FWIW

There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. - Steinbeck

I'm fresh off of what I can authoritatively speak to as the worst month of my life.

Some of it was the travel. I'm on a new project - consulting with Walgreen's outside of Chicago, so I'm there Monday morning through Thursday evening on your typical week. I flew out there and worked the week before Christmas, and then flew home to California from there. After Christmas with the folks I flew down to Dallas / Ft. Worth for the wonderful wedding of one of my best college friends, Kathleen - she was wedded on New Years Eve. After New Years it was back to Chicago for more work, and then home. All told, nearly a month not in my own home. As an aside: for so many years I resisted calling a place not in California my home, but that paradigm has certainly shifted at this point. You get to missing your own bed.

Some of it was the work situation - there's a lot of it, I'm in an area I don't have particular expertise in, we're behind schedule, and if all that were not enough, we have management that is jerking us around on the hotels we out-of-towners are staying in. At this point we've worked our way back into the relative luxury of a freakin Courtyard, relative to where we've been the last couple of weeks. There's a Westin just down the street that is delightful, that other people from my company on other projects are not restricted from staying in, but apparently that's just too good for me, for the extra few dollars a night. And I'm going to be out there for more than a few months.

Some of it was the quasi-relationship I have or have not had for the past few months as the case may be. Long story short I met a fabulous young lady that (from my point of view) works on paper just great, but I just don't get the feeling that the timing / etc. is going to work out. Its quite maddening - which if you know my history I'm sure you can begin to understand. She's been out of town for the month, so February should be interesting.

Certainly a huge part of it is the "is this all there is?" whisper I've been hearing from the dark corners of my heart lately. I've completely lost any passion for work, but what's worse I've lost most hope / positivity on other options - going back to school, finding some other line of life pursuit, etc.. And its not just work - I haven't had the desire to write, to read, even the one day of skiing I got in so far this year seemed an empty experience next to any other day I've ever spent on snow.

And then of course there was Christmas. Long story short I had a certain part of my reality turned on its ear - and certain things in my life will never be the same. It wasn't the best time for me to find out what I did, but in retrospect, it was the right time. That's really all I can say about it at this point, and probably ever.

Its just been really, really tough.

But thank God that's not why I'm posting this.

What I am simply amazed by as I type this out is the "strength for today" I've been granted in these darker times. I may not have the "bright hope for tomorrow" at this point, but at the very least, if I can look back upon days of strength granted, I can hope for at least that much in the future - I just need to keep telling myself that.

I have this strength because, in large part, God was preparing me for this time over the past year. At least one way that comes to mind is through my pastor's preaching. I've been listening to him for almost 5 years now, and while his underlying theme is usually one focused at communicating the gospel message to those in need of it, there are the recurring side-themes that I benefit from in different ways. This past year, one new thing I began hearing was that, for most of us, its not until your mid-twenties to mid-thirties that life starts really throwing you the big curve balls that begin to help you define your true character and hopefully find that its rooted in Christ. These curve balls come primarily due to the consequences of sin - whether they be damaged relationships, intimate betrayals, the loss of health in one's self or a loved one, or sin's temporary triumph of death - and the important thing to realize is that they are indeed coming.

That said, I just wanted to throw this out there for the times that you may be down. I feel there's two important applications of thrusting the pain of real suffering into your horizon. The first thing is - in the down times, think about where your down is: are you down, or are you really down? You may be the latter, but most times its just a concentration of the former - in which case you need to think about all the wonderful things that you are blessed with right now, rather than the one or two in particular you might not yet be.

And the second thing is that, yes, the big drops on the roller coaster of life are indeed around the corner, if you haven't yet already been in one. But there's hope in the fact that God only ever gives us enough grace for one day at a time: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own troubles."

But there's an even greater hope in the fact that our God is one who knows where we are when we do suffer. To paraphrase my pastor, the Cross may not tell us why suffering can happen, but it clearly shows us that it can *not* be because He does not love us. We have a God who walks with us when we are in the shadows.

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened. - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov