Lost and Dry.

My soul is really dry.

Actually I don't really feel my soul.

Eugene Peterson finds that the Hebrew word for soul is actually a metaphor for neck. It is the part of the body that connects the mind with the rest of the body. It is the part of the body that brings the air from the mouth into the lungs.

That kind of soul seems to be missing. I guess I could easily give a plethora of reasons for it but I can't pin point one down.

I have often been in the dry desolate desert but I have never felt absolutely lost before. This feeling leaves me grasping for something.

It's like I was thrown out into the desert and I so long for someone to come and give me some direction. I came to Bible College clothed in a specific plan which has been ripped away and thrown in the fire. So I find myself where Adam and Eve found themselves. Completely vulnerable in a place that is absolutely terrifying.

A place that leaves my soul in a state of alarm. I am asking questions that I have never fully grappled with.

I was reading Hosea last week and God was talking to the Israelites and describing their adulterous behavior. But later on it says that God tenderly speaks to them and brings them back to Himself.

That image is literally burned in my mind. That tenderness in God's character is something that I so long to encounter. Collision is out of the question. If I collide with anything I will fall very far and very fast into something that I don't know I will ever crawl out of.

I need the tenderness of God's voice to echo into my soul. That living water would sure taste good right about now. I need to be refreshed and revitalized.

So I go on knowing that God is good. That Christ is alive. That the Holy Spirit is active. I trust that God is working in the details.

I trust that there is light somewhere and that I will eventually get to see it again.

Father let your light shine down on me,
Father let your light shine down on me,
No matter what the day or night may bring,
Father let your light shine down on me.

Oh Jesus you became
What was my deepest shame
That at your very name
My calloused heart would change.

How could you perfect one
Love me when I have done
Nothing that's worthy of
My freedom you have one.

Oh wonderful love, you died for me
A power of you life is in me.

Father let your light shine down on me
Father let your light shine down on me
No matter what the day or night may bring
Father let your light shine down on me

Open up the Heavens
Pour on down your spirit"

"Love is watching someone die

So who's gonna watch you die?"

We are all slowly dying. Every single day we lose more breathe, we lose more stamina, we get older.

Our skin starts to droop, the bags under our eyes become more apparent, wrinkles pop up around our face.

While we are clinging to our youth through plastic surgery, pills, and new jeans we are all falling. Slowly falling apart.

So who's gonna watch you die?

Who is going to be there when you pass your last breath?

Will it be your education? Will it be your salary, or your car or your house? Will it be those whom you have loved all your life?

Or will you be completely alone?

Pure Enjoyment.

So, I came back to Lincoln today with a frustrating week and weekend behind me. I decided to watch a pretty depressing movie, so my mood wasn't the best.

But then my roommate came back. We did some chatting and I vented a little and then we did something that will remain in roommate history for as long as I live.

I just happened to turn some music on and I started a new game. I would go through a mixed list and every song would get played only fifteen seconds. In that fifteen seconds my roommate had to make up a dance for every random song.

Now not only was this enjoyable for me but it also got my roommate laughing. I finally could not stay seated and turned it to a dance song and got off my bed and started dancing. Now if any of you know me well you know that I am the best worst dancer. I am the best because I can dance in perfect beat. I am the worst because...well let's just say you would have to see it to believe it.

So my roommate and I are now both standing up dancing like crazed maniacs, and our shade is open. Wide open for the world to see.

I am just glad we don't go to a baptist school or we might have been kicked out for dancing. We ended up closing the blinds and having a great time.

Lesson learned; that one truly should enjoy oneself in a state of pure enjoyment while dancing with one's enjoyable roommate.

