The Lists that Govern my Life

This week was a blur of… ·       writing long midterms (all this time that I’ve been trying to do more push ups I should have been doing more finger exercises) ·       finding, naming, and trying to kill the mouse in our house (while hoping our little friend is still a bachelor and has not yet started to provide for a family) ·       getting more cultured by eating yogurt and  drinking mocktails while watching people perform Shakespearian Star Wars and seeing (on a separate occasion) Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro ·       cruising around Provo on a push scooter (like the ten-year-old I still often wish I was and sometimes pretend I am) Which is why I love Sundays. Not because of the unrelated scooter bullet point but because of the blur portion referred to at the beginning. Because God graciously gave us a Sabbath day of rest to remember what happened during the blur of the week

It’s a terrible question. And a terribly common one too. An attempt at a get-to-you-know question that sounds more like an interrogation to me. Plaguing its victim with self-consciousness and uncertainty . You take it as a personal attack on your aspirations and plans and even your humanity and feel the need to validate and defend yourself, even if you’re not completely sure of your answer. The dreaded “And what do you want to do with that?” I live on a college campus where future schemes and dreams are constantly under construction , where the finished product is anything but certain. Yet we love predicting our hypothetical futures . Until we try to merge those with reality. But when we first meet people, we usually ask questions about reality (we being unwilling to share our highly-imaginative-life-in-ten-years-vision). Like where we’re from. And what we like to do. And what we’re studying. When I respond to that last question with H istory and Ger

So a couple of weeks ago at church, someone gave a talk about Lord of The Rings . About it being a metaphor for life and all. Not about explaining the different types of orcs and elves and wizards and whatnot, if that’s what you were thinking. She's a Sam; this picture is supposed to symbolize all my Sams. But about life. And life metaphors are great since we don’t seem to be satisfied with simply trying to comprehend life at face value. We search for ways to make life more relatable (because we can’t relate to our own lives?), or maybe we’re trying to deepen connections with things like running, literature, music, and good. Whatever the case, we obviously need help understanding life.   Fortunately, this talk helped me understand more about life rather than about Lord of the Rings. Since I seem to have a harder time coming to grips with reality than with fantastical stories. #livetheparadox Anyways, the speaker emphasized finding a “Sam” in our liv