holy week journey

I've thought about this for a while, so here goes.

I'm going to post for several days primarily about things I think of related to my faith. For the purposes of setting the record as straight as possible, my faith is Christianity. I might call it any number of other appropriate or even clever things like Jesus-following, Christ-following, The Way, whatever. But to the general American consumer, I might just as well say I am a Christian. In this country, anyway, that could actually mean any number of things. You might find upon closer investegation that it means only a few of the things you would assume it means.

Clearing that up is not really the purpose of the essays I aim to write this week. I'm not going to defend the faith, or try to get you to see that it is indeed The Way, or get into a debate with you about any of it. My point is that I just want to write a bit about some (a very few) of the things I have found to be tremendously meaningful along the journey. "Holy Week" seems like an appropriate time to highlight this kind of thing, so that is the choice I have made.

I hope you will find something of worth here. To those of you who don't buy in to Christianity, well, I'm going to talk about Jesus this week - probably all week. So if you want to take a week off of Greggoranting, I won't be offended. Several of you have let me know privately that you are fine with reading Christian thoughts here. I appreciate your thoughts, and I'm glad you read here and I'm glad I read you. To my Christian friends, I hope that you find something here that will be worthy of your time as well.

I can't make any promises about it, but at least you know my intent.

One thing that got me thinking about all of this was church this morning. Because at church this morning, I saw something that really touched me deeply.

Ashley Etier danced in our church service. I appreciated this so much, and I could see the loving care that she and Theresa Taylor put into this beautiful artistic expression of a passage of prophetic poetry in the book of Isaiah. It wasn't just the work that was put into it, though. It was the actual dance. To me, her beautifully crafted expression brought Isaiah's poetry to life in a new way that words on a page - even poetic words do not. The dance guided my imagination through the prophetic pictures. The dance interpreted the prophecy, but in an artistic (open) way. It left me to deal with the implications rather than telling me what the implications must be. Frankly, I enjoyed having that space.

Dangerous.

Lovely.

Beautiful.

It was a stretch for me. A welcomed, needed stretch.

I'm going to keep thinking about it, but later. I should sleep now.

saturday (3.15.08

Not that much to report yet.

My head hurts a little.

Breaking the cycle this morning. It's a battle.

I'll let you know how it goes.

-------update 1--------
Well, my head is fine now, but the rest of me hurts. On the way to the gym, Dixie and Clayre decided they should invite me to some class they go to. I've been planning to try someday, but I really wanted a month or two more of my own program before assimilating.. Well, they said, "Oh, come on, if we can do it surely you can do it," appealing to my masculine competitive spirit (which by the way I can turn off at a moment's notice). So sure, whatever, I'll try.

But first, I asked, "Do other men do this class, or only women?"

"Oh, yeah, there's guys in there." (This was a lie).

So here we go the doors open and everyone but me knows what to do and where to get the equipment. If not for my precious Dixie, I'd still be looking for all of the crap I needed to survive the hour. There was a very loud female voice barking out instructions, but with all the mirrors and newness of the surroundings, it took me five full minutes to identify the body that belonged to the voice.

So I pushed through the fear of looking like a dork, and the fear of Tim Money walking in and catching me in a girl's class. Those fears were quickly replaced with a new one...where exactly in this mirrored room will I find a place to throw up?

Basically, the girl's class kicked my ace all over the place.

At present, I feel like a noodle.

I think the most ridiculous part was seeing myself in a mirror, my massive sculpted hands making the teeny purple dumbells all but invisible within them, barely able to push my arms upward.

Yes, I'll be back next week.

The most important thing, though, is that the cycle (at least for the immediate moment) is broken.

My trek continues.