Rogue State of Heart

Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

I am amazed at the way God designed us to be connected. It is everywhere. It’s instinctual; it’s intrinsic to who we are.

A few months back, I went to my chiropractor because I was having some leg tingling and numbness caused by some back issues. We were still in the discovery mode at the time of just what exactly it was (we learned later a herniated disk was to blame), and how serious it was.

In the office, a neuro-technician checked me out with all kinds of wires, plugs, and sensors. I laid on the exam table while he plugged me in extensively up and down my right leg. I looked like some test experiment out of Frankenstein or Total Recall.

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This weekend, we had our annual Father’s Day weekend camping trip (which should really be called Mother’s Day Two camping trip–but that’s another post). Anyways, a bunch of us survived the Saturday morning ‘wall of water’ that greeted us as we awoke.

Afterwards, the clouds eventually broke, and, as a matter of fact, it became a pleasant day by sunset. We even had fires going by the afternoon, much to our children’s delights.

At one point in the afternoon, I was horsing around near our fire pit with Riley, the four year old son of my friend Nathan. I’d lift Riley upside down and pretend to lower him to the ground. He would giggle and squeal about letting go, but then jump back at me for more. 

At one moment during our tussle, as I held him in my arms, a stub of a fresh green pine-cone dropped right between us—amazingly accurate targeting by the tree, I must add. He picked it up and laughed. I told him it was a gift from Mr. Tree.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or abstaining from media for the last 6 months, you know that by now we are undergoing a metamorphism of sorts—good-bye analog, hello digital TV. When DTV finally becomes reality tomorrow, many of us anticipate clear channels with great pictures and more options.

But there is one silent problem lurking for some of us on that fateful day. If you have cable, then you’ll be fine. But if you’re too cheap for cable like me, you may face something called the “cliff effect.”

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You might be asking that question based on the name of my blog—or asking other questions like “what was he smoking?” Rest assured; the title was reasonably arrived at.

In a nutshell, life is just not that easy for us to decipher. It can be difficult, messy, and perplexing at times.

The greatest enigma we face, besides the plot lines of the TV show LOST, is the depth of the human heart. Frankly, it is beyond comprehension—and definitely beyond taming and controlling.

A prophet of long ago decried the same conclusion that the human heart is just a ‘mess waiting to happen’ (my translation). Another great theologian bemoaned his own state of duality by lamenting that the good he wanted to do, he didn’t—and the bad he sought to avoid and shun, he did. In my lexicon, it’s just another traveler discovering his own rogue state of heart.

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