Thursday, January 29, 2004

thoughts on living

i'm finishing up prayer and the art of volkswagen maintenance by donald miller -- the guy who wrote blue like jazz. it is his first book and it talks about a road trip he and a friend took from houston to oregon with a stop at the bottom of the grand canyon along the way. it's good stuff. he is an amazing writer and his perspective and honesty are incredible to read. the book is making me think a lot about living.
there is this part of me that wants to sell the house and most everything in it and buy an RV (there are too many of us for a VW camper van) and take off to see everything. that would be caleb's dream by the way -- he thinks RVs may be the coolest thing God ever thought up. we'd have to take the church with us though...i'd miss them. so off we go in this caravan of jacob's wellions. there is a church on the way and a church on the move in tulsa...we could be church on the road.
of course then i think about things like money and gas and where the kids would go to school and stuff like that and reality sets in. there is also the issue that most of the country - travelling RV crowd is about 40 years older than us. another point for corey's theory of retiring first and then working the rest of your life.

i think the problem is that so much of life is occupied by breathing that we don't take enough time to live. breathing is the stuff we do to get from point a to point b during the day and most of the stuff we do at point a or b (or q depending on how many points you may have). it's things like driving and eating oatmeal and grocery shopping and doing your job and dealing with telemarketers and answering emails. the "stuff" of life that seems to be just "stuff" -- that's breathing. we have to do it, we don't think about it, there is no real excitement to it.
living is different. it is those great conversations over coffee (or whatever). it's dinner with 15 friends at fazzoli's. it's playing basketball with the neighborhood kids in the driveway and letting them win. it's watching basketball with a seven year old and having to explain everything. it isn't all skydiving and RV buying.
it just seems like the life we were saved to should consist of more living and less breathing. maybe the point is to figure out how to live while you're just breathing. hmmmmm.

red tells andy in shawshank that the choice is to "get busy living or get busy dying" for me that sounds like stop breathing and live.

more on this later. i need to think.
j

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