The Naked Green

I don’t know why, but I was excited this morning as I put down today’s date on an order and realized it’s the beginning of December. I knew yesterday was the end of November and it still hit me with a sort of excitement when I wrote it down. This, of course, is the month of Christmas, New Year’s Eve and birthdays (both my brother and sister-in-law were born on the 31st)! It’s a festive time of year that I guess I’m kind of happy to see roll around this time. My “Grinch heart” must be starting to grow bigger. I’m sure it’s due to my wife who carries on her family traditions with heart and military execution if needed.

The past month seems to have flown by and I feel as if life is passing me by. All those things I want to, or should, or need to do are not being done and I’m losing track of it all. It’s actually more that I still don’t have any kind of clear direction from God and the choices are staggering and hit me like a deer in the headlights (who thought he was already dead before the truck even hit him…poor deer). I’m sure it’s also due to the amount of work I’ve been doing (including snow plowing) and the time it takes to just live the “American life” (church, house cleaning, cooking, eating, car repairs, driving, shopping, more shopping and even some time for friends). How going to school will ever work out, I’m not sure.

It’s not so much that I don’t want to be busy or active, that can be a great thing. I just want to be doing what I’m supposed to be doing, to accomplish something and shake this feeling of floating along. Will anyone have anything to say about me when I die? Most importantly, what will God have to say about my life? I’m striving to improve my relationship to Him and often feel I’m losing ground.

I guess that’s why I’m excited about it being December. A month to focus on the important things in life: Jesus Christ, family and shopping (just kidding). It’s a new month to make a difference and incidentally my church has a great idea about that. Instead of doing the typical Christmas program, we’re going to focus on reaching out to the community: families, the homeless, etc. It should be a great month and I’m hopeful and excited!

We had a great time on Thursday with family playing The Settlers of Catan (a great board game) and of course eating lots of food. I had a good talk with my cousin Andrew before taking off. We discussed some of my plans and he agreed that it is important to find someone to “disciple me” and some to disciple. I feel more and more that discipleship is my calling and though that is a broad spectrum, it’s nice to have some direction and some idea to measure against.

Yesterday I worked, finishing up “the harvest” from earlier, while Jamie worked hard at spending the money. She did lots of shopping and left before I got out of bed to get the good deals!

I met with Justin (our Associate Pastor) today to begin a re-design of the church’s website after it sat with nothing on it for a while. Nothing has been uploaded, so I won’t give a link yet. Jamie and I just got back from getting new tires and an alignment and now I should get some sleep because of the snow coming down.

Today may be Sunday the “new Sabbath”, but it was not my day of rest. Thankfully yesterday was somewhat relaxing.

I received the call to plow at 3.00am this morning after about 2 1/2 hours of sleep. I got off just in time (11.30am) to pick up Jamie from church and am now home. I just took a shower and got dressed up to have our pictures taken at Wal-Mart at 2.30pm. We’ll go from there to my parents so I can work on retrieving data from a corrupted hard drive (again) and Jamie will do her crafts. I have to wait there while Jamie goes to “her thing”. She just said it’s to make crafts and have dinner. I’ll probably sleep…maybe my Mom will let me crash in my old bed.

5.52pm:
Too tired to work on computer. Here is a picture of me after plowing this morning. Must to sleep….

I had a dream(s) that seemed to be about money….

I gave Joe (my boss) my passport and four or five thousand dollars to get me a new one. He said he would have it to me the next day with the money inside which I wasn’t comfortable with, but agreed to do that instead of coming back at 3.00am. [Why did I give him so much money in the first place?] He was doing it legally, if you’re wondering, but in a completely different manner than usual.

I was in some back room with a large machine when some “higher up” in the company came in and pushed the down arrow below one of the small green displays. He was buying puts on some company. He started talking about buying Gateway stock [GTW ] and I went over to a computer to sign up for an online stock trading company and buy some. I was asking the guy and some other guy about insider trading which they didn’t know much about (I don’t either). I asked, “Where do you draw the line?” to which the 2nd guy just shrugged. Later there was a bunch of hullabaloo about this inside trading. Some lady got got fired and was trying to get a job in the finance department at the ministry my dad works. We were walking down the road and I started walking down a long driveway to my massive house inviting the execs to come on in if they wanted. a few followed and with some dreamy gender confusion over the man/woman who was fired, I suspect it was the first guy.

