Another day another smile

I find it very hard to get through a day without smiling.  Not because a smile is intrinsic to my being, it's not, I've often been described as having a quite somber looking countenance, but there are so many things around me that cause me to smirk, grin and smile that it becomes routine for me.

From watching my daughter play on the swing, singing a song she has in her heart, or my oldest son doing math for no other reason then to simply know the answer to different questions, always running around shouting; 'what's 1 plus 1 again' or 'what's 5 plus 4' and even 'what's 100 plus 100'.  He'll be the math genius of the house for sure.  Then there's the baby, who changes moods as often as we change his diaper, but when he gets into a good mood, everyone in the house knows it.  He sings, talks, laughs, jumps, swings, and smiles, none of which is for our entertainment, but one would swear he is just trying to lighten the mood and change the day for the better.  Baseball makes me smile, it may cause you to sleep, but I get joy from watching all that happens in those 3 hours.  Dirt even makes me smile, maybe that's because I'm a guy, but I like dirt.

Yet with all the reasons to smile there is a burden in my heart that I can not escape, it haunts me day and night, leaving no room for joy.  Only this burden is not a health concern, or a lost pet, or a financial crisis.  It goes much deeper then all of these concerns and others could imagine.  This burden I have is the lose of hope in our community and specifically the new teenage generation.

Around my house and church you will hear me talk about it all the time, I often proclaim "I want to spread hope to our youth and to this city, they need to know they were made to bring change and that they are crafted for greatness."  I have many great ideas to accomplish this task as well, but in the last year only a few have taken form, maybe I am too much of a zealot for hope, perhaps I am over reaching on the issue.  But what I see are families that follow a generational strong hold that no one is either willing or able to break free from.  This needs to change, there is a hope for greater things and there needs to be a desire to be a catalyst for the change.  I am willing to champion the cause, if others will soldier it.

Hope is not a word that can be taken lightly, it's like saying I love cheese in the same sentence as I love my wife, the too do not fit well.  Taking hope as a word that brings a desire for small temporal changes lowers the effectiveness when we look at the importance it can play in our everyday life.  'I hope I get a new iPod' has no weight when placed beside 'we hope this isn't cancer' yet for some reason both statements mean the world to the person saying them.  Why?  When and where did the desire for more objects begin to line up with need for whole health?  Here's one I overheard from a teenager, "I hope they breakup so I can date him" is placing pain in one persons life really worth a little pleasure in yours, is it something to hope for?  That view point, hoping for one girls emotions to be utterly crushed, has no place in daily life until someone else sees her boyfriend and thinks, I wish he was mine.  Line that thought up with hoping your position at the place you work will last through the recession, or hoping the oil spill will stop and not cause too much more damage.  Where does the importance lay now?  With the work place and the oil spill?  Not for that teenage girl, she'd rather have the man and let the earth take care of itself, we hope for what we see and what is consuming us at the moment, all of us are different, but not all 'hopes' have equal consequence or gravity.

The point is that I have a burning in my spirit to bring about real hope to the generation I work with on a daily basis, to show them that self esteem and self worth are not just words and a state of mind that we all struggle with but that when you really grab a hold of what hope is, you can change not just your own life, but you can literally change the world.

Stop taking it lightly, hope.  Stop abusing the word, the movement and the shift in culture.  Find a way to spread hope to those around you, even for just one day, then you'll see why I am so passionate about bringing it into the world.

Hope, like love, is needed by all of us.  If not for hope we would all be lost, if not for hope hospitals would close, if not for hope convicts would all be executed.

Because of hope, today I smiled, but because of hope I hurt.  The pain of 10 000 people sits on my shoulders, their lives, desires, passions and yes their hopes.  They haven't placed it all there, I have.  I have done so because I have a burden that they will some day have a deeper hope, one that drives them to change the world.  Until then I will find my reason to smile and I will be driven by my burden to spread hope.

The mind is a terrible thing

I thought about blogging on my last few weeks of life, my dental cleaning, time away with the youth at convention surrounded by 900 teenagers who were enraged with hormones and overwhelmed by a very real presence of God, possibly talk about the ongoing destruction of 20 some gardens while in the process of attempting to reclaim our backyard all the while knowing that next year the poppies will be everywhere. Maybe I should share about my now growing state of being highly agitated and easily irritated, should I repent here publicly of my road rage and how I contemplate throwing golf balls out of my sun roof at the 'bad drivers' with no real intention of ever following up on those envisioned destructive moments.  How about the possibly justified offense towards christian radio, or maybe the unproven first impressions rule of conversation and relationships.  So many things that I could ramble about aimlessly for many non progressive paragraphs all of which would turn into another run on sentence or unfinished thought.

So I choose instead to blog about my mind that right now seems so jumbled and mixed up that to even concentrate on writing this I have to blast out some old school Skillet from my macbook speakers, because I'm too lazy to reach for the ear buds or plug in the external dell speakers that are both sitting mere feet from my current position at the desk in my office.  So I type with speakers at half to not ruin their small ability to produce sound.

This is the way my life has been lately, a pile of thoughts that have no conclusion and lead me astray from any task, taking away all effectiveness and bring motivation and process to a grinding stop or a giant crash like a broken track under Bennet's Thomas trains as they so valiantly attempt to negotiate the quickly deteriorating bridge he has hastily built for them.  Why am I so unable to maintain one thought, where is the work ethic I had last week, I start researching and preparing for various things and my mind goes to next weeks softball game and the line up we need to prepare.  Even at lunch as I drive home to kill some "weeds" and make room for grass I find my self embracing the thought of sitting down for a few hours to play video games and forget about the building piles of clean laundry I have neglected.  CD's over what's next.... POD nice.

Even that last thought got me thinking about why I am getting offended at Christian radio, whole other well thought out and carefully written post, maybe next week?

I heard it once so plainly stated and basically explained that a man's brain is made up of many boxes where different areas of life exist, one for house work, one for office work, one for family, one for friends, various boxes each one having one purpose, one idea, one need within them, and they rarely if ever are opened more then two at once, which is why men are horrible at multitasking and making then keeping appointments.  We cannot operate in a state of multiple thought processes, we concentrate on one thing at a time and when we need to go to a new idea we close that box and when frustrated we go to the nothing box, and YES this does exist.  Women on the other hand have a brain that looks like a bowl of spaghetti noodles, everything intertwined all touching each other with the ability to think about many different things at once and actually carry out a distinct thought process on one topic, have a  conversation about another and work on three projects all at the same time.  Here's where the problem comes into existence with my current state of confusion and adult a.d.d.  My nothing box is full of everything else, every box is open at once and every thought and area of life is invading my brain until the point I find a way to shut them down and go to sleep, or when my body just shuts down and I vanish from full consciousness to instant rem sleep, no really this is happening.  New CD again.... Hip Hope Hits 2005, wow those are some old jams!

So while this blog may not appear to be like the previous two, it kind of explains why it's been so many weeks since my last posting, my brain appears to hate me and doesn't allow me to write at a constant pace for more then 5-10 minutes.  K so 3 CD's later about one hour and this is my post.  Time to pick up the kids and go home for a couple hours before returning to shock the minds of our youth with the idea of God's glory being revealed.  Until next time, thanks for reading.