Doo-do-do-do sounds the trumpet horn (I hope you heard it)!! Another month is finished and another blog is being requested to be posted. How could I not oblige myself to this request that is slowly becoming my favorite thing to spend time doing? That is right y’all, welcome to Volume II! Hopefully this one is not as long as the last for the sake of you who is reading this, but I guess we will see what happens. Or rather, you will scroll and know immediately if I rambled on forever again or not. My guess is I will probably end this and say, “Dang, I really did it again, didn’t I?”, but it’s been so long since you last read about my life here, so can you really blame me? Anywho… lets just dive in.
In the last blog, if you recall, I stated that I had not yet found a theme that I wanted to carry with me in these writings to y’all. Welp, that statement still rings true as I am currently lying in bed writing this a month later from the last time I had stated it. Though, please cut me some slack. Themes are hard y’all. I just have so much I want to inform you of that it’s hard to fit into one umbrella, let alone one blog post.. Maybe my theme is not having a theme. Talk about an amazingly underused cop-out. Let’s just say I am an “impromptu writer”. ooooo better yet let’s say that I am a “stream of consciousness writer”. Now that sounds fancy. I don’t really know if I am using that phrase correctly for the way I write these, (my guess is no because I think that implies an invitation into the thought process rather than just the thoughts themselves but actually that is kind of what I am doing now in these parentheses. Wow, I should probably just get rid of that parenthesis up there and make that a sentence. You know what? I’m gonna leave it. Thus concludes the longest use of parentheses probably ever), but if anyone ever asks just tell them the latter thing I said. And get ready because people are totally gonna ask about me as a writer. Just you wait.
Daggum, I am already on my way to typing my second novel. I apologize. How about we start talking about my month rather than my thoughts about who I am as a writer? Would that be okay with y’all? Hope you answered yes! If you answered no, maybe go on a walk or something and then come back and see if it is okay. Also, is it an obvious thing that I resonate with a number that falls in the “thinking triad”? Shoutout to the enneagram for helping give me a better understanding in that haha. Alright, enough of this… Here was how my month was:
Getting away from the goofiness I very much enjoy to project while writing these (hopefully not for that long), this month leaned a little more on the somber side than the previous one. I feel as though in my first update, I talked a lot about the fun to be had but not necessarily myself and how I was feeling. While there has been plenty of joyous and fun moments to go around (s/o to all the shenanigans), there has also been a light rain from the cloud of grief that has been present while being here. It wasn’t until I conversed with a friend sometime this month, that I realized this. It has been 16 years since my family moved to Kansas. I spent pretty much my entire collective, cognitive life in that state (May God bless it), more accurately in the city of Wichita. I have rare memories of any time before we moved there as a family. I left for college once, only to live with guys I knew from my high school, and eventually move back home to finish my degree. I have made all sorts of connections and met all sorts of wonderful people but all in a way in my own comfortability. All of that being said, this is the first time in a while that things have been uprooted for me. I mean literally everything in my day-to-day in a way is new (and hecka busy). In response to that, I feel as though unconsciously I have been grieving for the things that I have left back home. I am sure you, the reader, can relate to this in some way. The fact is that I definitely am not in Kansas Anymore (“He said the thing!”). My tree has just been planted, my roots have only just touched the soil. This compared to the tree back home that had roots crossing over other roots deep beneath the surface of the ground, who could react in such a way that wasn’t grief? I am certain that in due time, my tree will grow in multitude and my roots will start to cross over one another as they did once before. However, at this current moment a time is set apart, a transition is being made for the preparation of a sapling to evolve into that of a great oak. Praise the Lord for this. Praise Him for the allowance of fresh roots to be implanted and further entrenched into the soil that is a community and a culture in a new city and for allowing these roots to intertwine with the other great oaks that are being planted and the other great oaks that have been planted among a grand forrest that is this new city. Boom, how’s that for some imagery? Also, how’s that for some encouragement of being placed in something new? I mean I want to be a tree in a grand forrest interwoven with other trees. Well maybe not since we tend to chop those guys down pretty often, but besides the point. A tree in a nationally protected grand forrest. There we go, much better.
