A New Post … And Email!

I just put the linked post up at my website, lightsinthedarkness.net. Please go check it out!

‪http://lightsinthedarkness.net/?p=1387

Starting A New Blog

I finally took the plunge yesterday and started a new blog dedicated entirely to perspectives on depression and other mental disorders from a Christian perspective. Hopefully, this will allow me to use this space for other subjects, such as parenting or editorializing or just messing around. Check out the new blog at http://depressionlighthouse.wordpress.com/. Thanks!

My Advice To Graduates

With this being the time of year for college and high school graduations, I’ve been paying more attention lately to the plans of those receiving diplomas. I’ve also been reflecting quite a bit on the decisions I made over the course of my educational journey, and while I would not by any means consider myself someone qualified to dole out career advice, I believe I made enough wrong turns along the way to be able to pass along a few tips about how to not fall into some of the pitfalls I have over the years.

I was always one of the “smart kids” in school. I made good grades, enrolled in all the honors and advanced classes in high school, even took the SAT in middle school. I graduated college with a 3.5 GPA, and that was even with my failing one class and not retaking it (For the record, it was an earth science class, and I could take it a thousand more times and still never pass it.). I received honors and awards and got my name in the newspaper a few times for different accomplishments. As a student, I was a success.

And, for the most part, none of it meant a damn thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything useful in school. For instance, had it not been for the encouragement and efforts of some great teachers, I would have never realized I had a (debatable) talent for writing. I never had any vision or passion, though, for what I wanted to do with what I was learning. Even worse, I somehow believed that doing well in school would save me from the more mundane jobs and tasks I didn’t want to deal with learning. I didn’t learn things because I didn’t want to. I was a good student, and that would get me where I wanted to go … even if I didn’t know where that was.

So I never learned how to change my own oil or repair a broken transmission or hang sheetrock or build a bookshelf or bring in a crop or shoot a deer. Are you going to be required to do any of these things in your lifetime? I can’t tell you for sure. I can say, though, that everything I just mentioned (with the exception of shooting the deer) is a service people will always need someone to do. I used to make fun of the kids in vocational school. Now I wish I knew how to do at least half of the things they do. Never consider any job beneath you, no matter how smart you think you are.

Manual labor is not for everyone, though, just as college isn’t for every high school graduate. We live in a society now that preaches everyone must go to to college, whether they have any clue what they want to do there and no matter how much debt they incur on their way to obtaining a degree. I am sad to say this is not a recent development. A great many of us have diplomas hanging on our walls that don’t have much to do with where we wound up. If you find a calling in life that doesn’t require a degree, go for it.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, unfortunately, it’s not. You’ll be faced with all kinds of decisions. What do you need to learn? How much time, energy, and money will it cost? How will it affect those around you? Should you move and make a new start or make a go of it where you are? Fear and uncertainty will be waiting around every corner to derail you, and, unfortunately, you won’t always get the best advice. Education will be a tool, but it can’t make a decision for you. Be brave, and don’t take the freedom you have right now for granted. It won’t always be so easy to take chances.

Keep in mind, of course, these words are coming from someone who flubbed up in one way or another nearly all of the things he was just talking about, so I’m not claiming to be some kind of expert or guru. I just don’t want you to travel some of the roads I have. And, if you do happen to wind up on one of them, I hope you’ll be able to navigate them better than I did. That reminds me of my final bit of advice: Give yourself room to screw up. Because you’re going to – a lot. Instead of endlessly beating yourself up, though, keep going forward or backward or sideways or whichever way you have to go to move on.

Take all that for what it’s worth, graduates. I’m guessing a lot of you already know more than I do anyway. Just remember me when you get really successful. Okay?

Just Write Something

This is the kind of post I hate writing. You know the one – the “Oh, crap, I haven’t written anything in a while, so I guess I had better come up with something so people don’t forget who I am” post. Funny, I never notice really successful bloggers having to write things like this. I, on the other hand, seem to have to do it every few weeks or so, which leads me to one very obvious conclusion…

I’m not doing this right.

It’s usually at about this point I would start going on about the difficulties of writing or the busyness of life or the struggle to figure out the purpose of having a blog in the first place. I don’t think I’m going to do that this time. Fact is, I’ve realized (with the help of others) that I’m sort of lazy sometimes. Or I’m deathly afraid of failure. Or maybe a combination of the two.

