynamos in greek lexicons, written songs, read Chesterton, preached Romans, and believed in Jesus since he could remember, this is a significant revelation: I no longer know what i believe. (I say it again for my own benefit. You must remember that this is an exercise for me, not for you...I am back to navel gazing again).

Now here’s the crux of it: the reason I write this is to re-trace the rich path of my spiritual growth. I wish to linger on the porch and ask God to remind me what he is like, then stick out my thumb and wait for some thought to carry me somewhere. I want to note signposts, to toss pebbles in the pond and count the rings, to smoke cloves in corncob pipes in a pew of long grass. I want quiet inside, not just quiet outside, nearer my God to thee and all that. Perhaps at the end of it I will again be able to tell you what I believe. Perhaps not, but at this point my options are limited...sink or swim, don’t they say.

It reminds me of the joke about the two fellows sitting in a boat. One baits his lure with Dynomite...the other is a game warden come to see how this fellow catches so many fish. When the warden sees the other man’s lure of choice, he berates him mightily about his ears with a torrent of angry words. The fisherman calmly lights a stick of TNT, plunks it in the warden’s lap and says “You gonna talk, or you gonna fish?”

I think i’ll fish.