New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton

"Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. "I think, therefore I am." This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence(!) based on the observation that he "thinks." If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away form his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some "thing" alien to himself: "I am, therefore some thing." And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a "thing," and"object," like other finite and limited objects of our thought!" pg. 8

I have recently discovered the theologian Thomas Merton this winter break. The passage above comes from a book that is all about realizing who God is through contemplation. When I first read this the first thing that I thought about was the "Secret" that has been so popular this last year or so. My best friend and I have talked about this reality and whether it has the ability to apply to life or not. I first heard about it through Kelly who said that the founder of "The Secret" was on Oprah. Ronda Byrne, the recent founder of this idea "defines The Secret as the law of attraction, which is the principle that "like attracts like." Rhonda calls it "the most powerful law in the universe," and says it is working all the time. "What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want, and that is based on what we're thinking and feeling," Rhonda says. The principle explains that we create our own circumstances by the choices we make in life. And the choices we make are fueled by our thoughts—which means our thoughts are the most powerful things we have here on earth."

Basically if we think one thing and react to the natural order around us we are actually creating our own "fate/destiny/best lifestyle" While I think there is some truth to this I also realize that if this is your full and only philosophy on life you are ultimately going to be disappointed when the things that you cannot control end up causing every single reaction that you display. It's funny because while we can say, we can control our thinking and make our lives better we still are reacting, which in turn shows that we are not in control and that we are not truly thinking first and acting second.

Also this idea actually stems from the statement that Merton describes above. The idea from Descartes that we think first and so then we have a created identity. However, if we base our identity off what we think then we find ourselves to be completely based off of conceptual reality. We then create our own God and create our own savior and mask the reality and the gravity of sin in our own lives.

Because if we think one thing we are ultimately correct. And if we base our thinking off of ourselves and our success, we then destroy morality in the basis of our own society. Our social constructs become useless because our thinking is completely and utterly individual. We then find ourselves to be back in a place of illusion. Without any real grasp on reality and on community.

So the question is do we desire for the ultimate life that is masked in illusion and a preparatory death sentence? A life that is completely individualistic and has no marking of influence and impact? A life where God is defined as a crutch and is not truly needed to intervene and save us?

Do we long for a life that is conceptual and based on the illusion that we are free?

Or do we long for a life that is fully aware that we are not free by our own consolation prizes and that we long and desperately need something to create the moral and the real fiber within our own being?

The choice is yours. Masked bondage? Or a freed reality?

The "Holidays" Aka the Christmas STory,

So because it is near Christmas I suppose I should write something on how I feel about the holidays.

I lived with the Spirit of Christmas for my first two years in college. My appropriate response to my roommate who watch elf at least once a week starting right after Halloween was to be the nastiest Grinch on the floor. I actually was nick named the Grinch for two years and it still comes up time and again.

However, I enjoy the holidays, I guess I shouldn't call them the holidays because I have never cared to be politically correct.

So I have always enjoyed Christmas but I have never really understood it.

Now I know that I am not stupid but I guess I have never grasped in my own life the impact of the Christmas story.

It's kind of like communion, which I just recently got a real taste of.

You do it, because every one else is doing it and it's written in the Bible but you don't really know why you are doing it.

Then you learn why but you still have that misunderstanding, almost like that well I should do this even though I don't understand why it's such a big deal, but everyone else is making it such a big deal so I might as well too...right?

That is how I feel about Christmas.

It's originally about Christ.

I guess.

But it doesn't seem to matter because I have not been able to grasp it in my own life.

I guess I just don't get it.

And you can use words to explain it and so can I. But words only go so far, and experience only goes so far, and prayer only goes so far, and scripture only goes so far.

It's the fact that I need to collide with the Christmas story to understand it and to start living it out.

Why faith is dirty.

I was talking to a guy that works at my college about women preachers, simply because he was asking about what I wanted to do after I graduated and we ended up on women who are preaching today.

He had brought up Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore and we were discussing the difference in generations.

I think that these amazing teachers and preachers have an audience of middle aged women whom have had children and whom have been married. Which is great because they need Jesus too and they need to be discipled as well.

But I don't connect with either of these women. Maybe it's because I am a pessimist or maybe it's because I am a cynic. I don't really know.

So while I was communicating that this is a generational thing this guy wanted me to give an example so I told him this.

To them God is good so God sent his son to die for us.

To us Jesus came and saved us and it's because God is good.

To them hope is there and seen and felt.

To us hope is a distant thing that we need to collide with.

To them the church is made up of 'good' Christians.

To us the church is made up of people who are a mess and who are trying to live.

To them faith is a soft compacted manageable thing.

