And then I felt the need to explain why it was going so great. But I had no answer.

So I said, “I don’t fully understand it, but I guess I don’t have to understand something to enjoy it.”

Reconcile

Why do we feel the need to reconcile everything? Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we learn to account for every penny, dot every ‘i’, cross every ‘t’, and have a reason for everything that happens.

Everything must happen for a reason. Everything must have an explanation. Everything must be earned, everything we have must be deserved.

Wonder

My son Austin does not know why the coffee grinder makes such an awesomely loud noise. He has no idea what it’s doing. But he loves it. And every morning, when I turn it on, his face breaks into a huge 8-tooth grin.

He also thinks opening and closing doors is awesome.

Have you ever stood next to a huge waterfall? Close enough to feel the mist as the water crashes on the rocks? Me neither. But I have a good imagination.

I imagine the feeling of extreme smallness.  The realization of how powerless I am next to such a force of nature. And then there’s the impossible quantity of water that flows over that waterfall every day.

It just. Keeps. Going. Every day. All day. It never stops. Even though I understand how water gets from there to here, the sheer magnitude and scale of the thing boggles my mind.

So at some point, I just stop trying. I stop trying to figure out how it all keeps working, and I simply stand there like Austin by the coffee grinder, with a big grin on my face.

And on some level, I hear myself say:

“That. Is. Awesome.”

Unfair

Bad things sometimes happen to good people. For reasons we can’t explain. Evil people sometimes prosper. And we can’t explain why they’re not dead.

Sometimes we don’t know the whole story. Sometimes we know just enough to drive ourselves crazy while we try to balance the scale.

We try to explain tragedy, justify blessing, validate increase, and reconcile loss. We just want everything to make sense. But sometimes it doesn’t.

In this life you will see and probably experience suffering. Some of it will be because of decisions you’ve made. But some of it will not be.

You will tire of people trying to explain it, giving reasons. Long after you’ve stopped trying to justify your suffering, people around you will still feel the need to explain it, not for your sake, but for their own.

You’ll also experience blessing. Sometimes as a result of your decisions. Other times, not.

Oh You Shouldn’t Have….

Nobody likes giving a gift to someone who doesn’t know how to receive gratefully. You’re excited because you know it’s something they’ll love.

All you want is to see them enjoy it.

You’re not giving it because they deserve it, you’re not giving it to get something in return.

All you want is to see them enjoy it.

But when you give it to them, they get all weird, acting like they’re ashamed to be getting it, trying to think of something they can give you in return. Trying to figure out why they deserve what you’re giving them.

And all you wanted was to see them enjoy it.

I’m That Guy

So when I find myself trying to explain why the guitar lesson business is thriving, and justify it’s success, I have to ask myself “Am I that guy?”

Am I the guy who can’t enjoy something unless I think I deserve it? Am I that guy who can’t enjoy something unless I completely understand it?

Maybe I need to simply look at it like that waterfall, appreciate it’s awesomeness, stop trying to understand it, and just be willing to say:

“That. Is. Awesome”

Nothing ruins a good action movie like the main character drifting off into some daydream sequence, away in some peaceful place with his family……

When I watched "The Gladiator" with Russell Crow years ago, I was in awe.  That’s the kind of movie that makes you want to be noble, to do the right thing, and in some weird way learn how to fight with a sword.  Eventually reality sets in the next time you get a paper cut and are tempted to cry about it…but I digress.

The only part I didn’t like about that movie is that Maximus, the big tough Roman Army General turned rebel gladiator, kept having this re-occurring dream sequence where he’d be walking through a field towards his family.  For a long time I just though that the director had included that part of the movie to be artistic, to give the main character some depth.  And I thought it was a waste.

I wanted to see action! I wanted to see Maximus take control of the army, to fight some more battles.  To restore the glory of Rome.  And to give my my money’s worth for the ticket I bought to live vicariously through this movie as an ancient superhero.

Alas, it was not to be.  Maximus dies, and floats away through the grass to his family.  But now, at the young old age of 31, with a life that seems more cluttered than the office I sit in, with too few hours in the day to have both a job and hobbies, I finally understand why the gladiator daydreamed.

At a certain point in your life, you long for the action, for the glory.  You have a point to prove, and you’ll do anything to prove it.  To be peaceful is to be boring.  To be resting is to be wasting time.  So you go out and pack your life full of the things you think you need to do, only to find that they high they bring is only temporary.  It’s never enough, no victory is good enough.

So one day you stop and look around at your life and think "What am I doing?"  "Where is this going to end?".  You take a look around at all the unnecessary things in your life that you’ve been chasing, and all of a sudden you feel like one of those horses pulling a chariot, and the stress of being driven around the ring of life has left you with a tired mind, and an empty soul.

For a while you don’t know what to do.  So you cry a little, get anxious a little, maybe get angry a little.  But at the end of the day, you’ve got a mess to clean up, and there’s no use getting angry about it, it won’t make it disappear any faster.  So you begin to clean up the cluttered mess that is your life.

At some point you begin to get a vision of a place you want to get to.  A peaceful place with only the essentials.  Free to take an evening with your wife to go down to the park without feeling like you’re leaving the world without a savior.  You imagine this place, and then the reality of your situation settles back in. 

But you know where you want to be.