Other Reflections on My Younger Self

 Over the past couple of days, I have recounted my spiritual odyssey, but that is only a part of who I am.  It is an important part, as my faith is integral to my existence, but there is more to me than that I wanted to discuss too.  I am a person who has dabbled in a lot of things over the years, although not as much in my old age as I used to.  Having a time of reflection due to a summer break from my teaching vocation, I have some time to catch up on some of these things, and I wanted to talk about them more.  Trying to sort through these recollections is akin to clearing spiderwebs from that long-neglected hutch we often find in our kitchens, and then the daunting task of trying to figure out where this, or that, or the other fits is the looming challenge.  So, I am writing it all down. 

Some years back, a friend of mine who was a Black guy affiliated with a Oneness Pentecostal group of some sort (their official designation is Oneness, although back home we used to call them "Jesus Only Pentecostals") had a sort of vision about me that he shared with me, and it was somewhat profound in all honesty.  In the vision, he described me as being in a damp, dark cave, and I had to dig, but then I came upon a huge cache of precious stones.  This was essentially a message that often we feel a bit weary and lost, but the real riches of our lives are within us, as God put them there and they just need to be tapped into and discovered.  Although I know Oneness people would be what is considered heretical (due to their rejection of one cardinal doctrine, the Triune God) at times God uses the most unlikely instruments to speak truth to us.  That was one of those times.  It sort of meshed with a personal word I received when I was 21 and attended what was called a "School of the Prophets" meeting at Christian International Church in Panama City, FL, and a speaker - a guy with a prophetic gift named Tom Nicholson - prayed over me and said that he saw me in a deep well, and I was looking up and no one was there except God himself, and I was lifted out of that well and transformed: banners were mentioned in that word too, and in all honesty I think that referred to my eventual acceptance and embrace of a more liturgical faith.  Both of these insights - given by two radically different people to me over a period of several years - bring me back to this moment.  And they preface what I am about to say next.

In the past several years or so, I have felt more displaced and somewhat buried by the cares of life and other things, and as such I sort of lost my vision a bit.  In the past few days of talking about revisiting my spiritual odyssey, it was an attempt to sort of dig out some of those dusty old memories and re-examine them.  While a lot of them had to do with matters of faith, there are other things about myself I wanted to re-examine as well, including some activities I once found solace in.  One of those was art.  As a younger man, I used to draw a lot - I have literally an entire portfolio of my artwork, and at times it has garnered the attention of others, as I did win a contest once and I also have been drafted from my high school years onward to design artwork for band programs and other things.  I can still do it, but in all honesty I haven't actually drawn anything for perhaps years - I doodle some, sure, but nothing of any significance.  I have thought recently about investing in a small sketchbook and attempting to do some drawings again, and maybe I still will, but motivation has been a bit lacking as well - I feel a lot more complacent than I used to in all honesty, and perhaps need to motivate myself. I have a relatively small circle of friends and supportive voices right now, and that hasn't helped either as I feel somewhat like I am stuck in a sort of mental wilderness and am just in survival mode.  Am I in a midlife crisis?  I mean, I am 55 years old now, about to hit 56 in just over 3 months from now, and could be that is what this is about.  I mentioned the other day about the Mark Lowry shtick of "striving for significance," and a part of me wants to do just that, but how??  This will take some effort and time to figure out for sure, but I feel something interesting going on inside me, which also is why I have been writing a lot more too. Let's reflect some on that, shall we?

The ironic thing about the time we live in now is the fact that technology is the most advanced it's ever been.  I have sitting here beside my school-issued laptop what is called a microcomputer, a palm-sized desktop modem that I still have to figure out how to set up, and I also have a tiny thermal printer I invested in just a couple of months ago.  Additionally, I am sitting at a desk with two laptops - one is my personal one, and then there is this one which is a perk of my teaching position at the school where I work. I also have sitting just above me a small box, in which are a dozen thumb-sized flash drives with a music collection in it that would be the equivalent of about 500 CDs or perhaps a thousand LP records. Another box to my immediate left holds about 20 or more similar flash drives with a huge library of documents, photos, videos, and other things on them (one is unfortunately corrupted, but it isn't a huge deal as I can easily download the stuff elsewhere).  And, shopping, researching, and so many other things are a mere click of a key away as the internet, with its thousands of terabytes worth of data is at my fingertips - type one word in a Google search engine, and you will get everything you are looking for plus a few things you weren't expecting.  Whereas also I used to have to send stamped envelopes with money orders to get things I wanted, now a quick visit to Amazon or Ebay gives me an unlimited set of options to even order obscure stuff I didn't think even existed anymore.  This is the 21st century, and we live in a technological age no doubt.  While it has some benefits, it also tends to get a bit boring, as now the excitement and mystery of tracking things down has become just a 5-minute click of a few keys.  And, all that made me think about some things I want to explore now too.

