It occurred to me today that I have been jealous of the conversion stories of other people.

I’ve often found myself listening to the conversion stories of other Christians and being jealous; thinking to myself, “Wow! What a great story of God’s redemption, grace, and forgiveness!”

The story of the person, at the end of their rope, at rock bottom, when God appears and makes Himself known through the example of Jesus, so the sinner can turn from their sinful ways and begin to walk down a better road, toward a better way of doing things; I’ve always been jealous of stories like that. My conversion story is not like that –> it’s not very inspirational.

I was raised in the church, I was baptized as a teenager, I have been working on my faith and my relationship with God for all of my life. I’ve committed no major crimes or moral indiscretions. I’ve never been at the rock bottom of anything.

Or, take the example of the man responsible for writing a majority chunk of the New Testament; Saul of Tarsus. Imagine walking around, persecuting The Gospel of Christ, when God reaches down and forcefully turns you onto a better road. God chose Saul to become the ultimate example of a conversion story.

How awesome would that be?!?!

* * *

I’ve actually been sitting on this post for a couple of months, not knowing quite what I wanted to say on the matter. I brought it up recently with a close friend of mine, with whom I share a common past when it comes to conversion stories, and he said to me:

“I look at my past and the way that I’ve been able to live my life so far as a blessing. I think my conversion story is the way that God intended them all to be, and that other conversion stories, while they might be great instances of God’s merciful forgiveness, aren’t examples of how things are supposed to go. We are supposed to be raised by faithful parents. We are supposed to make their faith our own at the proper age. It’s like being jealous of an amputation scar.”

When this friend of mine said this to me, I immediately thought of Mark, Chapter 2 (also Matthew, Chapter 9 and Luke, Chapter 5), when Jesus tells the Pharisees that He came to call sinners. When I pair this with information from Romans, Chapter 3 (especially verse 23), I come to the conclusion that I am no better or worse than anyone else, despite my opinions to the contrary. When I think of myself as a ‘boring conversion story’, those who have really wonderful stories to tell would probably be jealous of me, since I didn’t have to go through any of the things that they all went through.

Then, as I was thinking about that, I thought of Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son in Luke, Chapter 15. A lot of retellings of this story stop when the prodigal son returns and the father is glad to have what he’d lost; however, there is the other son’s –the brother’s– story that comes in verses 25-32. I guess I sometimes feel like that guy does.

Except that guy is most certainly meant to represent the self-righteous Pharisees, who were most certainly listening to Jesus when He was telling the ‘lost’ parables that He told in Luke 15.

I guess that the bottom line is this: we are all ‘lost’ before our conversion to Christ. While some might be more ‘lost’ and others might be less ‘lost’, it doesn’t make either position enviable. The best part of being ‘found’ is that you are no longer ‘lost’. What Jesus is saying in this particular chapter of The Gospel is that it is always a great thing when what was ‘lost’ ends up being ‘found’.

* * *

Part of what I envy in these situations is the ‘rags to riches’ story. Who can deny the appeal of movies like Annie or Pretty Woman or Rocky or The Pursuit of Happiness? Don’t you just love to see it when a down-and-out character is able to make their way to the top?

Is there a greater possible ‘top’ than being redeemed by Christ?

The problem with the movies, as I am often reminding my children, is that they often don’t represent reality well. For every ‘Annie’, rescued from an orphanage, there are hundreds of children who grow up in loving homes with loving parents in their lives. That situation, albeit less inspirational, is much more real, statistically speaking. For every ‘Saul of Tarsus’ conversion story, there are probably plenty of stories of the ‘lesser lost’.

And, I’ll bet, God sees all of this differently from His perspective.

A Holy God, who is disgusted by our sin, probably sees very little difference between the ‘greater lost’ and the ‘lesser lost’. Just as I imagine that God doesn’t think that an eighty year old is that much older than an eight year old, having existed for all of time, God probably doesn’t think that much of my pedigree –> I’d imagine that He is less-than-impressed.

What makes the story of Saul and his conversion so impressive isn’t as much about the horrible person that he was, but rather the powerful tool he became in God’s hands. With that in mind, you don’t necessarily need to have a wonderful tale of desperation-turned-salvation in order to be an effective tool in God’s hands.

 

 

It occurred to me today that I’ve got a thing for broken-hearted love songs.

My wife and I were driving in the van the other day, and we were listening to my all-time favorite playlist. I have been working on perfecting it, and all of the songs on it, for about a decade, at least. The playlist is known in our house as the Mega Mix. As we were driving around, listening to the Mega Mix, there was a string of about three or four broken-hearted love songs in a row.

At some point during the parade of these songs, I turned to my wife and said, “I do believe I have a thing for broken-hearted love songs.”

After determining, through a short conversation, that a broken-hearted love song is a love song that tells the story of a love gone bad, we started to try to come up with a list of these songs, especially the ones that would definitely be on my favorite-songs-of-all-time list. Of course, as it was happening, this was easy to start, since we’d been listening to a series of them in the Mega Mix.