At any rate, I don’t dedicate myself to writing like I should.

Feels good to get that out of the way. Now, time to start thinking about the next post…

The Absolute Last Post You Will See Here About Doug Phillips

Okay, I get it. Doug Phillips was a bad dude. The stuff that came out public concerning his affair and how that related to his resignation from Vision Forum Ministries was just the tip of the iceberg. The affair that he claimed did not involve knowing a woman “in a biblical sense” actually probably involved just that. There was a weird gap between when he stepped down as an elder at his church and when he stepped down from Vision Forum. He was cocky and arrogant. He may have exaggerated his accomplishments. And, in the end, he alienated some of his closest friends and allies.

Really, I get all that. Now let me say this: People, get over it and move on with your lives.

Ever since I wrote a post titled Common To Every Man, this site has attracted readers looking for information on Doug Phillips. My top post from the past week was basically just a link to an article WORLD Magazine wrote on Phillips; I barely even wrote anything myself. I only wrote the first post to express a sense of caution I think every man ought to employ in realizing that none of us should ever be arrogant enough to believe we are safe from the type of fall Phillips experienced. I believe his is a cautionary tale, and I only shared the WORLD article because I respected the manner in which it was written.

This is not a Doug Phillips-related blog site. If news is reported, I’ll read it, but I’m not going to share any more links. It’s bothersome to me how many people seem to be trolling WordPress looking for information about this man. Maybe people are still trying to figure the whole thing out. Maybe they’re still disappointed. Maybe they’re intent on feeding their negative feelings toward him. Maybe they just like to gossip.

Whatever the case may be, I’m out. It was an awful affair (no pun intended), and it hurt a lot of people. It may have even shaken the faith of a great many. There are other more pressing matters worth our time, though. Love your families. Follow your passions. Read edifying things. I don’t know, go outside or something. There’s no point in beating this thing to death anymore.

Keep praying for Doug Phillips. That is all.

Too Much

I remember several years ago having a talk with my supervisor at the time about mail. Specifically, we were talking about the sheer volume of mail he received every day, and he said something I don’t think I’ll ever forget: “We get so much stuff, I just get overwhelmed with it. I’m sure there have been good things that I’ve thrown away, but it’s just too much to keep up with.”

I’ve thought about those words often as the world keeps changing to bring us better and better access to nearly everything imaginable. There’s just simply too much stuff out there to take in. It flies at us from every direction every minute of every day. From our televisions, from our computers, from our cell phones, from our radios. We can’t even blame the professionals anymore. Suddenly, it seems everyone is capable of producing anything they put their minds to – albums, books, apps, podcasts, websites, movies, videos. You name it, we got it.

It’s just too much. Links to links to links to links to links. Independent music websites. Independent book publishers. YouTube. Hulu. Web series. Daily podcasts of programs that have already aired somewhere else. Spotify. Pandora. Online sites for newspapers and magazines you might have missed. Reviews of reviews of reviews. And the blogs. Blogs and blogs and blogs and blogs…

A lot of you reading this have been kind enough to follow this blog. I can’t thank you enough for that. Every follow notification I get is a tremendous encouragement to me, and lets me know I actually have something worthwhile to say. In all honesty, though, I’m not reading your blogs. I’ve looked at some of them, and they’re very nice, but there’s only so much information I can stuff into my tiny brain in one day.

So I’ve begun to cut some things out. For instance, if you post a video to your Facebook or Twitter feed that is “amazing,” “unbelievable,” “touching,” or “astounding,” I will more than likely not watch that video, since 99 percent of those videos I have watched are neither “amazing,” “unbelievable,” “touching,” or “astounding.” If an article is billed as “mind-blowing,” I’m skipping over it. If a video is “must-see,” it ain’t gettin’ watched by me. If an album doesn’t have at least one fast song on it, it will not be getting added to my collection. And so on and so forth…

I fully realize I could be missing some truly great stuff this way. Then again, I could be missing some truly great stuff by focusing on all these other things, too. Either way, I just can’t take it all in. And, in an odd way, having this many options has actually caused me to limit my horizons in some areas. Take music, for instance. With options like my iPod, Pandora, and Spotify, I can tailor the music I listen to into whatever categories I choose, which means I can basically not try anything new or out of the ordinary if I don’t want to.

