The Direction I Don't

V1
The new dawn keeps
distancing himself from me
The blank page keeps
Filling up with scribbles I don’t need

PC
Trust me when I say
That this is all I’m seeing
Trust me when I say
There’s nothing that I’m pleading

 Ch 1
Like Tomorrow
Please come quickly now
I’m prayin for these dark clouds
To scatter away with the sunlight you endow

 V2
The lightened beams
keep falling on places I don’t set my feet
The brightened scenes
Are in the backdrops of where I don’t set my feet

Ch 2
Like Tomorrow
Please come here soon
My heart can’t find my tune
In the darkness surrounding the places my steps take me to

Br
I’m lost in the darkness
That’s darkest before the dawn
I’m staring straight ahead
in the blacker than lead unknown that I’m followin
So I keep beggin

Ch 3
Oh Tomorrow
Please don’t leave me alone
Warm the chill in my bones
Give my daydreams and my soul hope

So I couldn’t sleep last night. It was one of those nights where my head was rushing. Basically it was a night where I had ideas on how to save the world from hunger, mend broken friendships, knock common sense into people that have been walking without it, and make a hit CD all in one night. Sadly, I was also too lazy to get up out of bed, so I’m going to take my shot at the common sense one right now. The rest of it I’ll just hope come back to me in the middle of the day sometime.

Now, the common sense I want to knock into people isn’t what maybe you’re thinking as you sit and read this. In fact, if you aren’t in college this probably doesn’t even pertain to you. Which is too bad.

My Alma Mater (can I call it that if I didn’t graduate from there?) has Rush week starting up. Now, when I was going to school there was tremendous pressure to be in a fraternity or sorority (or in Baptist College land, social clubs). All of my friends were talking about how much they wanted to be in this club and that club and which one was cool and which one was known for spittin out weird guys and prude girls. Everyone just apparently knew everything about all of these clubs. They were supposedly professionals. Let me say something, you won’t know jack about any of these groups until you’re in one. No matter what any of the current members tell you.

Which tells me something else, the whole rule about pre-rushing? Non-existant. I got pre-rushed by some guys who were supposedly the most solid guys on campus. I got pre-rushed by club Presidents, and I got pre-rushed by members’ wives. Every club breaks that rule. Which makes me wonder just how much these clubs really do for people. I mean let’s face it, what are the benefits of being in a club? At a traditional college with the actual greek system it can sometimes give you credibility in jobs, but outside of that it’s just about drinking parties and games and hierarchy of college life. Whoop-dee-doo. In my old school, there was no actual greek system. It doesn’t even help you in any way possible. It’s simply for the goal of categorizing and breaking people down.

Which reminds me of something that really happens after you pledge, even at a supposedly “Christian” college. Hazing goes on. The whole reason is so that your “brothers” can break you down to the point of building you back up in the form of a frat brother in the same club. I don’t care how you put it, even telling someone “We don’t wear clothes like that” is a form of breaking people down to make them how you want. Weren’t we taught in elementary school to not let people mold us into what we are? That should be all us. And for those of you who go to a “Christian” college, shame on you for breaking others down. If someone deserves to be changed and molded, God is take care of that. Who are you to tear apart who someone really is anyway?

Now please don’t think I’m anti-frat. That’s simply not the case. I know people at the University of Nebraska who are in a frat and every guy in that club has a 4.0. Yes, they party and all that stuff, but the advantage is that the grades are being kept up and higher education is still a vital part of even that fraternity. I’m not saying don’t join because clubs are evil. I’m saying understand what you’re getting into.

For me, I was told what to do, what was cool, how to take care of myself, and why things were how they were all through high school. In all honesty, I’m done with that. I wouldn’t have joined a club for the sheer fact that I want to choose what I do with my free time. If my friends and I want to hang out, we will choose a time to hang out together and go do what we choose to do, not what the club is doing that night because were new pledges.

Now let me tell a little story. I have a few friends who are looking at different clubs. Because of this, their friendship is being jeopardized. The importance of the choice they make could in the end totally change the friendship forever. They may not ever speak to one another again. Rush week may be their last time really hanging out. Now you tell me if your friendships are worth it. Tell me if you want to conform to a segregated group of “higher-than-thous” and be who you’re told to be.

Don’t let pledge week control your life. Don’t let it control your college career. Don’t let it control even the last half of your freshman year. If you want to be in a group, go for it, nobody is stopping ya. I would rather not have the drama. I would rather not have the extra commitment. And I would sure as heck like to keep my friends the way they are.