When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars
Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison
I’ll Be There For You by Bon Jovi

And then, after these three played, one of my favorite songs of all time played:

At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters

So, from there, we started to try to add songs to the list to fill it out a little bit more. We added these to the list:

When We Were Young by Adele
Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley ft. Alison Krauss
The Dance by Garth Brooks
Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room by John Mayer
Wanted It To Be by Sister Hazel
Purple Rain by Prince
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston
Alone by Heart
Yesterday by Boyz II Men

And the list could go on and on. Maybe I should create a separate playlist that is just these broken-hearted love songs?!?!

* * *

I don’t know what it is, exactly, that I love most about a broken-hearted love song, but I do know that part of the formula is the emotion of the singer. For me, the beautiful part of a song is the emotion that it contains, that it is able to convey, that it transfers to the listener. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets of all time; he once famously said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

To discuss this concept further, I want to go back to one of my favorite songs of all time, and most definitely my favorite broken-hearted love song –> At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters. If you are unfamiliar with the song, check it out HERE.

Billy Vera, as he is singing this song, seems to me to be dying inside. The way that he wails on the high notes, and the agony that you can hear in his tone, speaks of his desperation and gut-wrenching grief. That kind of sadness, that amazingly heavy sorrow, gains a significance that goes beyond the standard “I’m sad because we broke up” love song.

In fact, look at the list above, or think of your own favorite broken-hearted love song –> doesn’t it express a dejection and a misery that you can just feel, that you can just connect to?

The other part of this, for me, is related to the fact that I’m a vocalist. I just really love singing these songs. They tend to be more vocally-challenging, and you have a greater ability to express yourself while singing a song that has such a large range of emotional variation. You can just really beat your breast with songs like these –> I know that I enjoy singing songs more when they seem to have an appreciable emotional size.

* * *

During this discussion that we had in the van the other day, my wife seemed a little concerned about the fact that I seem to like these broken-hearted love songs so much. In my quickest recovery possible, I told her that I like those the most since I am not likely to ever experience such sadness, since we are so committed to being together permanently. She looked at me with an adoring smile on her face and I knew that I had appeased her curiosity on the subject.

But her question continued to ring on in my head, even after I’d answered it.

My wife and I have a bit of a different romantic history; I am my wife’s first boyfriend, but she is not my first girlfriend. When it comes to how we look at romantic sadness, she and I probably have different perspectives, as far as history goes. While we’ve been together for more than twenty-six years, I do have memories of romantic sadness that would cause me to look at these broken-hearted love songs differently than she would.

Additionally, I think that there’s something more that I appreciate about these songs. Romance starts out, for everyone, without fail, to be largely about dreams; as such, these broken-hearted love songs are also –even in their sadness– about dreams. As sad as the songs are, these relationships weren’t always bad or broken. They were once hopeful and excited about the future. The broken-hearted love song is just the unfortunate finale of what was, most likely, not unlike most other love stories.

Finally, I can honestly say that I was being frank with my wife when I told her that it is really nice to be able to appreciate a broken-hearted love song from the perspective that I am never going to have to feel that way ever again.

That’s all I have to say about that.

It occurred to me today that we don’t have any right to expect so much.

I started, yesterday, a post about genies and bottle-rubbing, along with some theological insights, but I wanted to be able to continue some of my thoughts. In case you didn’t read Part 1, it’s HERE.

The gist of the first post was this: if you are wanting someone –in general or in particular– to meet a need that you might have, you are probably more likely to get results in the event that you have an established and healthy relationship with that certain someone –in general or in particular.

But, I’ve got a little more to say than that.

* * *

I’ve noticed, many times when I hear people trying to rub God’s genie-bottle, that they are asking for things that they wouldn’t need, or they wouldn’t even ask for, if their relationship with God was more significant, more healthy.

For example, I’ve heard my fair share of people trying to rub God’s genie-bottle because they need God to get them out of jams that they’ve gotten into, because they aren’t following His rules or His design. I don’t know if that’s how He would do things, but I do know that it’s not how I would do things.

I’m a computer repair guy, among other things, and I know for a fact
–because I’ve done it before– that people who don’t follow the instructions that I have for them in how to use a computer are not at the top of my list of favorite customers. If a computer repair comes across my desk, and the malfunction is a result of someone not doing what I told them to do, not following the instructions properly, that repair goes to the bottom of the list.

While I am sure that God is infinitely greater than I am –infinitely wiser and infinitely kinder and infinitely more forgiving (thanks be to God) and infinitely more compassionate– I often wonder whether or not one’s request for miraculous intervention, in paying the mortgage this month because one has run out of money at the casino, doesn’t end up at the bottom of God’s list.

Or, as another example, I’ve also heard of a number of people rubbing God’s genie-bottle to ask him for things that a person of faith would find of less interest when their relationship with Him is at its strongest. If you think about the things that people are often inclined to ask a genie for, when they stumble across his bottle, they tend to be the kinds of things that people with a strong faith feel like they are already getting from God, when they trust and rely on Him. I truly think that, by and by, people with a more significant relationship with God will come to find that “the things of earth [do] grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace”

* * *

If you’ve ever seen Disney’s Aladdin (the cartoon, not the live action hack job that came out last year or the year before –> don’t even get me started on what a joke it is that Disney is rehashing their old classic movies into live action remakes), I would hope that one of the things that you noticed is that, for the genie, service outside of the context of relationship is just a monotonous bore for him.