I didn’t think this was a problem until I thought back one day to all the music I listened to in high school. Now, I’m more of a hard rock/borderline metal kind of guy with bits of Americana mixed in, but back then I also thought Bobby Brown, LL Cool J, Young MC, and Enigma were pretty cool, too. And as poorly as some of that music has held up, it broadened my sense of rhythm and wordplay and electronic music. But I heard it all in the natural flow of life – radio, friends’ cars, sporting events. It was just there; it just happened.

It’s hard to believe I actually feel this way. I mean, a world of infinite possibilities should be awesome, right? I should be more knowledgeable than ever, able to snap off information in the blink of an eye. Instead, I read a really wonderful and insightful article the other day on the relationship between teenagers and social media, and now I can’t remember the name of the book it featured, the author of the book, or the website I saw the article on. Whatever I got from it is crammed into all the other bits of data I’m consuming nearly constantly.

So consider this my apology for missing out on all the wonderful work some of you may be doing. Maybe one day I’ll give you the attention you so richly deserve. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here sorting through the day’s mail and trying to decide what I should keep and what I should get rid of. The trash can is looking pretty full already…

 

Falling Away

I sure do love me some March Madness. Wall-to-wall basketball for the better part of a month. If it’s not being played, it’s being talked about. Nobody mailing it in, every team playing their hearts out because they know it’s win-or-go-home. The best time of the year to be a basketball fan, hands-down.

I used to devote hour upon hour to watching every second of basketball I could during the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament. I obsessed over my bracket every year, cursing the names of every losing team that made me look foolish for picking them to win. Much to the chagrin of nearly everyone around me, I was a Kentucky boy rooting (for no particular reason) for the North Carolina Tar Heels. Yelling at the television, throwing stuff, biting my nails… Yep, I was that guy.

I say all that in the past tense because I’m not really that guy anymore. I mean, I still watch quite a bit of the tournament, but I don’t feel very emotionally invested in it anymore. I still fill out a bracket, but I don’t really care what my overall record is once the dust is settled. Not only do I not root for the Tar Heels anymore, I don’t throw my support behind any particular team these days. I still care … but, then again, I don’t care. Know what I mean?

Maybe my slow fade from tournament junkie to semi-casual observer started several years ago when I read Alexander Wolff’s Raw Recruits during the breaks in a lengthy trial I had to cover for the newspaper I was working for at the time. Or maybe it began nearly 12 years ago, when my wife and I welcome our first child into the world and our lives and priorities got turned upside-down. Or maybe it was when I realized I was finally older than all of the players (and now I’m actually older than a lot of the coaches,too).

Whatever the case, I found myself sitting down to fill out a bracket this year and suddenly realizing I had no idea what I was doing. Even stranger, I wasn’t really bothered by that. I’m certainly not criticizing anyone still knows the starting five of every team or dresses up in their favorite team’s gear just to watch them on television. If your heart still lies there, I think that’s awesome. Somewhere down the line, mine sort of moved on … and I’m not entirely sure that’s such a bad thing.

All my life, I’ve heard that God will take things out of your life if He doesn’t think they’re fruitful. I’ve always envisioned that as Him having to pry whatever it was I was holding onto from my clutching, angry fingers as I kicked and screamed through the entire process. Whatever it was, it would be something I desperately didn’t want to give up, and He would cause me great pain and discomfort by taking it. After a while, with this mentality, it’s easy to start thinking that Christianity is less about joy and freedom and more about sucking all the joy out of life in an effort to conform.

As with most things in life, though, God needs to change the heart before he change the behavior. Had someone come to me and said, “Hey, you’re really obsessing too much over basketball. You need to stop watching so much.”, I probably would not have responded in a very compliant way. Stretched out over time, though, I saw my time going to other things – writing, kids, friends – that made me happy in my heart. And while I never lost my love for the game, I did lose that feeling that I had to be plugged into it constantly during tournament time.

