document real emotions

I’m in way over my head. This is nothing new; I just thought I’d document it. Between work and school I have more than I could ever finish in a day. It’s a terrible weight knowing that every second I’m not sleeping I need to be working and having it feel like failure every time my head hits the pillow. I’m averaging about 4 hours of sleep a night lately and that is an all time high for sleep. It’s really tough to be faithful with everything God’s given me. It seems like if I spend too much time investing in one area of my life I have to steal from some other area. The area I steal from consistently is my own needs/desires. I suppose I make less of a sound when I infringe on my own desires than if I come up short in another area of my life (friends, work, etc). God’s really teaching me how to give Him my best and try to honor Him with everything, and let Him deal with the results (which are always more than I could ever hope to attain through my own efforts). I don’t just want to be the guy that did one thing really well. I want to be the man who God looks at and says “Well done Joel. You’ve been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many.” (Matthew 25:23)

Some old proverb (Oriental or Buddhist or I don’t know) goes: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? There’s two schools of thought on this one. If you define sound as the perturbation of the elemental constituents of air in reaction to a pressure stimulus, then yes, of course it still would make a sound. However, if you define sound as the human ear’s perception of the aforementioned agitation of those air molecules, then no, sound doesn’t exist unless there is an ear there to hear it. I struggle with this dilemma daily. I feel like every day the world comes at me. Some days I get my butt handed to me—others I come out ahead. Regardless of the outcome, I give it my best, all, 110% can’t try any harder, effort. It’s tough investing the best of you in something that no one ever sees. So my question becomes this: If a man is great without anybody to be great for, is he really so great? I desire to just fight for just one woman, come through for just one woman, discover just one woman. Not being able to do that leaves me feeling like a bottle-rocket that never got ignited, a kite that never found wind, or a baseball that flew over your fence into your neighbor’s yard and landed in his rain gutter and you can see from your yard but can’t get it down to play ball with and you’re kinda grumpy every time you’re reminded of it. I could take on the world, if I could just come home to one woman who thought the world of me. It’s what I was made for and here’s what I’ve learned in its absence (and my consolation): It’s in the times we aren’t doing what we were made to be doing, that we learn what we need for when we are doing exactly what we were made to be doing. There is a God who knows me and understands my heart. His promise to me is that He’ll never give me crap for the sake of crap, but for the purpose of taking me from where I didn’t need to be into where I’ll flourish, teaching me what I wouldn’t have learned but needed to know, and growing me where I wasn’t smart enough to know I needed developing.

I cannot keep a diary to save my life. (You know, the ‘this happened, that happened’ kind of diary.) It turns out I’m a very unfaithful journalist. Well, about a year ago, I started using a prayer journal. It’s nothing complicated: I just write out all my thoughts and feelings to God. I think they are the most honest, real emotions I am capable of having; He can see right through me, into my heart and mind, and I don’t hold anything back. I can’t pray for more than thirty seconds otherwise without getting distracted, so it’s is my way of staying focused. You should give it a try. :]

I’m going to a pool party tomorrow. There’s going to be a girl there that I remember having a really fun conversation with last time I met her about the tyranny of the refrigerator ice-maker when it’s accidentally set on crushed and not cubed. She asked me if I had a girlfriend last time I met her and I told her I didn’t. She asked why I didn’t and I responded, “Because I just spent 15 minutes talking to you about an ice maker”. Most of my morning today was spent imagining what funny things I might say or what clever things I might do to make her attracted to me. I went about brewing a pot of tea for myself and whoever made tea before me had left the teabag in the pot. The teabag label, in all its water-logged wisdom, reminded me that I don’t need to be trying to be attractive to people. I just need to be real about me. Whoever’s left around after that is worth having around.

I find myself hanging out with kids more and more. Maybe it’s because they’re so honest, or maybe it’s because I’m steadily losing faith in adults. I went to a wedding this weekend. I love weddings. I was a groomsman for this wedding which set me on prime target to just have fun and celebrate. Not the case. I ended up catching grief from everyone because the bridesmaid I was with was interested in me and I didn’t reciprocate the feelings. Then, anytime I wanted to just talk to someone (in a platonic way) everyone was standing around critiquing my “flirting” skills. I didn’t want to flirt; I just wanted to know new people. I didn’t want to find romance; I just wanted to dance and enjoy the night. I felt like I was the only one there that didn’t get the memo about weddings being a meat-market. What really finished me off was when my mom was trying to sell me off to some girl who she would have been ashamed to call her daughter-in-law, and my best friend in the whole world trying to convince me that I could date a girl he knew I didn’t like simply because I’ve been single for too long in his opinion. Being single is the hardest thing I do because, more than most guys, I want to give only one woman my best. It’s kinda how I’d like to be remembered, as the guy who really loved his wife in a way that inspired others to do the same. It makes it so much harder to wait for that one character-filled woman who will complement me, when everyone around me is telling me what I need to be doing differently to attract a barrage of women that aren’t her. I did meet one beautiful woman though. She wore a white sweater with a pink dress and was just getting her adult teeth in the front. She was in forth grade and told me that she knew algebra already. The best part of the entire reception was me and her doing “hard” algebra problems on a napkin so she could prove to me she knew math.