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Early yesterday evening, as I had the house all to myself and was preparing for some mindless exploration on my ultra-slow internet, my phone began to ring. Rudely breaking my connection to aforementioned internet. As my introvert self tends to do I ignored the call. My annoyance with the called changed to excitement when I heard the voice of my friend Kathryn on the other end. I hardly ever get to see her, and true to form she gave us a call letting us know she was in town for one night and one night only. We met when we both lived in Boise; she now lives in San Diego and we of course live in Portland. Prior to San Diego Katy spent a year in China, and after San Diego, well, who knows where she’ll go next. She is working on her second bachelor’s degree, dates weird pagans and thinks she might want to be a nutritionist (a vegan nutritionist-that’s hardcore). She goes backpacking with people from Belgium and surfs almost every day. Such is the life of those who refuse to grow up (I saw that with envy and admiration-not insult).
My life is a bit different these days. I worry about the mortgage every day. I rearrange my schedule for childcare purposes, and a good day is one that ends by 9:30. I spend the vast majority of my day sitting in front of a computer and I’m getting fat. To top it off I am undergoing a pre-midlife crisis. Still….
Yesterday my daughter, complete with Pippy Longstocking pigtails, Marion berry smears on her cheeks and a big grin, said “Hi Daddy” and ran up to me and hugged my legs. It’s worth it.
I’m starting to narrow down the tattoo I want on my right arm (not that this is particularly relevant since the big money for case management won’t start rolling in for a while). At the top of my short list is a three headed snake. I think it will complement the dragon nicely. The three heads are of course symbolic, in this case they are symbolic of my three main goals in life; these are very broad goals, many things could fit under each category.
My first goal is to love. I want to love God with all my heart, mind, and soul. I find this daunting, and I challenge anyone who doesn’t. “Heart, mind, and soul” is basically symbolic, representing the whole of one’s being. No compartmentalizing, only holistic, unhindered love. I don’t do it, but this is my goal.
I want to love my family. Despite my many foibles and failings, I really, truly, really want to be a better father and a better husband every day. I want to love them more deeply every day. I want to submit and support, lead and guide, follow and encourage.
I want to love my friends. I want to be a support, I want to build up, I want to cheer on. I want to know and be known in a personal, transparent way that opens me up and opens them up to compliments and critique, accolades and accountability.
I want to love others. I want to show compassion, empathy, and aid to those who need it. I want to be a safe place for people in a dangerous world. I want to figure out what it means to be incarnational.
I want to love my enemies. I want to not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (this is a hard one for me, I’m pretty vengeful). I want them to be so surprised, so taken aback, so shocked by my love in the face of their, well, enemyness, that the seeds of revolution will be planted in their heart.
My first goal is love. My second goal is life. There is so much to see, so much to do, so much to experience. There are so many blessings to give and receive and I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want to look back on anything with regret, I don’t want to wish I had been brave or bold. This is difficult for me as I am pretty much always shy and sometimes cowardly. I am frustrated by the human tendency to get stuck doing things a certain way because they have always been done that way or to think that something can’t be done simply because it has never been done before. When St. Peter meets me at the pearly gates and introduces me to my first angel, and that angel asks me, “So, what is life like?” I want to have a good answer.
My first goal is love, my second is life. My third goal is to leave a legacy. Our lives are but mist, or the equivalent of the blink of an eye in all of time. We will not be around very long and we will not be remembered. Almost everything we do, even the most powerful and influential of us, fades away into meaninglessness and is without consequence. Almost. Some people live their whole lives like this and simply don’t care and it drives me insane. I want to leave a legacy; I want the time allotted to me to result in more than consumed resources and over-populating offspring. I want said offspring to know me, to now their history through me. I want lives and subsequent generations to be different because I was involved. I want to help people heal and be transformed now and after I meet that angel. Lofty and perhaps a little arrogant? Yeah, probably, but also doable.
So that is what the three heads on my three-headed snake are going to mean, and hopefully that is what my life will mean. I’m not sure where the tattoo itself fits into the grand scheme of these goals, but it fits somewhere.
HEALTHY DAY
I suck at eating healthy. I love chocolate too much. I really think there is something to the whole food addiction thing too. Yesterday was not a good day for Dan’s insides, but today is better. Today is salad and Sobe Lean. I’m still planning n that whole bowel cleansing thing too-I look forward to describing it to you.
