A few days ago, my wife described how her feelings for me had evolved since college. Hearing her version of how I have changed since we met in 2000 reminded me of how frantically I clung to some version of a poetic lifestyle. I was entirely opposed to the stiff professional mindset of corporate America. I had no intention on focusing on money and acquiring lots of “things”.

Seven years later, I am older and somewhat wiser, and I cant imagine how I arrived at this point from there. It seems like crossing an ocean of time. My feelings are so different from what they were then. Having and loving a wife will do that, apparently.

These days, I spend 10 hours per day on the computer, writing, blogging, researching, reading, plotting, and goofing off. I own more blogs than I care to admit to myself, and there is never enough time to write for all of them. Something always suffers neglect. Balance is by far the most challenging concept in life.

Where once I tossed out prose like it was going out of style, now I blog for no apparent reason and have nothing of value to say. Where once I had some depth to my words, there is now a shallow facade spread thin.

These days, this blog is the closest thing I have to emotional honesty in my writing. I sense the loss of something valuable, but it feels so distant I cannot mourn. I feel no sorrow for its passing. I am who I am. I pursue the ever elusive dream. I have no concrete goals. I pursue for the sake of the pursuit. I love a challenge much more these days because I believe I can accomplish much more than I once could.

My wife will argue that she is much more proud and secure in who I am now than in days of yore. But then again, I was “hot and sexy” back then, while today I am pleasantly satisfying. Hmm… personal depreciation or maturity?

Initially, this all was a means to an end of returning to the prose and contemplative life. Now I do not recognize what it means to contemplate without America’s Top 40 music playing in my head.

There are casualties of war, and casualties of choice. I pray that what I have surrendered can be regained at the proper time. And if it can’t, I hope that something deeper and profoundly more pleasurable grows from the ashes of who I once was.

Watching the movie, Breach, I realized that I do some things right that other husbands don’t. We all fight and argue… that’s a given. But what isn’t given is how we handle the aftermath. What shocks me is that there are men out there who will yell and say all sorts of hurtful things and then walk away and leave the mess. Maybe it’s just a momentary flare up. Maybe it’s cold and calculated avoidance. Whatever the case, I see men treat their wives with indifference.

It’s not in my blood. Sure, there are times when we’ve fought for so long without resolve that I feel spent and unable to care about her feelings. I have those moments. But all it takes is one tear. All I have to see is her hurt and weeping and every defense I’ve constructed melts away. I see her in her weakness and I feel like a monster for hurting her. I feel condemned for being careless, blundering, and insensitive.

All it takes is a tear, running down her cheek, or that sob that says “my world is crumbling”. I forget how tender her heart is. I forget how real she is until that moment. Then my heart comes rushing back to me, screaming that I cannot leave this wound untended. I must touch her heart. I must. She is my responsibility. Her heart is my responsibility.

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While I can claim to be a good husband, I also know that I am a bad person. I am innately self-centered. It takes tears to get me to act with kindness. While this may be better than some, I don’t feel like a good person based upon my peers. I measure myself to the standard set by God’s word, or at least my understanding of it.

I have said some of the most cruel things you can say to another person. I have looked at my wife in the middle of a brutal argument and felt completely justified in insulting her with hatred oozing from my voice.

My wounds run deep. We hurt the ones we love the most. You can’t get close to my heart without suffering a little of what eats at me on the inside. My wife knows that, and she dances on tiptoe around some of my deepest cuts.

The point is, I call myself a good husband in contrast to other men my age. But when I examine myself, and look at the cruel and merciless way I have verbally abused my wife during heated arguments, I feel shame. Deep shame. Every wound I have caused marks me with greater shame. I want to be a healer. I want to become a better person.

On a night like this… a Friday, when I don’t have anywhere to be the next morning… I look out into the dark sky, at all the stars, and I try to imagine God. I don’t think he looks at all sinister like Eternity from Marvel Comics, this is the best graphic image I can think of to describe how I see God.

Imagine all the planets, the stars, the galaxies, and the deep, impenetrable mysteries of space, and imagine them all living within the one we call God. Divorce yourself from the cartoon image for a moment. Go outside. Look at the stars (if you can see any). Imagine that the moon, the sun, and everything you see out there occupies massive space, yet they and we all exist within God.

