I just don’t know what I’m doing. Are you there? Are you listening? Are you responding? Not sure.
I’m usually about 2-3 minutes in before I start the self talk.
“God can hear me, God knows my thoughts before I think them. If he knows my thoughts, why should I speak them? If I don’t speak them, or even think them, are the things I thought I would think even prayers, or simply foreshadows of something that never happens…?”
Uggh.
I say start, because I really don’t.
I won’t give you some cheesy BS line about my life being a prayer…I don’t pray. I rarely see the difference it makes, I feel more like I’m talking to myself than I’m talking to God.
I will take a 12 minute daily journey of prayer for the next 30 days…That’s six hours. That’s more than i’ve prayed total in the last well…years….
this should be interesting. Jesus modeled prayer right? I think I want to be like him. I guess I should pray too…
i want to not worry. i want to not be anxious.
i want to trust. i want to trust that god knows me, loves me and cares for me.
i want to have passion, excitement, challenges and growth.
i want to have fun with my family, enjoy my kids, to enjoy my wife.
i want to read books, watch good movies and travel.
i want my sister and mike to have a baby.
i want to create new things.
i want to have the rock starest bestest, most impactful nonprofit in the world.
i want to work 4 days a week.
i want to make more money.
i want to run more, be outside more, and have a garden.
i want my lost hair to come back.
i want to find another pair of perfect jeans.
i want to teach, or i think i want to teach.
i want to write, or i think i want to write.
i want peace. i want to be known. i want to laugh with my wife, travel with my wife, cry with my wife, be with my wife.
i want to know jesus more.
i want to find a reason to go to church.
i want to get a bush fellowship and live in new york or south africa.
i want to know how to spend my time when i am all alone.
i want to share christ with someone who has never known or experienced him.
i want someone to share christ with me in a new way.
i want so much….
what do you want?
12 minutes, but I think I need a new 12 minute focus. The conversation is much more free-flowing in the Scheller house. Sarah and I, while we still have our ups and downs, our high talk days and our low talk days, are communicating with greater frequency and much more naturally.
With that in mind, I think I need a new 12 minute focus. Everybody who knows my faults and deficiencies are welcome to chime in…Where should I place 12 minutes of focus in my daily life over the next 30 days?
the definition of the idiom “means to an end” is as follows:
something that you are not interested in but that you do because it will help you to achieve something else
i could honestly say before this my interest in prayer was slight. i mean i might have said i was interested in prayer, but my behavior for the long past has shown differently. but if i have for 26 days (+/- 4 or 5 days) engaged in something that i wasn’t interested in, what is the ’something else’ it is helping me to achieve?
as phil has so brilliantly wrote lately, “so (?)”
throughout our 4 week journey, I have been consistently asking myself the question, “Why Pray?”. at one point i wrote:
“I guess that’s what I’m hoping for through this month. Not just that prayer would be something I check off my list of things to do, or even to see ‘things happen’, but simply to see if consistent prayer might draw me closer to Jesus in a new way.”
essentially a more intimate life with god is the ’something else’ i am hoping to bring about my doing something i wasn’t really interested in (prayer) before this.
so the question 26 days into this is, am i at the end? has prayer brought about a more close relationship with god?
yes…and no.
sometimes i have felt closer to god and sometimes not.
but what i’m learning is that prayer is good, and prayer is powerful, but it’s not the end. prayer isn’t the end goal. giving 12 minutes of my day to some time in prayer is not the end to which i am striving.
if my end goal is a greater intimacy with god, then prayer has been good, but only as one piece of a larger puzzle.
prayer alone. worship alone. conversation alone. scripture alone. none of these things alone get me to the end.
somehow i have to find a way to integrate many things into my life together to reach the end.
so i’ll keep praying… but hopefully with a commitment to developing some other positive habits into my life that together might help me get closer to this thing i define as ‘closeness’.
I live alone. One night, last week — I think it was Thursday — I was getting hungry and started to look through the cupboards for food. I found a can of vegetable beef soup and started to warm it in a saucepan on the stove. It began to boil and I dished up a bowl. I was standing over the sink still holding the bowl and I decided to taste the soup. I took a spoonful and then another, then another, and another and realized I may as well eat my dinner right here.
Then my girlfriend walked in the door, because we’re in that stage of our relationship now where she keeps a spare key to the apartment. Without so much as even greeting me, the first words that jumped from her mouth were, ‘You’re eating your meal standing over the sink?’
‘So?’
I mean what rule is there that dictates where and in what position one must eat? Right?
- Troy, Sacramento, California
It’s 9:50 on a Sunday night. The restaurant closes at 10. The place is deadsville. We haven’t had a new table come in over 40 minutes. I’ve cut all the servers but Tracy, and she’s spent her last half hour emptying and refilling every last salt and pepper shaker in the building.
