Things I'm Struck By Today

Call these personal realizations, "oh, okay" moments, or just plain better sense finally breaking through to me, but I've got a few things on my mind of the should-it-really-have-been-that-hard-for-me-to-learn variety.

Tom Petty Said It Best
"The waiting is the hardest part." Lately I've identified areas of my life in which I'm "waiting on God" for what's next: housing, family, etc. Somewhere along the way, something in me interpreted that to mean, "I'm waiting on God and doing nothing in the meantime." Somehow, I need to get from there to a place where I'm living as if I'm lacking nothing. Because I have everything I need. When you think about what it means that the shield of faith extinguishes the flaming darts of the evil one, maybe it means you use it to keep all those hundreds (thousands?) of advertising messages - that bombard you constantly each day - from sinking in and convincing you, "Ooh, I need that." (Hasn't someone done the math on this? I wonder how many of these get hurled at us on an average day.) So I suppose, if I could piggyback off Mr. Petty, I'd say something like, "Waiting on God doesn't mean sitting around." (Which, admittedly, doesn't make for near as cool of a song line, but I've never exactly owned the market on cool.)

Nuance Doesn't Convey
I was watching some talk show or news cast or something of the sort the other day where they were talking about Barack Obama. Sorry if I botch the details, but what I remember was that they said he was at some kind of press conference, talking about trying to raise the general tone of campaigning above attacks and back-and-forth bickering, and at the end of his speech, the audience was basically silent. He had been very careful to state his position tactfully, or at least that's the picture that was painted of the event. Finally, someone broke the silence with, "Did you change your hair?"

God Bless America.

Whether or not the event really went down exactly like that, it's a picture with fresh relevance for me. So a couple of weeks ago in my performance review I had mentioned that I'd be willing at some point to take on some new projects, as time allows, while emphasizing that I wasn't in any hurry to do so, but that now was a good time for this, seeing as the summer isn't a busy time for our project at all. Now, I know for a fact my boss caught all the nuance bundled up in my little spiel. So I don't blame her for the fact that the next week, one of our administrators came up to me, asked me to come to her office to talk about some new projects, prefacing the entire conversation with, "So I hear you're bored."

The feeling is not unlike buying an expensive piece of chocolate to send via international mail to a relative living halfway around the world, only to have it shipped wrong and get sidetracked all over the globe, finally arriving at your relative's smushed and eaten by worms that it picked up somewhere en route. Oh, and then the relative calls you and gives you an earful about how you should have insured it. Something like that, at least.

Anyways, said admin tells me of a project I can help another coworker with. Said coworker comes to me later that week to talk to me about said project, and, no lie, this is what she says, "So I hear you're bored."

To those of you women who read my blog, I must say that while I respect your intuition and your ability to far outpace us males in terms of the general accuracy of the conclusions you jump to, I must also remind you, as the great Dumbledore once said, "With great power comes great responsibility." Ladies, please use your intuition and assuming wisely and with caution. Please, for once, take the lead of us men when it comes to wielding dangerous weapons: we don't mess around with things that can blow up in our faces, as you'll observe when we're handling guns (all the men I know are extremely cautious, even when around other men who are equally cautious). For those of you ladies who have already attained to a measure of wisdom in this, there are plenty of others around who could gain from your example! God bless you.

God Bless America.