the end of the month

This past month has been interesting, to say the least.
I've had my highs, I've had my lows.
May has been hell for so many of my dearest friends.
John's dad's in hospice, the cancer back and unrelenting. It's a waiting game.
Isaac's mom is in the hospital: invasive lung cancer, and the prognosis doesn't look good.
I want to be optimistic about June, but this spring is promising to be hard as hell.

Paul tells us that Christians don't grieve like those outside Christ, those who have no hope. We have hope, even in death, but that doesn't make death any less scary. In our modernist world, we've been able, for the most part, to keep pushing death's timetable back. When that timetable's violated, it's easy to feel like we've been jipped. Never mind that death has always been a facet of life, and up until the last few centuries, it didn't carry the same weight of fear as it does now. I'll be honest: I fear death. Ever since coming face-to-face with my own mortality back in May of last year, there's been a subtle terror clawing at my bones. It's irrational on many points, when I convince myself that I'm slowly dying, being eaten away by some mysterious ailment or cancer, destined to die within the next few years. This is certainly no way to live life, and I've brought it before God in prayer time and again, and slowly he's reworking the way I see my life, the way I see death, and all of it becomes all the more striking when death, or the threat of death, looms up in the lives of loved ones all around me.

Not all is Gloom & Doom, and nor should it be.

I'm hoping June will be a good month.

I'm hoping to quit smoking everything once and for all.

I'm hoping to start running again, and I have a zombie app to keep me going.

(It's never too soon to start preparing yourself physically for the zombie apocalypse)

I want to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Maybe I can accomplish at least one of those.

Speaking of wisdom, Ams says I'm one of the wisest people she knows. Really, I think that just shows her to be a fool (just kidding; but seriously). No, I do tend to be wise, the problem lies in applying that wisdom to myself. I've been reading through Proverbs, bit by bit, at least once a day (sometimes two to three times: I read it while I'm pooping, so it may be that my bowel movements become consistent with my growth in wisdom). I want to live a wise life, and I'm praying for God to give me wisdom, as James tells us to do. Dan Dyke defines wisdom as living in accordance with reality, and wisdom is ultimately manipulative: it's manipulating our world for our own benefit. It's a weird way of looking at it, but manipulation isn't necessarily a bad thing (Paul does it all the time in his letters; if manipulators are jackasses, Paul would be the supreme jackass). 

My coffee's cold and far too sugary.

It's time for me to get out of here and run some errands.

Goodbye for now.