Have a good pledge week.

It’s interesting what can happen to a person in twenty-six days. You can feel a renewed sense of friendship with people you haven’t had a strong relationship with. You can feel your almighty deity’s presence in a warm sensation on the back of your neck. You can even watch as your strongest relationships erode right in front of your eyes by choices and decisions regarding drugs, alcohol, and sex. You can grow from an immature boy to a man after God’s own heart, and you can demote from a strong independent woman to a girl who struggles to hold on to her dreams an aspirations. Yes, twenty-six days is a long time when you think about it. What about one day? What can happen in just a single twenty-four hour period? You can move from loathing another human because of a way their tone of voice seems to strike you to learning that your differences are unimportant and over exaggerated. You can travel from the heart of Nebraska to the middle of Arkansas and (if you’re driving fast enough) make it back. You can wake up in love and go to bed in heartbreak. One last thing, what about a moment? This can be a split-second, or a brief period of time when an event takes place. Yes, even a moment can decide fate. In a moment you can make or break a relationship that you have with another by making a decision that affects trust. In a moment you can change your Facebook status and have it reach to all corners of the world! In a moment, you can hear the small whisper of a voice in the wind. And after twenty-six days, it’s all down to a single, split-second moment that has defined my life.

I choose to allow these moments to make an impact on me. Without the allowance of those scenarios to sway my thinking, they are just dead, unimportant scenes from a movie that are later taken out and rarely watched on a DVD’s “extras” menu. In fact, it’s that exact way of thinking that sells all of these philosophical books that are hitting the best-sellers lists right now. Don’t take me the wrong way, those are books that open our eyes to the things that are right in front of us. I’m reading a book like that right now in fact. In the book the author is talking about how his life is too boring to make into a movie, how the people who want to write the script with him for the movie about his life are trying to explain to him that in order for a movie to be interesting, there has to be conflict in every scene, and every scene has to hold some sort of relevance and importance to the overall plot-line of the story of the movie. So in order for his life to be an interesting, and successful, movie they have to rewrite the boring scenes and make them interesting. It gives the author an idea of whether or not a person can purposefully live life like a story, where every scene has direct importance to the plot-line. I was at first blurting out to a book that can’t hear me a distinct “no”; that a life is bound to have boring scenes in it. I continued thinking about my own current situation, where I am dropping out of college to pursue God and follow wherever He may be taking me. I then thought about the moments that make the impacts on me.

These situations hit me at any given time. I am choosing to take away myself from a place that I love in order to follow God. This leads to me working at a mall, living at home with my parents, sleeping, and having all of my friendships miles and miles away from me. Sounds like a boring and uninteresting life, doesn’t it? But wait! Only by allowing these moments to hold no substance do we actually have boring scenes! If every new scene, every room, and every event holds a memory of impact, we will not have a single boring scene! Using our freedoms to choose and our ability to think, we can make any second one with the silver lining or the one with the allusion to the allusion to the allusion of our fondest memory.

We hear about the purpose-driven life, the desires of our hearts, and even the American dream quite often, but rarely do we understand that these are not things that just fall into our laps. We must choose to hold these moments to importance. If we only let what comes to us make the impact, we will miss the opportunities to impact others, where if we are searching for and finding the miracle of the moment then our greatest moment will always be the one just passing.

In twenty-six days there is a total of 2,246,400 seconds. In the time from the start of my Christmas break to now I have had that many moments that had the chance to show myself a miracle. Some moments I show the ugliest side of myself, and others I feel like the representation of the hero that I try to be most like. The truth is that we won’t have 2,246,400 golden moments and even memorable scenes. Even in my favorite movie there is always a scene that I watch that I don’t remember is even part of the film. But the point is that if we aren’t constantly working towards and searching for those moments we can miss the still, silent voice that can lead us to the decision that can define our lives. So as it turns out, we have 2,246,400 golden opportunities to live a life of impact and importance.

It’s interesting what can happen to a person in twenty-six days.

I’m sitting in my friends Logan and Justin’s room, who I’ve been sharing a bathroom with while I’ve been crashing over in my other friends David and Grant’s room for a little over a week, using Logan’s Mac charger because I left mine up in my room. Logan has been napping and I’ve been literally sitting here on the computer doing nothing for about 30 minutes, waiting for my next class to start (which is about 10 minutes from now). Of course, this is when inspiration usually hits me, when I have someplace to be.

