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There are a lot of random things floating around inside my head. Some of them are serious, some of them aren’t. So I’ve decided to share them all with you, maybe it will inspire your own set of random thoughts.

The Pursuit of Happyness

Will Smith’s new movie is a good one. I saw it tonight, and was impressed by it. It’s not going to go down as an all-time great movie, but it was good and well worth my time tonight. I kind of felt like the director didn’t know how to play up the emotions in the movie. There are a lot of emotions that could have been elicited, but I felt like the movie moved a bit too fast through the most dramatic parts. A hard balance to find, no doubt, because there was also a time when I felt like the movie wasn’t progressing through the storyline fast enough. If they would have played with my emotions more, if they could have gotten to that tear-jerking moment in the movie, then I might have walked away saying it would be a classic. Still, I think it’s worth a trip to movie theater, especially when the movie theater is in the wealthiest part of DC and is ridiculous (read: 25 rows of stadium seating, with about 40 chairs in each row. Yup, an 800 person movie theater, complete with comfortable seating and a HUGE movie screen. $10 for a movie.$4.50 for a soda, which I opted not to get.)

The Pursuit of Happiness

The movie comes at an interesting point in my life, because I resonated with Will Smith’s character at the end of the movie. Shortly after he, against all odds, gets the job of a lifetime working for a stock brokerage, Smith narrates one final time to the audience about his childhood. How growing up he had done well in school, and shown so much promise, and had been the one who was sure to succeed. And then he wakes up in a homeless shelter one day and realizes he’s managed to fulfill none of those things that were supposed to happen to him. I think that might be my biggest fear right now. And it’s not so much that I feel incapable of succeeding. It’s that I don’t know what it is I want to succeed at. At this point in my life, the rumor is that I’m supposed to know what I want to do and how to get there. That’s what all the successful people do, they pick a dream and they work tirelessly at achieving it, right?

There are days I love the prospect of moving into a church role as an Executive Producer. I mean, I enjoy the process of planning a worship service. I can handle the administrative tasks of making budgets and meeting deadlines and all of those things. But there are days when that sounds like the last thing I want to do. Some mornings I wake up and wish I was flying for a living. Helicopters in the Navy, or commercial jets from airport to airport, or even a seaplane filled with tourists from a small island in the Caribbean. But there are days when that doesn’t sound so great, either. So my question is, how am I supposed to be the passionate, motivated guy working for his dream when I have no idea what my dream is?

Speaking of Dreams

Speaking of dreams, I have a strange record when it comes to them. Typically, I don’t have them all that often, or at least don’t remember them all that often. But when I do have them, they’re generally huge, monstrous dreams, full of vivid detail and outlandish places that are too hard to describe and not similar enough to anything real to draw comparisons. What’s really strange is the fact that often these places I dream of will randomly appear in my dreams again, many years later. A couple of nights ago, one of those places came back.

Again, it’s impossibly hard to describe the places, but this last one is an amusement park of some sort. It doesn’t feel like your typical amusement park–instead of pavement and tall fences herding you in specific directions, it’s very open. Lots of short, white fences seperate the different attractions which are in some sort of large field or meadow. The part I remember specifically has a couple of rollercoasters and a ferris wheel. The rollercoasters aren’t at all typical. One is white, and somewhat like a normal roller coaster except for the fact it does physically impossible things while you’re riding it. The other is inside, and is a mix of a haunted house with a water ride, except it’s neither scary nor wet. It’s unique. Then there’s the ferris wheel, made entirely of plastic. No steel or wood, just a plastic structure which stretches a couple of hundred feet into the sky. Of course it’s more of a ferris wheel on steroids, because it whips you around and around. Your car spins freely, and spends lots of time upside down. And to make sure you stay in, there are small ropes for everyone to hang on to. No harnesses, just ropes. It adds to the fun.

I don’t know who I spent the day there with, but I know she was blond and she was incredible.

Blondes

Today at dinner, I ate with a lesbian family. Okay, I didn’t actually eat with them, but I sat across the restaurant and watched intensely. These two blond ladies quickly struck me as odd, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that it was indeed mommy and mommy taking their children out for dinner. They had a 3 year old boy and a very young baby that I never actually saw long enough to see how old or what gender. But I found myself watching intently at what exactly a family is when it consists of two moms and children. Of course, the boy didn’t really seem to know any better. That’s the way he’s grown up, and he hasn’t gotten to the point where he’s old enough to figure out his family situation isn’t normal. And I just empathized him immensely, realizing the pain he would go through of not only dealing with his peers finding out he has two moms, but also what it means to grow up without a father influence in his life. I had one for half my life, so even I don’t fully realize how terrible it will be, but I just felt awful inside. Those poor kids are doomed from the start–there’s not a chance they will ever grow up to be even remotely close to normal.

So then I began to challenge my world view with a question that I cannot answer. I haven’t decided yet if this is a question the Pharisees would ask Jesus, or Jesus would ask the Pharisees. Suppose said lesbian family begins to get involved in a church. This church doesn’t actually exist, because it would allow them to come and get involved and not push them away for being ’sinners’. But let’s suppose it happens anyways. So this family comes and gets involved, and slowly the two begin to feel convicted of their homosexual relationship. What happens to this family? Is it better for them to break off their relationship, and splinter their children’s family even further, or is it better for them to remain a family unit and live together despite Biblical precepts which we know to speak against their relationship? It’s probably a pharisee question, which means the answer isn’t A or B, but rather C. But I don’t know what answer C is.

