My Best Friend

My best friend is Conner Clemens. I haven't spoken to him in several years, and that was but a brief and awkward moment. It was years before that, and years before that. I would say in the last 15 years I've spoken with him three times. Maybe. All of them brief.

I moved to Oregon in August, a few months before I turned 7, and one month before school started. I just moved here, not even settled down, and then I had to take another leap into the wide world of Public School. First Grade. Mrs. Hubadavacheck. Yep, that's a real name and a real person. I remember being scared to death, and wondering how I was going to make it without my mom being there. But I did somehow, and out of it I met my best friend. We had a fantastic Elementary School boyhood. He had a "field" for a back yard (it was just a big yard, not at all a field. It's sad how things get smaller the older you get) and we liked to play war, football, knights, whatever back there. We would stay up late at his house playing his Sega and watching TV. The house he lived in had four bedrooms, and two living rooms, so his sister, mom, and himself would move around from room to room. It seemed like it was always a different room each time I stayed the night. Sometimes his mom would take us into town, and we would play with all the toys in the store. Every year we went to the fair on bracelet day. The only word to describe those days is scrumtrulescent.

Life is like..

Forrest Gump (and his mom) once said life is like a box of chocolates. This may be true, but I think life is also like raking leaves from a yard. You get the all the leaves raked up, and then the next morning it's back like it was before.

Failings and Shortcomings

...are all too familiar to me. I think I even try to set myself up for failure, because that's what I'm comfortable with. I am much more comfortable with failure, than success. That scares the heck out of me. I don't think I would know what to do with it. If I really think about it, what scares me the most is falling further. The more successful, the harder the fall. So I'd rather fail, and then I can just give up.

I've failed. I didn't meet my goal of publishing a post every weekend. I wanted to try and see if I could do it, and I didn't. I didn't make it very far. But there was actually another reason I wanted to set a mark that I didn't think I could attain. I kind of wanted to fail. In a good way. I wanted to have something that would be tough, and if I succeeded would be very rewarding, but I also wanted to have something that was tough in order to have a good chance of failing, and getting back on the old horse and keep trudging on. I am really, really good at giving up. I'm not good at getting back up. So I'm getting back up, not giving up on this goal. And though I'm publishing this late, I am publishing this, AND it's before the next weekend. That means I have a chance to keep somewhat on track.

Paul said something about God's grace being perfected in our weakness. I hate weakness (in myself at least). I want my grace being perfected in my perfection. That's not how God wants it to happen though. He wants (and deserves) all the glory. I know I have weaknesses, and so I try my best to not let anyone else know. What I need to be doing is resting in God's grace. Let my weakness show, don't strive to be perfect. To not give up and quit, but instead continue walking. It's hard for God's grace to shine when you shut down at every failure, which is what I normally do. So I'm going to try and not shut down, no matter how much I may want to. I'm going to try and continue through failure, so that God may be glorified when He, ultimately, turns it into His victory. (Something that may help me along this way is lining up my definition of failure with His definition.)

Hoarders and Hell

Sara and I watched the whole first season of Hoarders in a 48 hour period. She started before I joined her, so she saw a bit more than me. But small details aside, what a fascinating show.

Super super sad, but fascinating.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, Hoarders is an hour show on A & E (or in our case, Netflix instant watch on Wii) that follows two people each episode who are diagnosed as "hoarders." The intro to the show tells us compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary. The show then sets up an introduction for these two people with a psychiatrist or therapist of some sort, and a team of cleaners ready to help them clean up.

Here's a quick run down of what happens: the subjects spend some time explaining themselves. They say something like how they can't help themselves, but they hate it. They understand that it's not right, yet they can't seem to stop. They then seem to give off the impression of being scared, but optimistic; hopeful for a change. They meet their counselor who tells them they can do this. Change can happen. But the subject is in charge, and nothing will be thrown out that they don't want thrown out. Then they get to it. And the subject starts to get really anxious, and has to go through every little thing. They have a hard time giving up control, deciding on which things to throw out, and parting with a lot of things. Usually they work through it, but it is a slow and painful process.

I think this show is a dead on perfect picture of what Lewis describes as Hell. Which is simply, getting what we think we want. These people have created a god out of not only their items, but their control. They must be in control. I'm afraid to say that I know how that feels, at least on a smaller scale I hope. They are unwilling, in most cases, to allow anyone to throw anything at all away until they have approved. Most times they end up going back through some of the garbage and taking at least one or two items back out. This control, this inability to let things go, has led them to be literally overwhelmed with stuff. You would be amazed that people actually live in these houses. And more often than not it's with someone else, who loves the person, but usually is having a really hard time being committed to that as they drown in crap. The hoarders usually know this too. They know that they are living in a chaotic mess, and they know that it's hurting their loved ones. And they hate it. They hate it. Not enough to stop though. So in reality they love their god of items and control more than anything else on earth. They need this. And when it comes time to throw things away, they realize it. They realize how much more they love it than they hate it. Or more importantly, they realize how much it controls their life. How much life they actually get from it. How much they feel they won't continue to live if they were to allow these things to go. If they were to allow control to go into somebody else's hands. Once again they look to control for their answers, for their hope, and the more they try to gain control themselves, the more it actually goes into the hands of their items. The vicious circle continues.

That's where an outside force that knows what it's doing steps in and shows them a way out. They don't force them. They don't throw stuff away while they're not looking. That never works. Some family member try this technique, and it always ends up making the hoarder try to tighten their control and become more unwilling to let go of things. No, the expert allows the hoarder to retain control, or at least feel in control. They just gently push them and encourage them and show them that there is a way, that they can let go of these things and continue to live. They don't make them. They don't force them. But they give them a chance to get out of Hell, and I think that is beautiful.