But, as Aladdin and the genie develop their friendship during the course of the movie, it becomes easier and easier, it seems, for the genie to do whatever he can to help Aladdin out. Near the end of the movie, when Jafar takes the lamp and becomes the master of the genie, you see the genie’s entire demeanor change. The genie doesn’t appreciate having a new master, after he worked to befriend his former master.

The other part of the story, related to this theme, is the part, earlier in the movie, when Aladdin is forced to make a decision to either honor his promise to release the genie with his final wish, or to use his final wish for himself. Unfortunately, Aladdin betrays his friendship to the genie, intending to use his final wish for his own purposes. Greed: 1 — Honor: 0.

However, before he ever gets the chance to actually commit the betrayal, the plot takes a different course and Aladdin makes it all of the way to the end of the movie before he has to decide whether or not to break his previous promise. The genie, at the end of the movie, actually encourages Aladdin to forget about his promise and to use the final wish for himself. But Aladdin frees the genie and honors their relationship.

Service in the context of relationship can be enjoyable; the reason for this is that we want good things for those that we serve –our friends or our loved ones– because of the relationship. Service without that context can be a drudgery, or worse, a manipulation of a pseudo-relationship to receive service rendered.

* * *

When I think about the Christina Aguilera song that was partially responsible for this extended post that I’ve been putting together, the song is –in a certain way– a love song. When I think of love songs, I think of my wife.

For most adults, living in modern society, the importance of the primary romantic relationship is significant. The relationship that we have with our significant others is one that involves a lot of learning, compassion, and understanding. Forgiveness for our significant others, as they are in a position to hurt us in ways that no one else may be able to, is the penultimate endeavor; the only endeavor more paramount would be their forgiveness of us for the same reasons.

Because our significant others are so central, much of the time, to our happiness, it’s important for us to do our best to serve them –and to serve our relationship with them– so as to avoid giving them reasons to be unhappy. As my post from yesterday illustrated, it’s always better to be on good terms with people if you expect that you are going to be needing or wanting something from them.

Hopefully, however, you and your significant other would eventually get to the point where service and self-sacrifice wouldn’t be a quid pro quo situation where each of the partners are just doing what’s fair, to keep things even –> she made the bed so I’ll do the dishes or he mowed the lawn so I’ll fold the laundry. It should eventually be the case that service becomes what you want to do in order to be a benefit for your partner, whether or not it’s fair.

It’s unhealthy to stay in that place where things stay “only fair”.

* * *

So, genies and bottles and rubbing aside, see what you can do to foster your relationships today by showing people the bonus of your service. You’ll be surprised how far it goes.

 

It occurred to me today that so many of us are rubbing the side of the bottle.

In 1999, Christina Aguilera burst onto the scene of pop music at the ripe ol’ age of nineteen with the hit, Genie in a Bottle. The song, if memory serves, was a rollicking good time, specifically focused on the mating dance of the All-American Club Goer. While the specifics of the lyrical score have escaped me over the last couple of decades, I do remember the lyrics mentioning how imperative it is, when it comes to the genie, to “rub [me] the right way”.

Oh, how true that is.

* * *

I’ve often noticed, when it comes to the people around me, that many of them treat their faith in God as if it were a genie-in-a-bottle kind of situation. It always occurs to me, when I hear people say things or see them do things that suggest that God is just a cosmic wish-granter, that I don’t think that’s how it works at all. Perhaps, I’m wrong, and I’ve been operating under some false assumptions about whether or not God is just sitting idly by, waiting for us to ask Him for things. Somehow, though, I don’t think I am wrong about this one.

For example, if I pray to God that it doesn’t rain next Tuesday because I have a golf outing with a couple of my closest friends and I don’t want to have to cancel it, I guess that can only go a couple of different ways. Are you with me on this? 1) it doesn’t rain, or 2) it does rain.

If it does rain, I’m left with 1) my reaction to that, and 2) my interpretation of why God chose to allow rain to ruin my golf outing. Similarly, if it doesn’t rain, I am still left with 1) my reaction to that, and 2) my interpretation of why God saw fit to allow my golf outing to happen.

Regarding my reaction to the events that unfold, I would hope that I would find a way to react with a grateful attitude, regardless of whether or not God answers my prayers, because that’s what people with a real faith would hopefully do. Because God is God and we are not, his decisions as to how to answer the prayers that we issue are beyond our ability to understand. We ought to realize our proper place and just take His decisions as they come.

Maybe God brought rain, not to ruin my golf outing, but rather to feed the crops in the field next door to the golf course, so that people might be fed and a farmer might be able to earn a wage. It is the height of arrogance and ego to think that my behests are any more worthy of God’s time than anyone else’s.

