waking up

This past weekend was the most busy weekend of my life. I drove down to LA to make it down for Robert’s birthday and just to see old friends. It was probably the most stressful time I’ve ever had with the goal in mind of just purely having fun and hanging out.  It didn’t help that it started and ended with stressful stuff (car broke down, got towed, got a rental on the way down, picked up my car in bakersfield, went straight to work in SJ for the way back up).

I am not Superman™. I need downtime. But even while I was hanging out with old friends, I was still packing each day full of time with people.  I surpassed my own limitations of extroverted-ness trying to relive old glory days or just catch up with too many people.  Angela said something pretty profound… “With old friends, you feel like you have to make up for lost time, but it’s not possible.”  With the people closest to me (Robert or Moe or Mike), though, it just feels like we pick up wherever we left off, which is nice.

Overall, the trip was good, bittersweet… definitely more enjoyable than the trip I took when I quit Guitar Center and came down all emotionally beaten from life, feeling uprooted, lonely, and confused by the transition to San Jose/working/Haven. That was a tough trip, filled with many moments of self-doubt.

I saw how much I really missed Robert (practically my brother; lived with the guy for two years).  I asked Robert if he thought our paths would ever cross again. And I keep “prophesying” that we will start a church together. Hahahaha…  But hey, if it ever did happen, it could be a matter of a few years from now.

Questions arise again as to what my old group of friends is up to, whether we are “living it right” or missing the point (as if there were no gray areas).  But I think something resounds above it all… this question of faithfulness:  Are we being faithful?  The opportunities we are given, the family we are born into, the friendships we have, our money, our time… are we being faithful to God in all of them?  I think faithfulness is extremely important because we don’t really ever have the oft-hoped for picture of what God wants from us, the cystal clear vision God has for our lives.  Vision is important, don’t get me wrong…  But we cannot neglect the now, the very immediate moment where the seemingly small choices we make today shape who we are becoming.

I told Elton in an e-mail before I knew I was coming to San Jose that I was learning that you cannot pick and choose what to be faithful with, and that all of life is to be brought under the lordship of Jesus.  Crazy how that is still the case two years later, and even truer now.