Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

Four years ago my life was very different. My life then was about … well, me. There is not one single decision that I made that was not somehow wrapped up in helping me find happiness. Funny how pursuing your happiness at all costs is a very unhappy pursuit.

Since then Christ pulled me out of my gutter and I have happily worked to turn my life into service for others. That single minded approach to my time has kept me very busy. Leading a home group, mentoring a 14 autistic girl, volunteering at an inner city VBS and on and on… My life by design is poured out into others. Service to others creates in me satisfaction that lets me know I was created for it. I say this not out of arrogance but out of concern because I have discovered an unintended problem to a life of service.

When everything in your life is about somebody else, you tend to ignore the monsters in your own head until something comes along to shed light the stuff you didn’t even know was there. Dark corners dressed with the cobwebs of time have been hiding issues that have flown under the radar for years. Their discovery produces an uncomfortable angst that settles into my days as I struggle to find the right choices between two unfairly matched opponents.

The good in me is nothing more than a whisper. Just planting thoughts here and there designed to make me think. Never demanding, never making it hard for me to make the wrong decision. Just asking me to think and pay attention to what I might normally ignore.

The bad in me is more like a roaring lion looking to devour anything good in me that would choose the Lord. This side in me makes it extremely difficult to make the right choice even though I know it is the better one. A quote from C.S. Lewis helps put into words what I am discovering about myself…

"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." - C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I find myself wanted to trade myself in for a less confusing model all of the time. How is it possible to be 30 and 4 all at the same time? What I do know that it is okay to not be okay, just not okay to stay there. Looks like I’m going to start heading back to CR.

Read: 1 Kings 19:9-13
Ask: Why do you think God would choose to speak to Elijah in a whisper?
Ask: How can you apply this situation to your life?
Read: Romans 12:2
Ask: What areas of your life have you not been renewing?

I sometimes forget how small my existence is in the scheme of things and am usually rudely jerked out of my inwardly focused trance with a blog in mind.

Vancouver is a beautiful place. When I first arrived, I walked along the harbor observing my surroundings. A flock of geese grazed to my left and in the harbor to my right, people were kayaking and tossing balls in the water for their dogs to chase. A handful of sparrows jetted in front of me and all around me were groups of people playing with their kids, grilling out and chatting over local wines. The area was full of people enjoying each other but it was 5 PM which means that they all had to get off work early to be here by now. My first glimpse what kinds of ideas frame this place.

The skyline is littered with tall condos and all of these buildings far out way the office buildings. So, the question is, were do all these people work? I imagine that you can find them at Starbucks, restaurants, manning gas stations as well as in the office buildings. While I was there, only one young person served me my coffee or brought me my breakfast. I guess they think that your job doesn’t define you and that careers aren’t the main focus. Weirdos.

The city is nice but it isn’t new. Most of my meetings were in buildings that would be considered run down in Dallas. In fact, my first meeting was with the Canadian Country Station of the Year for the last three years and when I walked into the lobby, I thought I went in the wrong building. They obviously built the building in the 70’s, moved in and have never renovated. There is nothing really wrong with it. It just smelled musty and everything is orange and peeling. Almost all of the buildings are like that.

I watched a man dig through the trash behind my hotel, but he wasn’t looking for food. He was foraging through everything that we threw away and organizing it into piles. Glass bottles here, cans there. He was making a living off what we threw away. While he was digging, a ton of other trash fell out of the dumpster on the ground. When he was done, he cleaned all of the extra trash up and made sure that it looked like it did before he got there.

Life is just different there. White people are the minority. Homeless people are considerate of their surroundings. People care more about what they are doing after work than work itself.

At the end of my trip after I had observed all of this, I felt really weird. Like I had stumbled past the lamp post into some fantasy world that didn’t really exist. Was I the weirdo? Were my ideas of life shallow? Was this the real world or was the world I came from real?

As I considered staying in this place and abandoning everything that I previously knew to be true, I settled into my seat on the plane flying direct back to Dallas. And then I was jetted back to “reality” by conversations flowing around me.

“Your shoes are so cute, where did you get them……I am going to e-mail George and let him know that I saw his name in the paper…….I don’t give a –bleep- if we missed the numbers, they are just going to have to deal with it.”

Ah, Dallas and real life. The question now is, do I tell my klan about the world I saw beyond the lamp post? Will they call me a hippie and roll their eyes? Will they send me back there? But more importantly, will I be different? I hope so.