That’s not to say that we are God, or that God is a personality-less spirit. Just imagine an eternal being… a supreme being who is not so much inanimate as he is beyond your ability to comprehend. Your mental faculties cannot wrap themselves around the awesomeness that is God.

The beauty of this image is that no matter how deep into space you imagine, you are not any closer to escaping God. You cannot get farther from him or closer to him physically. He contains all things and by him all things exist.

One of the points of this blog is to explore the doubts, the ideas, and the beliefs I’ve grown up with to see which ones actually fit: what makes sense, what is illogical, and what is purely speculative.

This is the perfect example. I form this thought as often as I can remember. It helps me to imagine a God I cannot fathom.

Well, I have next to no respect for him. He’s incompetent, scared, full of resentment, judgmental, uninvolved, and self-absorbed. He does not know what he’s talking about, but he acts like he does. And though I may regret it later, I just felt the need to say that I have no respect for the man.

I don’t hate him, because he’s not that kind of guy (or I’m not). But I am sorely disappointed. I am disappointed and I pity his pathetic way of hanging his head like a whipped puppy dog. It’s not my fault that he can’t sell to save his life. It’s not my fault he undervalues every employee except the big stupid one (and the stuttering yes man who just turned in his notice).

I wanted this company to work. I wanted it to work out. But the leadership sets the tone, and the leadership has effectively said, “F%#@ you, lowly employees!” So there you have it.

I want him to grow and succeed. I want him to learn how to be a better man, and find some peace and joy in his life. I want him to be a good husband and father. I want him to have his heart’s desires met. Yeah, I care about him. That’s why he pisses me off so much.

Play the victim, be the victim.

I spent my entire 20s complaining about the lack of community at my church. I grew up at that church. From the age of 9 to age 29, I went to the same church. And I never connected solidly to a group of people except for a brief two year period from 19-21. During that time, I was a part of a home group for college aged guys, and that was decent (I mostly enjoyed it).

But I never felt like I fit in. The people were all so different, but they shared one common thread that I did not: the belief that all one needed was to firmly believe when in doubt, as though one could will one’s self into deeper faith.

Go to these people with any problem, and they had no real answer 99% of the time. They had no solid foundation for everyday issues. No answers. Just pray and believe. Pray and believe.

That’s not good enough for me. Maybe it will be someday, but I doubt it. You have to know something to believe it. So many of these words are interchangeable: trust, faith, belief, confidence, conviction, etc.

Then there are the stupid things pastors and youth pastors teach people which are solely based on opinion and can severely damage a person’s ability to deal with real world situations. For example, my youth pastor taught me to believe that God takes people with skills and puts them in situations where their skills are irrelevant, so they will depend on God for everything. This teaching was based on the youth pastor’s interpretation of Paul being called to the Gentiles and Peter being called to the Jews.

He said that Peter was a fisherman, a common man, with little education to help him discuss Scripture with the educated Pharisees, Saducees, and everyday Jews. He said Paul was an ex-Pharisee type, meaning he was overqualified in Jewish culture and not prepared to evangelize the ignorant Gentiles. He said that God doesn’t want us to depend on our gifts, talents, and abilities, and will therefore put us in positions which require complete and total dependence upon him.

Sadly, I just recently revisited that memory and realized that he was wrong. Paul was perfectly positioned to speak to Gentiles. The Jewish believers feared him for all the times he persecuted them in the past. Sure, they probably got over that eventually. But Paul was a Roman citizen, fluent in the primary Gentile language and educated in some Roman/Greek philosophy. He was ideally suited to preach to the Greeks, who always pondered new ideas.

Peter was no idiot, but he was definitely less cultured than Paul. That makes him more ideally suited to relate to his own people.

Translation: I grew up expecting God to screw with my life because one youth pastor misinterpreted and misapplied Scripture. God gave us the giftings and abilities we have so that we would use them for his glory… that we would be good stewards of our talents. I can’t be a good steward of my talents if my situations never call for the use of my talents.

Whatever. Now I have to go back and see how that one bad message has affected my entire way of thinking, believing, and living. Who knows how many stupid decisions I have made because of it.