To us faith is dirty and beautiful and untamed.

And that is where I ended. Faith is a gift that has been given to man to use and mold and learn. God doesn't give us gifts to just look at and play with once in a while. They are meant to be used and molded and communicated.

Faith isn't logical. It isn't easily explained. It allows people to follow the Holy Spirit and it shows the world what the biggest difference is between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of men.

I mean you can look at any character in the Bible that is used by God and see that the culture around this individual thought they were out of their mind. Abraham was going to sacrifice his human son, Noah built a big boat, Moses wanted to lead millions of people from oppression, Jonah ended up in a fish, Mary was given the opportunity to mother the Savior of our fallen existence, these men and women were all considered crazies by there culture, because of their faith.

It's funny because we so crave for a revolution. We long for something to change, so we help the poor and we love people, and we think that if we take our social justice and but it on a white banner that we will change the world.

How we are so easily deceived.

We have missed the faith part. The trusting part.

We need to fall to our knees and surrender. Because our logic won't save us from the dirty faith that is commanded to be harnessed in any person who calls themselves a Christ follower.

This dirty, beautiful, faith is the need that the church so longs for. The ability to follow the Holy Spirit without hesitation.

Big words are not the proof of spiritual maturity.

The faith to be obedient is.

Taking it all out.

So I very short and yet pointed question asked to me today by a friend.

"Do you love God just because of his Majesty?"

I asked the person to expound and he asked me the same question in a different way, "Do you love God because he has done all this stuff for you through Jesus or do you just love God?"

My immediate response was "I love God because I don't know how to love him without all that other stuff. I don't know why I should love him if Christ isn't involved."

My friend's response got me thinking, "Well God gave you life, you should love him just for that."

So I started thinking about that statement, and I came to the realization that if I were to love God because he gave me my existence it still would be a conditional kind of love. I would love God simply because he gave me something. So in essence I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the reality of loving God without it being reactionary. I cannot love God on my own because I simply don't know how to love without loving through reaction which is where the post I just recently blogged about gets hairy because if you are supposed to love in a unconditional manner than the reaction of your life is not supposed to deter that kind of love.

I am not allowed to love in a reactionary way however, I seem to be trapped in reactionary loving. I love because.

But then I start to look at my newly founded relationship with Waylon. I am in love with Waylon and I don't know why. I guess you could say, we are compatible, or I love him because, but then I have those days where I just love him and there is no reason and there is no reaction but because it's just the reality of my life. Then I think whether I would love him even if he did not love me back and I come to the conclusion that I would. If Waylon decided to leave me tomorrow I would still love him. Because the love I have for him is not a worldly love. If my love for Waylon was worldly it would be very easy to stop loving him because a worldly love is flawed and corrupt and isn't truly love. But because this love comes from God I can love him in a deeper sense.

Or I take my niece for another example. There is no way that my niece has done anything for my love. I mean she just was born four years ago and walked into my life and the love just blossomed. There is a love there that I don't understand and only comes from God. It's a love that leaves me speechless at times and allows me to realize that I am very very small in a very big story.

So maybe the love that is embedded in my life is not just reactionary but is just slowly being portrayed through different people. I can love God without it being a reaction because I am commanded to do so, but I feel like it goes much farther than that. It is not just a commandment but it is a planted thing. And when the love I have for God and for myself and for other people is watered and put out in the sun and nurtured the love grows and it's grows like a vine grows on a house. There is no stopping it and it tangles around everything and in everything and through everything.

So the question still remains; Can I love God solely and individually without any help?

And my answer is no. I can not love God first because He loved us first. It was His hand that reached out to us and I can grasp this love and unfold it as I encounter the different aspects of who He is through different experiences, scripture, prayer, and relationships.

Loving You Back

So yesterday I came to a short realization that is going to lead to a long resolution. God doesn't call people to love you back.

I was thinking about the greatest commandment, "Love the Lord with all your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself" Matthew 22:37-39

The Light Bulb came and I realized that I should stop expecting people to love me back.

Now, most of you out there reading this will find this to be quite unbelievable but let me explain to you why I have come to this conclusion.