I’ve already told the boys and Sharla in the kitchen to break down as much as they can, thinking we’ll get them out a little early. They deserve it.
In walks some middle-aged guy wearing a mustache and a cheap suit attached to a middle-aged blonde girl who looks like she’s been around the ringer a couple of times, and who’s dressed suspiciously like a hooker. Not in the new style, either, where all the girls now are dressing like high-priced hookers in their lingerie shirts, short skirts and leather boots. No, she’s dressed the old way, late eighties or nineties where you could actually tell a hooker by how she was dressed. Like in Pretty Woman. Only this lady’s no Julia Roberts.
The man – Mustache, I’ll call him asks for a table by the window, normally a tough request to grant. But I can get it for them, because the whole restaurant is empty, an obvious fact that one might assume would be just as obvious to these two lovebirds as I bring them to their table.
The problem is it’s my job to keep the posted hours, and turning away customers is not smart business. Still, for the sake of Manny and Jim and Sharla who are working the line and nearly done scouring all that needs scouring and Tracy who is done with the salt and peppers and now talking to her daughter on her cell phone at the corner booth in the bar, telling her she’ll be home soon, and for the dishwashers Luis and Robert who can either catch the bus at 10:15 or have to wait until 11:15 before the next one comes along, I politely remind the pair, “Just so you are aware the kitchen closes at 10 PM.”
Mustache, is looking nowhere near the menu I have just placed directly in front of him, nor his watch, nor the 43 other empty tables around him. No he’s staring right into the eyes of his date, right at the pair of bullseyes between the double bags and wide swaths of dark purple eye make-up.
For a second I doubt he even heard me, until I hear him say it,
‘So?’
- Charles, Chicago, Illinois
There is this homeless black man that I see nearly daily in my neighborhood. I let him use my cell phone to make a call once. He asks me for change whenever I see him. Sometimes he’ll ask me twice, if I pass by him twice on the same walk, not remembering he already hit me up.
The truth is I don’t carry change, or cash for that matter. I mean, my check card is just so convenient.
But for whatever reason, the last two times he’s asked me, I did have change at the bottom of my coat pocket. Probably left over from buying a candy bar or something small. Anyway it must have been 33 cents, because the first time he asked me I gave him two dimes and a penny, thinking I had scooped it all out, only to later that night feel a couple more coins as I was rooting around the same pocket. The next time I saw him, he asked me again. I reached in and pulled out two pennies from the pocket, once again thinking I had grabbed it all. And wouldn’t you know it? Later on I found another dime, when I was emptying my pockets of receipts.
Oh well, what matters is that when I handed him those two pennies the second time, I noticed how leathery and black his hands were. Not the skin color black, which I never really understood, because peoples’ skin aren’t ever really black. I mean, it’s brown isn’t it? No, this was like really black, like charcoal. Like his hands had been on fire and when he put them out they looked identical to charred bits of wood. They were black like bad frostbite is supposed to make your hands. Like they were stained by residue of oil, or dirt, or ash. Whatever it was, I remembered thinking that they must have been like that for years, and that the black is permanent.
And as I’m looking at his hands while I’m giving him those two pennies, I say, just trying to make conversation, ‘Wow, you’re hands are really black.’
Guess what he says?
‘So?’
And, I guess, why wouldn’t he?
- Theresa, Saint Paul, Minnesota
There’s a homeless guy in my neighborhood.
So?
- Pete, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Imagine a perfect summer day. You’re walking along the sidewalk in your neighborhood, minding your own business, completely satisfied by the merits of the fresh air, warm sun and the blue sky. Green is your favorite color precisely because of days like today. Trees and grass even weeds are growing everywhere, decorating the scene with their lush bodies and blades. You’re breathing it all in, enjoying it without really over-thinking it.
Suddenly a stranger strides quickly toward you from what must be his lawn. He has a look of absolute horror in his face, and you can tell right away that his look of mortification is not from something he just saw, but from something he is seeing right now. His indignation is directed at you, at something you’re doing. He’s pointing to your feet as he’s approaching and in a tone that can only be interpreted as accusatory, he screams, “You’re walking on the cement!”
What is your reply?
You’ve been granted eternal life, and your pleased to discover eternal life takes place on a tropical island where all of your food and drink, all of your basic needs are tended to by servants who actually anticipate your every want and need just as you’re about to think of one. Your primary responsibility is to have no responsibilities at all and you’ve taken to just lying by the beach and listening to the rhythm of the waves reaching the shore as if you were listening the steady pounding of your own heartbeat.