Directly going off of that (the imagery, not the forrest banter), I would like to highlight something that we as fellows talked about in one of our classes at the beginning of this month. On our docket this semester, we have several classes: Just Leadership, Old Testament, Spiritual Formation, Family Systems, and a plethora of other single session classes (enneagram, Meyers-briggs, etc). If you wanna know about any of these classes further, just let me know and I would be happy to tell you about or even share the content :-). The class that I would like to highlight is Spiritual Formation. In this class we get a lot of time to reflect and attune our spirit with that of the Lord. Some of you might be thinking, “what does that even mean?”. That’s fair. I’m not gonna tell you though >:). Just kidding, I’ll tell you. Basically in my words, it is a time to practice trying to notice the rhythm that the Lord is playing in our lives. It is a time of quite literally sitting and meditating through our thoughts and trying to hear the Lord guide us in them. It’s helpful to read a little scripture before hand, just to get some spiritual thoughts flowing. Sometimes it may even just look like resting and slowing down though. Some people find it to be a little bizarre but I really dig it. A time to really sort through all the thoughts in my head? How much time are we talking here, because I got a lot of thoughts.
Anyway, in this class we meditated over a certain passage in the Bible. This passage was Mark 10:46-52. The story is of a blind beggar, named Bartimaeus, who was sitting as Jesus passed by. He cried out to him, begging for mercy. As others tried to silence him, Jesus halted and invited the beggar to come forward. Jesus asked for the beggar’s desire to which the beggar asked for to recover his sight. Jesus responds with “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” I wanted to highlight this story because the beggar leaves a huge impression on me. Was it his success, his status, his assets, his comfortability, or his tactfulness that ended up making him well? No. It was purely his faith in the Lord. We obviously don’t know the background of this man in depth, but we can assume being a blind beggar, he probably didn’t have much that he could consistently look upon for hope. Yet, Jesus was enough for him and was the one he cried to for help. I think there is power in the story in the way it challenges us to question ourselves. Among all of our loss, do we still look to Jesus to help and heal us? Are we following from a shallow need or from an utmost dependence? Would our faith be able to make us well if we were put in the shoes of Bartimaeus? This is the stream of consciousness (what a callback) that I experienced while meditating on the word and that I wanted to share.
I believe that I wrote significantly less than the last update that I provided so y’all are probably severely stoked that this one was shorter (and trust me, I could’ve made it much longer). Maybe it wasn’t though. Regardless, I’m hopeful y’all are severely stoked to read the words I write no matter how long. If you made it all the way through, thank you for reading all of that and I hope something resonated with you. If you skimmed through most of it, still thank you for taking the time to gloss over what I transcribed. This is the part where I told myself I would finally say “enough about me”. If y’all have any fun little updates or prayer requests, feel free to email me back as I would love to be praying for y'all!
Not me saying “enough about me” and then saying “wait, actually I didn’t write enough about me”. I literally forgot but If you would like to be praying for me during this month, here are some ways below that you can:
Prayers that my roots would continue to be entrenched in the soil that is present in Raleigh, NC
Prayers for my grief of home
Prayers that I would not get caught up in “what’s lacking” but would instead focus on “what’s thriving”
Prayers for burn out
Prayers that my vocal cords are still in good condition
this is kind of a joking one, but I am planning on joining the Christmas choir at our church and its just been a while since your boy has sang some music in a group. I will provide updates accordingly.
I think that is just about everything I wanted to talk about in this edition. I apologize, as I probably will again and again for how long these things are but I have a habit to just keep going and going whenever my hands touch a keyboard. I hope that I provided you enough information about my month to quench your thirst. Attached below are some pictures I thought would be fun for people to see of me further ingraining myself in this city.
Picture of my friends Neil, Ian and I recreating an iconic meme. Hopefully you get it.
Picture of me with a big ol heifer of a chicken at the state fair. First time at the state fair and it for sure will not be the last.
Picture of the sunrise that blinds me every morning in my office that I get to work in (please ignore my reflection.)
Picture I captured on the “Hanging Rock State Park” overlook hike. The hike was very interesting considering I didn’t eat lunch or breakfast and it was an 8 mile hike fully uphill/downhill that took me about 5 hours to do. should’ve mentioned this experience in the blog but lets just say I really saw Jesus on that last mile to my car.
That is all for now. Thanks for reading.
May He bless your month of November,
- Alec