Later I got my passport back with $2000.00 in it, lots of notes and a small tape with all the phone conversations my boss had. There was a detailed breakout of all the taxes and fees taken out of my original wad and a note saying I would receive the rest in three months. Sounds like my pension (not so big of course).

[I also saw many large 20 cent coins toward the end of my dream]

This dream brings up interesting questions like if God tells you to buy stock, is that insider trading? If I had bought Gateway stock in my dream not knowing that the man knew inside information, would I be liable? I mean, I didn’t even know where I was let alone what I was doing. I guess it was good I was too distracted to sign up for an online trading account. And how in the world did I end up with such a big house and not even think it to be odd until now?

My prediction: Gateway (GTW) is at $5.85 a share right now. I predict, based on my dream, that it will go up and some other stock will fall. So, hurry up, you may still have time to buy! Don’t worry, I think that some guy in some company in some dream of someone like me (knowing as much as I do about all this) is a hazy enough trail for you to avoid being charged with the ominous “insider trading”.

As I was going out to start the car this morning I heard a goose that was being quite vocal. Looking up, I noticed that it was a lone goose flying North. There is probably a good, normal, scientific reason for this, but it got me thinking: What if it’s a portent?

The problem is, I don’t know what sort of portent or sign it would be. Am I being warned against being rebellious? Me, just “swimming upstream”, not in any purposeful manner, but just a desire to be different to the point of stupidity. This rebellious goose will probably not fair well on its northward journey by itself.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a sign to go against the flow, making dynamic decisions that are against the grain. Trusting that God will be the protector and provider and not fearing the cold loneliness. Standing against tradition saying, “Wait! I’m not going to fly South any longer just because we have always done it!”

Possibly, it’s a sign that we should move North. That we need not just stay here because it’s warm and cozy. It just might be that God is telling us it is time to move, even though we will go alone. Perhaps…and perhaps not.

Whatever it might be, the bird made an impression on me. I guess I’ll have to ponder it some more. It might not be anything, but I can use it as an opportunity to turn to Christ and seek His direction. I thank God for that goose.

I don’t have any orders to work on yet, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading on The Ooze. It is partially due to this and a “waking up” that’s happening aided by my distaste for apathy that I’m feeling the way I am. I have an obvious lack of direction after going to DTS which has led me to reiterate my goal: relationship with Jesus Christ.

There is a lot welling up inside of me, I can feel it. I don’t know what it is exactly. There are lots of ideas going through my head, but also muddled “what do I call thems”. There is this feeling (or feelings)…like something is about to happen, or needs to happen. Oh, that’s not quite right! how I wish I could understand or express my emotions sometimes.

God is certainly doing something in my life and I praise Him for it. He is drawing me to Himself even as I seek Him out and my desire to be with Him grows. It’s amazing to me how God’s Spirit is at work within us. Father, make me more like your Son, Jesus!

This post is one of those that doesn’t seem like it will make it. The fact that no one is reading this blog still doesn’t help me post something that seems so silly. The post lacks substance and I realize that, but I guess it does give the reader a glimpse of the emotional confusion that I regularly experience.

What a weekend! We spent most of Saturday morning sleeping and laying and the rest of the day getting ready to make this massive building for the cat to play on. Sunday, after church, we spent some time taking back all the materials for this building because it was going to cost about as much to build it than buy it online (although ours would have been much bigger). We then went home and took a long nap. I don’t know why I’ve been so tired lately, but it was nice to just relax and not do anything.

I finally finished The Idiot by: Fyodor Dostoyevsky after putting it down a while back. I basically hadn’t read much since we came back from England in early July. I don’t know why it’s hard for me to finish Dostoyevsky’s books, but I’m glad I did and even though I didn’t particularly “like” the ending much, it was certainly a good one. Now I’m going to have to go back and skim through the book to refresh myself to the prince’s adventures and separate them from all the Karamazov brothers in my hazy mind.

I got to sleep late last night because of the nap and the book and had vivid dreams again. They had to do something with protecting painted eggs with my life, a big wad of cash, carrying around my dad’s gun (9mm), selling our cat and meeting an old friend who is not doing so well. I don’t remember enough to go into it and don’t even want to try to analyze it.

