Thursday, May 24, 2007

Saints Don't Bother With a Tear Stained Eye

So I am way behind on my blogging, and a lot of crap has happened to me in the last few weeks. Sadly, you'll not be getting your update at this time, either, as it is very late.

However, I am sitting here in the midnight hour, looking at an email from a long lost friend that seems to have grown up to be succesfull and pretty, and I am also thinking of my dad's cancer, and about how my lovely wife is sleeping on the other side of the wall in front of me, and about how we as yet have no children. I'm listening to my iPod is a mostly dark house, when I should be asleep, and I am savoring the sheer mess of it all. I think about how I'm not living the life I was planning to be living just a few years ago, but how my life is still blessed in the now, and that I will certainly find my plans changed yet again in the future, but its all OK. Life is a good kind of sadness, a strange paradox...the bad causes hurt but gives you stength, and quite often the good causes joy but ultimately leads to a nostalgic ache for what once was but is no longer here, (and this is quite a different thing than simply missing something).

But its good. I thank God for the mess, because I am not removed from the mess. I AM the mess, or a little piece of it. And if I must be in the thick of it to experience those moments of joy, that's OK with me. I think everything- the happiness, the sadness, the tears, and the joy- are all made to be more bearable if you accept the fact that its a package deal. You can't pick and choose. Some get a lot more of one or the other than other folks do, but we all get a little of everything, whether we like it or not. And if you're not part of the mess- well, you're missing out.

And in these pensive moments of the midnight melancholy, you could do a lot worse than listening to the album Trace by Son Volt. Off to bed now...

4 comments:

Dogwood Dell said...

It's amazing how the silence screams in the middle of the night & awakens the profound thoughts we buried in our minds.

Life in never what we planned. If it is - then you not living life but, quite possibly, avoiding it.

At times I've seen many focus on the future instead of living in the moment God has provided us.

Breath deep and let your soul live. It's the "mess" that makes us human.

Peace

Theresa said...

Amen. A--men.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely wonderful, Christopher. I love you so much.

IPW said...

It strange, I think I wrote this blog entry last year around this time....or at least something close to it.

Well, I hope your "Hour of the Wolf" wasn't that bad. But I do have to laugh, because when we went to see Son Volt, I remember you not being that impressed.