Amortal

I’ve said it before... I’m an idiot.

I am very confused about many things. My relationships have been changing and I’m finding that the world ruled by Newtonian physics can be as strange and random as the world of quantum physics.

I have no idea where I am in my relationship with my wife. There has been some tense moments lately, and there have been times when we laughed, we worked together, we made decisions together.

During one of the tense moments I told her that if I became convinced that our marriage cannot be repaired, I would divorce her. Her eyes widened a little. From anger or surprise, I'm not sure.

Other relationships have been changing as well. I have a friend I work with who does his best to cheer me up, encourage me with the joys of our shared profession.

Several good friends have been keeping in touch, knowing that I am struggling in some way, and drawing near to let me know I am appreciated, cared for. These have been changes which have helped me.

My relationship with my faith, with my God, has also been changing.

Over the last six months there has been a progression in my prayer life:
* Specific requests for help, blessings, to general requests...
* General requests for wisdom, perseverance, strength, patience...
* To numb quiet... just walking, thinking...
* To a sort of seeking friendship, searching for the Carpenter who would be my friend as well as my God.

Last night there was an eclipse of the moon. The bright full moon darkened, the edges of the Earth’s shadow glowing red from the ring of sunsets and sunrises shining from our world onto that one.



I watched the darkening moon sitting in my van, the engine running, the lights out. My wife’s car was parked on the other side of the lot in front of the drug store where she was picking up a prescription for her mother. (As Imentioned before, I'm an idiot.)

A shadow had crossed my heart. The eclipse of what is good in my heart was shadowed by the specter of something else, someone else, reddened on its edges by the embers of anger and jealousy.

She pulled out of the parking lot, turning southwest toward the area where she said her AA meeting was, not southeast to where I know he lives.

I turned on my lights and followed anyway. (Idiot.)

I let her stay about a half mile ahead of me, the running lights on the left side a little dimmer than the right because I had removed one of them before she left.

She went where she said she would.

I felt like an ass.

She went into her meeting, sitting beside a couple of women, showing them the sweater she is knitting, laughing.

I went to her car, fixed the taillight. Slunk off to the van, drove home, watching the darkened moon drift over my small town, my home.

I brought the boys out to look at it, I took a fuzzy picture of it with my digital camera.

Crawled into bed.

I thought about my weaknesses. About my failures.

I thought about the mystery of being a mortal with aspirations for immortality.

I thought about what it means to be born in a body that ages and will eventually decay, and the mind it carries, the one that can think such bizarre thoughts and contemplate such saddening ideas that it pulls my spirit down to dark places. I thought about my spirit which lives beyond the confines of this animated 200 pounds of flesh, the spirit which will carry that mind into eternity and joy.

I thought about the reverse. About the all powerful, the immortal, slipping into this world into the tiny helpless flesh of an infant, so He can share in the experience of mortality. I thought about how He will carry the wounds of His mortality throughout eternity. I thought about how the moment when His death intersected the timeline of the universe it altered (alters... time has no meaning in this discussion) fundamental relationships between these four dimensions and the eight or so we can not see. I thought about how He will be an eternally immortal mortal, eons beyond the time we slip from our own mortality into immortality.

I thought about how such concepts do not seem to have proper words in our language.

Christ was, is, both. He was mortal. He lived, He died. Christ was, is, will be, immortal. He is both and neither. Jesus, my friend the Carpenter, my Lord and master, my Shepherd, is amortal. Death simply isn’t within the framework of who He is. It is, and it isn’t and it matters more than any other death, for it makes all death meaningful and meaningless.

I have no clue what I’m talking about... what I’m trying to say.

I just know that my heart is shaken (and stirred) and I’m just rambling...

I'm an idiot.