Love game of heart and pain.

"What's this phony ceremony hanging around? We got to...get down! Lock it out from this shaky ground! Come on and spit it out, your hearty party, mood everywhere. Let's see you people laughing, people punching out in the air!"

I feel like I lost my positive outlook for a while there. It's scary to see how I'm changing, sometimes. The one thing I miss about my old self is that I never stayed down for long. Now I get pushed down and stay down until I feel like I've fixed it.

"Get down to the hip hop a bee bop a loo a...You hear the sound it's all coming to ya! I wanna get ya! I wanna tease ya! I'm gonna get this beat to hit ya! Get down to big time illusion, life or the rest. Come on and tough it! Jump it! Funk that feeling! Give all your best!"

I also seem to be becoming a perfectionist. I used to feel that as long as I did my best I didn't care what the outcome was. In many ways that was bad, but in some it's a major detriment when even when you do your best you still don't get the outcome you wished for, and you end up with a lot of regret for something you had no power over.

"Come on and drive on drive on drive on into night...You got that burning power, midnight hour, flashing your light...It's just a love game of heart and pain that we're going out. That's what the twenty first century is all about!"

I'm not down and out, yet, dear reader. This love game of heart and pain called life hasn't defeated me by any means. This is simply a hiccup, and I think the feelings I expressed in my last post were exaggerated by my exasperation with the spiritual desolation I've been feeling. I'm determined to keep my head up. It's not over yet.

"Get down to the hip hop a bee bop a loo a...You hear the sound it's all coming to ya! I wanna get ya! I wanna tease ya! I'm gonna get this beat to hit ya! Get down to big time illusion, step into time...Come on and rock it sock it, just jump on it, LIVE IS DIVINE!"

There was a dream that I dreamed, and that dream was for a positive outlook forever.


http://chrono.ytmnd.com/

My agoge.

"At age 7, as is customary in Sparta, the boy was taken from his mother and plunged into a world of violence. Manufactured by 300 years of Spartan warrior society, to create the finest soldiers the world has ever known. The agoge, as it's called, forces the boy to fight."

I feel like I'm going through this in a very spiritual way...my own agoge, at least as depicted in the movie 300.

I feel like I've been left out in the cold in more than just a -5 degrees sort of way like it was this morning. God has really left me to stand on my own two feet. He sure chose a strange time to do it, from my limited perspective.

I'm tired. Just plain tired. Except in rare moments often involving my amazing girlfriend I find it very hard to hold a smile for very long. I'm running out of patience with anyone and everything. I'm hurt by small things. I'm more tempted by things I used to be strong against. I can't do a lot of things right anymore. I'm under attack.

I'm facing a duel to the death with the Deceiver and I'm starting to lose stamina.

If there's one thing I hate since my conversion, it's being a disappointment. I feel more assured with my girlfriend that I'm doing OK with her because of her constant patient reminders, but I still feel that I'm not doing all I can in many other ways. I want to become who I was born to be, but now God has taken off the training wheels and I'm in a wreck. I need to get stronger, I need to persist, I need to fight, I need to win! I can not and will not fail again. To me there is only greatness in the eyes of God or failure.

I take back what I said about God choosing a strange time to do this to me. God knows me well enough to know how I feel about victories. It's the most hopeless fights that are the greatest victories, and the most unexpected victories that are the most glorious. And right now, I feel that I'm fighting a losing battle. If I can just persist long enough, maybe I'll survive my agoge. God has forced me into battle, and that's fine. I'll fight if I have to.

I go in and out of fascination with the movie 300. It's violent and has nudity in it, but sometimes when I remember major themes and amazing lines in the movie I feel differently:

"'Remember us.' As simple an order as a king can give. 'Remember why we died.' For he did not wish tribute, nor song, nor monuments nor poems of war and valor. His wish was simple. 'Remember us,' he said to me. That was his hope, should any free soul come across that place, in all the countless centuries yet to be. May all our voices whisper to you from the ageless stones, 'Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here by Spartan law, we lie.'"

Christ, our King calls us to die to ourselves, to join in the battle against Satan and give our lives up for his sake. "Remember me," I hear from Calvary. How can I forget His sacrifice?

Here I am, left in spiritual desolation for only a month or so and already I've run out of energy. Well forget it. I'll run on empty for as long as it takes to complete my mission in life. That's the end of it.

There was a dream that I dreamed, and that dream was for victory in spiritual battle.

Conversations with infinity.

Conversations with God are certainly nothing like a conversation with a human being.

At first this sounds like an absurdly obvious statement, but sometimes I think that God should make himself more easily available. It takes me a great deal of concentration and determination that I don't often have, especially with my huge attention deficit, to have good prayer.

I have long held the belief now that the reason God speaks to me when he does is because I'm ready to hear what he has to say, and not because he doesn't want to talk sometimes. My prayer only became good after I truly wanted to talk to God and would actually understand what he wanted to say. But as I have said to some extent in my last post, prayer lately has been difficult.

Though, now I believe I know why. Whereas for a while, I have had many incredible experiences of prayer with God that have led me not only to enjoy prayer, love God more, and make some important decisions regarding my love life, suddenly this all vanished. Every time I pray, though my approach to prayer is unchanged, I feel and hear nothing.

Saint Ignatius says that it is a normal part of anyone's spiritual lives to have periods of spiritual consolation and desolation. Consolation is the time where one feels God's presence, feels joy in their faith and grows easily spiritually, which is how I would describe my spiritual life in November and early December. I learned a lot very quickly in this time and entered a new stage of my life. Then after all those wonderful things, suddenly God felt a little farther away. I had no idea why.

At first I was worried I'd done something horribly wrong. Then I was worried I was starting to regress spiritually, that I was screwing up my prayer. Then I was worried about both. Now, I have a different opinion.

I have entered the opposite side of the coin of the spiritual life, that of desolation. Spiritual desolation happens often when someone slacks off in their spiritual life, but St. Ignatius, the expert on the topic, writes of two other reasons why it happens.

Sometimes it happens because God is testing how we will respond when the result is desolation and not an expected reward. "God may try us to test our worth, and the progress that we have made in His service and praise when we are without such generous rewards," says Ignatius. This makes perfect sense. Prayer felt so good, it was so wonderful and helpful and miraculous. I had come to expect it, and now God knows I need to see how my faith works without it.

I needed to see how I would handle the changes in my life if suddenly God withdrew and left me alone for a while. If I would suddenly make my girlfriend my god instead...if I would suddenly decide I no longer believed in God because he was silent. God knew what I would do, but I would not if it never happened.

I'm still trying to figure out the full implications of the result of my time in this period of desolation, but it's still not even over yet.

I'll wait.

There was a dream that I dreamed, and that dream was for full communion with the Lord eternally.