wait until you are using your computer late late at night and then come back and look at this again. you will howl with laughter. howl.

how to protect yourself fully:
- do not close your eyes, ever.
- never breathe in too deep.
- if you find you are being carried away by the beauty of a song or a cinematic episode or a play or a painting: stop it - leave the room / forest - emit a low grumbling noise to block it out - focus your eyes elsewhere.
- as often as possible think about concrete or inanimate objects or things smaller than you - concentrating on plastic packaging works especially well.
- become one with your cellphone / laptop / internet receptacle.
- grit your teeth.
- stay indoors.
- don't communicate verbally.
- do not sing or skip. ever.
- avoid (at all costs) looking people in the eyes.

oh man. the postal service is working its way deeper and deeper into my brain. slowly wearing me down into a meditative / vegetative state. i am sitting in somebody else's (jeremy went to ecuador this morning) office and just hooked this laptop up to his much-better-than-i-anticipated speakers. it's like ben gibbard is right behind me. well sort of like that, except not as creepy. now, back to jesus.

this past sunday steve read a portion from a letter one of the first christians wrote to his friends in rome. it made me think a lot, even just remembering what Jesus said, and reconsidering what it means to live like he did. i wrote it out in my own words so i could think about it better.


thus far in my life i think i would have to say that i have done pretty poorly. going through those sentences just now, to try and put them in my own words, the thing that most stuck out to me was how simple the instructions are. and yet i still have so much trouble with them. i often think better of myself than i do of others. i am way more likely to talk badly of someone who talks badly about me than i am to wish good things for them. i don't really talk to God that often. and even my fellow Jesus-followers, sometimes i have a really hard time acting (or even thinking) charitably towards them. i would much rather hang out with the people who are like me than hang out with the people who are dressed in raggedy clothes and smell bad and perhaps "aren't all there". sometimes i am not sure how real the love i have for other people is. i am no Jesus, not even a little Jesus. but i have said all of this before, and i am quite sure that i will end up saying it all again.

i have long believed in, and a few times felt, a quietness that can invade a soul like a deep sleep. i cherish those times. this internship (or whatever you call it, following?) was meant to have some qualities that would lend itself to that sort of thing. embracing quietness, letting it take over. the house of t is a good place to do that. sometimes in the late evenings i will sit in the dark on the couch in the front room and hear only the quiet mumblings of the refrigerator.

i have been quite enjoying this time already. i am glad that i can do this. step back, think, reflect. already i find myself learning a lot about people, and about how to interact with them, when to be straight with them and when to be softer because they need it. i am also learning a lot about what i didn't really think about beforehand, about the mechanism of a church corpus, how different people think it should be put together or organized, or open for change or positioned for growth.

when i think of a church meeting i generally think this: small groups of people who really connect with one another, who share their experiences with each other, encourage each other to live and love the best way possible, to share and embrace the freedom and joy of the connection with Jesus as a community. to people who do not understand this or want to understand this it probably sounds like some sort of orwellian groupthink. but when i sit back to times i have had when i really felt like i was in that sort of community there is nothing sinister or malevolent or even foolish about it. but lately, i have come to realize that that is not the end of what local church means. i am still sorting it out. i am glad to be here to do it.

i am quite thankful for the people here. i am enjoying them a lot. and i don't mean to neglect this journal quite so much. maybe i will get better at it. : - ).

'One night I went for a walk by the sea along the empty shore. It was not gay, but neither was it sad... it was... beautiful. The deep-blue sky was flooded with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparklingly gem-like than at home - even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires. The sea was very deep ultramarine - the shore a sort of violet and faint russet, as I saw it.' - vvg, 1888