my careless contagion

Can we try? Can we wade into this together, holding on to one another? This is such a beautiful thing. Please don't worry. Let's enjoy the journey. We don't have to see the whole way. We can trade knowing the future for knowing we're in this together. You and me and yours and mine. Let's do it. Let this thing we don't know what to do with grow from uncertainty to something we can't imagine living without. Please take my hand. I don't want to do this with anyone else.  This thing. It grows. It can take over our hearts silently. We wake and feel something undeniable blossoming within. Let's do this together and call it what we want. No one says it has to look a certain way or progress along a certain path. It's ours. We can take our time. We can press pause. We can jump ahead. Just as long as we do it together. We can meet. Talk. Lay in silence, you in my arms, and me keeping time to the sound of your gentle breathing and the sweet rhythm of your h...

I talked to the girl I love for a couple of hours yesterday. I love her dearly. It's impossible to express how much. One thing that became apparent years ago after she came back into my life (more than six years now) was how much she went through. The evidence was there. One of the first things she told me was she felt like a doormat. And then it was revealed she was neglected, abused, and cheated on. My heart went out to her because I endured much the same. I really hope she doesn't see this post in a negative light. It is a love letter of a different sort. I want her to know I will always be there for her and will do everything I can to protect her heart.  I don't know how deep the wounds go. Something tells me she put on a cheerful front for so long she doesn't even know. She is so used to distrusting she has to fight through her protective mechanisms and inclination to see my words and actions in a negative light. I pray to see her blossom and realize intimacy with ...

Waiting. Sometimes it drives us nuts. Sometimes it produces fruit like patience. Sometimes it does both. Hey, I'm not where I want to be in life, but I'm positive I am where God wants me to be at the moment.  Today, I said yes to a job (no start date yet, but the paperwork begins). There was no logical reason why I hadn't been able to get a job until now except God said it wasn't time. Yesterday it felt like the health problems making me feel incredibly tired and ill evaporated. I now know the cause of that feeling (low-level carbon monoxide poisoning). I wouldn't have been able to work very well in that condition. God's timing is not always our timing, but it is the best timing. This is an incredible load off my mind. All of that. Yes, when you ask God for something good, you will get it. But you may not get it right away. And there are reasons for that. I'm sorry it took me 44 years to learn that. I have to be okay with whatever God does. It is the best wa...

For this post, I reprise my role as Sad Keanu. Go away, bird. This post is a milestone — post number 300! I've been writing steadily for more than a year and a half (sometimes posting multiple times a day) about my various struggles. This space is a safe, healing place where I can fall apart and reassemble myself in front of a largely anonymous audience. In short, this is my therapy. But I need a break.  I've put so many thoughts and feelings here in a relatively short amount of time, and after my recent trip to Nebraska, I decided to slow down. There feels like a backlog of things I need to process. There are four drafts I have yet to post, three of which contain some beautiful sentiments, so I will post them. The fourth post I've been working on for weeks and is tentatively titled "Fifty reasons why I won't get the girl." I have not decided whether it will be seen or not. On one hand, it is part of my thought process and needs to be documented her...

Nebraska, you're not for everyone. But on this road trip, you were home to a great and unexpected blessing. Yes, I accomplished what I set out to do, which was to uncover what went wrong in my life. Not only that, but my expectations for this trip turned out to be inferior to how it actually unraveled.  It's clear, as I sit down to write this — the final post of my Nebraska retrospective — God chose to bless me on this trip. But you know what? It wouldn't have happened had I not said that prayer and put it in His hands. While the outcome may have looked obvious to anyone else, to me it did not look obvious. All I knew is I did not want to run afoul of God's plan or timing. That last sentence contains what I have learned in the last 20-plus years since I lived in Nebraska. Things are better left in God's hands than my own.  What went wrong all those years ago? I pushed God out of my life, leaving me to make dreadful decisions which took me far from His care....

