Here are a couple things you should know about me before reading my words:

1. I consider myself to be in a constant state of learning and growing. I am always open to any other thoughts or ideas. It doesn't matter if they are new, old, similar to my own, or totally opposing to my own. I will always try to weigh everything I hear with an unbiased point of view, and not be offended if somebody totally disagrees with me.

2. Ever since I can remember, every time I have had serious thoughts about serious issues (especially about God) the thoughts and ideas flow through my mind in the form of a sermon or speech. I cannot tell you why this is. Just please know that, although I sound extremely preachy, that's just the way my mind processes things. I am not in any way trying to tell anyone how to live his/her life. I am simply sharing my thoughts and views as best I can. It is your choice to take it or leave it.

3. I can't really think of any thing else that is totally necessary for you to know. I hope you fully understand everything that I say. Feel free to let me know what you think through a comment. God bless you all.

My Thoughts

Monday, September 12, 2011

The Irony in Lifes Poetry

I knelt to pray but not for long
I had to much to do
Must hurry off and get to work
For bills would soon be due
And as I said a hurried prayer
Jumped up from off my knee
My Christian duty now was done
My soul could be at ease
All through the day I had not time
To speak a word of cheer
No time to speak of Christ to friends
They'd laugh at me I feared
No Time-No Time too much to do
That was my constant cry
No time to give to those in need
At last it was time to die
And when before the the Lord I came
I stood with downcast eyes
Within His hand He held a book
It was the Book of Life
He looked in the book and said
Your name I cannot find
I once was going to write it down
But never found the time.

I'll get to that in a little bit...

Right now I am sitting in my bed exhausted. All these thoughts are running around in circles and not getting anywhere. I feel like I'm at a Track Meet. So I am writing them down in hopes to allow my brain to turn off easier so I can have a good nights sleep...which hasn't happened in a while. Therefore BEWARE, if you don't want to listen to some random 21 year old, ADD, middle class white boy rant about his life living and working in a low income, permanent supportive housing apartment building in Downtown Dallas, you should read no further.

Good no ones listening now...So I can go on...

So I started this job on November 3rd, 2010 after returning from a 5 month trip to Haiti. I absolutely fell in love with my job. I was put in charge of basically planning and implementing events, classes, and activities for the the low-income individuals who lived in the apartment building in which I worked and lived so that these individuals could become more self-sufficient in there lifestyles. I mean...it can't get any better than that...I knew God had put this opportunity in front of me for a reason. "Who knows...Maybe one day I'll run this place," I thought to myself going into the job.

Today, I woke up at 7:00 am this morning having to be at our monthly all-Staff Meeting at 8:30. It went pretty well. I was still waking up, I purposefully sat in the front row out of the 130 chairs or so so I would be forced to stay awake. Which I did successfully achieve. Unfortunately, the information presented at the meeting was not really pertinent to me at all so I blew it off and therefore I couldn't tell you right now what the meeting was about. I then proceeded back to my office at the apartment building. (about a 8 minute drive from where the meeting was held) I had to then go to a training over a software that we use to track progress in the resident's lives. I had been to 2 of these trainings so far. After the training I then worked on getting the weekly schedule created and posted, planned my week out for a little while, and started to become pretty stressed after realizing how much work I had to do and the fact that there is no way that I will be able to complete everything in 40 hours.

You see, the non-profit I work for has been having a hard time finding enough people to donate money so that we can afford more employees and thus, we are pretty short-staffed. This shouldn't come to a surprise to most employees in the non-profit world. When recession hits a country people tend to start trying to cut back on there expenses, and when that happens people feel it easiest to cut their donations first. Which leaves all the non-profits suffering. Which in turn, more people are staying on the streets, and more families are not eating, and addicts aren't capable of finding a place that offers enough love to help them out of there addiction. I feel like this is somewhat Ironic. Anyways...back to today.

Well, from that point forward I went through my day feeling a mixture of anger, stress, exhaustion, and frustration pretty much ruining my day. I would go into detail about what happened throughout the rest of my day but I feel like I'm whining too much already so I'm going skip all that.

I clocked out, and proceeded to the elevator, pressed the 11 button, got off the elevator, went to apt. 1109, unlocked the door, walked in and sat down on my couch. I think I sat there for about 15 minutes...I wasn't hungry. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't want to go anywhere. I just wanted everything to stop. I then remembered that I still had some really nice Bourbon left that I got a few weeks back. As I reached for the cabinet above my fridge I saw the piece of paper hanging by itself on the front of the freezer. It was the poem that started this blog. I stood there with my hand on the cabinet handle reading that poem.

About 5 months ago I was doing really well. I loved my job. I loved my life. I thanked the Lord everyday for the blessings he had given me. I had all the time in the world to talk to my neighbors, whom I worked for. I knew everybody and everybody knew me. People came to me with there problems and I tried my best to allow God to speak through me and act through me so that I could help these people with whatever they needed help with. I planned movie nights and game nights where we all got together and watched movies and watched the whole maverick playoffs, laughing, rooting for teams, and having a ton of fun. Yeah it was hard. Yeah I got played a few times. Yeah I got burned a few times. Yeah there was drama. But at the end of each day I thanked the Lord. I genuinely loved it all. I mean, all the stuff I loved about my job far outweighed the things I didn't love so much.