LAST BIT ABOUT BOISE
My bad bathroom karma culminated in multiple attempts to use the facilities only to be thwarted by the toilet paper, or more specifically the lack thereof. I was finally rid of the bad karma when we went out to lunch with the Jillemiah Project and my lovely friend had to borrow the car to find a bathroom. It appears that I passed my bad karma off to her. Sorry about that.
I went arrowhead hunting with Jeremiah and found some nice treasure for my collection, which is nice because I would have been thoroughly disappointed had I spent an entire day in the sun taking baby steps while I stared at the ground and getting eaten by bugs only to come home empty handed. But my hands were not empty-they had a nice specimen of an arrowhead and another piece f obsidian that I really think showed some initial work as well as a piece of pottery that I have determined to be officially old (though not Native American). I also got some really cool rocks. We stopped in a small town with a population of about 2 and visited the store, which was in every way an old fashioned country store; it even sold the majority of its products from behind the counter. They happened to be filming a movie while we were there for an upcoming film festival. I think the most interesting bit of the trip was when we arrived in the town of Ola, which unlike the other town has a population of about 6. We went into the restaurant and found most of the residents there waiting for us. Well, maybe they weren’t actually waiting for us, but since everyone in the building stopped what they were doing to look at us it sure felt like it. We weren’t there for food (they only serve food on Thursdays anyway), we were there searching for a man named Bear. We were told that Bear was out chopping wood and given some very round-about directions on how to find him. But find him we did.
Bear is an interesting fella. We found him in the middle of nowhere camped out with three trucks, four dogs, a trailer, and a campfire that never went out. He was out there “choppin’ wood and trainin’ dogs” and had been there for some time. He wasn’t sure when he would be back, probably eight days or so. He thought the wife (who ran the restaurant) could use a break from him anyway. He invited us to sit down and we chatted for quite a while about the neat things he’d found and what he planned to do for the summer and so on. I called him ‘sir’ once, which offended him quite a bit. What really impressed me about Bear was that he was so hospitable and kind, even when he didn’t have to be. The man lives in a tiny town most of the year and in the wilderness for the rest of it. He seemed to have no real connection with the outside world and no desire for one. There was nothing to gain from befriending us or helping us find our treasure that day; if anything we were just getting in the way. It was refreshing to meet someone who was kind just because that’s the way he is.
Anyway, that’s the last bit about Boise I plan on writing on. I’ve forgotten everything else that happened anyhow.
HEALTHY DAY PART 2
Last night I continued to eat healthy with heaping amounts of garlic (clears the bowels and other good things) on my sea food pasta (omega-3, the good fat). I added lots of spinach too, which is good for, well, everything. And of course this morning more lemon water and this afternoon many vegetables. Now after two grueling days all I can say is I WANT ICE CREAM REALLY BAD. It’s like a fetish. Ok, so it isn’t really like a fetish. But it’s still pretty sick the way I like ice cream so much.
BOISE TRIP PART 2
The trouble with writing about something that happened this far removed from the actual events is that I can’t remember the chronological order of things. I do remember my bad bathroom karma continuing as I was searching for a place to utilize (this was still when we were on our way there, just shy of the Idaho border) and every toilet there was had been previously used and abused and left in a state of utter grossness. I ended up using a women’s restroom that didn’t have a lock (the scenarios for what could have happened are just scary). I was hoping that would be the end of my bad bathroom karma, but sadly it was not. After we had finally made it to Boise I once again had to, well, you know, and the facilities were adequate but alas there wasn’t a roll in sight. Thank goodness I looked before I did anything everyone would regret! More on the bad karma later….
We spend a lot of time visiting with our friends the Wiesel’s who live in a cool old house with four rowdy but wonderful children and two massive dogs. They work with refugees from Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on, mostly Muslims. They do their work out of their home, which makes for much random fun when the ethnics come over. I have begun speaking to the about the Emergent church movement and now they want us to start a church up there. That would be fun….
TODAY
You’d think I could manage to get to work on time (8:30) when I woke up at 3:30, but no. No worries though, today was a day of meetings, also known as a throw-away day because nothing useful happens. Dinner with the parents tonight, some healthy salmon.