As to whether or not God has nothing better to do than to meet my fickle and inconsequential requests, I’ll let you answer that. When you see people who try to rub God’s genie-bottle, expecting him to grant their wishes, and they react poorly to those wishes not being granted, it is a pretty decent indication of the nature of their heart and the absence of their faith.

I’ve heard it said that people tend to interact with God in a manner similar to the way in which they interacted with any father figures they may have had, growing up. When I was a kid, I didn’t bother my dad with requests of no consequence; I simply knew better than to inconvenience him with anything, because he was a hard-working man who was doing his best for his family. Maybe that upbringing put me in a position where I don’t ask God for a rain-free afternoon for a golf outing –> God’s got better things to worry about than my capricious pleas.

* * *

I have friends that I would do anything for, and I would hope that they would feel the same way about me. We feel this way (hopefully) about each other because of the relationships that exist between us
–> relationships that are based on sharing and love and fun times together. But, unfortunately, I also have friends that only seem to want to be my friend when I have something that they need.

Even more unfortunately, I have been that guy who only calls on certain people when I need them, but I don’t really foster the relationship with these certain people the rest of the time. I have, on more than one occasion, felt ashamed of the fact that I use people sometimes.

I don’t know if you have anyone in your life that uses you, but it always makes me much less likely to answer someone’s request of me when I know that they are just using me. In the context of a relationship with someone, I’ll usually go all out, but I not nearly as willing to help out when the relationship isn’t there.

The funny irony of this scenario is as follows: when I have a relationship with someone, and I ask them to help me out with something, they normally do whatever they can; but if they can’t, I’m much more likely to be understanding… because of the relationship. When someone tries to use me for something, and we don’t have a relationship, I could say no, but they aren’t going to be very forgiving of that… because there is no relationship.

Now, imagine how God might feel when people, lacking a relationship with Him, come at him only in those circumstances when they discover that they need something. We actually have people like this in the church that I help to lead; you only see them in church, using the prayer chain, showing up to services, trying to get their lives right with God, when they need something from him. Then, all of a sudden and out of the clear blue, they want Him for what they want Him to do for them.

Once that need is met, either by God or through some other means, those people are gone again, at least for as long as it takes for them to end up needing something else that they want to rub God’s genie-bottle for.

* * *

So, as it turns out, Christina Aguilera is really only going to “make your wish come true” if she “like[s] what you do”; I know this because I went and looked up the lyrics after all. But, since I have a lot more to say on this particular subject, I am going to press the pause button on this post, and continue it more tomorrow.

It occurred to me today that pain is something that you can get used to.

I burnt my foot about a week and a half ago, right on the bottom of it, by stepping on something hot that I didn’t know was there, while walking around barefoot. Whatever it was that I stepped on burnt through several layers of the skin on the bottom of my foot. It hurt pretty bad. Then, the burn closed over with new, calloused skin on the bottom of my foot, and that hurt a little less and a little differently. Rather than being a sharp pain that was localized to a specific area, once the burn closed over, it became a dull pain that hurt with every step over a significant part of the ball of my foot.

This created a couple of problems. The first problem that it created was that I started walking on the foot funny, to favor the burnt area on the bottom of it. Walking on the outside edge of the foot caused my weight distribution to be a little bit different than normal. By the time the burn on the bottom of my foot healed (closed over), I’d ended up messing up my plantar fascia. The problem with stressed-out plantar fascia during the summer is that I love to be barefoot and these ligaments –the plantar fascia– require proper support as much as possible, if they are going to heal.

One of the other problems with plantar fasciitis (irritation of the plantar fascia) is that I’m a runner, and it’s very painful. I haven’t been able to run since Monday. I’ve been hobbling around ever since it became painful to walk.

As much as I love to be barefoot in the summer, I have recently had to wear my running shoes, with socks, to get my foot the proper support that it needs to be able to heal. While I’m on the mend, and things have almost gotten back to normal, I’ve noticed a few things about the pain from it.

One of the things that I noticed is that you can get used to pain.

* * *

My daughter got a case of swimmer’s ear this week. If you don’t know what swimmer’s ear is, you get it as a bacterial infection of the ear canal. It can be quite painful, and my daughter has been complaining of the pain for about four days now. A couple of days ago, we finally decided to have our pediatrician call in a prescription for some antibiotic ear drops. As we’ve been putting the ear drops in her ears, they have been taking some time to get rid of the bacterial infection, and of course, her pain continues.

The funny thing about her pain is that she’s gotten used to it.

As she was complaining about the pain earlier in the week, we asked her to describe it on a pain scale, just like they do in the hospital. As she told us about the pain that was significantly bothering her, she described the pain with a number that has been pretty constant throughout the week. The thing that has changed throughout the week, while the pain number has remained pretty constant, is the extent to which my daughter has been bothered by the pain in question.

Earlier in the week, my daughter seemed on the verge of tears when she described the pain in her ear. Yesterday, describing the pain in her ear, she almost seemed bored talking about it.