In the book of Proverbs, there is a verse that says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." I believe this is a spiritual perishing, but what is true in the spiritual is often true in the physical, as well; otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have used physical truths to reveal spiritual truths. The two realities often reveal one another. I think of the physical realm as the tip of an iceberg. The spiritual realm is the unseen part. It looms much larger than we realize. But we get a sense of it through the physical realm.  While I've been engaged in a pretty intensive retrospective — a retrospective I am not done with, by the way — I have also been thinking quite a bit about my future. Do I have a vision for the future? Am I doomed to perish? Is it too soon? Does it matter? I mean, it feels like my life is over anyway. Given the sheer embarrassment my life has turned into, it's only natural I've retreated to a...

  I'm going to start by apologizing. This post is going to be pretty scattershot. I know this because my thoughts are scattershot right now. I can barely keep things in their proper boxes, much less make sense of them. So, sorry.  A while ago I mentioned three things I wrote on a Post-It note — things I pray about daily that bother me. I won't name them all, but I do want to mention one. Let's just say there are only two things on that Post-It now.  I prayed before this week began that God would allow something very positive to happen in my life this week. And it did. Not only that, but I got to cross one of those dreadful things off my prayer list. My old apartment has been rented, so I no longer have to pay rent for two places. I wondered why God would give me the go-ahead to move into a new place and then have that hang over my head. As it was, I only paid about $150 to cover last month because my landlord used my security deposit to cover the rest. It's h...

She lay beneath me on the bed as she said those words — "I'm never going to be enough for you, am I?" The smile on my face disappeared, and my eyes blinked and then closed. The words slowly started to rally in me, then came out in a measured cadence. I started with, "No, you're never going to be enough for me." I said that because, at the end of each day, no one is ever enough for any of us. We are needy creatures created with a hole in us that needs something greater than any human being who has ever lived, no matter how amazing. We are created with a hole that needs God. So, no, my beautiful, you're never going to be enough for me because of that hole. "But life is amazing, and so are you. You add beauty to each and every one of my days. Just knowing I get to come home to you makes my insides warm, even on the coldest day. You make me want to experience every day with you the rest of my days because I treasure you, because I love you, bec...

This may be the hardest thing she's ever been through. This thing I've helped set in motion has unfairly impacted her and her little ones. This thing ... is just another trauma in a string of unsettling, traumatizing events. She's shielded her little ones from his actions. But, she couldn't shield them from mine. No, I've not been the one to heal her. But, I pray for him, whoever he is. This is my prayer. I pray you're a man after God's own heart. You'll need to be. You'll need to be selfless and strong in something other than yourself, something other than those around you. You'll have to be strong in the Lord. There will be times you'll feel slighted, rejected, left out, unable to make progress. Put yourself aside. You'll have to trust God because you can't give in to discouragement. You'll have to be more than a man, and I'm sure you will be. I pray you have a healing touch, for this woman has been abused (there...

When I touch you, what does it mean to you? I may never know, as you are a mystery to me. A beautiful mystery, and you hide so much in your heart. Can I tell you what it would mean to me to touch you, to be with you, to make love to you someday?  It would be unlike anything I've had before, for you are unlike anyone I've ever known. I could tell you I'd be loyal and kind and tender and gentle and loving, but you already know that.  My love, I'd hold you like you fell from the stars. My fingers would speak for me, and my heart would be in my hands. Every caress would be an affirmation and a revolution.  I won't ever hurt you like he did. I know you can't believe that now. You'll never have to wonder where my heart is or what I'm thinking about when I'm with you. It will always be you. Even if I never have you and reluctantly have to let you go, it will always be you.  Laying with you would be a dream come true. Holding you would be incompr...

I could have written about my hangnails or something, as the instructor never read our work. One of the last things I had on my list to write about this summer was this pesky letter that's been haunting me since 5-6-1996. But, I first had to read the letter, which I didn't want to do, as it felt like a can of worms. But, I'm getting good at opening cans of worms. The first thing that struck me was how poorly written the letter was, how sloppy my handwriting was, and the fact that I included a blank page (?). But, it was an honest letter from a no-BS kid who was really glad to be done with the "hell" of high school. Little did I realize I would be launched into another academic abyss very soon. In many ways, going to a community college (for a kid who got a 29 on his ACT) was like going back to the 8th grade. I met the woman who would take up more than 20 years of my life on 5-6-1997, exactly a year after I wrote this letter to myself. What in...