Imposing Chaos

My first reaction when things aren't going my way is always to do more, to become busier, and to impose ever more structure on the life that I'm living. It isn't the most effective thing to say the least, to find something crumbling to pieces and scramble to build a wall around it fast enough that all is not lost. Needless to say, it's quite stressful and, despite its surface appeal, completely ineffective.

So I've tried a million times to explain to everyone that I know and love and to the senatorial nomination committees why exactly I left the security of finishing school with a guaranteed 5-year job for free and came here. The economy just did a nose-dive and the world seems as though it couldn't be any less certain, and yet, here I am.

Here I am at the heart of the entertainment industry in the heart of a city I wasn't even really interested in visiting 'ministering' to a group that I didn't even know existed before I got here. I came here with a desire to be challenged and stretched, and it is true that every moment of the day I find some part of me stretched so far that I can hardly believe what I am seeing. All around me is chaos.

I am struggling with it. Well, mostly I am stomping my feet and shaking my fists. I don't have any control over the hundreds of lives that I touch or am touched by throughout each and ever day. In most of them, I don't even have a real stock. I am also not in control of how they affect me day in and day out.

The heart and soul of America is here, all around me. The beauty and the majesty of this country is in every building and especially in the palm trees that tickle the sky. I cannot control anything that is around me and very little of what is on the inside. These kids, these homeless, these ladies next door are reminding me day in and day out what it means to be a citizen of this country, and what is so crucial to protect. . . but are they mine to protect?

I have so many questions to answer this year - I only hope that I will find that balance between trying to have everything set up most all of the time and letting go. I hope that the answers to most of those questions will be revealed to me in my time here, and I thank God for this blessing of being able to come here and to experience this.

This will be a year of questions, but a year of answers also.

More later, perhaps more coherent thoughts; it's bed time!