I’ve been wondering about this change as the days have gone by. I don’t know what leads us to become accustomed to the pain in our lives, but it is most certainly a fact that we do. I also wonder whether or not my daughter has been finding ways to deal with the pain, because of the hope that she has the her medicine will soon work –> the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

* * *

This concept doesn’t just apply to physical pain, either. I unfortunately know this for a fact.

If you’ve ever lost someone very close to you, then you probably know what I’m talking about. Grief can become a very close presence in your life, in deed. That grief can stay, for days and weeks and months, and the pain becomes something that you learn to tolerate. Sometimes, rather than making our way through a process of healing so we can get to the place where the pain is manageable, we instead become fixated on the pain of grief, and we start to own that pain as something that we can hold onto.

This isn’t healthy, of course. Grief is supposed to be a temporary pain. Death takes people away from us, and we will never get those people back, of course, but that grief isn’t supposed to be a permanent pain. No pain is supposed to be permanent.

* * *

Pain is supposed to be an indication of a problem, something that gets out attention, to cause us to take actions to correct these problems. Sometimes the problems can be corrected, but more often than not, the process simply involves a passage of time during which healing can take place.

It is an interesting facet of human emotional processing that we can incorporate pain into our routine daily experience. I guess you would call this coping.

But, I also know that there is an end to everything. Pain doesn’t last forever, and the fact that we can outlast most of the situations in life that cause of us pain can bring us a measure of hope. I like to remember the phrase, “This too shall pass.” to remind me that better days are sure to come.

If you are dealing with pain in your life, do what you can to get it checked out. Also, understand that time will help to get you through it. And hope. Don’t forget the hope.

It occurred to me today that the past is rather obdurate.

Fair warning, this one is a little long.

When you think about memory, and how your memory works, at least for me, I tend to remember things of emotional importance, at least over the long haul. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last Thursday because it is of no emotional importance. I can’t remember the names of all of the kids that I taught in my Senior English class ten years ago because that list has no emotional importance. I do, however, remember holding my father in my arms as he sobbed over the death of my only brother, his youngest son. I do remember the joy of seeing my wife coming down the aisle toward me at our wedding, and I suspect that I always will.

But those events are gone, inasmuch as I no longer have any power to make any changes to them. My wedding ceremony, my brother’s funeral, the birth of my three children; all of these events are solidified. The details surrounding them, the events leading up to them, everything in my life, up to and including the minute, two minutes ago, when I started writing this sentence, they are all immutable and gone. The past is the past, and the size of that past continues to grow, in each of our lives, as every moment that passes becomes a part of… the past.

This, of course, leaves our future constantly shrinking in size, as well, if you think about it.

Your past has a known size to it, however, that your future does not. I, at the moment that I am typing this, am forty-four years old. That just so happens to make me 16,322 days old, exactly. Now, go ahead and ask me (or ask yourself, for that matter) how many days I have in my future.

This puts all of us on a little slider that is sliding toward that place where there is no more slide left. As we grow closer to that point, the space that we’ve left behind –the space behind the slider as it slides– grows larger. Once you are out of slide, your past also happens to reach its maximum size –> a size that is equal to the length of your whole life. At the moment of your death (whenever it comes) your future equals zero and your past is as large as it will ever be.

The great thing about the future that the past doesn’t have going for it
–the great thing that almost makes up for the fact that we have no idea how much future there is for each of us– is that the future is malleable. I may be more than 16,000 days old, but not a single one of those days has any flexibility to it. Those days when I was a jerk to people that I love, those days when I wasted my time in a farce that mocked what life should truly be about, those days when I fell short of being the person that I aspire to be; not a single one of those days is available to me ever again. Lost. Gone. Irredeemable.

The future, despite the fact that I might have four more days or forty more days or fourteen thousand more days, is 100% chocked full of days that are 100% still adjustable. If I decided, at the very moment that I am typing on this keyboard, that I am going to spend every day that follows this one pursuing my secret dream of becoming a scuba instructor, then the future is mine to write.

* * *

Speaking of writing, I am working on a novel (actually, truth be told, I am working on a series of five novels) and the writing of the novel(s) has been an interesting process; I have powers, in my creation of the worlds in these novels, to do what I am powerless to do in my own life. If my character suffered as a child because he was a bit of a dweeb, and I’m not okay with that for him, I can simply go back and change that. My dweeby main character could just as easily be the star quarterback who marries the head cheerleader, if I change the right sentences here and there.

I, unfortunately, can’t do anything about the fact that I was a finalist in the North American Greatest Dweeb contest, representing the great state of Michigan, for six years from 1985 to 1990. I would have won in ’87, if it weren’t for the fact that the representative from North Dakota was a major nerd.

The other day, I was doing a timeline review for one of my novels and I discovered that one of my major characters had her first daughter at the age of twelve. Oops. So, I simply moved her birth year back eight years. Problem solved. If only that were possible in real life, right?!?! I’m unhappy about being middle-aged, then BAAM! I move my birth year from ’75 to ’65, and I am now just hitting the prime years of my thirties.

