New Poem Plus Check out TMR!!!

Hey, so all of you should check out my interview at www.missourireview.com. I interviewed the short story author, Molly McNett. The interview is fascinating filled with info on the life of a writer and we talk about her discussion of having faith and believing in her stories. (Not necessarily a religious faith, but belief nonetheless.) SO, check it out to support yours truly and tell me what you think. I am so excited about this!!!! Also, here is my latest poem. I have had the idea for it since Colorado LT summer of '07, when I was inspired by this guy playing guitar.

Communion

He is strumming.
On a bench outside my cabin.
He is strumming on his guitar, crying out in passion to his God.

I am intruding.
I hear the creak of my footsteps on floorboards.
I am an intrusion gracefully encased in wood and glass.

I wish to be his fingers.
To brush against the strings and throb
I wish to be his fingers, scraped, battered into submitting his heart.

I want to speak his language.
Translate lyrics between two souls
I want to speak his language, to sing backup, together, we could both let go of our hearts.

He is preparing to leave,
I wonder if he felt our shared communion.
He is preparing to leave, having warmed up our bread and boiled our wine.

He has already gone.
His voice echoes, ricochets within this hollow cave.
He has already gone, I am shattered and splintered within.

I feel alive. Reflections on Fall Retreat.

Wow. This past weekend, God really showed up and proved His love for me.  I didn't know I could be so happy. My joy is over-flowing. 

So, I'll start at the beginning. 

I had been praying for days before the Fall Retreat for God to show up to me there. If it wasn't already obvious, I had been "spiritually on E" for a long time. I have really struggled for a year now about my self-identity, whether it was being too critical or being self-consumed, it was always an issue. And in the midst of this I was Martha. If God didn't show up, If God didn't help me out, I was going to give up on seeking Him. You may recall, the story of Martha and Mary, how Martha ran around the house cooking, cleaning, preparing, etc. while Mary sat down in front of Jesus and did nothing. Yea, I was Martha and I was angry. Why didn't God show up for me, even though I felt as if I was working so hard? Why isn't God bothering to address any of my problems?

"Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her." 

With my Martha attitude, I showed up at the retreat. Everything played out like a normal retreat, hangout, feast, then speaker. Neil Kring, a pastor at Ball State University in Indiana, spoke to us. The very first thing that he had talked to us about was about his struggles with his faith. He called it pre-2001 and post-2001. pre-2001, faith was easy for him. He ministered very well to people, he seemed to understand everything that God put to him, life was great. And then there was a relationship problem that went out of control. Enter post-2001. He struggled with God. He struggled with belief, with knowing if God was there, he didn't have anything come easy to him anymore. (Huh, this is kind of sounding familiar...)

And then he shared how he really likes rap and for his birthday his wife and his friends got a rap concert to be played for him with some rap artists who were coming into town. And in the midst of this really fun surprise, Neil felt God speaking to him and he said I brought these guys here for you, because I love you. 

Moments like that helped Neil realize that he had to let go of the pre-2001. He realized that life wasn't worse now, because of the difficulties of his faith, it was merely a "different path". And in the midst of it all, with all this struggle, God still loved him. God didn't need Neil to be this amazing, outstanding, servant for Him, he wanted Neil for more than his deeds and his actions. He loved Neil regardless of how he acted and in spite of Neil not being this, no-doubt, amazing Christian he used to be. 

And these were the words I had been longing to hear and to believe and I felt in the moment Neil was sharing those words, that God was sharing them with me as well. I felt for the first time in my heart ever that God loves me despite of all my shortcomings. I feel like I have had many moments of Grace in my life, but this one shouted in my head. Nick, I brought this guy here for you, because I love you. 

Afterwords, we had a fort-building contest, which was really bizarre, but a lot of fun. I was proud, because my sombrero was the crowning piece of the fort. People were so into it, that I couldn't stop laughing. Laughing? When have I done that recently? And then I stayed at the campfire for most of the rest of the night, talking. I talked to Heather, Joey, and Thomas who are three really cool freshman. And I also spent a lot of time talking to Elizabeth and Beth, who have been two really good friends. Well the five of us, (minus Thomas who went to bed in the guy cabin.) slept under the stars and saw at least five shooting stars in the span of a half-hour. And boy were those stars glorious! You could see them endlessly, it was amazingly clear. 