One day, as one of your servants sets down a cold glass of fresh pineapple juice on the table next to your beach chair, he leans over and says with eyebrows arched as if to imply some sort of extra meaning, “It’s Tuesday, you know.”
“So?”
We’ve come to the First Meaning of So?
So? as Oblivion, or So?-Oblivion, as it’s often abbreviated.
So? as Oblivion runs rampant, mostly to the benefit, and sometimes to detriment of the Philosophy and its complete adherence.
Most will note almost immediately the real irony for followers of So?-Oblivion is that they are so often unaware of themselves in its practice that it could it hardly be called a practice at all. In essence So?-Oblivion is truly being adhered to best when done merely out of natural attitude rather then any type of discipline.
This should come somewhat as good news, even despite the Doctrine of the Trinity of Meaning which states that all three aspects of So?’s meaning must be subscribed to for the sake of being a true “Practitioner.” Because despite the fact that one must go on to learn and practice the other two meaning of So?, the first meaning is practically a ‘gimme.’ It’s like the free space in Bingo.
Now the above examples are rather far-fetched and take place in purely fantastic realms, and they though might illicit a certain ‘feel’ for the First Meaning they’re not entirely reliable as hypothetical scenarios. That’s why it’s necessary to draw on the collected texts from the Living Experiences section of the So? Narrative, which are actual first hand accounts — testaments, if you will, of followers of the First Meaning of So?
It won’t take long for you to quickly identify how some of your own true to life experience fall right in line with First Meaning. You may even want to consider your own testimonies, or write them out.
Though it may seem like an exercise in tedium, it is important that from the very onset something be said about the significance or insignificance of small words and conjunctions. This is fundamental because in the very word So we have both a small word and a conjunction. Those facts, those pieces of identity, those properties, those characteristics that are the very foundations of So? are important not entirely in defining its very meaning but more in understanding its quiet and humble beginning, which is only now a simple part of its meaning.
In short, it’s a place to start. A Genesis. A manger birth. Or Matthew 1: 1-17.
There are few words shorter than So. I can think of only I and a. An argument could be made that, as a stand-alone, a has no meaning at all. Only when paired with another word will a indicate that word as one, singular or of a certain category.
And I, well it only has the one self-reflexive, egotistic meaning, doesn’t it?
Though So is as short as it is, and often accused of having limited meaning, we will see in due time and through revelation its dynamic qualities.
People of a certain age might recall with a certain fondness that brilliantly entertaining, effectively educational, dare I say edutaining body of informative musical cartoons titled School House Rock.
Arguably, one of the most memorable episodes, (and from what I know the only to be given homage by Snoop Dogg in one of his songs, Hydroponic), was titled Conjunction Junction.
When the question is sung in call-and-response style by the female chorus, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?”
The answer from the animated train conductor comes, “Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.”
Though So itself is left out from the song for favor of and and now and but, the definition covers our beloved conjunction too. It is a word first drawn for the sole purpose of bringing other words together. In almost all circumstances it has no place on its own. It is designed only to be used in relation to other words or clauses or to ‘coordinate words in the same clause,’ as one definition would have it.
“Do your homework now so you can play outside later.”
The temptation is to believe that like a, So is useless on its own, that it must only serve its function as a conjunction hooking up word and phrases and clauses.
But then recount from your own uses of the word, the multiple times you’ve thought it or declared on its own. You might even be thinking it now, reading this. So?
Though it cannot be denied the work it does to bring words and clauses together, this little conjunction is brave enough and has the power to create meaning standing all alone.
Not just one meaning, but three.
A Trinity.
Today I submit the philosophy of So? Understand 12 minutes won’t even provide enough time for laying the complete groundwork. I’ll need 12-plus-more-this time, and 12-plus- more next time and 12-plus-more a third time, and fourth and an infinite amount of times more just to barely plumb the unplumbable depths of So?
For I assure you, in the small field where these two letters, S and O, meet there is a space expansive enough to build an entire religion. Whether the religion is indeed built is not for me to determine. No, that’s the work left to the hands of So?’s followers.
Instructions to the followers will come in due time and by way of biographical examples as you’ve come to expect from any religious narrative. But no delay can be made at the current time in introducing the very fundamentals of So? In other words there are no believers until there is something to believe, and preaching that which is to be believed is the matter at hand.
that’s about how much i’ve been averaging this week. i’ve made the effort most days, usually at night, but after about 2 minutes find my mind wandering in all sorts of directions with little focus. then i usually just give up, rather than trying to bring it back. i think part of it is not knowing what to pray for this week. the first few weeks I had some specific things i was praying for, now not so much… i mean i know prayer is more than just ‘asking’ god for things, but i’m struggling with what the ‘other’ point of prayer is.
good night.