There are certain things we’ll have to give up in life. For example, if you’re an alcoholic and you’re destroying your liver with booze every night, you will have to give up drinking. Something will have to move the heart away from the liquor store, however, before the body will follow. So from ending sports obsessions to chemical addictions to ingrained behaviors, the same madness is at work. The good thing is, it’s not just limited to the month of March.

Sick Of Ourselves

Well, it finally happened last week: I became a narcissist.

I’m not sure if it happened all at once or just gradually crept in over time. I’ve never thought of myself as a self-occupied kind of person. As I sat at my keyboard last Monday night, though, I realized I was three-quarters of the way into a blog post that had no real reason to exist other than to get people to visit the site you’re on right now (Isn’t it ironic? Don’t ya think?).

I wanted to think I was just following up a post I thought was pretty good from the day before (which can be found here, wink, wink). You know, generating traffic, building readership, providing enlightenment for the masses, etc., etc. After struggling through a few paragraphs, though, it became clear to me I was uncovering another uncomfortable truth about myself…

I really, really want you to like me.

When I first hopped on the Facebook bandwagon a few years ago, I was racking up “friends” like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, if you and I had even exchanged glances at the local Walmart, you were getting a request to add me. Even before the days of social media, though, I craved the praise of others. The internet has just sped up my journey toward being completely self-absorbed.

I’m making some of these statements tongue-in-cheek, but there is an element of truth to them as well. I’ve noticed lately I’ve been keeping a closer eye on my “likes” and checking in on the WordPress dashboard every morning to see how tall those little blue bars are. I still don’t get Twitter, but I always get a good feeling when someone acknowledges one of my tweets somehow. Sometimes it’s as if I’m building my own little cult of personality … and that is not a good thing.

I’ve noticed something else lately, too: Many of my social media friends seem to be posting less and less these days. They’re not talking so much about how they went to the grocery store or taking so many pictures of the food they’re eating or shouting as much about political matters. This kind of made me sad for a while, but then it hit me that maybe they all were starting to feel the same way I did Monday night. Maybe we were all getting tired of talking about ourselves.

So my lesson learned here is there is a fine line between self-promotion and just blatantly grabbing for attention. I dislike the idea of this space becoming my barometer for how popular I am or how well I write. I want to contribute something or help someone or make people think about things in a different way. That might sound too lofty for a little ol’ blog on the internet, but it’s the truth. Positive affirmation is great, but it doesn’t need to be the sole goal.

If you’d like to comment on any of this, though, I’m sure I’ll be checking WordPress every few minutes or so today to see how many views this post has gotten. At least I’ll be able to respond to you fairly quickly…

Dumb Beginnings

Maybe one day I’ll figure out why certain random thoughts pop into my head. For instance, I’m taking a shower before work last week when, totally out of the blue, I think back to an old documentary I watched one time about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. For no apparent reason, I remembered Will Smith talking about how embarrassed he was of his acting during the show’s first season and how hard he worked to improve over the course of the show’s run. I also remembered how he was basically the biggest movie star in the world at the time I watched that documentary.

Let’s face it, though: As much as I loved Uncle Phil, Aunt Viv (both of them), Carlton, Hilary, Ashley, and Geoffery, Fresh Prince wasn’t exactly Shakespeare. In fact, it was pretty dumb most of the time. As catchy as its theme song was (“I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air…”), I still cringe a little when I catch an old episode on cable and see Smith bobbing his head around while waiting for someone to answer the front door of the Banks’ mansion.  I actually kind of wonder if he does, too.

Thing is, I don’t know if we ever would have gotten Will Smith the movie star without Fresh Prince. I don’t think anyone was really thinking of Smith as an actor when the show began. Without it, though, we probably would never have seen the Will Smith of I Am Legend or The Pursuit of Happyness or even Hitch. I guess you could say, then, that a goofy beginning was actually the springboard into bigger and better things.

I’ve been working through the worthiness of doing things lately. I can’t tell you the number of things I’ve turned down in life because I thought they were silly or not worth my time. Do you know how many southern rock bands I could have joined over the years? Or how many writing contests no one has ever heard of I could have entered? Or how many jobs I never applied for because I felt they were beneath me? Or the number of books I never started because the plot lines suddenly seemed outrageously silly to me?