And then I woke up and later had a quiet time. This was quite possibly the first quiet time I've ever had where I said nothing the entire time and felt listened to and loved. I picked a spot far away from everyone, rolled out a sweatshirt to lay on, and spread out under a tree, with the sunshine trickling through. Anyone who knows me really well, knows how I connect to nature. And I just laid there. I was going to speak, but I felt as if God didn't want me to. It was just me, Him, and his creation spending time together. And I felt in that moment, truly loved. 

And then later there were baptisms, with two of my good friends Elizabeth and Shelley getting baptized. And it was so awesome seeing them dedicate their lives to God in this form. It was beautiful and I was so happy for them. 

And the result of this past weekend at the fall retreat is that I feel alive. I have felt dead inside for so long, but now I'm alive again. And I felt for the first time like Mary, a girl who just wanted to be at the feet of Jesus and hear Him share his message of love. For once I was choosing what was better, and this feeling, this connection with God will not be taken away from me.

And there's so much more I want to tell people, there's so much more I want to say and apologize for, but I've talked too much and maybe that is for another time. I feel alive again.

I promise, one of these days I will be strong.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. --John 14:1

I'm trying Lord. I'm trying to understand who you are, I'm trying to learn, I'm trying to spend time with you, but I do not feel you there. I don't sense you like I used to sense you. I see you in the little things of nature, I see your sunsets, I see your perfect, beautiful days. I see you in the amount of care I've been given by those around me. I see you everywhere and for this I am thankful God, but whatever happened to my feelings for you?

I wish sometimes I could just go back to October of my freshman year and just believe in you like I used to. When I felt you so deep inside me that I was infectious with joy. Do you remember that? I do and I pine for it and I just want it more than anything in the world. I want to go back there and be joyful that I am with you. But now I have other concerns. Now I have addictions I can't get over. Now I have selfish desires that tug at my throat daily. Now I have this hurt inside of me, feeling inadequate, feeling selfish, feeling wrong and full of dirt. Most days I am left with questions and frustrations and I just want to know that you need me, that you are going to pull me up out of the mud that I have flung myself into face-first. Because I feel like I can't. I'm not strong God. I'm not. And I wonder how and why you can even still use me. 

I feel like I never understand that phrase that "God is strongest when we are at our weakest." Because, to me, I'm not sure why You would have anything to do with me. What use do you have for me, when I am so weak and full of doubt? Two nights ago I feel like I confronted myself with the scariest question that I could ever have, one I can not answer and one that leaves me longing.

Will I ever meet someone who will need me just as much, if not more than I need them?

I am tired of feeling clingy. I am tired of feeling dependent. I am tired of venting like I am doing right now. I feel like I abuse Your grace because I can never seem to grasp it. I want to share joy. I want to be genuinely happy and not this artificial fluff and artificial joy I give people too often. I want to share in real love. I want to know how that feels again, because I am beginning to forget. Lord, fill me with courage. Lord, fill me with strength. Lord, teach me to be a man of your ways. Lord, please remind me what it means to be deeply in love you. Because I need it and I need you. And I need to know that there's gotta be something better than this.

And why are my prayers and deepest concerns so public? Is this attention really necessary? Well, I guess it is. I'm not really stopping myself from posting this, am I? 

Small Offerings

So I have a poem. I know it's been a long wait for everyone, but here it is. I'm actually very nervous about this one, because some of the imagery is very...personal. But it's a spiritual poem, one that has gone through a couple of revisions already.

If it's not obvious, the poem is about my comfort level with worshiping God during service, and how I worship, and my insecurities about letting myself go and trusting God which is something extremely pertinent to my life right now, and something I am having a BIG struggle with.

Small Offerings

Small, clenched fist.
This is what I offer to the sky.

I do not dwell in
Extended-arm independence,

I do not raise my arms in passionate release,
Swaying, stiff like branches caught in the wind.

My palm refuses to open in worship,
It is reluctant to give itself away,
Like a bride in an arranged marriage
Trapped between duty and desire,
Uncertain of it’s motive.

