To be as forthright as possible, I've never resolved the struggle of the educational/personal/developmental investment that I sometimes feel I've traded away for this way of life- of which, I don't think I've fully delved into yet. And there are times wherein I feel nothing has been bartered (those places absent of the feeling is the realm of faith).

I don't suppose I'm supposed to resolve this thorniness. Additionally, I can't have seen it all thus far. Let's face it....this way of life is unglamorous, unkempt and almost no one recognizes what it took and takes to have arrived at the meager place in which you are. The vantage point is no pedestal and garners no accolades. And, no, this is not a call for lauds, honors and the like. This is more of an outward sloughing off of bindings, I guess.

Unemployment has a way of catching you in the netherworld of the "what-could/should-be's." This current situation only exacerbates the issue. Like computer software on the glitch with grayed-out clickable options that you need, the right window just doens't seem to want to pop up. I tinker with feeling like an absconder extraordinaire in that there is something I have to offer of myself (and not just for myself) that is not yet existent. I don't seek public recognition, just the inner recognition of what it is I am to be doing in concert with an infectious outpouring of a real move of God as the central thread weaving every facet of my life together.

In many ways I have no doubt I am on that track and in the right place. This is not a question of physical location as it is one of emotional/maturational.

There are money questions inherent in this, but they are not bourne out of greed. Is it a sin to get paid for something you'd love to do and something about which you are passionate and with which you are skilled? Isn't that what most of us are after? But is it what we should be after? IF I were a real Christian, I'd abandon these things and vow away my relatively "affluent" lifestyle (compared to some) for one more simplistic and truly sacrificial with its attending poverties of self and stuff.....selling what I have, checking my ambitions/motivations 24/7 at the door of "Do You Really Love Jesus Or Not".....Right?

Part of my past that haunts with prickly barbs is the fact that I have this reality of having afforded myself the opportunity to become educated. I went through having two degrees conferred upon me. However, I am not convinced that that segment of my life is being fully utilized by cleaning up baby doo, food scraps and saddling a thirty-six foot-long, 36,000 lb. diesel donkey with a love-jones for twenty, ten-to-fifteen mile-per-hour circles for seven hours.

But I determined to go to college and then to seminary to better prepare myself for something into which I was called long before the actuality of college/seminary was before me (well, a few years at least).

The simplest way I can conceive of it is that God crashed my spiraling self-destruct course and invited me at the burly old age of 15 into his Kingdom and I accepted. In that place, I found Home. Rather, it found me and propelled me outward so that I was immediately thinking about what my life would mean thenceforth. I would vow, by myself- beside a juniper bush on the campus of a youth discipleship camp on the side of English Mountain in Tennessee- that whatever I would do with my life, I would do out of gratitude for what He did for me. I would avail myself of whatever I could to make that happen. It might have been easy for me to do so because I entered the Kingdom SOOOOO profoundly "lost" that I have never, to this day, forgotten what that lostness was existentially like.

In short, my educational pursuit was not one emanating from the bounds of some boomer parents' ideation of the American Scream that they felt they had lost out on (and one they could live through me vicariously). My educational route of choice was not just one of the acquisition of information, but also the formation of self and soul. My way was not one enforced and I had no predecessors to influence me. I chose that for myself and made it happen with the gifts and abilities and talents that I knew I had, most of which paid my way through.

Having my education has allowed me to get "here." Here is better than the "thereness" of my way back when, or even yesterday. I was intuitive enough to separate out real life from the foibles of academia that could breed a mule mentality and a slave syndrome. In that sense, I met more invitations of God the further I went along.

My wife told me today that I've just been kicked in the butt. I didn't think so upon hearing it. But maybe I have. I just hope God didn't lose his shoe in the accumulative lard of sloth he was sure to have found on my posterior.

CURRENT MUSIC: "Prismatic" by Oxana