Old Writings

I've had many careers and fears throughout my short years and I foundtwo  old writings while looking through things... perhaps reflecting my damaged memory, I can't remember if I wrote these or found some of these (clearly remember on most). But the kid who is very much trying to find his way was fascinated by some of these old things... As I've kept a blog of the last year and a half I dug back a little further... and realized it's good to have slices of time that show us that unlike the naive idea that today's emotions, today's ideas were always true and will always be true, one of my favorite (and most scary) elements of Big Brother is that we think this, that whatever is true today was always true (Eurasia was always at war with...). It may be comforting to think that there is destiny, and that things are meant to be and maybe somethings are but maybe that's just how we get ourselves to sleep at night rather than live in the shoulda coula woulda's.

These writings have nothing to do with much of the present but just to go where have I come from and where am I going, what makes it worth it. We all change but that doesn't mean it's an improvement. Lance Armstrong is under investigation for whatever but the way he changed the sport was that he chronicled where his heart rate was, where his muscles were, how they ate. I did this once during marathoning and while nothing in life is completely predictable (trust me on this one), some of it has a strong pattern. Or as Mark Twain more eloquently put it, history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes."

These are not meant to flow but to make me remember to remember and to remember to keep writing:
From the days of being a pastor
In Lewis Caroll’s classic Children’s Story, Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen asks Alice to practice believing six impossible things before breakfast every days. Every year during Christmas time, I often think that Christianity asks us to do a similar thing by accepting the Nativity Story. Our faith requires us to believe that God traded power for pampers and glory for Gerber. It further demands that we believe virgins give births, wise men chase UFO’s across the desert sky, and shepherds are touched by an angel choir. In all this absurdness, we are asked to accept that manna became man, that eternity stepped into time so we could understand that God the father had a human heart. I am unsure as to when this would be harder to believe, whether it would be in our own present skeptical age which often dismisses religiosity as silly or if it would have been harder to trust as truth in the early ages of Christianity, when the Christ was just a snotty, crying infant. Although I am unsure, I would like to explore the idea that those who first accepted Jesus as a crying infant into their lives were giants of faith, great contributors to the redemption of the world. 



From the fears that the kid who brought his dog from the South Pacific, has pulled off a few firsts and has always been as a mathematician friend says an outlier

And so the attempt to make the world into a vision of one’s own

Turned out to be a myth, leaving one empty and alone

Big Brother never seems to lose, victory he always claims

And those who dare to rage against him find they are forgotten names

Conformity must be the rule to those who wish to reach success

Whatever falls not within in the frame the heart must not express

What a high price we all must pay to color inside the lines

And all the joy outside of that imagination confines

The power structures never shake, their foundation’s solid ground

Those who think they make a roar make but a momentary sound

We remember only those whose ducks were in a row

Who never wavered never failed the party line to tow

Whose lives were examples of all that we could be

Look how great your life will grow if you are just like me

Great minds may dare to have a single creative thought

But find that challenging certain ones is not something they ought

And in the end that which we’ve made first place

Is that we must all run the same to be in the human race

A hope that you might be different is a ridiculous token

They take the challenge, ignore it and your soul they leave broken. 

We like cheering on the non conformists... but their history often rhymes in that they lead challenged challenging lives...