Have you ever known just how ridiculously inadequate you were and laughed? It's happened to me before but right now I'm not laughing. To live by a law is to die by it but it's not standards I'm talking about. It's drive, passion, integrity. I'm 22 now in Clemson working on a doctorate. Constantly I'm surprised by people and how small we think. My friends always joke that I'm emotionless and never get upset or anything. But that's just trash. The strongest currents flow deep in the sea and barely cause a ripple on the surface. Or at least that's my feeling on it.
Have you ever broken out of your frame of mind, looked at your life and couldn't stop laughing? Maybe you need help understanding the question. Have you ever stopped thinking about all the crap you stress over that don't matter (careers, hobbies, romantic interests, education) and just looked at how easy yet perplexing it is just to live a good life? I get so caught up in my own dream of what will happen. I was taught multiple foundations morality may be built from yet if we have the drive all the scraps of paper to explain what's right and why it is burn in our passion to love someone else.
Everyone I may feed or shelter will die. Everyone I right or wrong dies. In the long run then, do my actions matter? Nope, I'm a fleck of dust that is helping another fleck of dust move out of its apartment. I threw a jacket over living clay before it decayed back into the inanimate. The why is so much more important than the what.
I want to love. That's an odd comment, isn't it? "Just do it." Comes to mind but we can't, can we? In our frames we have made it impossible to love without going through some arbitrary hoops. "I can't invite that person to this until I know them better." "I just met her, hugging would be awkward." We have built barriers that have no purpose but to insulate us from each other. In the US we have this inclination that a house is better than an apartment because you have much more room, you're insulated. I for one wish to always live in some sort of community. Growing up, it was awkward talking to the neighbors because we never really talked before. Really they are just strangers that happened to be geographically closer to us than most strangers. Then I went to college and I saw a family created in the dorm I lived in. To be sure the family was dysfunctional but it was a family. There weren't any strangers except those that made a point of being insulated. It was much easier to live out The Way when you saw everyone around you as family. Then I moved into an apartment and I barely talked to our neighbors. Then I moved into a house with some friends and we never talked to the neighbors. We were "moving up" in the world. We were living in a house, heck yeah! But it was so lonely. In the apartments only walls separated us from everyone else, now walls and the elements separated us. The next year I moved back into an apartment, it's great.
God give me strength and wisdom. Grant me passion more than anything though. Grant me the desire to do your will, to love. Because even if it's hard to carry out, I know it'll complete me. This is what we were created for. Not to build empires from the ashes of the kingdoms of old, but to embrace and love those who got burnt.
