I'm looking at my hands right now. There are wrinkly places where there didn't used to be. I gazed at the bends of my inner elbows and the skin is wrinkly there too. Certain hair folicles have lost their ability to retain pigment as they used to. Shucks...certain hair folicles have seen a cessation of existence. Productive ones that is.

I just tried growing out my hair for about the last two months. Let me tell you....that was a stinking exercise in futility. I had a receding hairline since it all started back in college. I thought I was set and was just going to have to deal with it as that. Now the receding areas not only are meeting from left to right and vice-versa, but the emerging hair island on front and center sports a newly balding streak in and of itself. So I thought I'd dye it, as in the olden days. It turned orange. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Bald is beautiful again.

I am trying to rectify my own bodily changes with those around me, with my own sense of my place in the Kingdom work. I am trying to figure if I am just a wrinkle in the face of its ever-present, ever-breaking newness. I fear those with whom I have invested myself in deeply see my spiritual wrinkles, tire/bore of them and long for thicker, more vibrant colors. In such were vestiges of promise; times now bear a different, stranger fruit, promising neither certainty nor total abdication....I change; people change. Am I still wanted? Does God still want me? Do I still want myself?

And yet, I want to go for it all. I want to lay aside encumbrances and thrust into a faith unknown. But I won't go it alone. Things got scary a year ago when it became clear that this kind of life in the Kingdom ACTUALLY COSTS US OUR LIVES! I shared that vulnerability with people I love and I think I shooed some away. Maybe I layed too much on the line. Maybe I opened up too widely and prematurely projected expectations belonging only to myself and no one else. That's kind of why I feel like the chubby kid in dodgeball who gets pelted first and stands alone in the "out" line.

You can't manipulate people to journey with you. Neither can you settle for tag-a-longism to count for diligent Kingdom work, the kind you can share with a confidante and the kind who will enter into the deep and the mystery. And hanging on the wispy triumphs of yesterday will sink you as well.

It's amazing how the cares of the old world and spectres of the defunct easily trail us all off the path. How cruel it is that we can't ascend the lofty ideations we held in faith when the things of God were new while the devils sit victoriously reticent. And from those shadows bellow even greater temptations to further cement what we said we'd never become.

I possess a certain indigence of spirit at present that neither inspires nor witholds. It's not an achievement and there are no worthy holdings here. These words probably ring quite an advertisement for self-aggrandizement, but they help to shape the hollows and core out the marrow.

It's a threshold for sure...for life, for self, for church, for community and for all ideations about them. I just feel more alone sometimes now than ever before. And some who gave all before now float in a boat of whimsy where I may be concerned.