Monday, January 28, 2008

Monday Morning

For better or for worse I am a believer in Christ. I do not mean that in a sense that I may or may not regret deciding to 'throw' my life away, I mean that in the sense that for better or for worse I am sticking with this commitment. Like any other marriage that goes through the high and low points my love has been battered, disappointed and hurt by my own misunderstandings and misconceptions...but I have always somehow found open arms of love at the end of the day.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

You know what I am thinking right now...it is sort of awkward, you know?

Saturday, January 26, 2008

C.S. Lewis Quote:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Friday, January 25, 2008

Into the Heart

You know me, you know this broken and infected heart.

Words do not give justice to this mess that I live in, you know my broken ways better then I do.

I guess I am just asking to please do not give up on me. Every day is a battle and every day it gets harder to hang on to this fleeting life when the vast reach of eternity seems but a breath away.

How trite is it to ask that you be by my side, to hold me in the good and bad, to be my back and front guard and to open my eyes and heart that I seek so desperately to close?

Take this piece of stone and break it, let life flow from within once again.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Mofo

I know you are listening, so I won't bother wasting time by going into an unnecessary existential crisis about whether or not you are real and if I am a block of cheese.

Instead, I just need to let you know that it is hard being here. Seeing so many things, feeling so many emotions and experiencing so many thoughts all at once...memories, pains and so many twisted burdens of life.

Combined it makes me want to scream.

Most days I am not sure what I think, what I feel, what I believe and what it is I am fighting for. So often there is this gaping pit in my soul that is begging to be filled by impractical and impossible means, devices that do not exist and died a long time ago.

In ways it feels like the song 'Mofo' by U2. I see all of this contradictions in the person I am and in who I am perceived as, who I have been perceived as and how I will be perceived. I want do desperately to have the family I never have, to be loved for who I am, to fill the void in my soul, to deal with a God that I love and despise at the same time, to embrace a life of art and liberation from the shell of false religion, to break my life open and pour it out as something useful, to be held and told it will be okay, to be myself, to tell that family how much I hate him, to stop being pissed off by the fact I'm never going to be able to tell my bastard of a father how much I hate him and that him never being there before he died has contributed to me being slightly upset, to let go of the pain in my soul, to know that the Father loves me and it will be okay, I want to be able to let go of every last one of my emotions and let the pain fall like so many drops of rain in a torrential hurricane downpour.

Yes, I am angry. I am enraged at my personal state of being as well as how fucked up this world is. I am nauseated at the fact both of my jobs seems to do nothing but contribute to this consumer mindset of buying your way to paradise. It is the blind leading the blind off a cliff with a rocket train.





"Lookin' for to save my, save my soul
Lookin' in the places where no flowers grow
Lookin' for to fill that God shaped hole
Mother, mother sucking rock and roll
Mother

Holy dunc, spacejunk comin' in for the splash
Been around back, been around front
White dopes on punk staring into the flash
Been around back, been around front
Lookin' for baby Jesus under the trash
Been around back, been around front
Mother, mother sucking rock and roll
Mother
Mother hopping sugar popping dropping rock and roll
Happy
Mother

Mother, mother, mother
Mother, mother, mother

Mother, am I still your son
You know I've waited for so long to hear you say so
Mother, you left and made me someone
Now I'm still a child but no one tells me no

Lookin' for a sound that's gonna drown out the world
Been around back, been around front
Lookin' for the father of my two little girls
Been around back, been around front
Got the swing, got the sway, got my straw in lemonade
Been around back, been around front
Still looking for the face I had before the world was made
Been around back, been around front
Mother, mother sucking rock and roll
Mother
Bubble poppin', sugar droppin' rock and roll
Mother
Mother sucking, fucking rock and roll
Mother

Mother, mother, mother
Mother, mother, mother

Soothe me mother
Prove me father
Move me brother
Woo me sister
Soothe me mother
Move me father
Show me mother"

-U2, "Mofo"

Hmmm

Meh.

