Importance

Still here, still huge, still reading.

I found 3 Nouwens, 4 books of poetry, and 1 by this guy who spoke at our church called Decision Making and the Will of God. Amazon's sending NT Wright and Kierkegaard. I'm finishing Through Painted Deserts, and will probably move on to the next Don Miller when I'm done. I like him because of the stuff he likes.

Funny- he talks about being impressed that Clinton remembered the name of a waiter in Aspen a year after meeting him. I remember walking down the street in Aspen into the sun, seeing all these guys in nice dark suits. I thought it was a wedding party, and nearly bumped into one of them as he was turning his head to do some window shopping while still walking forward. We both stopped and sort of did that back & forth-ness. Turns out the suits were secret service and the guy was of course C himself. Never was a huge fan of the guy, to be honest, but brushes with famous people still make you feel important.

My sense of importance is messed up. Miller uses the example of the life-boat economy: Constant evaluation of yourself and those around you to assess who gets to live, who gets dumped is pretty much how we live our lives. We want to prove our importance in any of the ways we can conjure. Generally for me that doesn't include a relationship with Christ.

This importance thing- I think the baby coming challenges my sense of it because I had planned on having a cool career to define myself. I've got the studly husband, I contribute to a church, I now live where I've always wanted to, I've finished all the degrees I can in performance. The next step was to get a job so that when people ask, I can tell them how much I belong in the lifeboat.

I know, I know. Having kids- it's what continues life, it's this amazing thing, and when I look into his little eyes I'll know that was what I'm here for. When I think about my own parents, and how they've lived and taken care of their kids, I guess they did always make me feel like the most important thing. They have their own stuff, and even that I have looked at as lives lived to be my examples. It's hard to imagine myself able to happily relenquish my imaginary reasons for being for anything. God, kid, marriage, humanity. It only took 32 years for me to notice this.