Crawling out, catching up

Well, when I got the "ok, where are you?" note from br'er John in Florida, I knew it was time to crawl out of my hole...

I wish I could say, "Gee, what happened? How'd it end up almost a month since I last posted?" But it's much easier than that. I've been in a funk, and I just have been particularly uninspired to sit down and write.

Oh, I've had plenty to write about, too. But I just couldn't kick it - and didn't really know why, until this weekend. Mother's Day weekend. Mother's Day weekend, 2007.

Mother's Day weekend has become the traditional graduation day for many colleges and universities...including the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Yes, Mother's Day 2007 would have been my graduation day, if I'd stayed. If I'd been able to stay....if, if, if. Blah, blah, blah.

Classic signs of depression show up. Not cleaning my room. Laundry piling up. Exercising stopped. And I have been largely just going through the motions.

Good things have come, despite my best efforts. It looks like I can find a place to land at a local Lutheran church that seems to have some good stuff going. I have also started working with a start-up chapter of the DeMolay youth fraternity in Van Wert, OH, about a hundred miles south of Toledo, and finding some blessing there. I'm still going to meetings, still working with sponsees, and working on a long-overdue 4th-step inventory.

But I have to admit that at the end of the day (or even at the beginning of it), I've been pretty uninspired to write - despite the blessings I know come from it.

Which brings me back to John, and another kick-in-the-pants from a long-dead inspiration:

Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write.

Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating day can be "redeemed" by writing about it. By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others too.
(Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey)

OK, OK. I get the point...

This is the hope of this current personal inventory - to let go of the "might have beens" of the past. There is no way to make "the way it was" become "the way it could have been." None. I am where I am - and many of you who have read here regularly have told me that life is better because I'm here, and not there. My prayer is that I can get the Greek chorus (koine Greek, of course...) to agree.

To Laila, Dirk, Ben, Tom G., and all the folks whose journey at LSTC ended yesterday, blessings and congratulations. I am glad for you - even though a part of me still wishes I was with you. But we are walking different roads, for now.

And that's OK, I guess.