When it comes to creating my characters, there really isn’t much of a limit to what I can or can’t do. I have a different character who is very unlikable. To show how unlikable he is, I throw two ex-wives into his past, one of which moved to the other side of the continent, just to get as far away from his as possible, and then it’s obvious that this guy is really unpleasant.

My past, regrettably, is not open for editing.

* * *

I’ve recently, quite by accident, discovered the whereabouts of a childhood friend of mine. This revelation has focused my thoughts on him, as of late, in a way that I wasn’t expecting; to be honest, he’s been invading my mind. As a matter of fact, I think I wrote about him in my blog post on trust a few days back.

It may be generous to describe the relationship that we had, years ago, as a friendship. It really probably wasn’t.

I don’t know if it has ever happened to you –> a situation like this, where you have a chance at reaching out to someone from your past to try to reconnect. When it happens to me (it’s happened at least a few times), I wrestle with whether or not to make contact, whether or not to try to renew the ties.

But, in this particular situation, and in consideration of the circumstances of my life right now, I am feeling differently. This time, I find myself wondering about the past, and the person that this person was to me back then.

In my past, this guy was not a nice guy –> to me or to most anyone else; he treated most of the people around him poorly, as an immature teenager who was accustomed to using manipulation, threats of violence, and emotional blackmail, to get whatever he wanted.

That’s who he was in my past.

And I, in that same past, was willfully subservient to my peers, to get them to like me. I was desperately starving for social approval, so much so that I looked for friendship in dark alleys down which I had no business venturing.

That’s who I was in my past.

But today, I am further down the road than I was formerly. It would be unreasonable for me to expect that this guy is not also further down the road in his journey. Did he develop out of his slightly sociopathic ways, to become someone who is capable of properly interacting with other people, just as I was able to develop out of my futile exploits in the realm of social acceptance? Do I really want to try to reconnect with him, to discover whether he did or not?

* * *

They say that one of the most important parts of a good novel is character development. We love to read about individuals who are able to work their way through the sins of their past, or through the pressure of their present circumstances, to arrive at a future that is better than what they might have otherwise hoped for.

I’d like to encourage you to let go of the rigid past. Write your story in the days that are yet to come.

It occurred to me today that the pursuit of excellence is something in which we should all be engaged.

Yesterday, I wrote about trust and how I hate to be in situations where I have to trust someone that I don’t necessarily have a reason to trust. But today, I am writing about having trusted someone, and that someone’s name is Kevin. Kevin is someone who, before yesterday, I didn’t know from Adam. I just so happened to be in a situation yesterday where I had to trust Kevin. I’m so happy to report that it seems that Kevin is my new favorite person on planet Earth.

The thing about my interaction with Kevin is that he was my second opinion yesterday. I went to someone else first, looking for a first opinion, and this other person –who will remain nameless to protect his identity– gave me information that I had a funny feeling was just wrong, and not “wrong” as in “incorrect”. I thought this person was wrong because he was telling me something that I didn’t want to hear. And, everybody knows what you do when you get an opinion that you don’t like –> you get a second opinion.

And so I sought out Kevin, and I’m glad that I did, and not just because he told me what I wanted to hear. Kevin’s approach to helping me with my problem was completely different that the other guy’s approach. In the end, I think that both approaches would have worked, but Kevin’s approach cost me half of what the other guy was going to charge me.

While I was waiting for Kevin to get back to me about what he was going to charge and how long it was going to take, the thought occurred to me that it was possible that Kevin’s quote would be even more outrageous, but honestly, I wasn’t expecting it. For some reason, I thought that Kevin was going to be able to offer a much better choice for me.

When Kevin told me what he was going to charge me, and the timeline in which he was going to be able to do the work, I told him that he was my new favorite superhero.

* * *

Maybe I’m expressing an opinion that is not as popular as I think it is, but I’m not interested in someone charging me to fix things that aren’t broken. I can’t imagine how happy people would be if they brought me their computers for repair and I charged them a crazy amount of money for fixing a bunch of things that didn’t really need to be fixed in the first place. Maybe it’s just standard practice for some people to do this, though.

Maybe they think of it as “preventative maintenance”. If I ask for someone to come in to my kitchen to replace the stove because it is dying, and they come in and replace the stove, and the microwave, refrigerator, dishwasher, and garbage disposal, as well, and they call it “preventative maintenance” because those pieces were going to die in the future at some point, I’m not sure how happy I would be to pay that bill.

Or maybe, they would have all of the pieces of a related system replaced, just to be sure that a problem within a particular system is fully addressed. If I call my HVAC guy and I say, “The furnace isn’t blowing hot air all the way to the second story”, so he decides to replace the furnace, and all of the ductwork, and all of the cold air exchanges, just to be sure that the entire system could have a clean bill of health, I’d be pretty flabbergasted by that bottom line.

Or maybe, in a hurry, and hoping to avoid too much time spent diagnosing an issue, someone would just think that an particular problem could most certainly be solved by just replacing everything, so it would most likely end up fixing the problem that the problem-solver didn’t actually have the time to pinpoint. If I tell my construction contractor that the floors in my bedroom squeak, so he takes off the entire second story of my house to replace it with an entirely new upper half, just because he doesn’t have time to pinpoint the two squeaky boards in my bedroom, I’m going to be upset with that approach.

