i have nothing to share but cliches

but i suppose it's better than nothing.

i hope.

death has a way of reorienting us - we recognize what's truly important, what's truly meaningless, what's missing, what we have. the world isn't the same as it was before. it's different. we're different. which causes all kinds of problems since most days we don't like to think about these things. we don't like to dwell on the larger questions because, frankly, it takes too much out of us. it's too hard and we'd prefer to just live our lives instead of making sense of them.

thank you, chad, for making it impossible for me to ignore the important questions of life.

just returned from our house church meeting where we spent the time processing (i'm growing to hate that word) the past week. steve did some live blogging if you're interested to see what we talked about. maybe it will help you as well. we listened to chad's podcast about poema, the church he and renee were starting in norwood. good to hear his voice again. good to listen to his heart. one important moment - he was talking about going through tragedy and the questions that come up and it was almost like he was speaking right to us - how we may not understand why they happen, but we know God can do miraculous things through them. all of our mouths kind of dropped at that moment.

we all felt chad was there - not in a typical, he's-here-as-long-as-we-remember-him kind of way. but in a real, physical presence. we talked how thin the walls between this reality and God's reality truly are and how death makes that thinness even more evident. i pray God will continue to remind us of that.

chad's the first non-family member close to me to ever die, so obviously there's significance there. but more than that, there are curious parallels to our lives that have really impacted me. beyond the surface stuff - love for U2 and the steelers - we were alike in many ways. we both left "professional ministry" to seek a less traveled path. we both sought for the intersection of our faith and the arts. we both tended to be slow to speak, introverts. soaking it all in before saying anything. these similarities have cause me to question many parts of my life. some of that is the old cliche, "it could have been me." some because in many ways, he was living my life better than i am (and i mean that in the best way possible). it was eerie at times to reread his blog and discover that he had many of the same thoughts i had, same questions.

i really don't have any grand insights here, just ideas that have passed through my head this week. some i'll keep to myself - i'll be burning an entire notebook page of excrement i spewed forth yesterday (not helpful to anyone, other than me to get it out of my system). and i certainly have no answers to the questions pummeling me over and over again. and that's ok, i think. i don't need the answers. i am content letting the questions shape me for a while.

sorry i've been absent for so long. hit a bad spot there for a while. actually, i almost gave up blogging completely. but like an addiction, i can't seem to shake it. so i'll be here for a bit longer. forgive me if i become preoccupied for a while - i'll try not to make every post about how i'm dealing with this. there's plenty of frivolousness for me to expound on still and i'll get to it soon (like how it looks like i picked a bad time to give up music....).

good night, my friends.
Æ