God

Listening to the neighbors fight and watching apple smoke rise up in to the air.

My thoughts drifted to my life and if I am actually more satisfied with it when I can see the hand of God in it or whether my life would be any different if it was God focused instead of me focused.

I am at the point where I feel like I could be just as satisfied with it whether God is in it or not, traveling around, making friends, seeing the world and experiencing nature.

I can pull off making people think that I am at least somewhat focused on what God might want for my life and how I can serve him, but do I really care???

Are the people who I know who are Christians really any happier, any more joyful, anymore driven towards anything. I almost feel like the majority of people look to God in there life because

1. It will make them feel like better people.

2. It is what they have always done.

3. They feel like it is the best place to get a sense of community and not feel alone in the world.

I really do not know if any of this is true, but I know that when I am involved in a church or seeking to know God better at the root of it all is the desire to be living in a community of other people. Where people are sharing everything and being willing to sacrifice what they have for other people.

Sometimes I see this in the church, but many times I see it in other places.

The desire to know and to be truly known by other people. To be accepted for who you are without regard to your faults.

True community is hard to find and I feel that I rarely see it in the church.

I admit in this that there are a number of people that I have no desire to get to know or to be known by. I tend to be judgmental of people who seek after status and riches or who think that they have to have the best when really they should be able to be happy with much much less. Maybe some of these people are seeking to replace relationships in their lives with these things, I guess I do not really know.

One of the things that has meaning to me and makes me feel that my life is worth something is being creative, building things, bringing ideas to life, but this can never replace the relationships I have with people.

Can it replace a relationship with God??

I think so...

But I am still trying to determine where that fits in my life and if it is really true. I always feel more satisfied with my life when I am being creative and have community in my life regardless whether I am seeking after God or not.

Does it really matter???

The Greenest of the All

This weekend I went to my Grandma's birthday party.


I sat reminiscing with my family about my Grandma and as I sat there I realized my Grandma is the most environmentally responsible person I know.

What is ironic about this is that my Grandma is not at all focused on or interested in environmentalism.

She reuses everything and rarely buys anything new. She even reuses the cartons she gets meat in...

She grows most of her own vegetables or buys them locally.

Instead of buying new Christmas presents for us she would go to the thrift store and buy us books she thought we would like.

Even though my Grandma can be seen as tight she may be a great example of what an environmentalist really needs to be like.

the smooth motion of the city

I sit on my back porch, contemplating my life as I smoke the hookah and listen to the sounds of downtown with a little bit of Zero 7 in the background at least for a little while.

I am inspired but at the same time distracted as I watch the smoke cascade out of my lungs up into the night air. I wonder how my dreams for what my life will become will come to pass.

I realize that even as I sit hear another second of my life has passed by and I think of all the ideas I've had and wonder why I have never really followed any of my dreams before this year.

I think that the last time I followed a dream was when I came out to Colorado in 2001 to work at Eagle Lake as a bike camp director. Actually maybe not, I think that going to Baja was following through with a dream.

Now the dreams I have of creating and building have begun to take over my life in the past couple months. I have to figure out how to put my ideas and my creativity into action or I think eventually part of my soul will dye.

So many of my decisions in the past have been reacting to what has happened in my life not really being motivated by any driving force besides the flow of life around me.

Now I am driven, not by the job that I have just to pay off debt or the guilt that I sometimes let drive me to distraction but by the need to let the creativity I have inside of me come out, to take every idea that I have and work it through and not let it go dormant. Dormancy and floating through life are not a way to live...

I must let the dreams I have for my life flow out of me and not be held back by circumstances or the expectations of others.

Freedom is just around the corner!!!!