One night around that time, I get a call from one of my neighbors. It was Andrew, a white man probably around 50 years old. He was a short guy with white hair that was in a pony tail that reached down to his lower back. Sort of hippie lookin. I had spent a descent amount of time hanging out and talking to Andrew prior to this phone call. Often times he was drunk, or tipsie. He always spoke in a positive enthusiastic manor. He seemed happy to be alive. He had a lot of old stories that he would tell. There was never much of me talking when we hung out. He was always just going along talking about his day, or one day in his past, or what he was going to do tomorrow. He would always thank me in the middle of our conversations for listening to him babble. I always said it was my pleasure, and I can say it honestly was. I loved listening to him. He could get to be annoyingly enthusiastic and positive about certain things. But over all I thoroughly enjoyed talking to him. So I answered the phone. It didn't even sound like him. It sort of sounded like a dieing horse or something. I couldn't make out anything he was saying. I could definitely tell that he was upset, and he was crying. So I told him to come up to my apartment to talk. About 20 minutes later I opened my door to his knock and the smell of booze and body odor hit me like a ton of bricks. He shrugged his shoulders looking down as he entered my apartment and sat down at my kitchen table. We started talking. It was clear that he had just gotten done crying for a while. So he went on to explain how his dog was dieing. I was like...wait a second...your telling me that a 50 year old man is sloppy drunk and crying about his dog dieing. I don't even like dogs. Why is this man crying. Better yet, why in the world did he call me about this. I was quite perplexed. Anyways, I started to ask him questions about the dog, why was it dieing, what kind of dog was it, how long had he had this dog. So we get to talking. Turns out that his mom died about 3 months earlier, his best friend had been in and out of the hospital for the past 2 years with lung cancer from smoking his whole life, his ex-girlfriend who he was still friends with had been in the hospital the last week due to some other illness, and he had just found out about 4 hours earlier that his dog was dieing and that he was going to have to put her down the next day. I don't remember much of what I said or how I said it, but we ended up talking about top fuel drag racing and how awesome it was to go to the track in Ennis to watch all the races and eating that amazing kettle corn and meeting the racers in the pits. Of course that was the end of our 3 hour long conversation. Like I said, I don't remember much of the middle of the conversation. Andrew left my apartment slightly more sober than he arrived, and a whole lot happier. He had forgotten what it was like spending all the time in his past having fun with the loved ones that he was starting to lose. Somehow he started thinking about all the positives, all the blessings he had. He even said it, that he needed to thank God for blessing him with so much and stop getting pissed off at the world for beating him up. I never said anything of that nature to him. I just asked a bunch of questions. He came up with it. He changed his attitude.

About 3 days later Andrew came to my office all excited and happy as usual. He handed me a magazine about Ford Mustangs and the history of all the Mustangs that had been made. It was a pretty sweet magazine, I'm not even gonna lie. He then handed me a piece of paper that folded in half. He thanked me for the other night, and he said that the piece of paper had helped him out in his past a lot and that he felt like it might help me in the future. So I took the piece of paper, read what was on it, and hung it on my freezer that night when I went home. It was that poem.

So tonight, when I walked into my apartment, and reached for that bottle of bourbon, and saw that poem, I had this long playback of that night in my apartment and that day in my office. I thought to myself, could it be? How the crap did Andrew know. Why did I hang it on my freezer. Why did I happen to look at it tonight and had totally forgotten it was there for the last 5 months. I quickly chuckled to myself and said thanks God. And I went on to grab my bourbon. Don't worry, I pored a very small glass for myself to enjoy after deciding that I was going to sit down and write all this down so I could get everything out there. So I could get all this crap out of my head and put it somewhere else. So then I could focus on the good stuff again. So that I could Focus on God. I didn't quite know what I was going to write down when I started. I really didn't know where it was going to end up. Or what I was going to feel like.

I am now realizing how little I've talked to God lately. I am realizing how far apart I've grown from Him. How little I knew Him in the first place. How much more I have to learn about Him. How much simpler my life would be if I could just focus on Him all the time.

Life sucks sometimes, doesn't it. I mean, you try over and over again to get it right. And you suck at it over and over again. You can never get it right. You go to bed at night feeling like a complete failure. You play it off during the day like it's all fine and your doing alright, or your just a little tired, or a little worn out. But then God hits you over the head with a ton of bricks and you turn around pissed off cause it hurt like hell and He is staring at you saying I'm right here, I gotcha, I love you. So you feel like an idiot for trying to do everything by yourself when you clearly can recall the times when you used to focus on the positives, when you used to focus on God, and how much better it was then. And then feeling that warm embrace of God's love and that sweet smell of Christ and that tingly feeling you get when you feel the holy spirit moving again. Then at the end of all that you finally realize that God never wanted you to feel crappy about yourself or guilty for your stupid decisions. Because, at the the end of the day, God loves us. Better yet, God is love. And if God is love than God is is patient, God is kind. God does not envy, God does not boast, He is not proud. He is not rude, He is not self-seeking, he is not easily angered, He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres, and most of all, God never fails.

I guess I'm about done now. I don't have much else to say. I think it's all out there now. I know I will be praying hard tonight. Come tomorrow....well, we'll see if I can find the time.