nanovivid

Mind… full of thoughts. Must… get them out coherently. This… may or may not happen.

I haven’t journaled in a while because I didn’t have that much to write for public consumption, and there hasn’t been too much eventfulness happening. But today I had a conversation that sparked a lot of thought.

I was talking to Ryan and we were discussing things that were happening in his life spiritually. In responding to what was going on, I was struck very hard by how different my perspective on spirituality and relating to God has become. This makes it rather odd to have certain types of conversations with people, where the assumption is all the "normal" christian ideas about life. I wrote this a couple minutes after the conversation ended:

When did I stop caring about "living for Jesus" and "letting God work in my life?" It’s such a strange feeling to have conversations with people about their lives and not be coming at it from the same perspective. I guess I just don’t get it anymore.

Walking home from work I did some further thinking about why this difference bothers me. Multiple factors play into it, I think, but one major one is that I don’t like to disagree with people or be different. I want to be able to have my ideas fit in with those of others and be able to feel that we relate. For me, disagreeing on serious issues is a major decision to make, so it’s hard to have different ideas about how to go about "becoming like Jesus" and such. Even on the issue of war… I definitely come at it from a pacifist point of view, but it’s hard for me to talk about it with people who strongly disagree, because I don’t like arguing (which is usually what such conversations become). Meh.

Another factor is something I’ve written about before - I’ve always sort of been a "rock" for people in their hard times spiritually, and now… I can still be there and listen, and I could probably give them good "christian" advice, but it wouldn’t be genuine. I guess I need to accept that I can’t be everything to everyone. But I often wish I could be.

This entry might sound like a bit of a step back from my ultra-optimistic rant from a couple weeks ago. I guess maybe it is. Maybe it’s me realizing that I still have a lot of questions to work through and decisions to make.

Adding fuel to the fire, I watched Waking Life again tonight. I really like that movie, and I appreciate it more now than I did the first time I saw it. There are a lot of beautiful ideas discussed, and it leaves more questions than answers, and that’s fine with me. I don’t have anything specific from the movie to discuss, but it just helped keep my thoughtful mood going.

I’m so freaking introspective sometimes. :-)

Quick living situation update: We looked at an apartment on Tuesday and have decided to pursue that instead of the house because a) It’ll work better lease-wise with Steve getting married next May and b) the landlord of the house hasn’t gotten back to us in like three weeks (or is it longer?). The landlord of the apartment is much more friendly and I hope this one will work out. Applications go in tomorrow, we should know by early next week.

♫ Something Corporate - Fall