Introspections...reflections and phosphourescence

So, yesterday at lunch a good friend of mine invited me to take a class at a local church. The name of the class, healing of the heart and mind. Now, I am not the greatest fan of traditional structured church environments, and am even less of a fan of church class, but after some consternation, I agreed. I went through the rest of the day not giving the class much other thought and went last night at 7:00 to sit through something having no idea what to expect.

So there I sat, me, my friend, and a room full of people that I have never met...ever. There was the usual first day of class chatter about expectations and what not, a brief tidbit from the director of the ministry school that this class was a part of, and an announcement that this class would be taught via video because the teacher was teaching other classes this session. Video? Yeah, that's what I thought. On one hand, I was glad to not have to sit in front of a teacher who might see me sleeping through some of his lectures, but on the other hand, I was more than a little skeptical of how this "healing" was going to happen via a phosphourescent image on a two-dimensional screen (I've been waiting to use the word phosphourescent for quite some time now-thanks). But, the class was about to start, so I figured I would sit through it, unsure if next week I would even return.

This first class was about the biblicality (yeah, it's a made up word) of the whole healing of the heart and mind-nothing too deep, or so I thought. For some reason, the class made me extremely uncomfortable. There I was a 24 year old man with a college degree and several years of practical, real world experience, being made uncomfortable by the topics discussed by a previously scoffed two-dimensional image. It wasn't even that he was saying anything that was cutting to my core. In fact, I think it was the absence of what he was saying that was unnerving. I realized that this was a class of confrontation. No, I wasn't going to have to necessarily tell others my deepest darkest secrets and apologize for the attrocities I had committed through life. Instead the confrontation I sensed was for me, by me. I felt like the next several weeks would be a time for me to unearth all of the things that I had so carefully covered over in an attempt to keep their painful memories from resurfacing and wreaking havoc in an otherwise controlled life. The things like the death of my father, the sense of failure that sometimes looms directly over my head, regardless of the outward signs of achievement that may be visible to others, the feelings of loneliness that I sometimes seek to satiate with being the center of comical attention. Yeah, those things- they were going to be confronted, and I wasn't sure I was going to like it.

Well, the class ended and my friend turned to me over coffee and asked if I was going to be coming back. I paused, looked off into space and chuckled. I knew that it would be far easier for me to keep those things covered, to keep the dirt on top of the pain and trust that people would see and enjoy the dirt they saw because it is all I had ever shown them and they knew no differently of me. I thought about how I would have to confront those things about myself that I hated but had convinced myself were not really as bad as they seemed. I thought about all of that and, jolted back to reality by my friend's gaze answered-- yes.

So, why am I writing about this for all of myspace to read you might ask? As some may have noticed, my previous two blog entries have taken a decidedly different turn from the blog posts of previous days. I realized that I always wrote blogs from the perspective of what I had to offer people. I realize now how presumptious that was of me. So, instead of writing to offer, I will write to reflect and process. I realized that when I am struggling through something, the best way I know to find resolution is to write about it; but the first thing to go when stress comes on me is my desire to write--ironic isn't it? So, I am embarking on a...a something, and I am not quite sure what to call it. Let's just call it a continued foray into honesty, a foray that I am inviting the world to be a part of. I, in the pages of my blogs, will attempt to offer honest reflections and observations about my life and what I experience daily. I am not going to try and clean it up, and some of it will make no sense, but they will be my thoughts, my observations and my failures written more for me that for the rest of the world. Don't worry, I am not going to air my dirty laundry out to dry, this is definitely the medium for that. What I will present to the world will be the way I process things, and I pray that this continued honesty will change, if no one else, me. God bless.

D-$