8.30.2009

lightening post

we'll call this one lightening post because i'm going to write it as quickly as lightening flashes from the sky to the earth.

boom.

community is the answer. the question is, what is your struggle, jimmy? being back at jewell is like getting kicked in the crotch with a frozen boot made of emotions. less because of pain and more because of the whoa-what-the-heck-is-happening-to-my-reality feeling. i am a quiet person, generally speaking. when placed in a setting where the path of least resistance is keeping to myself, i will almost always keep to myself. summer falls into that category for me. my summers are spent in what some might call relational isolation, with the enormous exception of the wonderful time spent with my dearest lyndsay. being back at jewell, at least in these first weeks, tends to be more like relational freaking woodstock (thats probably the opposite of isolation, right?)


beyond the standard catching up and deciding with whom it is most important that i share my time, i am having difficulty knowing where to belong. i told myself at the close of last semester that i would let God take me wherever He saw fit. know through prayer and discussion i have a pretty good idea of where that is. now the problem is obedience. the easy answer is to find some kind of conflicting evidence. for example, lets say that i feel God calling me to play some kind of role in a particular organization. i think my flesh, in an effort to help itself avoid discomfort, is quick to point out that the organization in question has made me no offer, has expressed no interest in recruiting my help. surely i misunderstood the call.

wrong. i know where i need to be, now how to get there. do i openly force myself into groups whose influence would assist me in the infiltration of said organization? or do i start from the ground up, executing a more subversive rise to power? or is there (and yes, there probably is) a more peaceable solution that God will reveal to me in the weeks to come? patience.


patience.

8.19.2009

getting hitched

hey dudes-

at present i am listening to mutemath's new album. i'm trying to let it grow on me, but it might just suck. however, that is how i felt about the first album (which i now love). more on that later.

so i've been engaged for something like a year, four months and a day now (i know, i know, but who's counting? ha). it has been a wonderfully tremendous experience, and i've learned a lot about my girl and about myself. the original plan was to seal the deal sometime during the summer of 2011. well over the past few months lyndsay and i have started to feel this pull towards making this thing happen a little sooner. there are about 67 different reasons for this, but the biggest one was the feeling that we're stalling. maybe stalling is the wrong word. i've just come up with an analogy that adequately describes my feelings. if you've never driven a car with a manual transmission, please bear with me.

so you're in fourth gear and you slow down a bit. you says to yourself, i should probably down shift. so you do, you depress the clutch and throw it into third, but WHOA! you weren't going that slow, and the transmission slows down abruptly to compensate for the discrepancy in speed. you lurch forward, wanting to go faster than the current gear is letting you.

thats basically how it feels. we're ready for this next step, and have been for quite a while. however, there were a number of things that were holding us back. most of those things were monetary, but we also wanted to keep the parents happy. at any rate, we wanted to get married in 2o1o, but just couldn't make the logistics work.

but then we said, to hell with it! thats right, we used a moderately bad word. we decided to go balls to the wall and try and figure out. we've spent the last several weeks crunching numbers, making phone calls and putting together spread sheets and pie graphs that illustrate our financial readiness. once we felt ready, we called for a meeting.

so on this last sunday lyndsay and i met with her parents and my parents (all three). the meeting was scheduled to begin at 1:00 P.M., so i started pacing around 12:45. lyndsay noted that i was making laps around the house. i keep looking through our soon-to-be replaced windows at the empty spaces on the street where a hyundai sonata and a ford f-150 would soon be. 1:00 rolled around and i began to pace faster. my mom and my stepdad were there, but they live there. the anticipation was killing me. what if her father decided not to show up, voicing with his absence his disapproval of the whole proposition? 1:04, and her parents arrived. their disposition was positive enough, but there was still no sign of my father. i was about to crap my pants. he arrived three minutes later. cool.

the meeting was mostly about numbers, the presentation of charts and graphs. essentially, it was our attempt to illustrate both our conscientiousness with regard to their money and the financial feasibility of (1) getting married next summer and (2) surviving our first year of marriage. at one point we had to defend our reasoning for bumping the date up one year. i began to explain how the prospect of yadayadayada was far better than etc., etc., but my mom cut me off and explained why we should get married next summer. way to go mom.

so as the meeting drew to a close, i decided to ask straight up: could we make this happen in the next 11 months? thumbs up all around. i took my first breath in two hours.

all of a sudden, the ball is rolling. we're juggling about 9 things at once, from booking venues to coordinating a ceremony guest list (which, due to space, will be different than the reception guest list) to conversing with photographers. by the end of this week, we'll have already dropped close to $1500 on this thing. boom.

so all this to say, we're getting married. for real, though. we're getting married.

mutemath update: perfectly tolerable, but by no means as good as their first album.

much love.

jimmy

8.09.2009

summer

wellll here i am, feeling kind of silly.

if i remember correctly, i said in my last post (about three months ago) that i'd be writing way often. i am, as it turns out, a liar.

it isn't that i don't want to write and give you my love and wisdom, it's just that i've been super crazy busy with work and vaca and other things like that.

I think i'm being pretty pretentious for thinking of you, my readers, as unfortunate for having been deprived of my musings. well, what are you gonna do?

the good news is, i think i've discovered why i find it difficult to post with any sort of consistent frequency. basically, i think my posts need to be somehow significant, either to me or to you. and it is pretty rare for something like that to occur in a way that compels me to write about it. so maybe i'll write about things that aren't significant, at least not on the surface. perhaps my desire for significance is actually impeding the cultivation of significance. anyway, something like that.

at any rate, i'd like to tell you about my summer in upcoming posts. it just so happens that a lot of significant things took place. and i've learned quite a lot. so here's what i'm looking at writing in the next few posts: my trip to texas, my internship at COR, my beef with youthfront, my wedding plans, and my two trips to Grand Avenue Temple.

thanks guys. keep it real.