Bleh.

Blargh.

The Other Job

Substitute teaching is a version of Hell in and of itself.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Work Again

It is going mostly well but all the same I know this is not the career for me. I enjoy most of the people and get to basically take charge and do what I want to (within reason, something tells me if I ran about lobbing Molotov cocktails I might loose my job) but bottom line this isn't going to bring long term satisfaction. Money is going nowhere and regardless of the economy happiness will continue to be elusive.



"There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go! This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike "What's next, Daddy?"

God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what's coming to us--an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!"


I want a real life, a real life caught up in love, the adventure of living life...I want to ardently embrace the responsibility of life and live it like there is nothing else. I do not care about the simple waste of time because I want something real, something that matters in life.

I have found it but I am still looking for it, I have found true love that brings me to tears and I have found a purpose that reaches beyond this life and into the depths of eternity. It found me and we are one in ways I never knew. But the search, the adventure, the fight continues on.



"The revolution returns
The reformation lives on
The great awakening is now
Sleepers open your eyes
A war is on, our rally cry is no compromise
No compromise, yeah, no compromise
A war is on, our battle cry is no compromise
So throw your fist up and pray the revolution rise
A war is on, our rally cry is no compromise

Our hearts have grown so cold
And we’ve such numb souls
But shirts and bumper stickers
Man we got ’em by the truckload
Is true religion what you have around your wrist
What does the scripture say of this?

They honor me with words
But their hearts are far away
I call ’em like I see ’em
And that’s what I see today
So I call on John Edwards
Who preached us all awake
We try to be emotional but here is our mistake
As a church we lack repentance and we lack true affection
Not only in our minds but our hearts need correction
And man that’s true religion, resignation and contrition
To love each other so much that we’d die before division"

-The O.S. Supertones "Return of the Revolution"

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Some Verse for Thought

Rom 8:1 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.
Rom 8:2 A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
Rom 8:3 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it.
Rom 8:4 And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
Rom 8:5 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them--living and breathing God!
Rom 8:6 Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life.
Rom 8:7 Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing.
Rom 8:8 And God isn't pleased at being ignored.
Rom 8:9 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about.
Rom 8:10 But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells--even though you still experience all the limitations of sin--you yourself experience life on God's terms.
Rom 8:11 It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!
Rom 8:12 So don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent.
Rom 8:13 There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life.
Rom 8:14 God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
Rom 8:15 This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike "What's next, Papa?"
Rom 8:16 God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children.
Rom 8:17 And we know we are going to get what's coming to us--an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!

On a random non-complaining note:

I'm officially 21 years and six months old. Does that count for anything?

Example of My Typical Post:

Blah, blah, blah life sucks for some philosophical and or moral reason.

Blah, blah, blah I am suffering from some physical ailment.

Blah, blah, blah I am officially causing myself pain from being so boring.

Thought of the Day:

I am exhausted from a very long weekend coupled with starting a new job, why can I not sleep?

Furthermore, why am I constantly haunted with visions of you? Can you never let me find rest? It is almost like you do your very best to lead me so very gently...leading me on to something that will never resolve, that will just leave me feeling confused and used.

I am tired of emotions, chemicals, desires, sexuality and the like. I am ready to give up.

I don't play for keeps, I play to find a way to escape from this damning madness.

New U2 Movie!

http://www.u23dmovie.com/

...so yeah, I am excited...to say the absolute very least.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Frustration

I am a stranger in a land that I do not understand.

I have wandered for these few years and have seen much, experienced so many things and have felt so little that I am at a loss for words.

I know you but I still do not think that I know you, for better or for worse. I see so little when all I have ever wanted was to feel you close and know you are near, to know that you are more real than I.

Is it to much to ask?

My question...

...is if these guys are actually serious?

http://www.godisimaginary.com

I have yet to have read all of the 'proofs' but clearly a freshman level Philosophy major would have a field day ripping this stuff apart.