Christ commands us to live three things out through this passage. He first commands us to love the Lord our God with everything. Not just with two or three parts of our lives but with every part of our life.

Second he calls us to love ourselves. Now this is generally overlooked because most of the time people immediately go to love your neighbor because it is the first part of the next commandment however, one cannot love their neighbor without first loving themselves. And one cannot love themselves without first loving God with everything they are. So in essence one who does not know God does not know how to love.

So if you didn't catch it before let me show you again in a list form;

1. Love God with everything.
2. Love ourselves.
3. Love our neighbor.

Well that's all fine and dandy but what should I do when I don't feel loved back? When I don't feel like I should be loved back? How should I react and treat the people around me who marginalize my ideas and my lifestyle?

God did not call us to love in a reactionary way.

It's interesting that we, as a consumerist society become so entrapped with being loved. We long so deeply for someone to understand us. We long so deeply to be whole and the only way this is to happen is through someone to make us whole.

However, this is not the case in concern with the life that Christ commands of us. He commands us to love the Lord with everything, Love ourselves with the Lord's love and love our neighbor.

No where in there does it say: Love others to make them whole, Love others so they will love you back, Love others so you may be whole.

The reason I have used this conditional love is because I have grown up in a culture of condition. 'I will give you this, if you give me that. I will love you if you do this for me. I will cherish you only if you help me out. But watch out because when I have a bad day, you will not be loved. When you don't do things that make me happy my love is not for you.'

So many times I have tried to earn this love from other people. I have tried to be good enough, or smart enough, or funny enough, or savvy enough, or culturally acceptable enough for the people that I so crave love from to love me.

But I don't have to be any of those things anymore. I can just be me. I am good just the way that I am. And I didn't find this out on my own but I let someone in who has the ability to tell me that I am good enough and that I can not earn grace but that it's a gift.

So I will strive to do what I have tattooed on my arm.

Love Recklessly. Another layer has unfolded in the revelation of what God's love truly is.

Sermon on the Mount

"Now when he saw the crowd he went up on a mountianside and sat down. The disciples came to him and he began to teach them saying;

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for rightesousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted becuase of rightesousness for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you because of me. For great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

Matthew 5:1-12

I am required to memorize Matthew 5-7 for a class. Now I started off thinking that I would just be able to get away with memorizing it and not letting it memorize me. haha. That is not seeming to happen though. I can't help but meditate on what I am memorizing. It seems to be something I am breathing in now throughout the day.

So I am going to go devotionally through the book of Matthew. I am probably going to blog about it since that's what I do. I hope you enjoy it. If you don't well then don't come to my blog for a while because that is what I will probably focusing on for a while.

Something Misunderstood.

This morning I got overwhelmed with the reality that I feel like the church is faltering.

I am reading a book and I just got this overwhelming feeling that it's all hopeless. Now I write this while knowing who Christ is. I write this while having collided with Christ on countless accounts.

He is the truth.

But there are days where my sin gets the best of me. Where I feel like I am swallowed up in my transgressions and in the hopelessness of this world. It's kind of like quick sand. I feel like I am reaching out to something that I can't really reach and my lungs are filling with sand.

On these days my soul aches and the darkness of the spiritual realm becomes overbearing. I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to interact in community. I don't want to live. I want to be what I feel. I want to let the darkness erode my being along with my soul. The hardest part of this process is the people that I am surrounded with. I try to communicate what I am going through and laughter precedes it because I am being over dramatic or unrealistic. When I get laughed at I pull back fast and I walk away and feel misunderstood. Sometimes the deepness of the spiritual warfare cannot be explained but needs to just be, and hopefully you will get through it. This spiritual warfare should be addressed communally but when your community finds you fantastical either because they are afraid of having these conversations or they simply just do not believe you, it's hard to be transparent.

I want to stick my head in the sand like an ostrich and let the world pass me by, but I know that I need to sit up and put my feet on the ground. I need to go through the day even when the day seems to allude my senses. I can no longer become lost in the opinions of what the Christians and the non Christians all push and pull around on their bandwagons.

So I will grapple for the truth as I sit here and combat the spiritual darkness that pierces every pore of my body.

