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Every once in a while I will drive around town and drive by our old houses.  There are 2 other than the one I am currently in.  One is the house of my youth, the first house I ever lived in.  412 Linda Lane.  When I drive by I always think about the tree that was in the front yard for so many years and the tree that they replaced it with.  I think about the area in between that house and the house next to it, the area that I would run away to when my mom and I would fight.  I think about the time I came home from school and the wind blew the door shut on my finger and how soon after, I would have to walk down the street to the soccer fields to take team pictures, Batman band-aides on my held up injured hand as tears stream from my face.  Great photo.  I think about the time I threw a baseball bat at my brother and the time I thought it killed him.  I drive down the street where I said my first curse word when I called my brother an asshole for not going back home with me to get my forgotten backpack.  I think about the dogs that we had there and when we got new carpet.

Those things will always be mine, no matter who is living in that house and no matter what house I am living in.

I feel kind of homeless right now.  Even though I am staying at a house I have lived in off and on for almost 15 years and I sleep in the same room I always have, something is missing.

I have been having these great but short conversations at work with a friend named Hannah about the direction of my life.  She is a psychology major or something and I think she will probably write a book someday about the quarter life crisis I am going through.  The other day we were talking about me moving somewhere and I confessed to her that I don’t think it will matter where I am in my life because the same things that bother me about living here will bother me somewhere else.  I told her that I was looking for a journey in my life, and that things here had been figured out for the most part because there was no more danger.  The things that matter to the world, job, good looks, bank account, etc, I realized had no hold on who I actually was and I wanted nothing to do with them.  The way the world throws judgment at people is not how I judge myself; I am much stricter because my judgments come from inside the dark cracks of my own life.

Those things will always be mine.  No matter where I run off to and no matter the place my heart calls home.

My heart feels homeless right now.  Even though it has lived off and on in the same place since it’s first beat I can’t sleep at night knowing that something is missing.

I have always felt I had a “free spirit”.  It seems like I do a lot of chasing in my life, chasing of things, status, girls etc. and whenever I finally attain those things they never seem worth it.  In fact, I would say that sometimes the things we want most in life are the things we probably need to stay away from.  If something is attainable then we probably shouldn’t go for it, but if something seems impossible then we should be drawn toward it.  I think that’s where I am in my life, looking from a distance at a mountain that looks impossible.  I don’t think I want to climb it, I think I would rather move it.

I had an idea for a short story the other day about a small group of people that lived in a valley that called themselves Mountain Movers.  They all were dirty and had beards and they made mustard and that’s about as far as I got.  I planned that they would hold the secret to moving mountains, the secret to what the Bible calls having faith.  The secret was that there was no secret.  The magic was not in their beards and dirty faces, but it was in their faith.  The moral of the story was that as spiritual believers we have already giving up on trying to move the mountains in our lives because we think we can’t.  I don’t know if the Bible is literal about that verse about mustard seeds and moving mountains but I know our culture has turned it into metaphor.  We also stopped believing in miracles.  We also don’t have faith enough to take on the day.  And somehow, I think these things are all connected.

If we don’t fear it, we don’t want it.  Whenever something is easy and routine and doesn’t scare the urine out of your bladder or force the insides of your stomach to come out of your mouth, the reality is you might be going down the wrong path.  I think that’s why I’m okay with my life right now.  I come home and try to write everyday and most days now I just stare at the screen and think about giving up.

Giving up before I ever really start.

I had a rough day last week and so I decided to take a bath and after the bath I wrote this:

I just spent the last 30 minutes of my life listening to my heartbeat.

There I was, lying in a bathtub half filled with soapy warm water.  The back of my head rested on the bottom of the tub and the water rose up just over both of my ears.  I closed my eyes and listened to my heart.

All I could think about was how my heart beats ever second or so, regardless if I am underwater to hear it and how it will keep playing its subtle but important song until the day I die.  After settling down, I began to feel my heart beat in my chest and it was playing my rib cage like a xylophone.  Once my breathing calmed down, I could actually hear my heart beat through the water and bounce off the tub’s walls and back into my eardrum.  My world, for the last 30 minutes, was dark and quiet, as I had somehow managed to turn off my ears and listen to my inside.

A mental picture of myself jumping in the air towards something popped in my mind with every beat.  Every time I jumped and my feet hit the ground, a commanding thud matched the thump of my heart.  Jump after jump, a desperate attempt to grab onto something failed each and every time.  But there was this rhythm to it that made the failures seem almost beautiful.

Jump after jump.

Missed attempt after missed attempt.

Thud after thud.

It was my life summed up in a continual .8-second loop streaming into my meditative state.  A constant reaching for something - anything - and a constant failure at actually grabbing on to it.  Over and over again, my life has seemed to be filled with these moments.  Ecclesiastes calls it a chasing after the wind.  It seems as though my life is on a journey of this constant loop of reaching and jumping as long as my heart will continue to beat.  Every time my feet landed and made the noise, my immediate reaction however was to jump up and go again.  I’m not mad about this loop, it actually taught me something about myself.

