To Haunt

What would you do if you could stick around after you die for a while? Would you even choose to stick around? I know the token Christian response is to say to be in Heaven with Jesus is better than anything you could have here, and I believe that with every fiber of my being, I have to. But as good as Heaven sounds, eternity is a long time to spend there and I think I would want to hold on to those I love here for a few moments. Not like a haunting or anything, but I think I would want to lie in bed with my wife and hold her while she weeps. I would want to wipe my kids tears away as Laura tries to explain why God takes those we love. I think I would want to see how the pastor portraits me at my funeral and sneak around and see if those I knew really cared. I have a hard time letting go as it is of things I love, even when what I am leaving them behind for is much better. For instance, I know beyond any doubt that I am in better shape right now with all that God has blessed me with than I ever was 10 years ago, but still I get this longing inside to go back just for a while and watch me do it all over again, not changing anything. Of course I would come home and of course I would go see Jesus, but for a moment I would want to hold on as tightly as my family holds me. There is this song by The Cinematic Orchestra called "To Build A Home" it is in my playlist to your right, listen to it. I think that is what this song is talking about. I have worked so hard and loved so deeply to build this home where the bricks and mortar could fall around us and we would still stand, and I don't want to ever let that go. To me, this is the Kingdom of God Jesus was talking about. He talked more about the Kingdom here on earth than He ever did in Heaven, although He spoke of Heaven. But I think I am living in His glory and am crowned in gold and diamonds. I see them when I look into my daughters eyes when she smiles. My son thinks that at night-time I am a super hero, my God, may he never stop believing that. My wife lives every day as a sacrifice for our family and gives us all of her. I seldom see people give all of themselves to another in this culture, obviously because divorce rates are bordering 60% now. I have been thinking a lot about death lately and what I want to leave behind, and my prayer is that I leave behind a strong family, full of kids and grandkids, and great grandkids, and great great grandkids who all love Jesus because I was obedient, and taught them to be obedient. May God bless you and your families and I pray for happiness for all of you.

Heavy Breather

Scientists say that people do not breathe right, that they do not even know how to breathe. When we breathe properly, we get light headed because we have trained our bodies to live on less oxygen, often causing unneeded anxiety. Try it. Take a minute and turn off all of the noise and breathe, not from your chest but from your belly. If your chest rises more than your stomach, you are doing it wrong, your stomach should rise. Breath in deeply through your nose and exhale through your mouth slowly. Repeat. Do this for 10 minutes and see how you feel. It is a shame that our lives get so busy and everything is so fast paced that we have forgotten how to breathe properly. The most essential body function we have, the most needed thing other than God is oxygen and we deprive ourselves of it because we can't take a minute to focus on nothing but breathing. I learned this in speech therapy when I was in grade school. I used to have this horrendous stuttering problem growing up. I would speak to fast, and get nervous and could not find a way to get the words out clearly. I had to go to speech therapy and she taught me how to breath and roll my neck and relax. Ultimately, she taught me how to talk again, free of anxiety about what I am going to say next. I speak for a living now, which is a testament to the Glory and Power of God that a stuttering kid who could not talk, now does so in front of a lot of people. May God bless you and be your guide this week, and remember to breathe.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day was one of the best I've had this year. We didn't do anything really out of the ordinary, but with school is was nice to just stay home from Up North this year and relax a little. Friday I went to the rehearsal dinner for a wedding I was in for a friend, where he and I dominated the Flingo Tournament (AKA Baggo) (AKA Cornhole). Sat. was the wedding which was really nice. I enjoyed being a part of something so powerful as the joining of two people, especially when they are my friends. Sun. I went to church and got to spend some time later with a couple of new friends we met at a halloween party. It is nice to get to know new people and especially nice to have the dude we hung out with grow up in the same neighborhood as me back up all of the stories that Laura has always thought were lies. Today, I went to the gym, then played a softball game, then went to a Bar-B-Q which was really fun. It was a good weekend, a much needed one as I go back to school and work tomorrow and pray for another nice weekend. Also we ate at the new Sonic today. I wasn't overly impressed, it was good, but just good.

We Should Start A New Party

I do not like our choices for President this election. Therefore I do not like our chances. I do not like the Republican Party and I do not like the Democratic Party. And I am terrified of the Independents. So I do not like my chances. I shall tell you why.
Republicans: I don't like war. I don't think that so much of our tax money should be spent on being the strongest country in the world, but instead how about being the kindest. If someone pisses us off or tells us no, we bomb them and kill their civilians as if those lives aren't worth our presidents. I do not like the capitalistic tendencies of the RP either. It is all about making more and more money and forget about helping those that can't make it or do not wish to give their lives away for it. Health care will stay the same with RP's in office and that isn't going to cut it because as the doctors and insurance Co's get richer off of gouging each other, those that can't afford insurance get no, or really poor health care. They need to go to the ER for asthma medication or antibiotics for the flu. Mccain, you are an ego-maniac and you can't win because you were a war hero. I like your courage to speak your mind, but I do not like a lot what you are saying.

