Someone Else

Last few weeks have blown by like the wind. As I go over the events of the days, I remember snippets. The Da Capo day at Midlothian days, leading the choir in JLM at HRBC, repetitive stress disorder as a result of the customer experience meetings, business meeting upon business meeting... If I were to judge the last month by any objective standards, I have been a success. I have conditioned my environment and set up levers to approximate control but it is an illusion. Only reacting is not controlling. As I go through the days, I am like a machine... I make decisions, talk with friends and family and I say the right things to get the job done. I am numb, the passion that was once so prevalent in everything I did is harder to find now. I am older, more experienced, more "mature", farther away from God. I am more self sufficient, more respectable, more established. I am successful. I love my wife and children, and I love the new things we are doing with Da Capo.

All that said, I feel disconnected. For the first time in my naive world experience, I go to work only to earn the paycheck and so that I can prove my "worth" and get respect. The entire system is a charade when I am at work. I feel like Pagliacci as I wear my clown face and sing. The world makes me into someone else. I allow it and am powerless to stop it. Asking for help achieves nothing material, my friends don't fully understand. Or maybe they just aren't close enough friends that I can really share this sort of frustration. My feelings don't stem for doing more or less, they stem from my identity.

I began this entire blog with a treatise on identity and priorities, and now, so many months later.. I still write the same tired questioning words. I am weary and confused and I with I could be more sure of my direction.

The burden of being a leader is heavy when my self confidence is so shaken. My words speak of assurance as the holy spirit works through me to small groups and sunday school life groups. As correct as they are, I wonder what the real me would say. I am a vessel. I pray that I will continue to be used by God and that I will not stray to my own desires, passions and ego.

Writing is therapeutic for me, the stream of energy somehow dissipates after it has been released and put into the computer for others to have access to. Sharing access to my thinking is a strangely private and public event all wrapped into one. I hope that my thinking can help to inspire someone else, in some other time, on some other day.

My God is an awesome God. He exists outside of time, beyond my comprehension, and yet he cares for and loves me as one of his children, his son.

Lord, Jesus, Christ, Have mercy on me.