One of the things that happened in the last six months - since I last wrote in my blog - was my starting a new job. I had been working for a large title company in Houston, working late nights and making a long commute from home to Houston and back. I got the opportunity to work a little closer to home at a local school district just across the lake from Conroe where we live. I took the job with the understanding that I would get school vacation dates (except for summers. They are our most busy time) plus sick and vacation days. This was welcome news after having a max of 20 days of vacation and sick time off in previous employment - not to mention all the time away from my family. So, I took the job. Pretty easy choice.
At the time, I didn't realize that I had the option of bringing my children with me to school in the district, which as a school employee, I had the right to do. When I started the job, I posed the question of transferring to all of my children, but only the youngest chose to make the change. Eventually her siblings decided to made their break from our local school district and now make the trip with me every day.
Now, after 6 months of going to school together, the 5 of us are getting spring break together (my wife doesn't work for the school district. She had to take off in order to spend it with us). It's the first time I've gotten a spring break since I was a student myself. We were planning to do some tubing down the Guadalupe and Comal Rivers in New Braunfels, but thanks to a cold snap, we're just going to be doing some sight-seeing for now. Of course that involves a little bit of driving and right now that means the 5 of us are spending a lot of time in a beat-up, 4-door Saturn SL1. But, considering the fact that I was spending so much time away from my family a year ago, being packed in a little car ain't all that bad.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Time Slips Away
Shortly after my last post (August 2007), I turned 39 years old. Nobody told me what to expect by that age. Of course, getting older affects everyone differently. From everything I've heard, nearly everyone dreads turning 40. So, I expected that I would be melancholy before I turned 40. Instead, to my surprise, the doldrums hit me a year early. Now, some 6 months later, I'm finally coming to grips with its implications and what I must do from here.
The biggest part of the melancholy I've felt has been about wasted opportunities, failures, frivolity and whatever shortcomings that have come from the first 39 years of my life on this planet. Youth is the time of dreams and hoping for big things. For any number of reasons, certain dreams go by the wayside, yet life goes on. Many of those dreams or grand ideas give way to good sense and reason. Sometimes those dreams die a slow death. A few live on as a specter that can cast a shadow on any achievement that one can manage - raising the question of "what if?" at every turn. Was the course I chose better than any other course that could or might have been? In the words of the famous poem, The Road Less Traveled, the choice is what "made all the difference." For me, 39 was time to take stock of those choices - including the ones I might wonder about their outcome. "What if I had...?" In the words of the great king and philosopher from scripture, Solomon, "such is folly."
Now, after spending at least 6 months considering these frivolous ideas, I think I'm ready to proceed on with the rest of my life. I'm at peace with the fact and reality that I won't die a rich man. Though I had aspirations of being a successful artist and musician, I will likely never reach a pinnacle of success that I dreamed of as a young man. And that's OK, too. After all, I didn't make the sacrifices that those who have succeeded in their crafts made.
But, as a young man, I did make a choice. I felt, at the age of 20 that I had been called by God to be a minister of the Gospel of Christ. At the time, that appeared to be something like what I was familiar with - a model of a man dutifully preaching in a small, local church assembly week after week, month and year after year until I could do it no more. I made the choice, at that time, to leave the small, mid-western college I was attending to attend a Bible college in my home state of Texas. In pursuing that dream, it led me, my wife - who joined me while this dream was still in its infancy - and our family in a course that we never could have planned or conceived. It led us through those small assemblies, as well as large ones. I chose to cast off those other dreams to pursue the one with no recourse or no sort of back-up plan. It was either all or nothing.
In the time since, my family I have experienced a full spectrum of emotions, triumphs and hardships, successes and brutal failures that we likely would have not faced had I chosen another way. To my delight, I have been able to experience the joy of experiencing some of the dreams I had as a young man peek into the other world that I chose. I've been blessed to play music on foreign soil, write and publish (well, I'm still working on that part) my own songs and experience what I think church and Gospel ministry was intended to be. Of course nearly all of this didn't look anything like I imagined it as a younger man. I suppose it takes an older man to reconcile the two and make the most from it. I also know that at this point in my life, if I choose not to stay this course I have chosen, all that I have done to this point of my life was for nothing. That is why, at this point of my life, it's best to stay the course. But now, to do so with the renewed vigor that only an older man can, pursuing a dream that a young man might have.
The biggest part of the melancholy I've felt has been about wasted opportunities, failures, frivolity and whatever shortcomings that have come from the first 39 years of my life on this planet. Youth is the time of dreams and hoping for big things. For any number of reasons, certain dreams go by the wayside, yet life goes on. Many of those dreams or grand ideas give way to good sense and reason. Sometimes those dreams die a slow death. A few live on as a specter that can cast a shadow on any achievement that one can manage - raising the question of "what if?" at every turn. Was the course I chose better than any other course that could or might have been? In the words of the famous poem, The Road Less Traveled, the choice is what "made all the difference." For me, 39 was time to take stock of those choices - including the ones I might wonder about their outcome. "What if I had...?" In the words of the great king and philosopher from scripture, Solomon, "such is folly."
Now, after spending at least 6 months considering these frivolous ideas, I think I'm ready to proceed on with the rest of my life. I'm at peace with the fact and reality that I won't die a rich man. Though I had aspirations of being a successful artist and musician, I will likely never reach a pinnacle of success that I dreamed of as a young man. And that's OK, too. After all, I didn't make the sacrifices that those who have succeeded in their crafts made.
But, as a young man, I did make a choice. I felt, at the age of 20 that I had been called by God to be a minister of the Gospel of Christ. At the time, that appeared to be something like what I was familiar with - a model of a man dutifully preaching in a small, local church assembly week after week, month and year after year until I could do it no more. I made the choice, at that time, to leave the small, mid-western college I was attending to attend a Bible college in my home state of Texas. In pursuing that dream, it led me, my wife - who joined me while this dream was still in its infancy - and our family in a course that we never could have planned or conceived. It led us through those small assemblies, as well as large ones. I chose to cast off those other dreams to pursue the one with no recourse or no sort of back-up plan. It was either all or nothing.
In the time since, my family I have experienced a full spectrum of emotions, triumphs and hardships, successes and brutal failures that we likely would have not faced had I chosen another way. To my delight, I have been able to experience the joy of experiencing some of the dreams I had as a young man peek into the other world that I chose. I've been blessed to play music on foreign soil, write and publish (well, I'm still working on that part) my own songs and experience what I think church and Gospel ministry was intended to be. Of course nearly all of this didn't look anything like I imagined it as a younger man. I suppose it takes an older man to reconcile the two and make the most from it. I also know that at this point in my life, if I choose not to stay this course I have chosen, all that I have done to this point of my life was for nothing. That is why, at this point of my life, it's best to stay the course. But now, to do so with the renewed vigor that only an older man can, pursuing a dream that a young man might have.
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