Democratic Party- Plain and simple, you kill babies. Call the babies what you want, their hearts are beating, they are alive. On top of killing the future, you choose to vote against bill after bill to do away with abortion that takes place in the birth canal and collapses a conscious babies skull. This is murder. You scream the loudest about the Iraq war, yet sign bills that make abortion the preferred method of contraception, even and especially in teenagers. It is not a woman's right to choose to kill her live baby. Just as it isn't the fathers right to choose to abandon that baby once born. Even in cases of incest and rape which make up less than 1% of abortions. How is making 2 victims out of one going to help, when their are millions who would love to adopt a baby. You also make up global crisis' to smoke screen the American people and get them to vote how you want them to vote. You say you are humanitarians, yet aren't helping anyone but yourselves, and using your time and money bashing the RP's instead of putting your money where your mouth is. Obama, I hate what you said about the Religious and poor. You are ignorant and have no idea or care about the majority of the people you wish to govern over. You have an agenda that is contrary to most Americans and have stated that you wish to change everything and carry that out. Except your agenda calls for more baby killing, the restrainment of religion, and taxes that will fatten your pockets more and impoverish the people. Hillary, you think you can run the country because you were married to the President? You haven't even run a business, or your own household. I haven't forgotten the sneer you gave Pres. Bush as He addressed the country right after 911. I haven't forgotten that your limo driver hit a 911 clean-up worker, and you got out, saw him alive and then drove away. I haven't forgotten that your husband sold military secrets to the Chinese.

Independents- You are scary, scary people.


PS. I still love you Mccain, Obama, and Hillary (as if you were reading this). I think all three of you are intelligent and somewhat genuine people. I do not think however that any of you would make a good president. I guess I am just angry that I do not have anyone I feel compelled to vote for this election. Anyway, I could be wrong.

The Heroes Are Crowned In Thorns

“Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself? God said this to Job in response to all of his questioning about God's unfairness. We often look over all of the beautiful things God has done to hammer Him on the things that He has allowed as if we had nothing to do with them. I make a lot of mistakes. I really do. Some things could have destroyed me. I was a father in high school and missed out on college because of it, so I am going now. Is that my fault or God's? I was abandoned by my father before my birth. Did God do that or did my father. The holocaust killed millions of people, did God kill those people or did people? Did God send the cyclone to burma to kill almost a hundred thousand people? Did He shale the ground that killed 15,000 in China? Or were those things also the consequence of a world that is dying from sin, just like we are? Yet God send so many to help us, to love us, to help us develop and see His love and mercy. I look back and God sent me some people who allowed me to see genuine love that I would never forget about. But do I always focus on that, no. I focus on the bad things that people and I myself have done to myself. I am a victim of my own sin and yet, I point the finger at God. I may not yell at God and vocalize it, but If I take a hard and honest look at myself, I do blame God in the way I carry myself. I want to play the victim when bad things happen, but I am no victim, I am the criminal. Job was not the victim, he was the criminal just like the rest of us. Yet God, in His faithfulness is at work here everyday. I have shed tears, and that had caused God to shed tears. Sometimes I end up shedding more, sometimes He wipes them clean. I am ashamed of who I am, to my very core today. Yet I thank God that He doesn't see me as I see me, and I think He wants me to.

School

Did you watch the season finale of The Office? Holy crap I laughed until I peed. So funny. Sorry, the blogs have been so sporadic lately. I started back at school and it is killing me literally, but I need to get it done, I have put off returning after my college closed 4 years ago and I need to finally finish so the blogs are a little choppy, but I will try to do a little better, I miss writing everyday. Instead I sit their with a boring book in my face trying to figure out what it is I should remember for a test. Anyway, how are things?

Not A Loaded Question

What do you think about human cloning? I have been studying the Human Genome Project in Biology. I intrigues me a bit. I used to against it, just because I didn't and still do not think that humans have the right to try to play God, but what if cloning is a solution to problems and has been given to us by God. It is weird because some religions won't take medicine because they feel that God is enough and He is, but most others look at modern medicine as a gift given from God. What if cloning and the ability to change problematic genes is also a gift. I have no opinion on this so it isn't a loaded question I am just thinking out loud.