However it would be nice to actually see a clinching 'proof' one of these days.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

So Very Sick

Pain, lots of freaking stomach pain. Need rest, need relief. God please help me.

Friday, January 18, 2008

personality test

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

results:

http://www.personalitypage.com/

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Donald Miller speaking on Hope

http://api.monkcms.com/Clients/download.php?sid=7&url=http://www.imagodeicommunity.com/ekkmedia/our-hope-in-the-eternal-glory-of-god.mp3&mediaBID=68648



I am not one who normally listens to sermons outside of church but this short bit illustrates why Donald Miller is one of my favorite writers and a strong influence on my ideas and thoughts of Christianity.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Thought of the day:

You know you have family issues when you look in the mirror and feel like you are in a Wes Anderson movie, much less look the part.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Pointless Post

I could speak it softly, yell it from the rooftops, scream it from my lungs...yet bottom line you never will hear it...it never will matter to you and regardless of what I think, feel, desire, want or crave...it is meaningless and pointless.

I believe in God but I also believe in chemicals and electrical pulses. Those last two things mean so much of life is preordained insanity and it hurts deeply. The insanity itself doesn't hurt, it just hurts knowing that the feelings I experience cannot be properly shared by one whom I would like to share it with.

Ergo, this is all rendered meaningless. Writing about something that is pointless and has no existence beyond my mind and whatever words I choose to waste on here.

Bravo Matthew, bravo.

It's Nice Being Able to Write What I Want

Few people read this, so I don't make profit off of the ads but I am able to express myself fully about my thoughts concerning this huge wrecked up ball of confusion and pain that life is.

I hate sexuality, I hate migraines and I most certainly hate people that insist on acting immature...yes I am at the top of that list.

Bah, I'll just go to sleep already.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Stupid Mornings

I really dislike pills. The medicine helps me to sleep but at what feels like the cost of my ability to function properly. I'm not even sure why I want to function properly when it seems the best course of action is to lay down in the floor until something happens.

On the plus side I think I'm cleaning my room (assuming this isn't just an incredibly dull dream reminiscent of the monotony of daily life) and that is something I can accomplish. I may be a complete failure in almost every other sense of the world but by golly I will be a clean failure if nothing else!

What makes the morning stupid? Memories of yesterday for sure. Memories of a lot of things actually, yeah...I could use a complete memory wipe at this point, that woudl make things better.

Things needing to be practical really really makes things a bit more difficult, akin to being shot in the foot while simultaneously being set on fire while realizing my socks are completely wet and are somehow fire retardant. Being burned, shot all while enduring wet socks, things can't get worse then that, right? Right?!?

There are plus sides, just like there are many chances for life in general but at the end of the day it is hard for me to try any of it. Personal motivation keeps fluctuating between negative levels and he slight problem of not existing at all. You do the math, I suck at it.

Anyway, I guess I will clean more before I have an existential crisis concerning the rights of dust to live in its own free world.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Day by Day

It feels like time is becoming muddled into this single unbreakable blob that I cannot begin to understand. It is hard for me to break lines apart and see truth for what it is, or really see anything for what it is.

These writings act as some kind of anchor and a reminder that I am not living some profane version of the movie Groundhog Day.

There is a real aspect to life, there is a reality, there is this confusion, there is anger, there is pain, there is sadness, there are happy thoughts too. Amalgamation upon confused mixtures of bitter words of varying shades of intellect.

It does not compute, it does not make sense, it is a struggle to press on, I do not want a game, I did not ask for this, no one ever gave me the option and here I am as I am and nothing more or less then what I was confused as being.
I am not a fan of my own thoughts most of the time. It feels like there are two people, one person who is speaking and giving all of these thoughts and there is the real me who is just here to act as a meat shield for all of the response.

Not an incredibly cherry world view I'll admit, but if something feels and seems like it might be true and the honest truth it may be true.

How much of negative is a choice? Is it purely perception or is there a real element of fatalism involved?
Thinking you are hearing voices is not fun. Obvious, yet a very true statement all the same.