In all honesty, a lot of those things I just mentioned actually were pretty silly. I just couldn’t picture myself, for instance, standing on stage and playing bass through a set of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers covers. Nothing against those bands; it’s just not my thing. On the flip-side, though, right now I’m not playing bass for anyone, mainly because no one knows who I am from all those years of turning down opportunities. Not to wear out a cliché, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Thomas Merton, the American Catholic writer and mystic, once said, “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.” Somehow, I don’t think Merton was envisioning a kid from the streets of Philly moving in with his rich relatives, but many a silly idea has come forth from thinking this way. In some cases, though, the seeds of greatness have been planted in those very ideas.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to become a “yes man” and start agreeing to every crazy thing that comes along. I am going to try to be a little more open to new things, though. Write a few more awful songs. Start the freakin’ book I’ve been talking about on here forever. Take some freelance jobs I’m maybe not so passionate about, just to get the experience under my belt. That all may sound like some sort of weird self-torture ritual, but I’m beginning to think it’s more about progression, even if I feel like it’s all a complete waste of time.

I guess Smith may have sort of bombed out last year with After Earth, but who knows? Maybe we just witnessed the beginning of the second act of his theatrical career. Granted, it doesn’t include a rare cab with a FRESH license plate and dice in the mirror, but it might lead somewhere even swankier than Bel-Air.

Play Day

I haven’t written anything here in a little while, but, believe me, it hasn’t been for a lack of trying. I’ve been pondering some heavy topics lately, and they aren’t exactly easy to put into words. You know, typical depressed male with the big 4-0 bearing down on him kinds of things – missed chances, insecurity, etc., etc. And to those of who so graciously responded to my post about the book idea, I promise I haven’t forgotten you. Real life just keeps getting in my way.

Of course, my lack of productivity here has been driving me nuts. Some people maintain blogs to show off their families or share their hobbies or just to (gasp) have fun; I have one to validate my very existence as a writer. I’m supposed to be coming up with a to-do list every day this week, but I’ve been slacking on that because I hate setting a goal and not reaching it. I feel as I need to be accomplishing something every moment I’m awake, whether that’s educating myself with a magazine article, getting in better shape by riding my bicycle, or learning a new song on the guitar.

Today represented one of my most anxiety-enducing scenarios when it comes to meaningful use of time: Watching the kids by myself. You would think a father of five wouldn’t be frightened by the prospect of babysitting his own children, but I always get a little nervous when it’s just me. I don’t like just messing around with them. I feel as if I should be creating those Hallmark commercial father-child moments. Or I should at least be helping them with their homeschooling. Or making them a sandwich. Heck, something.

On this particular day in western Kentucky, temperatures were mild and the sun was shining for the most part. My 1-year-old daughter was in a happy mood, and my other four were chomping at the bit to get outdoors. Now, I had already taken off work early to watch them (My wife was taking my mom to a doctor’s appointment, and we didn’t have another sitter available.), so I was already not getting something done somewhere else. Heading outside would effectively bring to an end any hope of educational activity inside today, which really didn’t matter because I didn’t have anything planned anyway. Could just fooling around, running around the yard on a February afternoon be worthwhile at all?

Turned out the answer was a resounding yes. We basically all played hooky together; they were getting out of school, and I was getting out of work. We played this weird variation of tennis in the driveway. We shot some hoops. I went on a bike ride (which I’m sure I will be paying for tomorrow). In the indoors department, I got to put my 4-year-old son down for a nap, and I got to read a book to my youngest. I really didn’t do much of anything, at least not in the traditional working sense. I did accomplish something very important, though.

It is so difficult for me to realize sometimes that what seems like doing nothing in my mind is actually necessary in some way. Sitting down and watching a television show usually seems like a waste of time to me, but there are times when the body just needs to stop. I don’t think my children learned one school-related thing all day, but they taught me that sometimes the dad who is supposed to be breaking his back for them all the time just needs a play day where none of the “important” stuff matters. Time is a worthwhile thing; my use of it today was certainly not wasted.

Real life kicks back into gear tomorrow. Threat of severe weather, regular eight-hour work day, kids likely cooped up in the house, books and laundry and dishes to clean. Good thing we did all that important stuff today.