Recently in Personal 05 Category

Gotta love hosting.

Time to fall off the grid again.

See you in the funny pages.

After overworking and a sickness, including missing personal commitments as a result of both, L and I have arrived in beautiful Cary, North Carolina, outside of Raleigh. I'm job hunting and she's enjoying spending time with my sister-in-law.

Who has recommended an old friend whose business might be able to benefit from my experience and skills.

I needed to do something. I've had a lead on a job in Chicago that I'm only pursuing now. The retail sales job is more tiring than I gave it credit. Of course, working below your capacity is tiring. Hopefully, later I'll be able to get all my files together and all the old material re-integrated. After all, I don't make money at any of this. I just write about what I'm interested in.

I missed a funeral, a Christmas celebration, the kickoff of Cingular (and about $100 in SPIFFs) and a cheap training session in the midst of everything.

Well, let's be thankful that those horrid "holiday" songs no longer permeate that retail air with their rancid sounds....

This, I realized, is how a man becomes what he is not: by doing what he could never do — Philip K. Dick

The Kid will memorialise his mother tomorrow, two days after Christmas. Any holiday after losing someone can be hard to get through. The winter holidays, so closely associated with the nuclear family, take on a bittersweetness, a time of remembrance and of re-experiencing the loss. His mother, though, died in-between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The holidays will never be the same.

L and I wanted to go down to Kansas for the service. I can't get away. We tried, we wanted to, but it's return season. I suppose it's a compliment to be considered one of the regulars, a part-timer who is the equal of the full-timers. But now, when if I were consulting I would have been able to go, it's hard.

The holiday for me was barely one: we went to services, heard some heretical statements, gave some help to some folks even worse off than we are. We gave a ride to a woman who just had a baby. His father doesn't know about him. The guy left the mother because she went back into drugs. He has their daughter. She isn't allowed to see her.

"I really screwed up," she says matter-of-factly. She looks squarely at what she did and lays the responsibility right at her own feet. It's not wallowing in guilt. Just the nemesis catching up.

As I finally get around to acknowledging the voluminous email I have received (can one say that email has volume?) — especially as a result of that earlier post which is now no longer a part of the blog, which cannot be named — I determined it best to set down in magnetic tape of some form on the servers in Oklahoma City (home of the Cowboy Hall of Fame and my mother-in-law) an answer to the most pressing question they raise. I shall endeavour to provide further answers in the near future, perhaps even numbering them according to some esoteric system to be mysterious.

Q1: If you were a pizza topping, what type of pizza topping would you be and why?

One of our adopted college students has been going through a period of struggle in the faith and her life recently. They came over before Thanksgiving for some food with us. She just felt out of balance. Not wrong or weird. Just off balance. Different. Something in the background. Hard to describe.

But she didn't say anything about it so I let it pass. I have a deeper relationship with her boyfriend, The Kid, so I didn't think much of it that night. It gnawed at me, though.

So when someone else mentioned that she had quit a leadership position on campus, it didn't take by surprise. I figured though that perhaps she might be going through what I went through at her age (God forbid!). Nowadays I call it the search for the Real Thing. Kind of combination of Mode and a Complexity boundary transition. I started asking difficult, jerky questions of all my fellow Christians. Okay, I'll be honest: I had a complete breakdown and spent an entire semester sleeping for over 16 hours a day. Luckily, I have a "phonographic" memory and only failed differential equations. I left all my positions of leadership, left most of my friends, and picked up the ones who stayed through my wedding, including my best pal.

Still, a horrible time. I wanted an answer that no one provided. I exasperated everyone I talked to because I kept destroying their answers. "Is God real? but I don't want an intellectual answer...." Even then I knew that I searched for something that I couldn't name.

These transitions stink.

I thought about her plight for awhile, wondering if it had the same qualities that mine did. I felt rather alone back then, at least when it came to anyone who could put my experience into context. And I was, looking back on it. It felt wretched and I'm surprised that I made it through without a extra orifices in my forearms.

So I sent her a quick email. Except that I can never write briefly so it got long.

I'm putting it here because I don't know what else to do with it.ace to myself eighteen years ago.

The Kid's mother died this morning after a very long decline. He's twenty.

Q. What is your only comfort

    in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own,

but belongâ??

body and soul,

in life and in deathâ??

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way

that not a hair can fall from my head

without the will of my Father in heaven:

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him,

Christ, by his Holy Spirit,

assures me of eternal life

and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready

from now on to live for him.