Although I have to be at the front door of Books-A-Million in five hours, I am still awake. One of the youth called me, so I have been up talking with them.
Today was my day off; I was relatively unproductive. I worked on my normal tasks for the day with very limited focus while maintaining a decent level of operable inspiration. It tends to work that way on my days off. I'll have lots to do, but all I can think about is other things. This all stems from the lack of daily structure: I go to sleep late the night before (with tons of caffeine, no doubt), I wake up late in the morning, and stumble through the rest of the day with a light headache from staring at a computer monitor coupled with the insatiable urge to nap instead of continue with my work.
This culminates into the perfect atmosphere needed for blogging.
I have been seriously wrestling with myself for the past couple months. I have found myself constantly confronted with my own insecurities and imperfections as to keep me in constant contemplation. One of the biggest subjects that always seems to sit before me is the lack of focus in my life. Ironically enough, it is this subject alone that takes up about 90% of my idle thoughts. I am obsessively focused on my state of incessant distraction.
In fact, I think I'll let you know fifteen topics I have had flying through my mind at some point during the day:
- Motremia: my ever-present object of imagination
- The compatibility of myself with Adriana
- The hope of a life with that girl someday
- The mind-blowing idea of fatherhood
- The creative potential of Maxis's Spore Creature Creator
- A story in which a man builds a vehicle
- The need for financial restraint and direction in my life
- A curious connection between web development and Jamie Howard's up-and-coming self
- An inescapable, yet incomprehensible passion for writing in my life
- The beauty of thought, imagination, and personal reflection
- Finishing Leo Tolstoy's Family Happiness
- A certain fascination with the study of Esperanto
- A rekindling of my studies in the Russian language
- Organization, administration, and practice of Jesus-centered youth ministry
- My questionably pretentious writing-style throughout this post
This list could be four times longer, but these are the first things that came to mind.
I thank God for the uncontrollably distracted mind that He has seen fit to equip me with. Although it is met with much aggravation, I stay creative and ever-fascinated. The flood of ideas never stops; it grows fiercer as the day dies and tomorrow comes.
Imagination is paramount.
Superfluous? possibly. Honest? completely.
Tonight at church I had an incredible encounter with myself. God broke me down so I could see a lot of things about who I am that I've been avoiding. I told God, "I feel so overwhelmed..." and He reminded me of an illustration I shared with the youth a few Sundays ago:
When I was about ten or eleven years old, we were moving from one house to another in a sort of forced move. I either didn't use my pre-move time wisely or I didn't have enough time to actually get packed up. As I looked around the room, I felt this extreme amount of hopelessness. My bed had been packed up, yet the entire tile floor was covered with piles of clothes, toys, and trash. I would go to pack up one pile and get distracted by another. I would start mixing trash with stuff I was keeping, and couldn't make sense of which clothes were worth saving and which weren't. I felt so overwhelmed and I just sat there on the cold floor with my back up against the wall. My mom came in to town that week to help us move, as she is very good at organizing and motivating me, Suzy, and John. In the moment that I thought burning the house down would've been easier than packing up these toys and clothes, Mom stepped in the room. She looked around and asked, "What are you doing? You've got a lot to pack up, and this room is a catastrophe!" After conveying to her my sense of hopelessness, she surveyed the damage and went to work. She grabbed a box, the trash can, and then cleared a big area in the seemingly insurmountable piles that were covering the entire surface of the floor. After giving me a few orders, we quickly reduced the wreckage into neat and organized piles. The hours we cleaned and sorted seemed only to be minutes when we finished. It was all done so quickly that I was amazed that I had ever thought the problem as a problem at all. The chaos was brought into order, and the confusing had been turned sensible. This was backwards entropy–the second law of thermodynamics being magically reversed!
God reminded me of that for a reason. Tonight's prayer was a very rough one. I say this because I want you to understand that being a follower of Christ does not mean that I parade a façade of happiness or I've-got-it-togetherness all the time. Sometimes I find myself rather overwhelmed. Not overwhelmed with feelings of insignificance or with the burden of living a Christian life, but with the sense that I'm not exactly on track. The question of direction is present in any person mind at this stage in their life, and I am no exception. God reminded me that we may get overwhelmed sometimes. We are all people. I may not have the answers for every question or the perfect word to make you feel better every time you're down. We all have imperfections. However, one thing that God has been trying to teach me over and over is that I have to trust in Him. When the decisions and circumstances around us seem as insurmountable as those piles of toys and trash to an eleven year old, we must hold on to the One thing that never changes–the faithfulness of God to always be with us.
I'm learning that slowly, and I hope that you'll never give up when this world seems to collapse around you.
"...and having done all, to stand." Eph. 6:13
In Christ,
jamie
