i can't be you

when I check blogs, I am often left with a sense of wonder.

Amazement at the friend who passionately searches out video clips and weaves them as a story of his life.

Amazement at friends who hug trees and then write deep thoughts about it.

Amazement at the friend who seeks to benefit from difficult circumstances in his own life.

Amazement at friends who feel and think deeply.

Amazement that I am looked at with wonder myself.

This last one has really hit me tonight. If you never check out Amsterdam Asp, click on it now, and come back. This can wait. Now if you followed instructions, you will have seen a ridiculous picture of me and a ridiculously kind write-up by my beloved brother Eric. Even though the dominating adjective is "crazy," my eccentricities are also labeled daring, avant garde, and creative. In his words I hear that the linkage between cool and rebel is still alive and well, even if its poster boy, James Dean, no longer walks among us. Now the classic back-and-forth between Eric and me is the longing for what the other possesses. This is human nature. Wouldn't it be great if I could be daring, and yet still be calculating? The fact is, I like Eric's list of attributes a lot more than my own. Sure, when you live in that skin for a few decades, you start to feel like "conservative" equals "stuffy" and "careful" equals "cowardly" (or something along those lines). But from inside my own skin, I don't feel daring, creative, avant garde, etc. I feel flighty, reckless, rebellious (and not in a cool James Dean way), chameleon-like ("Creativity is but judicious imitation."), foolish, and regretful.

So I can't be video guy, or deep thoughts guy, or book-devourer guy, or emo-guy, or brave-face-guy, or any other number of guys I wish I could morph into. I can't be you. And here's the tricky part: I'm finding I can't even be me.

The guy I was, the accumulated attributes that amounted to a hopelessly uncool individual, are breaking me. The patterns and habits and rituals and thoughts and motives and processes are draining the life out of me. Even the new thoughts and the new angles and the expanded horizons and the struggle to embrace "facts" have left only doubt, and brought no peace nor no real enlightenment.

I can't go back. I can't become who I was prior to all these things. I don't really know where to charge forward to, and charging forward has tended to land me in all kinds of trouble. I can only admit that I'm broken, and I need to be healed. I can only admit that I am lost--"lost enough to let myself be led." So I'm living in this desperate attempt (inspired by Frank Laubauch in "Letters by a Modern Mystic") to always be with Jesus. To always think of him and talk to him and listen to him. And believe me, I'm terrible at it. But I'd rather be terrible at that, than attempt to do what I was doing before and continue to be terrible there.