Laura Is Now Also A Dinosaur

It is Laura's birthday today! And for Laura's birthday I will tell an embarrassing story about myself. When I first met Laura at a wedding, I was completely controlled by her beauty. I like to tell everyone that I kept catching her looking at me, but in reality it took me looking at her to notice her looking at me. She was gorgeous and everyone in the entire reception hall knew it. None of the guys could keep their eyes off of her, they would be sitting there telling each other that they were going to ask her to dance, but they were too scared, so was I. Lucky for me she wasn't and she asked me to dance. I got her phone number which she hesitated to give me by the way, I still do not know why. I usually follow the rule that you wait 3 days to call a girl you meet, so they think you aren't thinking too much about them, it shows them you respect yourself. But with Laura, I had to call the next day, I was controlled by her. I called, her grandma answered and said she wasn't home. So later I called again, then again until Laura called me back telling me she had received all of the dozens of messages I left. I took her out the following Friday. We went to the cider mill, then drove around all night long talking. She was perfect. I wrote in my journal that I would marry her, and I did, I would have been crazy not to. But the dumb part was that bought new clothes for her. I was a normal dressed guy. I didn't dress up ever, but I thought for her I would need to she was that pretty, so I went to Express for men, not knowing that store was strictly for Metrosexuals. I looked at the mannequins and assumed they had it right, so I bought what was on the mannequins. I really should not have done that. Because I was informed months later of how hideously dressed I was while we dated early on. Especially this one particular green sweater that was skin tight and could be stretched for like a mile if you pulled it. I hated that sweater when I bought it, but the mannequin assured me that she would think it was sexy. I hate that stupid mannequin. Laura walked down the aisle with me a couple of years later in the this beautiful white dress as the piper silenced and all attention was on her. She was the most beautiful woman in the city and everyone knew it. I was lucky, standing there in my kilt looking dumbfounded as I could not wait for her to reach me. Today, 7 years later I still stand dumbfounded, she is still the most beautiful women in the world and everyone knows it. I am the blessed one.

Windows

Right foot Left foot repeat.

I used to walk the city at night two blocks over to 12th St. Then up to Vine St. then over the tracks to 5th St. Back to Oak then home. I did this most nights. The liquor store was on the way, and so was the bar, or many bars. Wyandotte, Michigan is weird because they have more bars and churches per square mile than any other city outside of Detroit in Michigan. There are literally churches and bars in peoples houses. I would walk for hours drunken around the city looking into peoples windows as I passed by. I used to wonder wish I were inside their homes watching TV, eating dinner, decorating the Christmas tree. Christmas was the hardest time for me, it never really felt good until I met Laura and started going to her families. Christmas made me sad. I had great Christmas' growing up, so I have no idea why they made me sad, but they did. I remember a Christmas Eve, I went to a midnight mass to listen to the choir sing while loaded, I left and sang in the streets while walking around the city looking at the Christmas lights. I sang like a guy on death row, not like a guy that one the lottery. I just walked and watched through the windows as people celebrated Christmas with their families. The windows outside were frosty, but the inside was full of warmth. I always wanted to be on the warm side of those windows and now I am. It is better inside than out. There is no point to this blog but to remember out loud who I used to be.

The Chinaman And The Faceless Super Hero

Leaves falling towards me reminds me of an October night in 1997. I was coming home from a weekend at my daughters house visiting. She was in the back seat with an ear infection screaming murderous shrieks that filled the car like an piano punched with a tuning fork. It was damp and cold outside as we drove down the freeway behind a Taurus carrying one nameless Chinaman. The traffic was clear, so it was moving at a pretty furious pace when the Chinaman was cut off and run off the road into the guard rail that just so happened to be on a bridge that overhang Ford Lake. The guard rail gave way to the car and the Taurus flipped upside down and over the edge of the bridge into the lake. We stopped, I ran out and looked over the edge and saw the car sinking into the water below. No one was struggling to get out. I dove into the lake and swam to the car and looked inside the window, which was now underwater. I expected to see blood, I expected broken glass, I expected a mangled dead guy, I expected to be scarred with this image for the rest of my life. Instead I saw a Chinaman hanging upside down from his seatbelt. He was still, so I knocked on the window trying to rouse him. As I did, he came alive like a zombie fresh after reanimation and looked at me. He was confused and I think in shock, he would not move. I pried the door open and unlatched his seat belt as we sank. I pulled him out. He had no injuries at all, he was not hurt, but he would not try to swim, he nearly killed us both trying to get him to shore. But we made it, by God's grace, we made it. I asked him if he was hurt and he replied by asking me to go back and get his keys out of the car before it totally sank. I respectfully declined as I was not about to be trapped in a sunken car over a set of keys, plus it was freezing in the water. Another guy came running from the freeway after climbing down and asked if we needed help. I left the Chinaman with this new stranger as sirens flashed above. I walked away, got back into my car and drove away. I felt something very cool when I walked away from the crash. I felt good not taking credit for the save, they had this other guy as a witness, so I got to be an anonymous super hero that disappears into the night without a face. A man to make them all wonder. I think this is how Jesus wants us to live our lives. To love others for Christ, not for recognition. Since, I have tried to do random things in secret just for the fun of making people wonder who did it.