Inspired by Nathan’s blog, I decided to share an unusually vivid dream I had this morning.

I have been waking up during the night in the past several days due to our cat, Caviar. We think that she is probably in heat and hope that getting her “fixed” later this month will help. The reason I mention it is because it may have something to do with the vividness of the dream and my remembering it.

The dream(s) that I remember started with me going shooting with my grandpa (never did that before) and the next thing I remember is the main plot line:

Jamie and I were at some friends’ house who had several children. My Mom was there and perhaps some others. Dinner was finished and we were sitting around downstairs talking in a living room area. My Mom began to talk about something spiritual (as if teaching a Sunday School class) and was reading excerpts from a book I believe. She suggested we all go outside for some object lesson with the kids. They started out the sliding glass door that was in the room and led out to the back yard.

Jamie and I had been needing to leave to get to work on time or something. [I couldn’t quite calculate the time as I do to figure the deadline for leaving, but knew we should do it soon]. This was a good opportunity, so we began saying our goodbyes and getting ready (don’t know what that entailed). Jamie was waiting in the car, but I was because intrigued with my Mom’s lesson.

Mom had all the kids up top near this ledge and I could hear her down below directing the adults to gather some leaves into a pile. I thought, “Oh, this is that faith thing where you fall into someone’s arms and they’re just adding leaves to make it safer”. [All this time I’m watching from a ways back because I was on my way to the car.] My Mom was then at the top giving one of the younger girls directions as she stood on the ledge with her back to the fall. As she fell, I ran over to the ledge to see what was happening. (more…)

We just went to the Humane Society to get Jamie’s birthday present. There actually weren’t a whole lot of options, but we looked at several cats for a while. We saw one who had been there for a while a decided to meet her. After waiting for quite some time, we were able to visit her. She took to us right away and we knew we wanted her. They gave us another number for more waiting and we finally brought our new addition home. Now I’m not one of those “My pet is my child” people, but it’s nice to have an animal around.

Her name was Lizzy, but Jamie came up with the great idea to rename her Caviar (Cavi for short) because she is costing us a fortune in apartment fees, food, toys, litter, etc. She is about one year old and already had a litter that were all adopted. Caviar explored our small apartment thoroughly and made herself right at home. It’s nice to have a cat that’s so personable and we were like new parents when she finally used the litter box.

Jamie is quite happy as she has been waiting for quite some time to be able to have a cat again. All week she was saying, “A cat soon!” She is home with Caviar now as I finish up house-sitting. I have to be away from them both but may get to plow some snow tonight which I’m looking forward to with childish glee. That is a topic for another post, though.

Edit: You can see pictures of Caviar and more by going to our Photo Gallery.

Obviously the computer is important to me. All my posts up to this point have been about it in some way or another. I spend a lot of my time working and playing on the computer and the only way I can bring myself to journal anything is on this blog…on the computer. I have spent the last several days trying to rebuild my operating system (yes, I know). It has been frustrated to re-install things and deal with several problems and re-configure things that should be able to work from backups. I have thought about my priorities partially because of these issues, at least my priorities with this blog.

Jesus Christ is the most important person in my life…my God! He is a wonderful person who loves me more than anyone else and has given so much. He released me from bondage to drugs and alcohol and forgave my sins even after I chose to walk away from Him…the eternal creator! I thank God that I was chosen to be His child and I hope to grow closer with Him with each passing day. You too can have this wonderful loving relationship with your creator!

Jamie is the next most important person to me because she’s my best friend who is always there for me and loves me even knowing my dark secrets. She is my wife and lover, closer to me and more intimate with me than any other. We share all with each other: Love, faith, emotions, work, money, car, food, etc. I love her so much and look forward to spending the rest of our lives together! You can read more about our relationship at our website.

It’s hard for me to share my deep emotions, convictions and thoughts. It takes a lot of work and is hard to do on an impersonal machine. It’s also difficult to write because it always seems like the words are not coming out right. I want to try to get this stuff out, though…for my growth and benefit.

I like the computer and a lot of my interests have to do with it so I’m sure you’ll see many more posts about it. I will also be trying to share with you many other ideas and feelings about those things that are even closer to my heart.