Open Issues / Report from the Crew

While I eat my massively greasy JPB-style Steak n Cheese sandwich and listen to Bloc Party thump in the family room, let me give you a similar update to what I gave the fine folks of our care group earlier this evening. (Last night, actually)

As some of you may know or remember, I had rough time with my job last year, feeling (and being) useless, excluded, and awkward all day every day, and being quite miserably unhappy many times.
It would be a disservice to let anyone keep thinking that is the case, and it would rob God of praise and appreciation that is due Him. I had a flash of realization as I walked toward the cullet silo this afternoon, striding by the furnace, pulling my gloves out: Here I am, DOING something! And not because someone told me to or I'm bored and wandering, but because I know what's going on, what needs to happen, and I need to know if the cullet getting run to the silo is wet or not.
I never have nothing to do, and haven't for a long time. I'm staying later and later, more oftener (for better or worse :-/), not because *that's what you do for your career*, but because there's stuff to do! I need to get caught up on the furnace, figure out where they should keep the refiner optical for the night, get the vibe at the tin bath, and finish my email to everybody summing up the day and instructing the night shift. There are days I walk around feeling like a million bucks, with a little inkling of thinking that maybe I'm a for-real working man, to stand next to people like Al and Earl and K-dog.
The coexistant flipside is the days like Wednesday, when I left the tin bath control room spewing violent frustration under my breath all the way to and around the furnace. That crew makes me feel like I'm being constantly mocked and laughed at by everyone, and I'm helplessly oblivious, with no respect and probably some animosity. Grates like fingernails on a chalkboard every second I'm around a certain group of the guys. And you know why they mock and ignore and discount me? Because I stink at this job! I can't make a single freaking decision on my own! Every step I think to take is wrong, and I just trip over myself again and dig myself deeper and miss some OTHER obvious thing. For the love of goodness, I can look at the furnace sheet for 30 minutes and turn away and not remember a single number! Bumbling over myself trying to report to superiors in the morning meeting, missing key factors in decisions, and utterly being NOT EARL. (My boss)
There is always at least a lurking fraction of that feeling during the days, but it is solidly overshadowed by the business and occasional satisfaction I described above it. Praise the Lord, even after a big Akron weekend flush with musical success, there was not one shred of unhappiness in going to work Monday morning. I didn't realize the degree of this blessing 'till I said it at care group. I can't remember the last time I didn't want to come to work, or not even mind or think about it. It's a real environment to me--alive with people, a dynamic & intriguing process, things to do, places to be, and good times to be had.
Now if I could just suck in a bunch of experience, flush out my brain's circuitry with contact cleaner, and be genuinely able to run the hot end! Untill I'm there, I am ill at ease.

That sandwich was SO GOOD ! I can feel the grease coming out of my pores already, but it was worth it. Mmmm. Yes, while everyone at work weighs in for the "Biggest Loser" competition, I'm running my own personal "Biggest Winner" campaign :-) So far I'm losing.

The second part of my update concerned the continuing drama of my spiritual quest.
Right now I'm in a good time. The best since last spring. So I don't want to recount and write down all the doubts, unanswered questions, self pity, victimization, sin, despair, dryness, deadness, and hopelessness I have been wading around in. Sometimes they have climbed up and ruled my day, but more often I walk about happily, even forgetting that at the end of the day, in the great gaping solitude of night, I have no real sureness that God actually exists, and the objective measures of my spiritual life are a thin film of oil on the dirty rainy ground... if you could even call it a spiritual life.
Dad reminds me that, be that all as it may, I am doing many objectively valuable and spiritually right things: serving a lot at church, not rebelling against home or parents or Christian friends, and not ditching the deep wisdom and provision of a solid job and chasing the fleeting fancies that get me all in a tizzy sometimes. At times I wrench at that very unchangingness, but in the end I suppose it's better to err on this side. ?. ??. I suppose. Dang folks, that one is hard.
But oh yeah -- this is a good time :-) It is! It started with a message about God's Word by Mike Pierson, from which God gave me a frank, "oh yeah.. let's do this" attitude that has resulted in reading Proverbs almost every night, genuinely poring down the pages for that great lady Wisdom that God extolls. I finally (i.e. God's inexplicable and independent grace) implemented the nagging feeling that I'm filling my head with music every spare moment, and not-God-things input = not-God-things mind and output. I've been listening to John Piper sermons to and from work, and they have been a key, humanly-persuasive (oh so persuasive!) voice inspiring me and making me feel like God is actually >real<. Struck with simple inspiration from a message on prayer, I have been getting together with Mike Q once a week to pray. To agree on earth concerning things, and change the world. Yeah! God has dropped frank faith on me for this, and looking at Jeremiah 39:12-14, I get a wisp of delicious hope that maybe things will actually change someday, and God "will be found by me." The jury is still out, and time will tell.
For now, I'm happy to be in a good time, and I'm ok with the unanswered questions hanging out there, and the lack of experience waiting to be resolved.

