You knew this wasn’t going to be easy. You never wanted it to be. It’s when the sailing gets rough that we learn to hold onto our friends and take each wave as it comes. You’ll find it helps to laugh, too. It’s not as if you were saving your breath for something else, right?
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The things that bind a society together are i’s stories, naratives and myths that it tells to its members. The more of them that any group shares, the more cohesive the group is. You find people who adore Animaniacs or Harry Potter, or what have you, you automatically have friends. When you have a society where the stories given to the children don’t match even remotely the stories that the adults have, there is no unity or cohesion. It may sound dumb, but the rapid change (not simply decline in quality, though there is quite a bit of that!) of childrens’ cartoons is nothing but a detriment on society. What I believe. In a nutshell. It is the story of the world that I think is true. God created the world, and us in it, for his purposes and goodness. God looked on and said, “I love them.” We, as an entire race, went and screwed it up, and rebelled, introducing a disastrous thing called sin into the world. And God looked on and said, “I Love them. Each and every one of them.” There are a myriad of metaphors to describe it- as a legal metaphor we have transgressed a law. As a romantic metaphor, we have committed adultery against our most beloved. As another metaphor, we are lost, wandering. Another, we are sick. We are rebels, warring against God and his kingdom. We are carrying a weight that doesn’t even belong in the world and it will crush us. We have been sold into/have sold ourselves into slavery. We have chosen darkness over light. We have become ugly. We are bent, selfish, ignorant, foolish and it will destroy us. And God looked on and sad, “I love them. Each and every one of them” God will not tolerate us to continue to deface what is made to be beautiful- us. It is further tragedy because of the beauty still here to be defaced. We make art and music and love and inventions and treaties, and try to mend wounded friendships and to figure out truth, and do all manner of things that are beautiful and loveable and noble. And God looked on and said, “I love them so much. Every last one of them.” But none of this was enough. And God looked on and said, “I Love them so much- I will come be with them. I will bring them beauty, and make them beautiful again” So God. Real God, came and became Real Man- one of us whom he loves this much. He brought us beauty and showed it to us in Jesus. And then Jesus did something amazing. He took the weight that we bore, and bore it himself; he took our punishment; he paid our debt; he shared in our exile to then bring us out; took our filth upon him; choose your metaphor (there are more, just as good), but the real man, God with us, Yeshua of Nazareth, died, broken, bleeding and alone on an implement of torture under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate in Approx. 30 AD. He died with us, for us, on behalf of us, and because of us. On the third day afterward, instead of being beaten by death, hatred and all the world’s sin, he won, and resurrected, and thereafter imparted his Spirit to us to enable us to become like him, everyone who would believe in this story and its main character, to live as though this story belonged to them. And God said, “I Love them SO MUCH! EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. No exceptions.” There is much beauty and goodness in the world, but no effort on our behalf can undo the damage we have done- we cannot save ourselves. God himself must save us, and we are to allow him to do the saving, to make us beautiful again, to remove our shackles, and to use us to further make the world beautiful, and to remove more shackles, as his very hands. If we fail, we are bad hands, but we do not fall off. We still carry the sickness, but we are not doomed to be bad hands; as we participate with him in the renewing and redeeming, we become truly better and stronger hands. As his hands we are to find the beauty and the truth here and affirm it every where we find it (among other things, that means every last soul we speak to). We are to Love absolutely, without reservation God, and those near us and far off. The Gospel is a story to be believed, and comes with a command to be obeyed- “Love. Redeem this with me.” This is the Good news. This truth matters, as all truth does, and because of that, reason and logic matter as well. The Bible is a reliable testament to all of this. There is much, much more to be learned about it from it. But mostly, that God has said, “I love them. Every one of them.” The things I’m most thankful for right now, in no particular order so i’ve updated ineedtuition.org lots more to see. Hi folks. This is to provide an update on my happenings. I’m in school. I’m actually now broke because these guys won’t pay me. I have until the end of October before I need to pay some more bills with money I won’t have. If you’d like to help, help me here. ineedtuition.org Beyond that, most things are going well. i’m in 4 classes right now, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, GPH111, and an easy CIS class. -CIS takes about 2 hours a week. -GPH111 (geography) takes 3 hours of lecture, 2 horus of lab and 30 min of reading per week. -Hebrew takes 3 hours of class per week, plus about 6-7 hours of study per week. -Greek takes 4 hours of class per week, plus about 24-28 hours of study per week. