20
Jul
So I updated my resume, Linkedin profile, and started looking for a job yesterday. I sent out some feelers and even got a call from a recruiter who noticed my status on Linkedin has changed who may have a position for me. I am trying not to get my hopes up too high but it isn’t looking nearly as grim as I felt the other night.
I am taking this time to do some work around the house and try and get things in order around here. I have a little laziness I have to get past so I can make this house, which I never should have bought, a little more livable. I obviously can’t replace the stained and worn out carpet right now but I have the materials to do a lot of the work that needs to be done so it’s time to get off my lazy arse and take care of business. This is the perfect time to make that happen in all honesty. While I am doing that I hope to instill a little more discipline in the horde of ankle biters I have running around. It’s a tall order but I need to make some changes in both the physical house and in myself to accomplish my goals.
My plan is pretty simple. I want to send out five resumes a day, note to whom they were sent, then work on the house for a bit. I don’t doubt it will be more difficult than it sounds but I am setting goals, making lists, taking notes and doing it all to an awesome soundtrack. The children are bucking me a little bit but I am not playing around and in only two days of my plan they have improved a little bit. Last night and at lunch yesterday I ate things I shouldn’t have without thinking about it and my lactose intolerance was hell on wheels last night so I slept later than I wanted to today but my plan hasn’t changed one bit and after I finish this little update it’s time to send out resumes.
Today was Diarmuid’s birthday, he’s two, and the cousins popped in along with my sister-in-law without even realizing it and just in time to see him open his two presents. He got a Snoop ‘n Sniff and a My First Harmonica. He can’t figure out the harmonica yet but for about an hour he’s been pulling around the Snoop ‘n Sniff and giggling so I guess I got the right thing for him. I bought them months ago on sale at Target and they have been hidden ever since. Now the cousins as well as my horde are watching a movie and it’s sort of calm for the moment. You can probably imagine that my seven kids plus four cousins can get kind of loud. Most of the time it’s a good loud but it’s also nice to see them all being calm and good even if it is just for a moment.
Diarmuid just came over and insisted that I acknowledge his “puppy” which I did of course and he toddled off very happy. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows right now but some moments make it all worthwhile. I am off to fight the job market and find myself a gig. I am in good spirits today. I don’t know if that will help me find job postings but I do know it’s easier to make it through the drudgery with a good attitude rather than the depression I had setting in the other night. So say a prayer for me if you are so inclined and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
I posted volumes 1 and 2 of the Suburban Home Mix Tape series but didn’t happen to get my hands on volumes 3 and 4 even though I meant to. This time Virgil posted the mix as a download so I grabbed it, retagged the files because he’s sloppy (love ya Virgil) and popped it into the Mix Tape widget. This is one was inspired by the looming release from I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House titled Sounds of Dying. I have been digging it for while now and I highly recommend picking it up. If you were a member of Suburban Home For Life you would have it in your email today. If you aren’t then you should be.
So enjoy this little break from the serious side of things ’round here as of late as I have more serious stuff to post. Actually this is serious just in a different manner. Music should not be taken lightly. So enjoy this musical interlude and we will return you to your regular programming shortly.
15
Jul
…I honestly don’t know where I put it.
Just like last time this one came as a complete shock. I mean I thought everything was going well and the owner of the company I worked for showed up today after lunch and told me I needed to clean out my personal things. The reason is probably legally justified but total and complete crap. I am not going to go into that here as the reason doesn’t matter at all. In fact the job doesn’t matter other than providing for my family and that’s what this is about. Regardless of the reason I feel like a total failure. I was just sitting with Diarmuid, who just woke up from his nap, and realizing I didn’t know how I could provide for him right at this moment.
I feel like an abject failure and complete and utter failure. Sure there were rough spots but I did everything they asked of me. I didn’t see it coming and I can’t help but think that is also a failure on my part somehow. It’s been a rough few months at work to be honest but I never thought someone was gunning for me. Every complaint made was tenuous at best and remedied immediately with little more than an increase in communication. I should have realized that the number and type of complaints that got back to me were petty enough that my time was limited. Now I am sitting at home and unemployed with a wonderful family whom I have no way to provide for beyond one more paycheck. I am analyzing everything seeing if and where I could have made corrections but have yet to come up with anything. I was just blind to the situation and it caught me unaware. My kids look up to me and think I can do anything and I can’t let them see how scared I am right now. Middle class families don’t do well in the current economy without a job. Charities are stretched to their limits. I am frightened like I never have been.
Don’t anyone get all worried about me being down. I think this is a normal reaction to the situation. I am not depressed nor am I thinking about doing anything stupid so don’t worry about that.
I can’t even get myself in the mindset to update my resume at the moment and that only adds to my fear. Somewhere in the rational part of my mind I know I will find another job and I am good at writing resumes but at the moment all I am is a big mass of uncertainty and doubt. I don’t even know if I should let this simmer for a day or two or push through and start trying to write my resume immediately. I am off my game in this condition. I am not confident of anything much less myself at the moment. I don’t want platitudes or anecdotes from anyone really. I am not writing this to garner comments. I just need to figure out how to pull myself together and quickly. Last time was bad and this time won’t be any better. I need strength I am not sure that I have. I am surrounded by my children right now and feel utterly and completely alone because I am no longer a good father who can provide for them. I don’t think its ever been this bad. I am hoping that getting this all down will help me sort through it all. I am hoping that in a week or two I can look back and realize these feelings were just a reaction to the shock of the situation but I honestly just don’t know.