I don’t normally write my thoughts and emotions into essay-style writings, they usually come out in song. However, it sometimes takes multiple sessions of writing and different styles to get out my thoughts and organize what I really think and feel about something. It’s incredible how many thoughts are surface level in comparison to the number of in-depth thoughts. The shallow, unimportant ones take almost no effort to say and think about and can be summed up in one or two sentences. It’s on rare occasions that I have a thought that follows me for multiple days.

This idea that’s been haunting me is this: That I understand that I need to understand how to understand that I’m not always on the right side. What? Feels like I’m crazy, I know. I need a break from this, the crossing over of words and thoughts is blowing my mind, but I need to break this down. Peeling away the layers from the inside out seems to work the best in this, so let’s try this:

‘Understand that I’m not always on the right side.” Ok, so I understand that I could be wrong. I could be completely devoted to this, and later realize that I was deceived into wrong-thinking. I’ve had that happen before, where I’m so sure that I’m right and there’s no way in the world that I could ever be mistaken on a subject, and then it turns out that I was WAY off. So I can understand that I may be in the wrong. What’s the next layer?

‘I need to understand how to (previous thought).’ Ok, so I need to figure out how to get to the point where I understand that I could be wrong. Well, it sounds like when you see that you have been wrong before, and there’s a chance that you could be wrong again, that sums up the ability to understand. It’s taking past experiences and putting them with the current situation. If you can see that, then I think we’re ready to move to the next point.

‘That I understand that (previous thought).’ So now the question is ‘why?’. What would the purpose of understanding that be. Why in the world would you want to understand that you could be wrong? Don’t you want the confidence to be correct in your thinking? Well, let’s look at it this way, if you thought that every idea was definitely spot on and you were never wrong, then any bit of bogus junk that you said would be truth. Truth is not subjective to what you think, truth is truth. It is always right all of the time, but that’s another discussion completely. Because you can’t always be right, you need to learn how to critique yourself in what is ridiculous or not. If I told you the sky was pink and you believed me, you obviously didn’t think it through and discern what was true, and you didn’t critique your thoughts, and you didn’t critique the fact that I was being a fool. By looking at the possibility that you may be wrong, you are opening up the doors for yourself to be as unbiased as possible.

So you’re thinking, this is so obvious and easy, whats the point in writing it out? You aren’t getting to anything that I couldn’t figure out on my own. Don’t worry, I told myself that, too. So it’s time to throw in mankind’s natural monkey wrench: Biased opinion.

The practice of understanding you may be wrong is easy on paper. You just look at it and say, “That’d be dumb to not be open-minded.” In reality, however, it’s not that easy. Take a smoker for example. They always say that they can quit if they want to. In their minds they are totally right, there is nothing that would make them think they have to be addicted. You can’t say that though if you don’t want to. You aren’t in that situation. When we’re on the outside of a situation we can always see clearer than when we are in the heat of the stress and pressure of a situation. Most guys will understand that when you’re playing NCAA Football on XBOX that you seem to know exactly who is wide open if you’re watching somebody else play. You see that the ‘Y’ receiver is 30 yards downfield and if you just lob it to him he’ll take it the rest of the way for the touchdown. The player in the situation though can only see that the ‘B’ receiver is 7 yards away and is a clear throw, but won’t gain any yards. So he presses ‘B’ and the following is a situation most college-age males know too well.

The difference of being in the heat of the moment and looking at it from a distance is perspective. The smoker knows it’s unhealthy to smoke, but he keeps smoking because he thinks “That’ll never happen to me.” While the friend of the smoker watches as the smoker loses weight, loses his money, and ultimately ruins what could’ve been so much better had the smoker just seen himself from the outside perspective. It’s all about the camera angle.

So my biased thoughts take me to the point where I think that just because I’m doing the same thing as somebody else, and something bad happens to them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’ll happen to me. Sometimes that’s true, and people who read this will automatically think that that’s them. Here’s the hard fact though: in the world of statistics, you are only as great as the number of different outcomes you have. If you have 2 options, then there’s a 50/50 chance. Even if the odds of being one on side is incredibly minuscule compared to the other, you still have a 50/50 chance. That might be for the better or for the worse and it may be with or without the natural disaster known as bias, but we all know that there are cancer patients who survive and appendectomy patients who die. In the world where you are the number 1, your chances are only as big as the options in front of you. Just remember to look at yourself from all angles, so you know what risks are worth taking and if you know exactly what you’re saying.

So it comes down to this: Are you willing to look at yourself as the enemy and the villain in order to become the hero? Or are you clouding your eyes with what you want to see in yourself?