It's one life that defeated the darkness and that life is the life that I find my identity and dive into.

Hey, I got engaged.

I have seen and heard about so many churches and how they have been slowly dying. These churches were at one point in history the thriving, communal place to be, but for some reason the old is really getting old and the newly birthed churches are blowing up. I sit back, in a town of ten thousand with at least five different denominational churches and realize even now that these churches are not reaching a good portion of the demographic. If it’s like this in Lincoln where one of the best Bible College’s remains what is like in other small towns where the strong presence of a bible college is missing? So I must come to some conclusion for the declension in the life of the church. I could easily say it’s the culture’s fault, but when has that excuse ever worked? I know I need to look deeper and the reality that I keep coming back to is that the church does not know how to dance.

I have always loved to dance with a partner, because it makes things so much more interesting. Everyone dances differently and so you get a different kind of dance with every single person. You could be dancing the same dance with two different people and it will leave you in a different state of being. The most interesting thing that I have noticed about a dance is that someone needs to lead. Without a leader the dance does not seem to go anywhere and body parts seem to flay in destructive ways. Heads bump into each other, arms flay and legs get twisted. Someone inevitably gets hurt and both of the embarrassed dancers walk off the dance floor, not only licking their physical wounds but also licking their wounded pride. But, when there is leader present the dance becomes a beautiful wonder. There is a movement that the audience can not deny and it sweeps both the dancers and the spectators.

The church has lost its vigor to dance. It has lost it's want to partner with the Holy Spirit and follow the Holy Spirit around in a erotic and sensual dance that will leave the church intimately reformed.

Missing the Holy Moment

I recently just went to a Switchfoot concert. The last time I went to one of their concerts was when I was a junior in high school in Chicago. The funny thing is that I have a specific memory from that concert.

I went with a couple of student community leaders from our student group and a couple other high schoolers. I remember that Nick and I were sitting on a bench at 11 o 'clock at night and we were talking about colleges. I still was wavering from the Bible College realm to the University realm. Journalism or Ministry? Nick told me that he thought I would grow more efficiently at a Bible College with a Christian roommate than with a roommate that came back to the room drunk.

Weird how that conversation stuck in my mind. It seemed to be a necessary Holy Moment, even though I didn't realize it.

Well I went to this Switchfoot concert with Waylon and his youth group. It was fun because the concert floor wasn't packed so you didn't feel like you were being suffocated by people. We heard Ruth, Reliant K and then Switchfoot came on stage.

There seemed to be a weight to there music that didn't seem to be found in the other bands. So we were watching them and thoroughly enjoying them and the singer started singing a song and started moving through the audience. He ended up about ten feet away from us and it was amazing how people gravitated to him and tried to touch him. It was a weird reality.

So the lead singer was having this moment in the audience and most of the audience was captivated by this moment. They understood the weight in the air and the mass behind the message. But, there were those who didn't get it, and didn't care much for the message. They were loud and obnoxious and extremely distracting.

It wasn't just that they were distracting it was that they were distracting the community from the Holy moment presented. From the Holy message that was trying to be relayed.

How many times do we miss the Holy Moment because we are not looking for it, or because we like hearing our own voices more than anything?

Does the church ever get to lost in it's own 'mission' and 'vision' that it misses the holy moment?

The Beauty of Sacrafice Cont'd.

So, I was preaching at a local church near Lincoln and the topic that we were trying to hit was; What does sacrifice look like in your daily life?

There was a question-answer part of the sermon at the very end, and the question above was given to me. I actually received most of my questions a couple days beforehand so I could think about how I would respond in the moment.

While thinking about sacrifice, the first thought was children. So many times parents sacrifice everything for their children. They bank everything on their children's future because they want to see and give them the best.

God is kind of like that. He sacrificed everything so that we might have life, and have it to the fullest.

While this sacrifice actuality is looked upon negatively at first, when one looks deeper into this idea there is something much greater.

There is Beauty. This great beauty is the after effect of this sacrifice. This beauty emulates the life that is given after the death has been taken.