As a teenager, I grew up somewhat lower-income and living in a remote location in rural West Virginia, the state of my birth and where a large part of my life played out. But, I was a kid with a non-stop mind and an active imagination, and I was always looking for things.  Especially when I began to get more involved with my faith after I came to Christ at age 16, I got this insatiable appetite for learning more about the denominations and other things which were the heritage of my particular faith tradition.  At that time, this was only possible by two means - you wrote letters or you made long-distance landline phone calls.  The letters were the easiest, as postage at that time was a lot less expensive, but when it came to the phone calls I got myself into trouble a lot - at one point, I ran up a $50 phone bill for just one month!  My mother would get steamed at me, as at that time we stayed with a nonagenarian lady that Mom served as a live-in caretaker, and Mom was self-conscious with stuff like that.  While I got about a $25 allowance each month from my dad's $100 child support check he sent us up until my 19th birthday, I learned quickly how to account for every penny of that allowance as I budgeted, and I set goals for myself.  One of the things I also did then was I wrote down on a calendar every piece of my important mail I got, as well as keeping a list of what I was expecting.  For a teenager, I kept pretty meticulous records of everything, and I still actually have all my old calendars and other things in a bin under my bed right now.  Being that meticulous with everything made me a natural bureaucrat in many aspects, and I mean I kept everything too - I still do that even today in all honesty.  I had a personal enterprise of my own that was operated from my bedroom since I was about 11 years old, and it later became an asset as the words "attention to detail" were a fundamental quality I would list on resumes later.  That probably explains why even now in my closet here I have about a dozen bins stored that could document even the most minute details of my life since I was 10 - I can literally look back and tell you a specific piece of mail I received on July 20, 1988, and this slightly OCD trait I have has served me well over the years too.  Even these blog articles - I have taken the initiative to keep copies of everything I write, and on a shelf behind me I actually have a set of several volumes of every blog post I have composed in the past 15 years, as well as bound volumes of every college project I created for classes since my undergrad years. It is just part of who I am, and if I ever achieve the status of being someone important one day, someone who designates themselves as my official biographer will have a treasure-trove of material to hopefully paint a comprehensive legacy of my life.  Between old calendars and bank account registers, written journals, photos, old letters, bound volumes of all my written work, etc., not to mention the original documents that much of this written work was derived from, my life is pretty well-documented.  In a way, I am thankful for that, as in all honesty I am all that is left of my immediate family - I have no siblings, and my parents, grandparents, etc., are all gone now.  I barely keep contact with my cousins, as about 20 of them live within 10 miles of me but I never see them or anything, which in itself is sad (I tackled that issue a few weeks ago).  All is not lost though, as I do have something in the works which may actually give me continuity, but I will talk about that later as I am not at liberty to disclose that now, but it is a good thing though.  Part of the revelation of that depends on when I can travel abroad for an important reason at some point in the near future, so the suspense will have to sustain you as the reader until that happens. 

A large part of this is also prayer too - I am praying for direction now for many things, and for those of my readers who are people of faith, your prayers for me are coveted and appreciated too.  I feel as if right now I am at the crossroads of life, and I am seeking out that particular sign which will point me in the right direction.  I am compelled to look into my past for this too, as for some reason consulting with my younger self may be a key component into finding my current direction I seek.  I have written a ton of stuff in my life story draft already, and in essence this serves as sort of a reflection of that as well. At times this road is lonely, as I feel like I am tackling it by myself - it is like a dirt path in the woods in the darkness of night, and the flashlight I have with me has a weak battery so I have to stumble along to make sure a stray bear doesn't eat me or something. And, believe me, I have encountered my share of metaphorical stray bears - I have scars from some of them too. I long to have someone to confide in myself, and wish I had a few more closer friends.  However, I still bear the scars of disappointment, broken promises, and even complete betrayal by people I thought were close to me, but they were quick to abandon ship when the waters got choppy. It's a lot to process, and as I muddle through it, I hold onto hope that God will illumine that dark path in the wilderness so I can find my way out of it somehow.  When that will happen I am not sure, and maybe the lighted path is there but I am missing it.  However, I trust it will happen, and hope is a nourishment to my soul, as is a strong faith in a God I trust to guide my steps.  

Sometimes we have to look back to find the way forward, and as I look at my younger self, I see things.  I see the old mystery and enthusiasm I once had, and to be honest I would love to get some of that back.  But, I also realize that I am in a different place than I was then, and perhaps building upon the foundation I have will be the key to getting where I need to be.  If you are in a similar situation, I encourage you to look back, but also keep focused - losing focus is not an option, as it could be catastrophic.  Thanks again for allowing me to ramble along with my reflections, and hopefully they might be of some value to someone who may need them, even if it is just realizing that maybe they are not alone.