Blackout

Tonight I am tired, but remind me to tell you about the time I saved a China man.

Fireworks In Virginia

Fireworks In Virginia- By Trent Dabbs was the song I put on repeat on my ipod while sitting at Denny's on New Years Eve actually at the time I guess it would have been New Years Day. It was about to be 2007. I sat there all night long alone. I wrote things down. I looked up a lot to see who else was there. Mostly drunk people inhabited the place, smoke filled the room, people were talking about the stupidest things. I sit and listen to other people's conversations a lot. It started when I was practicing dialogue to write scripts, then it became habit to eavesdrop on the happenings of others without them knowing. It is harmless until they say something funny and I laugh like in Something About Mary. I was sitting there deciding on a life change. Things weren't going well for me. I battled more that year with depression than most years, I felt more alone and more lost than ever before. I felt far from God, I felt like I had been acting for my family, my friends, my church, and my students. I believed, yet I was stale and fake and I knew it. I still hadn't made the choice to embrace the truth of reality. I was to myself disgusting and I felt that I was that way to God too. I was oppressed, buried under the weight of guilt and bleeding from the wounds that I had denied to feel. I decided on New Years Eve that I needed change, but had no idea what it would look like or what that meant or even what I was going to do first, I new I just needed change because this is not what God had in mind for my life and I new it. I saw a therapist, he literally could not help me, I tried everything, nothing worked, so the issue was with me and God. How had I got here, where was the wrong turn taken. I felt tired and kicked around. I guess that is what has to happen to a stubborn person to show them that we need God. Maybe I lived a little too much for myself. Maybe I finally realized just how much I need God on a day to day basis. The song reminded me that when we are broken, our colors are shown like fireworks. Before they are blown apart, they are lifeless cans filled with explosives. They are set off and broken and they show their beauty. I think this is the change I needed. I needed to let people see how broken I am and maybe through that God inside me will be glorified. I pray daily for God to break me again and again. To tear my heart into shreds, to shatter me like glass. Because when I am broken I see the need for God every day in my life.

Colbert The Theologian

I love Colbert.

The Greatest Show On Earth

The Shins- New Slang was the song I was listening to the first time I saw him. He was tall, he had white ringlets of hair peeking out the bottom of his Detroit Tigers hat. He was a bit feeble, he was standing right in front of me, but I could see only a silhouette of his profile through curtain less frosted glass as he dropped his pants and sat down on the toilet. World meet pooping guy, the man I have grown to revere. The guy that is a real American hero, as he sits on his throne with no care of who may be watching him or who he may offend by wiping just once. He performs his show 3 times a day free of charge and the world is a better place with him here. We get a clear view of his wrinkled behind from our living room couch that only fits in the living room if we have it facing his way. Directly in front of our kitchen window which of course is directly across from his bathroom window. We don't even have to buy tickets, we have a season pass to the greatest show on earth.

Brick

Ben Folds- Brick reminds me of driving with my friend Joe talking about how much better we were than everyone else. The memory of the car I was driving is a little sketchy, but the conversation isn't. We were talking about how we would never, ever let a girl change us from who we were. We would never stop being stupid, we would do as we please when we pleased. We almost meant that at least I did, because a year or two later, Joe left for the military and let them change him. Me, I let Jesus change me. I was an arrogant little prick that none of you would have liked very much. Well maybe some of the people in the world who had low self-esteem and were looking for a bad person to be with. Someone who had the ability to self-destruct and drag everyone else down with him. I was a virus. My mom use to look at me and say, "Get behind me Satan." Ouch. Don't mince your words ma. But really, she was quite right. It wasn't that she didn't love me, It was that I had systematically dismantled everything goodin my life. But anyway I actually never believed I needed change. I always planned on killing myself and never needing it. God had other plans though.

I realize I have been a little preachy lately on this blog. Sorry I am not trying to do that, I just get so pissed off about stuff, and I am usually preaching at myself. So for a little while, I am going to write how I catalog memories with music. Not that you are interested but I want to write all of these things down before I die, or forget them. I think the best feeling is when you remember something you forgot a long time ago. My favorite Scottish grandma has Dementia and I think it is really sad because she is starting to lose the only real thing that isn't controlled by other people. Her memory is something the world can't touch or take away and she is losing it. I think that would be worse for me that being a vegetable.