Or maybe –and I think that this is a strong possibility– some businesses just treat their customers this way because they’ve gotten away with it so many times that they think that it legitimizes the approach. The customer before me was too dumb to realize that they were being fleeced, and the customer before that one fell for the same thing, as well, so I am the next schmuck in line to get “the royal treatment”. If it weren’t for Kevin, who shows up on the scene to save the day, I would have been the next casualty.

* * *

I guess when I started this post, I was thinking about how happy I was that Kevin was going to be able to help me out. When you need someone to be there for you, when you need someone to be at their best because you need them at their best, then it’s important that there would be someone out there who’s doing their best.

Somewhere along the way though, the post ended up taking a negative bent. If Kevin is the good guy in my story, then certainly this other guy, my first-opinion-guy, must be the bad guy in this story. However, I starting to discover that life is often not as cut-and-dried as that; there seems to be a lot more gray area than I would have originally believed.

Maybe my first-opinion-guy is just operating under a corporate philosophy that is being forced on him by his organization. Maybe he really wants to be doing his best for his customers, but he is constrained by company policy.

I guess, in the end, I just wish that everyone was doing their best. Pursuing excellence. If every individual was pursuing excellence, then companies couldn’t do anything other than to pursue excellence as a company –since their employees wouldn’t allow for any other approach. We should all be doing our best because there is someone out there who needs our best.

Answer the call. Do your very best. Pursue excellence.

It occurred to me today that I have trust issues.

Actually, this has probably occurred to me periodically for most of my adult life. When I say periodically, what I mean is, I feel like I have trust issues every time I am forced to trust someone that I don’t necessarily have a reason to trust, or when I have trusted someone and it ends up having been a bad idea.

I don’t necessarily have any theories about why it is that trust is so hard for me; I’ve been questioning the motives of people around me for as long as I can remember. The problems with this approach to life are many, not the least of which is that I end up being overly suspicious. When people are being sincere and legitimate, it often takes me longer to realize it than it would if I weren’t so distrusting. But, when there are reasons for being suspicious, I end up well-protected by my wariness.

* * *

I’ve owned cars, of many different shapes and sizes, for a couple of decades now. I think I can say that I have only recently found a mechanic that I absolutely trust (Tim –> if you’re reading this, here’s to you, my friend). I know that I trust Tim because he is the person I want to talk to when I am having a problem with one of my cars. I am extremely happy with all of the work that Tim has done on my cars in the past, and I know that he always does his best to make sure that the problems I have get fixed.

If that sounds like an advertisement for the guy, it’s just because I am so happy to have someone that I trust.

Before I had Tim, getting car repairs was something that would cause my blood pressure to rise. Not knowing who I could trust, always wondering whether or not someone was jerking me around, suggesting fixes that I didn’t need to separate me from my money.

In fact, I recently ended up having some trouble with a car away from home. The first thing I did was I called my mechanic. It is so nice to be able to say that I have a mechanic. He was able to tell me exactly what I needed to do to be able to get to where I was going safely. Isn’t trusting someone a wonderful thing?!?!

* * *

I’ve never been the kind of person to have a lot of friends. I prefer to have a small circle of close friends with whom I share things. I suspect that most people operate in this way, unless they happen to be a lot more trusting than me.

I think part of the reason that I operate the way that I do in this arena is past experience. I had a friend, or someone that I thought was a friend, when I was in middle school. I would tell him some of my most secret thoughts, and he would either laugh at me, which is hard to take when you’re an insecure middle school geek like I was, or worse, he would use the information against me.

As an example, I told this ‘friend’ one time about a girl that I liked. She was a mutual friend of ours. I told him how pretty I thought this girl was, and how wonderful I thought it would be to “be boyfriend and girlfriend” with this girl. My ‘friend’ not only went, almost immediately, to the girl to tell her about how I felt, but he then made his move to become her boyfriend, for a short time.

And, while I don’t know where either of these two individuals, my ‘friend’ or the girl I was interested in, are today, I do know that the lesson that he taught me is still with me. When you open yourself up to other people, it’s an invitation to betrayal and pain. You should do some significant work to make sure that the decision that you are making is a good one.

* * *

The thing about trust is that it takes a long time to create, and mere moments to destroy. When it comes to the circle of people that we trust, it is probably comprised of a group of people who have, over long stretches of time, given us reasons to believe in their honesty, integrity, and loyalty.

Unfortunately, the circle of friends can more easily become a smaller circle than it can a larger circle, at least in my experience. At any moment, anyone in your inner circle could end up giving you a reason to wonder why it is that you trust them in the first place.

But then again, I don’t know if that’s how it works for me, anymore. When I was a kid, maybe, but these days, there’s grace –> at least for the slight offenses and trespasses. I suppose that, the more time you spend building a relationship with someone, the more likely you are to weather the small problems in the relationship –with grace– because of what you’ve invested in the other person.