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted in my entire life. As you can see, without the Greek class, I’d probably be able to get a job, but Greek is the reason I’m going back to school anyway: so I can read the Bible in it’s original language. So I can’t drop it and get a job right now. Anyway, that’s my life right now. Don’t have time to focus on much else. I’m back to school! I’m in an easy science class, and an easy math class, and as most of you know, I’m taking Ancient Greek, and Biblical Hebrew. Hebrew is turning out easy for now, because it’s going pretty slow, and I’ve already got some experience with it. Greek is kicking my butt. When I pass this class, it might be the first time I’ve applied myself to something applicable to my potential in my entire life. I’m taking Greek and Hebrew because I want to be capable of responsibly reading scripture, and while this is neither utterly required for it, nor a garrauntee for it, it is definitely a very very lengthy distance in that direction. Now that I’ve got an idea of what studying will be like over the next few weeks, Henry and I will be holding each other accountable for some goals we’ve both got this semester, extracurricularly. I hope to provide some more blog posts to keep people updated. One of the things on my list of things is to provide intelligible and moving descriptions of the Gospel and Christianity, and I hope to have 10 up by the end of the semester. If there were no way into God, I would have never laid in this grave of a body for so long This post is to describe what I’ve been going through the last several years, and it’s just getting old, so I’m putting it out there for my friends to see and understand, and hopefully help with. This is NOT just a ploy for attention to go POOR LEO, as some would accuse me of. If you offer either that or the accusation, keep it to yourself or talk to me face to face. (1)Description of symptoms I have a problem. You can say I have an extreme lack of discipline. You can say I have difficulty being self motivated, and require external motivation, perhaps even requiring structure and consequences. You can say I have a very hard time focusing or staying on task. You can say I have little willpower. You can put it a number of different ways. I have an EXTREMELY difficult time 1) getting on task and 2) maintaining sustained effort for a anything. First, Let me explain what I experience, and this part is important When I start to do whatever work (of various kinds) I intend to do, a barely noticeable sense of distress hits me from nowhere. It kinda feels like annoyance or figgitiness. So, what I normally end up doing to relieve myself of this phantom distress is to allow myself to become distracted, by whatever is at hand, and this immediately calms the anxiety and distress, like taking your weight off of a sprained ankle. The result is that I rarely get anything started, and practically never get anything significant accomplished in the long run. It has been like this for years, and i’m getting sick of it. I’m talking about a problem that happens any time I try to do practically anything I want or intend to do, from writing essays and sermons that I find to be invigorating to my mind and soul, all the way to cleaning my room or the kitchen, or writing a simple blog post. This problem applies to things you wouldn’t even call work, like prayer, practicing at anything, or pretty much anything you can think of requiring concentration or (especially long term) sustained effort. Daily devotional prayers, daily vitamins. There are some exceptions like going to work and working my job. This problem pretty much applies to every area of my life except my job usually. I get figity and distressed whenever I try to self motivate to do something, esspecially requiring sustained effort. (2) Description of the effects of the problem One of my greatest fears is that when it is all said and done, and evalutated, my life will best be described “wasted potential.” This is why i’m so desperate to solve this whole problem I’ve got. This “condition” of mine, may be entirely my fault, it may not, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t care. I want it solved. But my difficulty in solving it arises from a possibly related condition. Growing up, I was so gifted at anything I tried or did, I never had to put real effort into anything, especially school, and so my “muscle” for sustained effort anything that’s not very easy, or really for pretty much anything, is essentially atrophied. Both of these have caused me a great amount of depression and despair esspecially over the last couple of years. Depression because I feel useless and incompetent, despair because it seems and feels like I can’t and won’t ever be able to fix it. This sense and reality of incompetence, inconsistency and lack of discipline dominoes into several other important areas including spiritual, and relational. click here for a very important expansion on this. (3)Analyzation In short, I lack discipline, and don’t know how to attain it, because it takes discipline to become more disciplined. So, because internal motivation doesn’t work for me, I’ve relied on external motivation to get things done. you could actually state the vicious loop in a couple of ways. (To see things and proposed solutions that simply don’t work and which I won’t pay much attention to, see here again.) Let’s take a look at the times and situations where I’ve been most productive and extrapolate. - I am wonderfully productive at work when working at a call center like Go Daddy or Verizon, as anyone who’s worked with me could attest to. - I was wonderfully productive at school when I was still in school. - When I have a particularly pressing matter, and have a sense of urgency, I get things done. (the kitchen is terrible, and i have an 40 minutes to clean it, because people are coming over. I clean it in 30, when normally it might have taken me an hour, and I clean it better.) - I always perform better socially than alone. I have concluded that the following observations are important for me to utilize all of my potential. 1)- People energize me and motivate me 2) - I need structure with consequence. But, I create lists and schedules for myself all the time and fail, so I conclude that it normally has to be externally provided or externally enforced (like at the call center, or classroom) 3)- Both positive and negative consequences for productivity or lack thereof, respectively. 4)- A sense of urgency helps me accomplish things too. ———————- Thanks for reading. I’m eager for any thoughts to help out (of course remembering to read the appendix before posting). |
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