take it all down

Christmas is on its way. boxing day, by rk, is a little diddy about missing christmas and what to do with the time in between boxing day and christmas eve. merry not-christmas. enjoy.

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.

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

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.

keeping it real

i tell you what, i'm not a very good blogger. i said to myself when i started this blog that it'd be revolutionary, that i'd write posts twice weekly and that they'd rock the very foundations of our culture. i didn't say exactly that, you understand, but my brain was operating under an assumption of comparable magnitude. the problem that i've run into is that i'm wayyyy to prideful (notice the four y's, added for emphasis). you see, i'd very much like for each and every one of my posts to be utterly perfect, so utterly perfect that readers cannot help but comment on the splendor that they behold. comments. thats all i'm really after. oh, to see that people made it all the way to the bottom of a post with enough enthusiasm to leave a little message, agreeing with me wholeheartedly about whatever.

alas, i found that i grew frustrated when several of my posts received no comments at all for months on end. most people would be all, yeah big deal whatevs, but not me. no, i was genuinely pissed that my readership (allegedly three individuals) were so small-minded that they did not deem my posts worthy of comment (i'm mocking myself here, i'm sure that all three of you are quite wonderful and have the most open of minds).

and so, in my pissedness (pronounced like blessedness), i would go for ages without posting, and when i did it was only when something truly profound was on my mind. even then, no comments.

and so i acks meself, why are these comments so important? the obvious answer is that comments = praise, praise = i'm awesome, ergo comments = i'm awesome. it can thus be deduced that a lack of comments is in direct correlation with a lack of awesomeness. and so to my poor heart each non-comment is a new level of sub-awesomeness.

but i digress. the purpose of this post is not to make you feel bad for not commenting, or explain how sorry for me you ought to be (although i'm sure that i have effectively done both, my apologies). no, the purpose of this post is to explain things that i have learned this year. it just figured i'd start with the thing most relevant to you, the reader. so the learning goes something like this:

sometimes God lays things on my heart to share by my pride keeps me from laying those messages on your heart. this must change. i think i'll start posting as often as i feel led, regardless of the quality or quantity of posts in which that results. i'll learn to deal with a lack of accolades, and maybe God will speak to you through me. or maybe i'll speak to you through me. you may even speak to yourself, but don't do it out loud or your brother will have you committed.

probably the most important thing that i've learned is the importance of my calling. in recent years it has become very popular (a friend used the word "trendy") to be all about fighting poverty, particularly in africa. thats a pretty awesome thing. but its something that i've seen taken a little bit too far. its been suggested to me that the suffering in africa is what is most important to God, and that if i'm not doing everything i can (in terms of my time and money) to alleviate that suffering, i'm somehow acting outside of God's will.

to that i say, "nay." you see, i think God sees all suffering as pretty sucky. and in my life, God has called me to help with a different kind of suffering, namely helping people in broken relationships and people who are suffering from mental illness. i'm psyched that God is using so many people to help fight poverty around the world, but that is not where i believe He has decided to use me in a direct way.

(this point in the post represents the period of time where i took something like a five hour break from writing to eat dinner and watch tv and stuff. the stuff below has a different tone, presumable because my mood changed. whodathunkit?)

at any rate, for a while there i was pretty insecure about my calling. what with all the cool kids being all about saving africa, i felt like i was behind the times. but i've matured a little bit, and its all good.

also, mac people are starting to bug me. am i right? it used to be that there were PC people who preferred using PCs and there were mac people who preferred using macs. there was no more animosity between the two groups than there is between coke and pepsi. but now mac people are like, whoa we are just so much dang better than PC people (i blame the commercials featuring justin long). it makes me not want to be a mac person no more. i was at the apple store the other day and i hear this guy, maybe late 30's talking to this saleskid. the guy is all, well hey i mean my current PC has all of these same features and specs, but it cost me like a thousand bucks less. the saleskid looks at him and goes, yeah well this is a mac. no other explanation. i wanted to puke.

ha there i go, getting all judgmental. but really, now. i use a macintosh computer. but i want no part of this 'mac revolution.' maybe i'm turning into an anti-anti-conformist. whatevs. i'm venting.

well errrrybody thats about all i've got. more posts in the future. you'll see. you'll alll see.

suffering

hungry people need food.

this man needs food of a different kind.

lets feed the hungry. but lets try not to forget about him.

crea-shun

what is it about creation that brings people to their knees?

have you ever been outside, just walking to wherever, and something catches your eye that is so spectacular, so mesmerizingly wonderful that you just want to collapse and take it in? sure you have.

but we don't collapse. we keep walking, because falling to our knees would make people think we are crazy. and we're not crazy.

but we probably should be crazy. that is, we definitely are crazy. since when did the need to appear sane keep us from being that which God made us to be: absolutely nuts. for Him.

now i claim to love God. i love a lot of things about Him. first, i love that i know almost nothing about Him. second, i love that He did a little ditty here on earth (a.k.a. Jesus) and died for my sins, etc. etc. the list goes on and on. One of God's coolest accomplishments, in my humble opinion, is what you and i call "creation."

let me spin you the briefest of yarns about time itself. first, there was nothing. then, there was something. that something started to become more and more something-like with each passing second, and billions (or thousands. thats not what this discussion is about) of years later, we have the stuff that you and i see on a daily basis: trees, cats, hair, pee, skin, rocks, clouds, stars, faces, dirt, elbows, etc.

how neat is this stuff, right? my hand, for no other reason than i command it so, has just typed a complete sentence. there are SALAMANDERS in CAVES without EYES causes why on earth would they need EYES? AM I RIGHT? is this NUTS OR WHAT?

ok so we have this wonderful creation. you look at it and your heart is all, whoa omG, and then you just want to SCREAM because the same Guy that did all that also wants to have a relationship with poor pathetic you. thats a pretty big deal.

but we don't scream.

little jimmy asks, "why not?"

"they'd think we're crazy." you reply confidently.

"and who is they?" little jimmy retorts with just the faintest suggestion of an approaching grin.

"the world!" you exclaim in premature frustration, immediately seeing the trap little jimmy has just put you in, a trap you could see all along but could do nothing about because of your silly pride that forces you to defend your need to appear as not-crazy as possible!

"baha!," little jimmy declares triumphantly, "you ought not conform any longer to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the blah blah blah...Romans 12:2"

but little jimmy admits that he, too, is often made to feel silly for his desire to scream at the top of his lungs the wonder he beholds. after all, not conforming is a lot easier said than done, am i right? i'm so right.

so what are you going to do about it? probably nothing. but you really should consider it. are we not called to be a little bit different anyway? do you think God will be displeased at our [unabashed] recognition of the sweet, sweet world He's dropped us in? i don't. in fact, i think He might just be a little pleased.

so go, my brethren and female brethren, and let God know how excited you are about all the terrific junk He has given you to play with and enjoy. you need not drop to your knees, but when you think about it, you probably should. i mean come on, right?

thats all for today. i'm feeling good! i hope you enjoyed this little pep talk. until next time, don't eat the yellow snow!

jimmy