The letter here is an exact copy of the e-mail I sent to an Orthodox priest here in Houston, Texas. I mentioned this some time back and have been meaning to revisit the issue and should have already. The priest never responded to my e-mail, which does not strengthen not weaken my convictions, so I am posting it here as an open letter to any Orthodox or Catholic, priest or layman who may wish to respond. I know some of my readers aren’t interested in religion but I make no apologies for posting about my beliefs. This space is about my journey and that journey very much includes my religious beliefs.
I write you with the hope that we can open a dialog. I am interested in Orthodoxy and have been for some time but a fear of change has kept me from seeking answers in a manner in which I might actually find them. I am a Christian who, as a low church Protestant, has studied scripture quite actively and studied the history of the Church for some time. This has led to many questions as studies are wont to do and I have found that the pastors I have been associated with, while learned men, do not have answers that truly satisfy the questions. So after much study of church history, including the history of the Restoration or Stone/Campbell movement of which I am currently a part, it has become clear to me that if I desire to worship in the manner closest to the early church that Orthodoxy is the only choice. I won’t bother going into the details of how I arrived at this conclusion during this missive but will be more than happy to share that with you in the future. The driving reason for this letter is that I recently read something written by a Presbyterian concerning communion and children that forced me to evaluate my position on communion and, as you can imagine, that has had a domino effect on other topics such as baptism. Knowing myself and my tendency to ramble on before ever getting to my point I will try and get right to it. Please forgive any disjointed ideas as the single topic of the Eucharist is not so much a single topic.
The article I read was about the church the gentlemen attends denying communion to children who are not baptized. (If you like you can read the article here: http://tonywoodlief.com/?p=2407) and Tony Woodlief, the author, used the term “excommunication” to describe this practice. Without going into a lengthy commentary on his article I realized that I have, as a father of seven, practiced the same idea as the church which Tony attends. It never once occurred to me that I might be denying my children a very real connection with our Saviour Jesus Christ. This is where things might get a little disjointed and I will try to stay on topic.
I was raised in Lakewood church with all the trappings of the Word of Faith movement. I believed with my whole heart that if any of my prayers didn’t get answered it was because I didn’t have enough faith and the that God wouldn’t say no to His children. As you can imagine, when I started actually reading the Bible I found that this was, to put it bluntly, false doctrine. The final straw, the reasons for which are unimportant in this missive, led me to not only leave the Word of Faith movement but the Church altogether. I experimented with occult practices and even when not actively practicing things against God I was at best apathetic to His commands and rebellious at every turn. When I finally returned to the church I decided to attend a church where a man I had been friends with, for better than a decade, was the pastor. This was Second Christian Church here in Houston on the north side of town. I discovered the Restoration movement and appreciated the history and ideals that were espoused. Yet when it came time for communion it was, like every other Protestant church I have ever attended, grape juice and little wafers. I was a bit surprised because one of the espoused goals of this movement was supposed to be “Bible names for Bible things” and as an extension “Bible methods for Bible practices”. When I approached my friend and pastor with this quandary his response was “Don’t you think Christ can work through grape juice as well as he can through wine?” This answer did not impress me. Of course Christ can work through grape juice as well as through wine, in fact, he could work through tap water as well He can through wine. The problem is that was not the point. Christ’s command was “do this in remembrance” and while it may seem to the casual observer that we, the low church Protestants, are the fact is that we are not. We are not doing what he did. Just like Nadab and Abihu with the strange fire we
are doing what we think is alright and not what we were actually told to do. Further research showed me that the grape juice substitution for wine began about two hundred years ago with the Temperance movement which claimed, in opposition to scripture, that all consumption of alcohol was evil. They developed the concept of “new wine” and claim that Christ never drank real wine which is in obvious contradiction to Luke 7:33-34 wherein Christ is called a drunkard. No-one would ever be called a drunkard if all they drank was grape juice. So from the outset I have had concerns about the elements that we use in our congregations. The second issue that makes me uncomfortable is that I believe in a
real presence. I believe that when I consume the elements I consume the very body and blood of Christ. I have never taken a stand on the trans/consubstantiation issue because it does not matter one iota to me how Chris is present only that he is and while it is mystery to me it is a beautiful and glorious thing that I am allowed as well as commanded to take part in. This is, of course, in direct opposition to the majority belief amongst low church Protestants which puts me in the position of watching my brethren treat communion a rote at best and with little care for the miracle that it is.Couple both of those issues with the sudden realization that I may have been, for years, denying my children communion and by my actions excommunicating them I have no choice but to seek the truth. I fear that while my heart has been in the right place in desiring to give glory to God and to worship Him that I have been using strange fire to
do so. I can no longer sit by and look at these problems academically. I must act to correct the practices of my family and myself before it is too late. This missive is my first step in doing so. I chose you because your church is physically the closest Orthodox congregation to my home and having a large family that sort of thing matters to some degree. I also work mere blocks from your church so visiting would be less than a chore.What I hope and pray is that you are willing to address these issues with me and help me seek the truth and to find God’s peace in my worship, my communion and in every facet of my life. I would love to meet with you in person if that is possible or to simply correspond via e-mail. We are not Greek but I am fairly certain that we desire to be Orthodox. Please accept my apologies if I didn’t give proper reverence in the form of capitalization to any of the concepts and practices I mentioned above. I am still learning what all those may be. I patiently wait your response.
