Sadly Grateful

I live in the future. There are not spaceships or talking droids, but it is the future nonetheless.

So much of my life is spent on finishing.
So much of my life is spent trying to get to the end.

It is impossible for me to live in the present. To appreciate the here and now. Appreciate the process of life. I spend my days constantly trying to check things off my list. I am always looking for the end result. i want everything to be instant.
Instant Coffee,
Instant hamburger,
Instant girlfriend,
Instant perfect relationship with God.
I want to fast food flagulate my whole entire life. I don't want to be patient. I want growth, but i want it to happen instantaneously. I don't want to struggle with everyone else.

Clawing. Scraping. struggling.
I want my life to be like a sitcom. A movie.

And i hate that this will never be. That i will never finish. That i will never be finished. I will never be whole. Never have it all together. Frustration. Confusion. Tension. It will never leave.

But here is where i remember one of my favorite authors Brennan Mannings words on Gratefulness. That i have so much to be grateful, thankful for. Sometimes i get tired of riding my bike around the city. I ride no joke at least 6 miles a day and for the most part it is fun, except times like last night when i had to ride almost four miles on a gradual uphill slope to get home at 11:30 at night. Or when my tire went flat and it took me an hour and a half to get a bus back to my place from Hawthorne BLVd. But then i ride past 3o homeless people sleeping on the streets outside of the Salvation Army and suddenly feel like the biggest selfish prick ever.

Yesterday i was at my friend Brandons house. Brandon is a guy who helps run the college minsitry for Imago. I will be helping him and Luke with things because they admit that they have no idea what they are doing. Brandon and Luke live downtown next to the PSU campus and they have this homeless guy named L.A. that sleeps on their back porch. Yesterday he was hanging out with us before we started watching I Heart Huckabees. We were talking about life and he was telling us about how he was a ordained minster and began telling us about the end times and how the world was going to end in 2012. He actually was pretty smart and not that crazy. He was also a vietnam vet and one of our friends(Sarah) accidentally asked him what it was like to be in prison. He began crying and shaking uncontrollably. Brandon put his arm around him and begna praying for him. He kept muttering the words "you don't understand, you don't understand." I jumped up to pray for him as well. Then he began to bang his head into a pole at their house and me and Brandon had to softly restrain him and then kept praying. Finally he calmed down enough and apologized. He spent the rest of the night drinking.

This morning i was checking my e-mail and i got a message from Tim who leads the Wild Hope teen homeless minstry. Apparently a transient kid we met from the street last week had died in from jumping off the Hawthorne bridge. He and a friend were just having some fun but he was not a strong swimmer.

So this morning as i am not really looking forward to starting work or with life in general, i remember thse two stories and have so much to be grateful for.