Listening to: Resurrect Me - Jon Foreman
Feeling: Tired beyond belief/Wishing you lived much closer
Well over the the last 4 days, I have maybe had free time for approximately 3 hours. All the rest have been me working my ass off for school midterms and deadlines. In the last 2 nights I have had 4 hours of sleep, I have had no free time at all and because of that I have been getting super stressed, tired and angry. Not just grumpiness that people experience when they don't get enough sleep, I get mad.
If you know me, you know I don't get angry, like at all. For the people that have seen me angry or have been on the other end of it while I am angry, they can usual say that I am definitely over reacting. It's true, I do over react, that because I don't get angry over things that other people do. I keep it all inside, too worried about me bothering other people with my anger. So when I do get that anger out, the thing that gets me angry is never what I am actually angry about. It is anger spread across so much of my life, so many things, building up for so long, too long. I don't even need all the fingers on my hand to count how many times I was really angry last year, two times to be exact. That's just how often my kettle boils over.
In this year already though, in fact in these last 7 days I have been really mad twice. I can already tell this year will be an angrier year for me than last year.
Today was one of those days.
In fact I was so angry I was just going to post a blog that's title was just going to say "Fuck this shit" as a title and then "I'm going to bed" and that's all I was going to say.
I have left school really late both days this week (9 yesterday and 8 today), I've literally spent over a day at school, inside, no breaks (worked over both lunch hours), in the last 2 days. I finished my work for the next couple days today though, thankfully. To most people, happiness is the feeling that would come over them and for the first glorious 15 minutes, that's all I felt. The stress had totally faded, a smile was on my face again.
Things started going down hill fast from there. As I was walking onto the c-train platform, I thought about a friend and how happy they were right now. For some reason, maybe some amount of jealousy came out of it, because I know that I can't be that same way right now, but I got like really mad. Just walking down the platform, just this rage filled my body (although I did see some guy with his pants down in the parking area right beside the northbound track, wanking off, just in the middle of that little road, like what the fuck buddy, get a room. There was like 30 people on the platform other than me as well, it was just weird. ok side note over now), it came out of no where. About something I would never get angry about, maybe sad at some points in life, but never, ever angry.
On the train I was just listening to my top rate playlist and some of my top top favorites came on, but not even a smirk broke onto my face. It felt like nothing was going to get this feeling out of my body. All of a sudden, while changing songs, a song came on. A song normally I would just skip, and have been skipping for the last 7 months, it's the song Ocean by the John Butler Trio. A song I had listened to almost everyday of the last 3 summers (which is probably why I skip it, it's not a top favorite either), in the morning at the leaders meetings at the camp I worked at (or on my ipod this last summer since we didn't go to the regular leaders meetings). It was like our daily devotional song, our boss would read us a posting from some Jeszuate (probably crapped on the spelling of that word lol) monks that would post some deep things on their internet site daily.
The weirdest thing happened as soon as he started playing his guitar, the angry just left, all of a sudden. It was as it just evaporated from my being and had moved on. I wanted to start crying (but being on the train and all, well we can say that would of been weird for the least), this sense of peace had just come over me, as if my soul was cleansed of all the junk I've been putting up with lately.
I finished listening to the song and right away started to watch the number 16 Nooma Video, Store (this is exactly why they will be always be on my ipod, for times like this). I have seen it many times, but when I can directly relate to what Rob Bell is talking about it hits me that much more. That's what we need to learn the most, a spiritual reference, something we can relate too. In this video (other than the happy music) Rob is talking about anger, bottlers, and essentially just getting mad at things. I won't get really into what he talks about (this blog post is turning out to be really long already and I need sleep), but he references a place in the bible where Jesus get's angry at some religious leaders because they do not want Jesus to help an injured man because it would break one of their religious laws. Jesus' response to them is 'Well which is better, to do good, or to do evil. To safe life, or to destroy it" to which leaves them speechless. He called out the hardness of their hearts and that leaves them with no answer. He then looked around at them with anger and then told the injured man to raise his hand and Jesus heals it. The cool thing about this, is that in the original language this story was told in is the Greek language and when it talks about Jesus' anger it talks about it in the Aorist tense. It talks about his anger is a temporary feeling, it comes and then it just leaves. Everyone gets angry, even God. Bell brings up a cool point, "would you rather follow a god that gets angry, or follow one that see's all the injustice in the world and doesn't get angry". It's a cool thought huh.
I guess it was like what had just happened to me, my anger came and then I was reminded of him and it left. I wasn't distracted from it (otherwise I would still be mad), it completely left my body. Its weird though, that our of a song used for devotionals that I never got much out of, hit me during a time when I needed to be reminded of whats worth getting angry about.
I then proceeded onto watching number 20, Shells. Which talks about business of our life's when we don't need to be, but do because we are addicted to it. I feel that sometimes I choose to be really busy sometimes, and mostly I am. This does not always mean with school, but also hanging out with friends or gaming for me. We push God aside, saying we'll get to him later, I want to do sometime for me right now. That has mostly been the story of my life, pushing him aside. I have gotten exponentially better as of late thanks to a few inspiring friends and have been setting time aside everyday for the last couple weeks for him. A cute story in this Nooma film is when he is talking about a time when he and his family are walking along some beach and his boys are collecting sea shells. They spot a starfish floating not that far out and one of his sons just gets a look on his face that say 'IT'S MINE!' His son runs out to get it, but then stops, while his family are yelling out at him to go get it. He goes further and stops and Rob asks him why he doesn't go get the starfish. To which his sun replies, "But my hands are full of shells".
I just love hearing this story over and over again. Also the message behind this is so important, we are so busy that we say no to things, but first we must say yes to something else. In the last couple days I have had my hands filled with shells and have been putting everything aside to do work. He found me today when I didn't try to find him because I had said yes to something else already.
How many shells do you carry, or more importantly, how many shells do you to put back in the ocean so have room for that starfish?
PS. If any of you are interested in seeing any of the Nooma videos just ask me sometime and I'll hook you up.