C is the first letter of Christmas

I would just like to go on the record as saying the Christmas holiday has grown to ridiculous proportions. I waited through five light cycles before I got my chance to turn left into the mall to get to the movie theater tonight. FIVE! Once I got into the parking garage, I narrowly avoided no less than 6 accidents from people driving 30 miles an hour through a parking garage and expecting nothing to be in their way. After I made it inside the mall, I walked shoulder to shoulder with 4 million other people who were also in the mall, all of them stopping at the Starbucks on each floor (that’s right–THREE Starbucks in one mall!). Once I got to the movies, I found a movie theater with 16 screens being manned by one person at the ticket counter. Luckily, I’m smart enough to spot the automated ticket center… yay for computers. Christians are waging this enormous war with the media and retail, claiming we’ve all lost our focus about Christmas. And we have. But I wonder if that’s made any Christians cut back on their spending and spend more time focusing on Christ.

Our culture has gotten severely sidetracked.

Sidetracked

The rest of my random thoughts:

- Go Colts! A big win and now we’re right back at the top.

- I have a tv in my room now. I’ve returned to the land of the American.

- I forgot how much I liked geocaching until I went today, after months of hibernation.

- Grape koolaid is the best flavor.

- I’d really like to have a plastic light-up deer in my room. You know, the kind with the moving head.

That’s all for now. More later.

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In an effort to make myself live more normal hours, I’m imposing a bedtime on myself. Yup, a bedtime for a 22-year old. It’s 1am, which is much later than most people stay up, granted. But it’s also 2+ hours earlier than I’ve been staying up lately, which is just ridiculous. So 1am if I’m just chillin at home. If I’m out doing something, then later is okay.

First Thursday of the month=work instead of my normal day off, which=no post until tomorrow night.

But I will post tomorrow night.

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I feel like maybe stepping on some toes tonight, and since I seem to be so adept at it, I’ll give it a go. By the way, I managed to do that quite largely when I visited Chorale last week. I mentioned something about drinking, just as an example of an IWU rule which isn’t as bad as it seems–only apparently 5 or 6 people have been booted from IWU (and Chorale) because of that very thing. Looks like the reputation I built as Chaplain is safe for a while longer.

My spiritual journey has been interesting in the past few months, and particularly since I started working at a church. Of all the places I expected my belief system to be challenged, that wasn’t very high on my list. It hasn’t been so much challenged on a dogma level (the things which we must hold to if we call ourselves a Christian), and has only moderately been challenged on a doctrine level (the beliefs which seperate Lutherans from Wesleyans, and Baptists from Methodists), but it has been radically challenged on a personal values level. After growing up in the center of religious legalism, now I am in one of the more religiously liberal parts of the country. And it’s interesting.

In order for us to all be on the same page, I’m going to admit something to you. In the last two months, I’ve began using curse words on a much more frequent basis than ever before. Up until the last year of college, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had used certain words in my life. Then the stretch for graduation came and I would guess that I doubled up on that number. In the last couple of months, I would have to keep a physical tally to know how many. I can easily point to certain influences in my work place and lay the blame, but I think it has little to do with what they say and a whole lot more to do with where they have placed their personal values. It’s no different than my housemates choosing to have a beer or wine with dinner. Both of these things are cause for being permanently removed from a church in Indiana, yet here they come without a second thought.

Which brings me to my point. What makes using curse words unacceptable? Is it a specific precept that says “don’t use &*#(, &#^, &#^*, or *#&(@”? Nope. It’s a man-made rule. Is there a specific passage that tells us having a beer with dinner is a sin? Nope. It’s a man-made concept. Originally I wanted to quote you 1 Corinthians 10:23, which is they widely used (and widely mis-used) verse about everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial. But in the next verse, Paul writes “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.” Here, no one seems to really have a problem if I want a glass of wine with dinner. And really honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it. And if I’m 25 feet in the air climbing on the rails of a scissor lift and it sways more than I expected it to, enough that my body starts pumping adrenaline because I thought it was falling, and I say it scared the hell outta me, there’s nothing wrong with that. And believe me, I’m drawing from personal experience on this one.

I’m going to go out on a limb a guess that no one had a problem with accepting the fact there’s nothing wrong with consuming alcohol. While I’m out there, I’m also going to guess that most of you disagree that there’s nothing wrong with cursing. And therein lies my dilemma. Here, it’s acceptable. No one is struggling with the fact that I may curse on occasion if it’s warranted. No one is losing sleep over my choice of beverage. So let’s say that over the course of however long I live in Washington, I decide I’m going to place my personal values in such a place that I do these things on occasion. What happens when I come home?

I can only imagine some of the reactions I would get from people back home. Certainly if I ever said a bad word in front of them, I would no longer be a Christian. No Christian says those words. And in Indiana, they’re right. Christians don’t use those words. But it’s a byproduct of legalism, not of scripture. (I remember not being allowed to say the word “fart” when we were growing up. How ridiculous is that?) How do I position myself now? It is truly wonderful to be away from the bondage of legalism, believe me it is. Wesleyans should try it some time. But what happens in the different context? Do I subject myself to personal legalism just so that everyone feels happy when I come home? That doesn’t really seem right either.

To put your minds at ease, I have no intention of cursing like a sailor, or drinking like one. I’ve never been a fan of people who curse excessively, and I certainly have no desire to get to a point where I use words unconsciously. Actually to be honest, the whole reason I like using them is because, when used properly, they become a very effective tool for communication. I bet you remember that phrase I used earlier, don’t you? You wouldn’t if I had just said the lift scared me. But tangent aside, I want to wrap this up by saying that I have in no way come to any sort of clear understanding about this issue. It’s late, I’m tired, and I didn’t really feel like writing tonight. Normally when I write poorly it evidences itself by a lack of comments, but I’m hoping the subject will make up for the style.

I bid you adieu.

I was eleven words short so I needed to write something else.

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