Whatever words I say, I will always love you.

I'm feeling better. In case you were curious.

It's not that my existential pseudo-crisis appeared and then resolved itself in the space of a day; such things never occur. It's merely that every once in a while, I have a hard time coping with my own overactive mind. On those days, I blog an effluence of self-pity and self-contempt (one I immediately regret but am too narcissistic to remove usually), and then go home and listen to Counting Crows for a few hours until I right myself again.

May not be healthy, but that's my process.

So, at any rate, now you know part (always part, never all) of what's knocking around in my noggin, and what's quietly knawing at my heart.

Now, the clean-up commences:
--Much as I hate to admit it, I stand by what I said about our activities being distractions from devoting ourselves to what lasts for eternity. On the other hand, when I got home last night, I stood in my living room with a guitar-shaped video game controller around my neck, and "played" the stadium anthem "Freebird" to an adoring electronic crowd, with fair-to-good results. (I still need practice.) But the ability to finish the song without completely falling apart; hearing the "cheers" as the song ended; and setting the high score, all made me happy. Meaningless, unimportant, and unreal it may be, but fifteen minutes spent playing my mindless little game brightened my mood. Maybe an artificial lifting of the spirits; but lift them it did. So there may be some value in the temporary after all. The key must be to maintain balance and proper proportion. Ain't that a daisy.
--While what I wrote is/was how I felt last week, I will hasten to add that I don't want to stop teaching the Bible study. It feeds me, more than it feeds them. I need it in my life to help keep me accountable. So as long as God allows it, I'll stay at my post.
--And in the end, my constant worry remains: that I'll reach the end of my life and realize I wasted too much time doing things that may have made me happy in the short term, but don't last. I want to leave something behind, to enrich the lives of the people around me and to inspire and influence the people who come after me. Legacy, I guess you'd call that. And legacies aren't born from movie marathons or all-time-high Playstation scores.

So here's to spending our precious and oft-wasted hours in the right way: occasionally engaging in the silly trifles that God, in His generosity, allows us to enjoy, while still putting the bulk of our energies and resources into things that matter, things that last.



(And, as a brilliant juxtaposition to that final thought--Coming Tomorrow: the much-promised-and-delayed Slackie (TM) results!)