Now I have the microwaved rice bag sitting on my feet to try to keep them warm as cold air gradually fills the house. It's 2 am, and the heat kicks back to 50-something degrees way before then. Fingers cold, fleece zipped up to my chin... I'm flirting with sickness again, which apparently is nothing trite for my non-hardy body. Sucks to be someone like that.

Lastly, lest I forget such a great trip, here's the past weekend in Akron:
Earl let me go at noon Friday. I'm still surprised at how giddily good it felt to just DRIVE AWAY, halfway through the day!
We worked in the Chima's basement, which was lovely. I'll forever savor the mental image of the wood on the walls, the carpets on the floor-- couches on the far side, drums in the foreground, computer on the side ledge, cables and bags and pedals clogging the floor, long shadows in the darkness from the yellow lights across the room, the creeping seeping cold as the day got old, and the minutes of glorious warmth when the heater came on.
It was a weekend of low lows and dizzy highs. The lows are when limited time is already too much past, the part you're working on bears down on your shoulders with the weight of all the work it will still take to get it right, and the performance factor eats at your heart with fear since you could spend forever and even drive yourself further from actually playing it right in real time, when the record button is down. Oh that kills like little else. Just sucks you away on every level. But then I'd try the metronome in my headphones and suddenly KNOW that I could play those drums perfectly, perfectly on beat; and sit down there and beat them out and look at those six tracks on the computer and know that we had those drums! There, down for good, every time we play them back. I'm still dumbstruck by Brian's FLAWLESS and seamless double-tracking of his rhythm guitar (recording the same part over again on top of itself, exactly the same as he played it before. EXACTLY.), and I still relish the sweetness of those solid drums, bass and guitars together at the end of Saturday night. Sunday we finished the arrangement and recorded the last half of the song, which evolved through the entire weekend into something that has been stirring me almost to tears every time I listen to it. More travail, more crushing despair, and more exhilirating highs, ending with a movie-like scene where Steve sang out a flawless, perfect-pitch vocal track down in the dim basement as I sat in the chair and listened in increasing excitement and awe. As far as I'm concerned, this song blows away all of our previous material in terms of musical unity and vibrancy, and emotional depth and power.
Uh, other small details, we watched a stirring movie Friday night at the cheap theater with some folks, and Sunday I got up at 8:30 and had the first relaxed, pleasant Sunday morning in the past... 2 years? At least that I can remember. Long shower, non-stressed getting dressed and out the door, Starbucks, and time to talk at church. Wow!
Oh, and the weekend ended with the worst drive home ever. There is no reason I did not crash many times, and I never ever want to be that miserable and deathly sleepy and helpless again. I had to get home, I had to work the next day, I had to drive. Ugh, recounting it is unpleasant. Was it worth it for the song? I would not do it differently. Given another similar situation, I will cut the fun, pack it up, and head home. May 4:30 endure as the latest I ever get back home from Akron.

Ohh, the song has been delighting my heart! It's called "Sweeping Me," and I rescued it from being another stupid girl song and spurred us to these lyrics, with which I will end this post. I wrote most of the verses, which completed the preexisting chorus and bridge. It's basically an honest song about the tentative bud of love in our real Christian lives.

V1
How alike, how alone
How much longer, I want to know
Down in my heart, tucked away
Maybe we're meant for each other some day
But it's

CH
Sweeping me and sweeping you too
Hold on tight as I hold on too
'Cause the lights are singing, singing in you
The night it wonders, would you, could you?
Sweeping me and sweeping you too
Hold on tight as I hold on too
'Cause the lights are singing, singing in you
And the night it wonders would you?
Would you?
Would you?
Would you.

V2
You don't see, you don't know
What I wish, I could show
Wait and see, what might be
Falling for me as I've fallen for you
'Cause it's (CH)

Bridge
So this is how
The stars in the sky are shining like I feel now
So this is how
The clouds in the sky are drifting like I feel now


Because of this post I will have to sleep in very long tomorrow and will not get much done before Fuse fun night. But it's worth it, because somehow expression like this gives me great peace as life passes on and by. Seasons like this, weekends like this, little things like making myself a cool philly steak sandwich at midnight after care group and listening to new music while Daisy sleeps on the couch and the fire flickers away are not lost once I get these words down. The memory is stored to revisit and relive and benefit from in the future, and I can relax and know it's here.

It's a crazy game we play, this game that we call life.
We sit and speculate, as the days go by, the days go by

--JPB