Rambling

I am just going to write, and see what happens. Perhaps such unbridled rambling will become an eventual regret - the kind where I read over my own words and choose to edit away those points that are not clear. Maybe I will just write, and let what is said remain.

I ask myself the question, "What are you doing?" with increasing frequency. What am I doing with my time, with my energy, my health, my future plans - what am I doing with my faith? Usually it is a simple, "I don't know," that comes in reply to that question. The reason I ask it is because I am afraid. I do not want to have concluded my life and have lived poorly. I want an existence that has the fingerprints of richest all over it - not the kind of wealth that is seen in monetary value, but one that is built on the foundation of relationship and grows in interest as the strength of those relationships develop.

I also ask this 'self analyzing' question as one that is more general - beyond simply 'me.' I wonder about us. People. What are we doing? Should we be doing something else? Do we actually have a chance? Can God himself be enough for us to change and become better as people? As humanity? Many times I feel that it is a fools hope that it is possible.

Call me a fool.

Why are so many people hurting?

I was listening to the latest Mutemath album this morning. One of the lines stood out to me. The lyric is within the chorus of Pins and Needles:

Oh, and I'm growing fond of broken people,
As I see that I am one of them.

I hurt, because you hurt. I feel pain, because I see pain in us. We are flawed. As CS lewis has written, the human machine is broken. We try to run it for a while, but it is not to long before everything seems to simply break apart and crumble into ashes.

I loved my first car. Pheonix - named as such because it was a black VW Rabbit GTI. I would tell people it was a Pheonix in-between life cycles, so it was not blazing with fire and brilliance, but was black like coal. This past year, there were some issues with the engine. I spent 7+ weeks working on it with a friend. Try as we might, we only got it working well enough that I could drive it home one last time, then it died. I feel like people are a lot like this. We try really hard to be a well oiled, fully functional machine, but some pieces are missing. Some wires lacking, some gears out of place. Something is wrong.

That last point can be pretty depressing, yet I continue to ask, "what are we doing?" Unless I really am a fool, I would stop asking that question if I thought we were unable to change. I think that we can change. Despite the failing I saw with Pheonix, the result largely came from my lack of mechanical experience and knowledge. I suppose this means that part of my hope for humanity comes from the thought that we might gain a knowledge and experience from seeing how humanity has existed in the past. With this learning we might pioneer a new direction, building strong relationships, schools, families, and nations. We can become more than we are right now.

Well, that is the end of lunch break - so ends my rambling (for now at least).


~David