It folds within, afraid of ridicule.
It folds within, afraid of blind trust.
It folds within, afraid of unrequited love.

Yet, sticking out in a fist,
It remains.
Clenched, holding on to nothing but a thin pocket of air
Wanting space, desiring to be hidden by my side,

Yet, sticking out in a fist,
It remains.
Captivated by this childish impulse to love the invisible,
Clenched, holding onto gravity like an infant from the womb.

Halfway towards the sky
With a gentle raise,
Upper arm locked by my side
The slight, bend of my elbow,
Fingers curling,
Palms folded,
This fist will be held.

Honest

First off, I want to start off by thanking those of you who took the time to reply to my last post, because your comments meant a lot to me, even though I never replied to them. Thank you for your kindness. It makes me feel less alone in these struggles.

So I don't know whether its a good thing or not that this is the only place where I can be completely honest. I feel like there are always these qualifications when I try to speak to someone individually, like that there are things I can't say to people directly because I feel like their disappointment will rain down on me. For some reason I have this false assumption in my head that I have to be strong whenever I'm around others. I also feel like it's easier to write things on here, because I don't have to face people with the things I'm a little less proud of. 

Anyway, I just have lately felt very...odd. I guess I'm doing alright. (I'm doing waaaay better than i did via last post.) But, I feel just really frustrated lately. I think I'm just frustrated because I just want to be considered important. But I always stuff this feeling down, because I am always afraid that it is selfish. I mean, what have I done to deserve being considered "important"? But, I just feel like I constantly have to be affirmed by other people that I am important and I can never seem to get this from God. I don't think I lack in getting love from God, I can even feel that myself. I just feel like I am being overlooked a lot more than I would like.

Is it selfish if I just want someone to go to me in their time of need? Is it selfish to want people to ask me for my advice or my opinion or my help? Is it selfish to want to have some attention thrown my way? If the answers to these questions are yes, then why am I not being affirmed as being something valuable to God? I think this is why I sometimes get so sick of being "the nice guy". I want to be the guy who makes people happy or angry or stimulates them into some other response other than contentment. I want people to take notice of what I do, and I want my life to be of some consequence to someone else. 

I think these things are why I sometimes act so selfishly, because I want someone to respond to me. I want someone to take notice that I am doing something. Being called "a nice guy" just means I did everything I did to get by or not offend someone. This is why i take everything so personal. Because if no one responds to some sort of action that I put out there, then that makes me feel like I'm of no consequence to them, that I'm not worth their attention.

I love to be "the best friend", but I also sometimes want to be the main character. What does this life even mean if I don't even feel like the main character in my own story?

Not a Happy Post

Okay, so this is not the happiest of posts, but I've come to realize lately that sometimes I have to let these things go. These frustrations I hold onto inside of me. I have begun to just feel myself tearing apart when I feel them. I also realized that I am a sensitive guy. I realized that people have a very skewed concept of what being "sensitive" means. It DOES NOT mean that I am a weak person. It DOES NOT meant that if you say anything to me I will blow up in your face in an emotional train wreck.

"Sensitive" in my mind, means that I feel powerfully. If someone is upset, I can feel their pain easily, like it was my own. If someone is worried, I can feel their anxiety swelling inside myself. If someone is happy, it is infectious to me, because I will smile and be extremely joyful. And for all this time the world told me that this was something I was supposed to be ashamed of. Men don't feel these things. Men only focus on one thing. Men are always strong and always supposed to be the strongest. Men are tough. For all of these years this is who I thought I was supposed to be. But here is a news flash. I am not a tough guy. I am not very strong. I feel so deeply for everything. I have intense emotional swings. 

So Thursday night was disastrous for me, because I felt all of the pressures of being a strong, confident leader and I couldn't deliver. I couldn't save the day. I was supposed to talk about canvas group in front of people and I couldn't pull it off. I faltered, I stumbled. I was nervous, I almost walked out of the room. And I felt like a failure. And then, afterwards, I got to thinking about Honduras. 