I invite every to comment as is the case with any post on ’round these parts. Don’t feel that you can’t because you believe differently or aren’t in the groups I mentioned in the opening. I am looking for guidance from a certain perspective with this letter but welcome any discussion on how I got here or where I think it might lead or of my beliefs in general. The only caveat is the usual one: I will remove any derogatory comments without responding. Please feel free to disagree respectfully and I will respond respectfully.
14
Jul
So every time I make myself a promise to post here more often something seems to happen that makes it damn hard to do so. This time I was out of work for most of three weeks including my vacation with two separate and distinct ailments. It wasn’t enough that finances prevented us from taking our vacation, no, I had to aggravate my sciatic nerve. I didn’t do anything remotely physical to screw it up. I simple made cookies. You read that right: I made cookies. On the Sunday night starting my vacation I made sugar cookies. Now good sugar cookies have to refrigerated to harden up the dough before cooking so I dutifully rolled the dough into rough tubes shapes, wrapped them in wax paper, and bent over to place in the fridge. After placing them in the fridge where they would live for the next two hours I realized I couldn’t stand up. I knew the pain. Oh did I ever know the pain. The last time I felt it was almost three years ago, that time I bent over to pick up a sock I had dropped, and I knew the source of the pain as well. I had muscle relaxers left over from that incident and some other pain medication from another incident so I took that hoping it would help. Alas it did not. Between my strange reaction to most muscle relaxers/pain killers and the pain my vacation was a miasma of painful movement, feverish sleep and insomnia. I had managed to get it eased up enough to move around a bit so I went to work when my vacation was over only to find that “a bit” was all I could move around. So I made an appointment with a new doctor. I didn’t want to see the last one I went to for this since he didn’t listen to my concerns over the medication he prescribed and the office visit was pretty much him writing a prescription and little else. The new practice was extremely nice in appearance, location and bedside manner. The physician’s assistant listened to my concerns, talked about my reactions to some medication, and wrote me two prescriptions as well prescribing no work for the next two days. This time instead of Flexiril I got a steroid pack and generic Soma. The steroid pack had an effect by the second day and the Soma, which I only took for the first day and a half, didn’t make me all crazy like the Flexiril did. All in all I missed five days of my own vacation and three days of the next week of work. Luckily I have sick days on top of vacation days so I still have a week’s worth of vacation left.
The very next week, on Tuesday, I woke up feeling like I had been kicked in the nads. I figured it was due to a lack of relations with the wife and would eventually resolve itself. It didn’t. By the end of the day I could barely walk. So I did the smart thing and Googled the pain. The prognosis looked bleak. There was a possibility I had an injury that could have caused me to lose a testicle if not treated immediately. The pain had been constant for more than ten hours so if that was the case I was pretty much in for emergency surgery. I left work and headed for the emergency room. They didn’t play around once I got there. I had a bed within fifteen minutes, pain killers less than ten minutes later, and an ultrasound in under an hour. Of course things slowed down after that but the initial checks were completed faster than any other ER visit I have ever had. They did a CT scan to check for kidney stones just to make sure then told me I had an epididymal cyst. Apparently this is a fairly common occurrence and most guys never even notice but in extremely rare cases the cyst forms in just the right place to cause massive pain. They did think it might be cancer at one point but it was ruled out before they talked to me so I didn’t get that scare confirmed but you can believe I was thinking it while laying there half doped up on pain medication alone in the ER. The prognosis was mostly good. Wear an athletic supporter and take Vicodin (7.5mg) up two pills every four to six hours. If my body reabsorbed the cyst it would happen quickly and if not the surgery was minor and they could do the vasectomy while they were removing it. Everything worked out perfectly, well as perfect as it could in the situation, and I avoided surgery. The athletic supporter was a hell unto itself but the Vicodin didn’t affect me like it usually does (I usually get nervous, irritable and can’t sleep) so it was a wash on that front. The two days of bed rest ate the rest of my sick days for the year but overall I didn’t miss any pay even though I was not at work for ten out of fifteen work days.
Of course missing that much work has meant a ton of catching up and getting my projects back on track but I have accomplished that as well and now everything is going pretty well. So there’s the update on why I haven’t written much lately. Between the pain and the catching up at work I just haven’t had the mental capacity or the time to come up with coherent thoughts to put here. I hope the being broken is over with for a while. I could use a couple of pain free months. I hope the past few weeks have treated you all better than it treated me.
