Just Moments in Time

For the past two years I feel that much of my life has been run based on some future event that is going to happen. Whether it is the end of a quarter, the end of a season in life, the end of a job, or the end of a day, much of my life has been lived impatiently looking forward. I have let myself become bound to the measure of clocks, watches, computers screens or calendars. There have been nights and days where I have dwelled on the future so much that I become paralyzed for doing anything at that current moment. I have felt that if a current moment of life comes, all will somehow come into order: my friendships, relationship with God, relationship with Katie, parent stuff, money. I have been living in the future, not within a current moment of life. Don’t get me wrong, there are times that I feel that I am right in that moment as if all rest of time is insignificant, but over all it pains me to say that this is not true for most of the moments in my life.

As of today I know longer want to be constricted to the impatience which has ruled my life of much of the last two years. I want to live my life in patience. Not the type of patience that is waiting for a future event, like a child patiently waiting for the morning to arrive on Christmas Eve. I want to live a life of patience that calls me to fight against the grain of my natural impulse. As Nouwen points out in his book Compassion, a life of patience enables us to “see, hear, taste, and smell as fully as possible the inner and outer events of our lives,” to “enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us” as we “give up control…entering into a unknown territory.” The patience that Nouwen speaks of reveals a new time, a time of grace. This time is not measured by units or numbers but it is lived in fullness. These moments of time are not necessarily happy, joyful, painful, or marked with struggle. These moments of time are experience in the fullness of there importance. Every moment in life is important, I…we, can no longer afford to live lives of impatience. May you and I live every moment to its fullness, experiencing everything each moment holds within it for the purposes of His glory that is now but is to come…

Is true community possible in the "now but not yet"

It has been a while since I posted...much of the reason for that this because for much of the last 2 years I feel that my life has been a weird balance of fragmented constant change. Moving from quarter to quarter, living pay check to pay check, moving from close friend to distant friendship, and driving place to place. I rarely have the time to just sit and process what is going on as I run through my life. As Katie can confess, this has lead to many nights where I lay on my back, in tears, trying to talk out what I am feeling.
It is about once a year that I really get the time to sit and process life...these last 2 weeks have been this time. During the first 3 weeks of Sept. Fuller usually stops enough while job stuff is in transtion that it allows me enough time to process what the last year has held. Last year, these 3 weeks ended with an amazing trip to CO, spending much needed time with good friends giving me enough strength to run towards the distance finish line. This year, while I have enjoyed not having school or work for the last 2 weeks, I don't feel as if I have recovered enough to keep me going. The only day during these last 2 weeks that I feel that I have really have been refreshed was the day I spent celebrating my 2 year relationship with Katie. (Side Note: I love you babe! and thank you for everything during these last 2 years!) Many of the last 2 weeks have been filled with me sitting on my butt...doing nothing, which if you know me is a quick way to kill me. I thrive off of community, doing, friendship, and conversation with people I love and who love me. My community has of late shrunk to a roommate whom I love, a girlfriend whom I don't know what I would do without, a friend who I talk to on the phone from Central Cali, friends whom I feel I don't really know anymore, what I can make out of the few friends from college I still have and what I can piece together with the new friends who are still to new to amount to much as of now. For some people this might seem like a normal group of friends but for me it is barely enough to survive. Maybe this is what life has come to. It seems that if the days of dreaming of a community of friends has drifted away. As I sat in church today and listened to my pastor Donn, who has been an amazing blessing in my life over the last 2 years, talked about community, I sat there wondering if a biblical community is really possible in our culture and world today? I long for a day where my married friends don't fall into some invisible married cassim of no return. I long for a day where people won't come home and sit in front of a box where they entertain themselves to death. I long for a day where people talk face to face and not read about each other on a blog sites or myspace pages. I long for a day where families of singles, marrieds, kids, and elders can come together weekly in fellowship. Maybe this hope is fleeting? I would like to think not, but it seems that the possibility of a world like this has been drifting further and further away in the "now but not yet."