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I was looking at a photo of my paternal grandparents this morning and wondering who they really were. Oh, I knew them (My grandmother just died last hear), but I didn’t really know them. I don’t think they even knew themselves.

I am full of feelings; joys, fears, doubts, questions. Sometimes I feel like I’m right where God wants me to be and doing just what he has for me… other times, I am paralyzed with fear for no apparent reason.

What

did

they

fear?

After going through the Great Depression, I am sure that having shelter and enough food was a driving fear. Frugal would be a great understatement. What else was there? Did they talk about their feelings to one another? They showed me that they had it all together. Being a child, I believed that. I believed that one day, I too would have it all together. I would know who I am, what I believe and where I am going.

It was a lie.

I don’t have it together and don’t believe they did either. They reduced life to a few simple rules. Follow those rules and you get a get-out-of-hell-free card at the end of your life. I think there is more to life than that. More to following God than that.

Do I sound disrespectful? I don’t mean to. They were who they were.

Now that sounds like a copout. I don’t mean it to. I guess I am resigned to the fact that I will never know what happened to them. What were their joys, their sorrows, their hurts and fears? What made them feel on top of the world? It would help me to know who I am. There’s something comforting in the thought that I’m not the first one to feel the things I feel, to struggle with the tendencies I struggle with, to fear the things I fear and to wrestle with the questions I do.

Dear Family and Friends,

I am a mess. I do not have all the answers and it seems like every time I wrestle with a big question and get an answer, it comes bundled with more questions I hadn’t even considered before. I am afraid. I fear failure. I fear success (does that sound weird?). I want more than anything to follow God… not some impersonal god idea… I want to follow the God of the Bible.

First and foremost I want to be identified as a follower of Christ, but I don’t like the baggage that comes with that label.

I am a mess. But Jesus loves me anyway. That is the good news. Although I cannot earn his love, I want to serve him because I do love him. I want to love in a revolutionary, radical way.

I want you to come along. Let’s explore this life together and help one another. I love you.

family, reflection, wondering

church, God, wondering

When I started this blog, I had aspirations of writing a book. I decided that this would be a good first “baby” step in the process. I still have a book in me, but I realize more than ever that it will require a discipline that I have not yet demonstrated. I am going on record here and now that I plan to write a blog a week. It may be something really heavy on my heart or not. I don’t know. Of course, my blogs so far have been varied and don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason behind them. That’s the way I think and the way I process things.

An Observation
I saw something one morning this week that I found to be quite bizzare. As my carpool buddy and I were driving to work south on I-85, we saw going north, a row of police or highway patrol cars with blue lights flashing. They had effectively stopped traffic going that direction. On second glance, they were moving at what I guess was the speed limit. There were no cars in front of them and a mass of bumper to bumper traffic following them. We quickly turned on the radio for news of what was happening. At the first update, we heard that it was a “rolling roadblock”. I have never heard of such a thing.

I googled for “rolling roadblock” and found two definitions, neither of which fit what we saw. the most common definition is what might happen if the police wanted to apprehend someone who would not pull over. They could surround the car and force it to stop. The second was from places that enforce the “no passing on the right” rule of driving. In this case, someone who was driving slowly in the left lane is effetively a “rolling roadblock” since no one can pass them.

I don’t know what the police were trying to accomplish by this other than a display of force. If their goal was to reduce speed on the interstate, they accomplished that for the duration of their little game. If they wanted to reduce speed overall, they failed miserably. Only the first few cars would have known what was happening. Everyone else would merely assume it was typical slow traffic. This appears to be a silly show of force that will result in doing little more than angering drivers.

If the law enforcement officers are really serious about slowing people down, I believe they should 1) Actually enforce the laws that are out there. Give out tickets to speeders. Most of us don’t want to get a ticket and we will slow down. 2) Model the behavior you are trying to inspire. No one is inspired to slow down by law enforcement personnel speeding. Come on, show us what you are looking for.

Nuff said

wondering, writing