I feel like God wants me to go to Honduras. This would normally be a super awesome joyous occasion, because I love new cultures. I love to explore and travel. And then I realized I needed to support raise in order to go, and then my parents denied it. No. Support-raising makes us look bad. We are against it. Promise us you will not do that to us. Oh, great. What do I say to that? I have enough saved up in the bank to pay it myself, but here's the catch, where would that leave me next year? I feel conflicted about studying abroad next year, because I have enough credits to do so my senior year, but then what else would I miss out on. There's so much that goes on at school in the fall. I don't want to miss the Fall Retreat. I don't want to miss the canoe trip. But if I don't study abroad, then I'll graduate early and I don't want that. 

And all of this caused me to go driving around Columbia. I balled. I just cried and I just had no one to talk to and that scared me. It scared me to think that all of this happened and I had no one to go to with it. 

I'm not tough. I'm fragile. Maybe that's the point in writing this. I just want to admit to myself that I can't do these things on my own. I can't live like this where I go out driving and yelling at God whenever I have a breakdown. 

I am sensitive and thank God for that. Thank God that I can feel these feelings. Sometimes they burn, and sometimes they scar, but I think this is my biggest spiritual gift. I can relate to people. I can feel their pain and their sorrow. And weird as it sounds, that's what I want. I want to feel closer to other people. And yet, for all the listening I'm willing to do, I am so afraid to go there with other people. And I am writing this I guess because I am so tired of what everyone thinks is best for me or I'm tired of being so tentative and afraid to step on anyone's toes. 

But I am hurting and I'm not going to lie. And I'm not going to cover this one up. But I need prayer and I need help finding a decent solution to this whole not-bringing-up-the-bad-issues thing I have because its hurting me. 

I have to write this because I have to humble myself and admit that there are going to be times where I'm not okay and I'm not everyone's friend. I'm done with that. This is real and this is what I want to say. I'm tired of putting this meaningless pressure on myself to be a perfect person. I am a man. I am sensitive. And nothing I am writing here I regret. 

Chasing Sunsets

Hey all,

So, it's about that time again for me to post something on my blog, and here I've got something I'm really excited about. It's not poetry, but rather it's the first part of a non-fiction memoir type of thing I've been writing. It really centers around my struggles in high school and how I found hope, strength, and inner beauty from God to change my viewpoint on who I was as a person, and the difficult process that this was and still is from time to time.

I will post sections of the piece from time to time. Some of it will be cliche and some of it will be unedited, because mainly I have never written anything on this scale before, so it's bound to have mistakes. It's called "Chasing Sunsets" and the first part is the Introduction that I would like to call "Sixteen and Gray". Enjoy.

INTRODUCTION---"Sixteen and Gray"

I remember feeling gray. Not the old, crusty, turning-seventy-type of gray, rather, the gray that comes with a knowledge of guilt. I’m talking about the gray that is first felt by a teenager who realizes the safety net, pulled out in the middle of a three-ring circus that we call life, is gone. Gone are the parents who always held you after you fell and would give band-aids with the design of Spongebob Squarepants. Gone is the age where mistakes had no consequence, and the worst punishment would be a scolding and a spank. Gone are those times when you could spend the entire summer playing with toys alone or with a friend or two in a 10-minute attention span maximum or taking naps and coming up with new imaginary friends named George.



I remember being sixteen, gray and uncertain. There’s a turn when you hit high school, small and undetectable, a click in the brain that signals rebellion. The feelings tug at the heartstrings, hormonal impulses hit like bullets, and branching out on your own plays out in experimental ways like a guy’s decision to ramp the twenty foot stair railing that leads upward toward the school entrance or like a girl’s decision to wear black mascara and eyeliner with a new secretly bought spiked collar and black fish net stockings to finish the ensemble.

Sixteen is gray, not because you have lost all innocence, but because the world you thought you knew is now a much scarier, darker, more overwhelming world than you had ever imagined it, even at fifteen, when you are forced to immerse yourself inside the black of temptation. It is gray because you still have hope and you still see the beauty somewhere out there in the magazines, in the way the popular ones are worshipped, the way the toughest men are admired, but you forget to find it in the only place where it matters, the only place you overlooked. You are sixteen and gray because it has not yet dawned on you to think that the world is more than just being black or white, scathed or unscathed, a leper or a saint. We are sixteen and gray until we realize that the color we look so hard for in life is begging to be acknowledged and released from within.