While this isn’t to say that large misdeeds wouldn’t have very detrimental effects, I guess I can think of examples of situations where I’ve been graceful (or other people have been graceful with me) because of the importance of maintaining the relationship. As a kid, friends come and go and there doesn’t seem to be any ground-breaking significance in whether or not you gain one or lose one, in the grand scheme of things. As an adult, you understand that there is room for forgiveness and dispensation when you are dealing with others, especially if you’d like to see that in others’ dealings with you.

It occurred to me today that the ants have something to teach us.

I was big into the Dave Matthews Band back in the late 90s and early oughts. I was admittedly late to the party on this particular matter, but my brother and sister-in-law were very into DMB, and my wife and I started listening by proxy. Come to discover, the Dave Matthews Band had been responsible for some of the songs that I was really enjoying even earlier, songs that I’d never attributed to a particular artist before that point.

One of those catchy songs was Ants Marching. It was a very popular song, probably primarily because the melody was upbeat and fun. The lyrics, on the other hand, were a bit of a darker matter. The meaning to some of the lyrics seemed to be a condemnation of the human propensity toward mindlessly making our way through our days, without much thought or inclination toward progress. This was one of the things that I enjoyed about so many of the songs from DMB: they had some significance to them, besides being enjoyable musical numbers.

I’ve recently realized that I am guilty of this more often than I’d like to admit. Figuring out that we only have a certain amount of time in our lives, and that we ought not waste that time on just going through the motions of the daily grind, is a lesson that usually requires us to have a reason for reflection. The death of someone close will often do this for people, as it reminds us of our own mortality and the finite timeline that we, most of the time, would rather not think about.

For me, though, I think I might be having a bit of a mid-life crisis, as of late. This is also a common impetus toward introspection, as we look over a life half-lived –in our estimation, mathematically speaking– and what we might do, what changes we might make, to better steer ourselves into the future. The problem with the concept of a mid-life crisis is that it assumes that we have more time than we might actually have. For me to be having a mid-life crisis at the age of forty-four requires that I assume that I will live to be eighty-eight, give or take. Truth be told, I could get hit by a bus in six months, and my mid-life crisis should have been during my senior year of my undergrad.

Nevertheless, when I think of the DMB song Ants Marching as I’m writing this post, I think that maybe I have reached a point where I am no longer going to keep blindly doing the things that I’ve been doing, just out of some obtuse promenade through the rest of my days.

* * *

My wife and I have been dealing with an ant infestation in our living room this past week. It’s only happened to us once before, in the almost eleven years that we’ve been in our current home, and the previous time was so long ago as to erase from our minds the solution that we used previously. So, we hopped on the internet and started googling things like “pet safe ant poison” or “diy ant remedy”.

What we ended up discovering, as to how to kill the little buggers, seems to have worked. As we continue to check the area where they were getting into the house from the outside world (our house’s original structure dates back to 1869, so needless to say, there are probably a million places where ants could come in), it’s been a few days since we’ve noticed any new ones coming in.

One of the things that we discovered as we were scouring the internet, looking for assistance, was that there are different kinds of ants (which we knew) and that some types of ants will only invade your home if you have something to offer. Sugar ants, for example, are specifically interested in human food scraps that might be laying around that they can come inside and steal, to take back to their homes for their own particular snack.

Now, admittedly, my family is not the cleanest family in the world, but we are also not the sloppiest family, either. We clean in the places in the house where we find obvious messes, and we (semi-regularly) engage in a cleaning regimen around the house, whether there are obvious messes or not. I would have thought that, all things considered, we were doing pretty well.

But the ants disagreed.

When we noticed them last week, we followed the line of them, from where they were getting into the house, to where they seemed to be going. They were heading to our leather love-seat. Since we were pretty sure that they weren’t looking for a soft place to rest their heels (do ants even have heels?), we decided to investigate the leather love-seat, to see what may have been of interest to the ants.

We found the mother load of food particles and dropped snack stuffs underneath that love-seat, crawling with little sugar ants. Let me tell you how much fun that was to clean up. Pieces of candy and potato chip parts and several instances of the snack that smiles back. It was a regular sugar ant buffet under that love-seat, and we had no idea.

Isn’t that how it goes? You are plodding along, thinking everything is alright and that you’ve got everything covered and then, BAAM! Something hits you out of a clear blue sky and you had no idea it was coming, or that there was even anything that you could have been doing in the first place to prevent it. I think, when that happens, the best we can do is to move forward with the knowledge we’ve gained, making changes to our processes, to prevent bad things from happening again (as much as we can ever prevent bad things from happening). As crappy as it is that we are sometimes stuck in lousy situations that we don’t appreciate, we should at least be able to appreciate the chance to learn.

* * *

So, whether it’s a song about ants, or the actual creatures themselves, I think that ants have something to teach us. Maybe they can point out where we’ve forgotten to run the vacuum cleaner. Maybe they can point out how dull and monotonous a life of unrelenting sameness can be.

See if you can’t learn something from the ants.