inside outside upside downside

I used to wear a lot of black shirts. These days, if I'm not wearing a white shirt, it's probably because all of my white shirts are dirty. It was about two years ago that this changed, and I'm not sure why it did. Not a change in happiness, because that time was pretty miserable. I don't necessarily like what I wear. Almost every shirt I have has been given to me. Then again, by this point I've weeded out a lot of shirts I didn't like.


I have headphones on right now, but I'm not listening to anything. I'm also bored of starting paragraphs and sentences with I. Oh well.


I feel dumb when I wear non-canvas shoes. I don't like the bulky look or feel. It just seems a little ridiculous. Not as much when I wear them for running (since they're running shoes), but even then they seem too big. Canvas or bare feet or flip flops is wear it's at. I used to wear sandals, but not for years, and I don't think I would like them anymore.


My body seems disproportionate without facial hair. Especially if I still have long hair. My head and face seems small. My lips look smaller too, at least to me, and I don't like the look.

Sometimes I want to sit down with people and figure out what they're all about. That's what happened tonight when I watched people play music, that I just wanted to sit someone down and figure out what they're all about. I hope I do. Today, I also felt tired of being at SPU, that it was time to be away from school and meet people with entirely different views on the world. There is a lot of diversity within Christianity, but I'm bored with that.


I'm tired of morality. Not following morals, but just the idea of morality. It's lost some of its weight for me. I'm not really sorry for the loss. I don't sense a change in my actions, just more internal peace. I'm tired of questioning whether something is sin or not. I just want God.

My sentences are shorter today than normal, maybe because I'm tired. Maybe because in my paper conference with a teacher today, a lot of it focused around sentence clarity, and short sentences often equal more clarity.

I feel tired of theology and teaching as well. Then again, I love theology, and I love learning. But the danger in theology is in compartmentalizing God. I don't want to study God so much that I miss him completely. Sometimes I think that's what happens when I read the Bible. It's so easy to forget that God is real, that God is person (he has personality). If I had goals for my prayers, the main one might be just to remember that God is real. Right now, I feel much more interested in narrative and in life. Where life is true life from God and with God and with others.

I don't feel a deep and abiding passion to help the poor. It's just not where I'm at right now. The funny thing is that a lot of my writing involves the poor. I think that was a them I forgot to list last week, but it's one I've noticed. It's not intentional.

When I was reading the Irresistble Revolution, I wondered if it was a problem that I don't have enemies. At least not that I know of. But I do wonder who the people are out there that dislike me. Or people that like me but resent me for some reason.

I've realized that it's important to be willing to let yourself be misunderstood, and to be willing to let others think you're an idiot. That's probably the first step to actually learning anything at all in life or in school, it's just incredibly difficult.

It's important to be needed, and important to have responsibilities. One of the difficult transitions to make between Thailand and the States was moving from where I was needed and important to a place where I was unnecessary. That's still how I feel to some extent: largely unnecessary to peoples lives, like a prop or a minor character.

Then again, I wonder if the whole idea of necessity is just delusion anyway, the idea that if I were gone, there would be no one to replace me. While this is true in one sense, that humans are too unique to be replaced, it's untrue in the sense that what I do for people can't be done by others as well. Maybe it's a good place to be in to not consider myself a necessity to anyone's life. I'm not so important that God can't find someone else to meet exactly the same needs that I meet for people. And I don't want to be motivated to get closer to people just so that I will have a sense of necessity, so that I will feel like a major character, which is good since I don't sense that I do that. Then again, that attitude promotes passivity, where I can assume that if I don't step up and meet a need, it's not a problem because someone else is just as capable of meeting that need.

The main problem with feeling unnecessary is that as long as I feel unecessary I will interpret myself as an outsider. But by thinking of myself as an outsider, I can never reach that elusive (and non-existent?) insider status. And, in some ways, I enjoy being an outsider because nothing is demanded of me, the only thing required is to observe.

I've been so restless lately, and I don't feel that I find rest in God. But rest has all sorts of meaning, and maybe sometimes it isn't so much about peace as it is about release.