…

I think my jumping at something, my quarter life crisis, and my desire for journey all can be summed up in my longing to have my heart find a home.  I realize now that having a home does not mean that the journey is over, but it just means you have a place and a reason to come back.  I want to go on a journey of moving mountains with words and I want to keep jumping towards something even if the something isn’t seen in the picture.  I encourage you to do the same.  Maybe the reason you hate your job or get stressed isn’t because you hate your job and are stressed, but maybe it’s because your life seems figured out.  I will tell you that since I have decided to write everyday and to write a book I have dealt with more internal problems than ever before, I have become an emotional and physical wreck, and maybe even a little insane.  But I will say that I have never been more alive.  Life is slowing down because everyday is no longer the same.  Some nights I can’t sleep at night and some days I have nothing to write, but I still try to go to sleep at night and try to write something.  It’s the journey, not the destination.  It’s the longing, not the attaining.  The grasping, not the grabbing.  It’s the home, not the house. This, my friends, is a backwards journey we are on to the Kingdom.

You know the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz movie?  You know his story right?  About how he was made of tin metal and had no heart?

Did you know there is a little more to the story?

In L. Frank Baum’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man has a chance to tell his story.  He used to be normal, flesh and blood like everyone else.  But then he fell in love with a girl.  The girl lived with an older woman who wanted her around the house to do things for her selfishly.  When the Tin Man confessed his love tot he girl, she said she would go with him under one condition: that he build a better house for the two of them to live in.  The Tin Man, being a woodsman, accepted the challenge and began working on their new house at a feverish pace.  When the old lady found out about the Tin Man she would not allow it and asked the Wicked Witch of the East to cast a spell on the woodman and his axe.

One day, while out chopping wood, the woodsman slipped and chopped off his leg.  A blacksmith repaired his leg.  Then, he chopped off his other leg, and the blacksmith repaired that.  He eventually chopped off both of his arms and his head, all repaired by the blacksmith.  He thought all the damage had been done until he slipped and chopped his body in half, and as the blacksmith repaired him, he left out his heart.

The Tin Man now had no heart to love with and forgot how to love so he just kept chopping wood until he got stuck in the rain and rusted.

He forgot how to love, and no longer cared if he married the girl or not.

I think it is really odd that the Tin Man was, at one point, complete and normal.  He was a human.

But then he fell in love and it all went down hill from there.

Even though this is a children’s book, I think we can find our story is very much like the story of the Tin Man.  We come into this life complete and ready to take on the world.  As time goes on we meet Jesus and fall in love.  But very much unlike how we think things should be, that is when things get hard for us.   When we fall in love with our Savior we start chopping off random body parts when the ways of the world seem to grip us and make our axes slip as if we have some sort of spell cast over us.  Each limb we lose gets replace by a prosthetic, is looks nice but it makes us numb to the ways of grace and peace.  Just like the Tin Man, at first the lose will slow us down, but we soon realize that having legs and arms made of tin doesn’t slow us down at all.  It actually makes us better, stronger and more durable.

Believing that we are stronger with prosthetics is the lie that we take.  This is the eating of the fruit in the garden:  the feeling that we are broken, but that the world can fix us and make us stronger.  First it’s a leg, then an arm, and before we know it its our heart.

So we work faster, longer, harder, and we chop down trees in what we think is the name of Jesus but is really for our own name.  Instead of going straight to Oz (I mean God), we go into the world for our remedies.  Our religion and spirituality of cutting down trees and making a little house for Jesus has left us cut, but only Jesus is the remedy and He isn’t even asking for a house.

Even though the Tin Man had chopped his body down and had no love to build a house for, continued to cut the trees anyway.

We were once human, made from flesh and blood but in the pain from life we have become broken people made from tin.  We started off in love and focused, but soon lost sight and lost it all.  We lost our love and got rusted in the rain.  We got stuck. We keep chopping the trees of religion and fake romance even though we lost sight of whom the house is being built for.

But the real journey for the Tin Man really hadn’t even begun yet.  His story really started when he was found – rusted – broken – made of tin.  He was born, he fell in love, got screwed over, and then, and only then, did the Tin Man’s journey really begin.  I have a feeling that I am stuck in the rain, rusting and in need of someone to come shake the rust off of me and start a journey down a road that leads to a new heart and some peace. As Oz gives the Tin Man his heart at the end of the story you become aware that he had a heart the entire time.  Just because it wasn’t pumping blood into his veins, didn’t make him incapable of love.   Just because it didn’t beat and squirt blood with every pump that he didn’t know how to love.  I think the Tin Man just thought that he couldn’t love anymore and the same goes for us.  At one point in my life I would have sworn to you that I had it all together, that I was complete.  A couple of years later I realized that I was stuck and rusted out from doing too much in my life and realizing that I had no heart.  For years I went through the motions of Christianity and religion only to find out that I am like the Tin Man, empty on the inside and cutting down trees for no reason.  Spells can chop our hearts in half but they will never stop the beating because the beating comes from someOne else and nothing can take that away.  We make be broken from this life, whether the brokenness comes from relationships or addictions, we are all made of tin.  Jesus is the remedy.  Jesus is the one who has our heart.