why is it .....

I feel like I have so much to say on here that I can't even get started. I have so many questions about my life right now. I wonder so much what to do with some things going on in Katie's life. I wonder what to do about work. I wonder whether to go to seminary. I wonder whether to ask a cute girl out on a second date. I wonder why I am so lonely after having a good first date. It never fails. It seems weird, but it is true.

I guess most of all I just wish I could share responsibility in my life again. I want to be part of a team again where I am not always the captain. Katie and I do make a formidible pair, but it is not quite what I am looking for. Every now and again, it would be nice to give my input into a decison and then trust the decision another came to, but I can't do that.

It is a part of spiritual discipline. I want to give these questions over to God, but I am not even sure what that means. I pray about these things. I try to lay them at God's feet. But I don't get burning bushes or the stars rearranged into words or voices telling me what to do, so in the end, it still seems like me making decisions. Hopefully more peacefully and in a better frame of mind, leading to better decisions, but they are still mine.

Katie tonight listened to a message my parents have saved from almost four years ago now. It is a call Becky and Katie made to them not long after we moved to Nacogdoches in 2002. Of course, they saved it because of Katie's voice, as Becky tells her what to say, but they have kept it all these years at least as much because of Becky's voice. I hadn't heard that recording or any recording of Becky's voice in quite a while, and yet when I heard her talking it was as if not a minute had passed since the last time I had heard it. It reminds me of a bit from a Paul Simon song:

"She comes back to tell me she's gone.
As if I didn't know that.
As if I didn't know my own bed.
As if I never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead."

And then,....
"I may be obliged to defend
Every love, every ending,
Or maybe there's no obligations now."

I sat at the concert on Saturday night, and the first couple of pieces in particular were very lyrical and peaceful, and I found myself praying about the stuff going on in my life, the stresses I listed above. And then I found myself praying about the woman next to me, who I have known for a while that God put into my life. Why, I can't say yet. It is not for me to know yet, I reckon. Which got me thinking about the other people that I would say without question God has deliberately put into my life. There are men I would say that about, certainly two in my life right now. But what amusing to me at the time and since is how the list of women all seem to be slender brunettes between 5'3" and 5'6".

Things that make you go, "hmmmmmmm." I guess the immediate lesson is that if you want a message to get through to me, send it in that kind of vehicle. They don't have to struggle much to get or keep my attention.

Anyway, my prayer settled on a simple request - let me be the person she needs for whatever purpose You have for us.

It is a prayer I haven't formulated so explicitly since Becky had cancer. Then it was let me be the husband she needs to battle this successfully. I guess I needed to be a little more explicit about whose definition of success I was after, but that is a whole different post. As I am sitting here, it strikes me as funny that I have never articulated my prayers for and about Katie in quite that way. I think I shall from now on.

And now I am off to bed.