And this beauty cannot be tamed. Just like the life that is given cannot be tamed. It can be self-disciplined to obey it's master, but if the master has sacrificed everything for it's servant than the beauty of it cannot be denied. The loyalty of the servant cannot be deterred or hidden. The servant who fully grasps this beauty and this life will do anything and everything for it, including sacrificing anything and everything for it.

We can try to look at this life in a purely logical way but logic cannot analyze and determine beauty. It cannot take beauty and tame it. It cannot tell beauty where to go and what to do because there is too much overflow. True beauty cannot be tapped.

This is where I turn when I see despair and desolation around me. When I watch the news and all I hear about is more school shootings and sexual abuse. When I see sin encroaching in every relationship that I am in.

I go back to the sacrifice that was made and the life that was birthed and the beauty that was and is clearly showcased and overflowing.

Because there truly is beauty to sacrifice.

There is beauty in sacrafice.

More on this later.

On my own terms

So I went to a random class yesterday and heard this really smart, soon to be professor, teach.

And he kept using this phrase that I caught onto.

"On my own terms"

He was referring to Christ and was discussing the reactions of the many people in the Old and the New Testament in concern to this phrase.

I have always realized this and even lived it out myself but sometimes you hear something old for the first time again. When I look into the New Testament and see all of Christ's interactions with people it's amazing how many times people come to Christ with "their own terms."

And how many times do I come to Christ "on my own terms" hoping that what I imagine will come true. What I fantasize and romanticize might be the truth when in all actuality I'm totally off mark.

I wonder if we come to Jesus on our own terms as the church?

I wish none of this had happened... So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. -J.R.R. Tolkein

Jews and socialism

A freshmen just asked me if I hated Jews...

huh?

also I believe that our country is heading towards the slippery slope of socialism, this I concur from the fact that I think Hilary Clinton will get the presidency because there is a governmental conspiracy.

The government is unfortunately not for the people anymore.

Sorry to break the news I'm sure I'm not the first, but if i disappear you all know why.

Deterioration

Do you ever feel like you are slowly deteriorating? I mean your insides. On the outside you look normal, but the insides are being slowly chipped away. Most of us don't really know why that is, so we try to use a natural medication for a supernatural epidemic.

However, I don't really think it works out, because there will always be that one moment when we will be left with ourselves. There will be an eventual moment when everything is torn away and we are left with what we have and want we sadly do not have.

This is why movies like Garden State, Elizabethtown, The Last Kiss, and The eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are so stinking popular because, they are clips of that slight moment. This moment seems to strip us of our doing and forces us to reckon with ourselves.

This reality strips us naked and leaves us out to freeze in the cold of loneliness and desperation. This cold ripples our skin and strips the marrow from our bones. It melts our fleshy surface, and leaves us with our soul to dry up in the wind.

While we are caught up in this moment we have a decision to make. Now I could be very limited and tell you that you only have two choices, but that would be very sardonic of my own existence. So I cannot give you only two choices but I must realize that you do have to make a choice because repetition is not truly possible, and the ascetic cannot be lived out.

Alas, we are called to make a slight decision to determine how we are going to react to our 'real' selves if they even exist, outside ourselves.

A Dream

So, I had yet another dream. This is not unfamiliar in the life of one Alison Higgins, but this specific dream was more like a parable than a weird dream.

Let me paint a picture for you of what I saw.

The setting was a street. There was nothing around except for two lawn chairs on the opposites sides of the streets. One was white and orange and one was lime green and white. The street was in a dessert and there were mountains in the distance.

And a man walked up in a blue button down shirt. He was older and if you looked closely you would see that he had been weathered by the storms of life. However, if you looked closely at his eyes you would see the laugh lines around his eyes. He sat down in the lime green chair.

Then along came a young man. This man was wearing a pink athletic shirt. There wasn't many things defined in this young man. All I know is that he was big. Not fat but big.

He sat down in the orange and white chair.

There was a short exchange between the both of them.

"I really like your shirt," the young man said to the old man.

"Well, that's interesting. I would be willing to lend it to you."

Then suddenly the young man and the old man both took their shirts off and switched.

They put on the other's shirts and walked away. Leaving the two chairs and the sun setting in the distance.