A Watched Blog…

Technology amazes me. Here I sit emailing my blog and it doesn’t post. A watched blog never posts. That’s what they’ll be saying a 100 years from now. It will be legend, and web archaeologists will have heard it from me first. Nope. I stand corrected. I just googled “a watched blog never posts” and it turned up http://teflsmiler.typepad.com/weblog/2005/06/a_watched_blog_.html and http://weblog.garyturner.net/archives/000564.html. Nothing new under the sun. And I didn’t even make THAT one up either. King Solomon did. Or at least, someone conservative scholars have called King Solomon did.

Testing email bloggability

I am emailing my blog this morning.  Just listened to Greg Surratt talking about the up’s and down’s of pastor blogging.  And should have had quiet, meditative, reflective, Brennan Manning, ragamuffin kind of time with Jesus

Beating up 5 year olds

Today I wanted to kick some booty. Some five year old booty. I rearranged my office today and Allie and I were just hanging out. I was playing like I was a guy reading a book and she was playing like I was her brother and like she was a little sister interrupting a brother who was trying to read a book.

And then she said something that would drop my heart to the floor in a bunch of little pieces and make me want to beat up a five year old. Four of them in fact.

She said, “Wait, Dad, a pause in the game. Today the kids were mean to me. They told me I don’t belong here. They told me to go home and never come back. They said, “Que se vaya! Que se vaya! Que se vaya!” “Why don’t you go back to Memphis and stay there?”

These kids are 5 years old. 5 years old.

She wasn’t really sad. Allie gets sad and mopey pretty easily. And she wasn’t sad or mopey. I don’t know what she looked like on the inside, but 5 year olds aren’t nearly as good as I am about totalling covering up what I am REALLY feeling. She didn’t seem phased. A little bumped, enough to talk about it. And I guess that is what the psychologists say is a good thing.

I think I responded with empathy. I didn’t tell her I wanted to kick them in the head. I told her that Jesus said if we prayed for our enemies then “God would take care of them.” So she prayed for them. I also told her that her friends probably had a really bad day and didn’t get enough sleep last night… that sometimes I feel like being mean for no good reason.

When I asked her if she did anything to provoke it she said, “Nothing.” Of course.

But I know Allie. She probably kicked them in the shins. And if she didn’t, I might have to try it tomorrow.

chaos points, the first

Someone has probably already written something really intelligent about this, and I will just look like another idiot who thought he had a bright idea. So here we go.

If you catch me after I’ve been with Lamont, or Cochran, or Jp, or Linus, or a few others, you will find me in this “wide open” place where the soul is big and the love flows. I’m like a giant love chamber. I am living in grace. I don’t mind all those crazy things about myself, like the fact that I weigh 214 pounds.

But put some pain in the mix, and I bleed. Well, I don’t bleed, but I do cry alot. I wonder how normal it is to cry. A close soul friend of mine told me about some hard decisions he made in the last couple of years, and he told me that he “cried sheets.” That’s right, friends. Sheets. It’s been a long time since I cried that much.

So cut me, and I cry.

I’m talking the common pain. The pain of relationship gone awry. The kind of thing when you are just starting to develop trust with someone and react toward you in some way that tells you they need their medication, their therapy, or whatever. And I’m talking people who should know better.

If I am doing that “wide open soul” thing, and that happens to me, I cry.

But usually those tears go to God, He meets me in a fresh “wide open” kind of way, and the soul stays almost as wide open as it was before. But not exactly as much. It is about 2.6 centimeters more closed than it was before the painful event. There is a proverb in Uruguay that says, “A man who burns his finger on hot milk sees the cow and starts to cry.” I’m talking about going from a wide open soul kind of guy to a crying hot milk kind of guy.

But I haven’t gotten to the kind of thing that happens to a soul when you hit chaos points, so when I blog again I will see if I can muster up some sort of definition.

Robins at 6

I didn’t want to wake up this morning, but their laughter was so sweet. There is really only one robin that has adopted our backyard as home, but it sounded like a million. Maybe there were two. Two robins hollering back and forth at each other, laughing about everything this whole day would bring, rejoicing at the very prospect of living another day.

I’m at 215 pounds now and wondering how I will make it through the day without all those stupid little things that make me feel good (caffeine, sugar, fat… all together make a great combination for weight gain).

Toni springs out of bed like a jackrabbit. I only wish I were that methodical.

The robins are sitting inside my head now, and all of us are laughing together about how good it is to be alive. They haven’t had caffeine today. They have just had sunlight, cold air, and a couple worms lured out of hiding by their sweet songs.

I’ll get up, log six or seven miles on my bike and head for 210. After some sunlight, cold air, and a couple of worms, I’ll be squared away.

Tired

I am adapting to being “home.” My head was pounding this morning like a bad hangover, but I hadn’t been drinking at all. I had been drinking transition, I guess, and sleeplessness, but nothing else. So after 44 hours of being awake, with a brief nap on the airplane on the way home, I fell into bed. My head was swimming.

I have always laughed at people who tell me their heads are swimming. Never could really imagine it. Now I know there is no better word.

Bright spot of the day? Pat Niednagel. She smiled and spoke of God’s words and God’s truth and God’s mighty acts on our behalf. She exuded faith and radiated hope and light. Awesome to be in the same room with her. She is the Creative Arts and Worship pastor at the Ventura Bible Fellowship. We are spending the evening together with them right now, which is why I gotta go.

Growing Fat Again

I stepped on the scale tonight after my trip. 220 pounds. I haven’t weighed 220 pounds since the last time I went to the states and severely medicated pain with food.

Not this time. No way. This time it was a free-for-all. It was Starbucks, Rendezvous and Corky’s and Central Bar-B-Q.

I watched Super Size Me about halfway through the trip and that inspired me for about a week to drink cranberry juice with ground flax seed mixed together, with a tablespoon of super high lignan flax seed oil as a chaser. Then it was to be an egg for breakfast, a bunch of carrots for lunch, and something like a green salad with a can of tuna for dinner.

I did pretty good on it. Took my wife on a date to Wild Oats just to affirm life and everything green.

The next day I ate half a funnel cake at the Cooper-Young Fest.

And so it went for the week and a half until I said, “Hey, it’s like my own version of Super Size Me.”

But I’m back home now, and so the one-man-eatin’-party has got to come to a close. I already laid out my skimpy spandex bike shorts for the morning so I get get out there and log an hour ride like my friend Randy in Minnesota.

I just hope I don’t bust a seem.

Arriving Home

I just got back from a foreign country that used to be my home country. Now I’m in my home country that used to be a foreign country. Only, today, it felt foreign again. But maybe that was due to the 24 plane ride.