WHERE HAVE I BEEN!!

These are posts from the past couple months I've written...

August 22, 2006

So 2 nights ago I stayed in New York Cityin a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air type house, in the 4-bedroom poolhouse, as a matter of fact. That day began by witnessing a truck flip right in front of me and my travel companion(Peter Moore)'s eyes, which was...well...freaking weird and scary. We pulled over right away, and after realizing nobody was seriously hurt(SOMEHOW both passengers walked away without a scratch) and a police officer arrived and interviewed us, we continued east toward NYC(Turns out the guy fell asleep at 10am on the road...NEVER drive when you're tired!).

Yesterday we left NYC, went through RI and CT and arrived in New Bedford, MA, in order to catch the ferry over to Martha's vineyard, where I am preparing to work a middle school camp with an organization called FOCUS which Peter in fact founded many years ago. After taking some time to check out the old, run down fishing town, I got my first glimpse of the ocean. It's always amazing to see it for that first instant every time you go, even though I had seen it over a dozen times before(if you didn't know, I "get around" - in the non-sexual way =)). I always think about what certain things looked like thousands of years ago - whether a shopping center, or a house that now stands there was covered in endless fields, or even if the ocean itself...just standing on a beach staring at it, looked the same. Unbelievable...because the ocean probably has looked the same for hundreds of thousands of years...to everyone.

During the 1 hour ferr ride, we passed through the Elizabeth Islands, and through Woods Hole, MA, where the Oceanographic Institute is. Peter Moore, informed me Emperor Hirohito(Emp. of Japan during WWII), when coming to the US to sign peace agreements and surrender after the war, requested only to see one thing while in the United States, and this Oceanographic institute was that one thing.

After about a 20-minute doze off session, something startled me. Our minds are so dangerous. I found myself seeing people around me dying, thinking about people in BAD ways - I feel so helpless sometimes, you know what I mean? It's the same when you're a little kid, and you're all alone in the dark. You are fine for a few minutes, but then that infamously haunting "Unsolved Mysteries" theme music gets in your head, or you start playing through the next "America's Most Wanted" episode, in which you are the main character. And it's all in your head, but now you are scared out of your mind. You know all you have to do is stop thinking about it and you'll be fine, but you can't. It's too late. We become prisoners of our own minds. I get that way - and Satan must love it. I know immediately when these thoughts enter my mind. I know they're bad - I know I shouldn't think them, but it's too late. Before we know it we're sinning over and over in ways we're not even aware of, and all we can do is pray or fall asleep until we forget it ever happened, until the next time it happens, which we know it will. Bottom line: it's terrible. What can we do about it? In the book of James as well as other places in Scripture, we are told to focus on our hearts, and be transformed from the inside-out. Or in other words, rather than changing our outward actions, by changing our heart our outward actions will reflect those changes. This is a process, bu our damn human nature screws us up, and makes us that much more likely to fall into the thought trap, yet again we must first learn to NOT ACT on those thoughts, THEN work on elimination the thoughts...

We keep on trucking...We'll find it...He'll help us find it...

It takes time.