Time To Rant

I’ve reading a couple of blogs from my internet blogging crew and got a bit worked up and want to let off some steam. My friend Luke recently posted on using the word “biblical” in front of something. My friend Yael then talked about on her blog how we sometimes act as though we have “God in a pocket.” Those things really light a bit of a fire in me so I am going to let loose.

Way back in college at a very ultra conservative religious school in the midwest, I noticed something that met me with a fair amount of disillusionment. It looked to me like the college would hire people who were sub-par performers at whatever job they were going to do just because they labeled themselves as “Christian.” That bugged me. Do we really have to settle for mediocrity because it is somehow the nice thing to do? Can’t we expect the best out of each other?

I see this same kind of thing happening today too. I used to have my kids in a Christian school because, of course, it was supposed to be the best for them. Public school is evil because there isn’t some direct connection to Christianity you know. But at this prior school there was available a Christian business journal. It almost gives me the creeps to think about it. It was full of a bunch of adds all with cute little fishies in the bottom corner or sometimes in all four corners. So I am supposed to think that these guys and gals are the best because of the fish. And maybe some of them are the best in end. But it is the exclusivity of it that bothers me. It almost heaps guilt and shame on the reader for choosing something other than the fishies. In fact, it probably does heap guilt and shame. That is the flipside of the message. Of course, I am a heretic for saying such. Who cares.

I think we use God as a genie much more than we care to admit. We decide what we are going to do, and then we assign God to it. We give it God’s blessing. We look up some obscure passage in scripture which proves that little green men live on the moon. And then we are all proud that we are following God’s will. And that of course is the ultimate trump card. Who can refute what God told us? It closes the door. My friend Yael says that she thinks we see in the bible whatever we want to see, and I think she is right. Fred Phelps looks for his justification for hating gays. Jim Dobson looks for his justification for heaping guilt on Christians who voted for Obama (which I did and I don’t). George Bush looks for his justification for pre-empitve war. Britain looked for its justification for the Crusades. And they all and we all thought we were doing what God told them to do. We use God as a genie to bless whatever it is we want to do. We treat God like a toolbox that we can pull out and use when we need to and then wail in grief when something bad happens. What a joke.

I think most of use worship idols. We work out our nice little theologies on how God is, on what God is like, on what God’s will is, and then fail to realize that God is too big to be boxed in. When we think we have him all figured out what we actually have is a golden calf. We have an image, a snapshot of God. But we worship that snapshot like it is God. That is idolotry. If you lose the fact that God is partly not able to be nailed down, you are committing intellectual idolatry in my opinion.

The Bible too. I see people treat the Bible like it is God. Our former Christian school had a statement in its list of crap that the Bible itself was the source of all truth. Really? All truth? There is no truth outside the Bible? The Bible tells us all we need to know about physics and medicine and rock climbing and triathlon and reading and educational technique and I think you get the idea? A rebuttal might be that it contains all the truth about God which is the ultimate truth? Really? Nature says nothing about God? Human experience says nothing about God? God doesn’t say anything to us other than through the Bible? I just don’t buy that crock of crap anymore. Treating the Bible like that is treating it like it is God. And it is not God. It is a book about God. But it is not God. To worship it is idolatry.

If I sound sarcastic and a bit angry then you have definitely read my tone appropriately. I am both of those things. It suprises me a bit to be honest, and maybe I have uncovered something within myself that I need to explore a bit more. If you care to know more about these ideas read How Not To Speak of God by Peter Rollins. A difficult but very good read. I have his second book coming soon from Amazon.

Orexis

I am privileged to have recently been exposed to a video on Facebook. My wife prompted me to read it. I used to have an account there but cancelled it (my INTJ personality (thanks to Luke for encouraging me to take the test again and re-discover some important stuff) finds it more of a burden to keep up with all that contact – my restorative times come when I am alone) so I viewed it on her space and am not sure how to link to it here, but you viewing it is not all that important. It is the video of an acquaintance of ours describing his pathway from what he terms “addiction” to pornography and explicit and promiscuous homosexual behavior all while he attended religious prep-schools, attended a religious university, married a Christian wife, etc to freedom from that destruction and wholesomeness. It got me thinking about a topic that I have considered prior, and even touched on a bit in a previous post. Additionally, one of the comments on my friend Jason’s blog dropped a bit of fuel on this for me too. That comment was about the idea that people’s actions are manifestations of their beliefs, and while I can see that in there, but I think it is largely untrue. Let me explain.

I have had this idea that much of the stuff with which we destroy ourselves involves our lack of control over that for which we are hungry. I don’t mean only hungry in the sense of our desire for food. Certainly, consuming too much food is perhaps the most visible major example of this self-destruction that is rampant in our lives and in our culture, and one I might add (and this plants the seed for an entire additional post perhaps) that the church and its focus on avoiding sin seems to completely dismiss. But to me when I look at the world and its evils more closely, much of the evil is there due to humanity over-satisfying that for which it hungers (orexis being the Latin for appetite). There is the drive to quench the thirst for money, for power, for sex, for happiness, for peace, for fun, for food, for relationship, for praise, for acceptance, for dominance, for status, for rightness, for proof, etc. The list is really endless and many of these things on the list may be intimately interlocked. We all have appetites. And we all satisfy them. But why do we go beyond satisfaction? Why do we destroy ourselves.

I hesitate to bring up Dr. Phil McGraw because he is somewhat of a pop-culture phenom, and I have made a bit of fun of him myself at times, but I read one of his books years ago, and he said at least one thing that I thought was really good and that has stuck with me. I come back to it time to time, and it is in my mind as I consider this topic and more specifically why we destroy ourselves. He said that people do what works. So I think people engage in destructive behavior because in some way, ways of which we may not even be fully aware, it works for them. It may be a very shallow or surface reason such as feeling good or it may be tied to something much deeper. But I do believe it to be true. People do what works. And it is a curious thing that doing what works seems to be stronger than knowing that we are destroying ourselves, or stronger than our religious beliefs, or stronger than our relationships, or stronger than our desire to not destroy ourselves. Again, why? Why do we destroy ourselves with our hungers.

I think it can only be because we are all broken and in pain and scarred in some way, and the things for which we are hungry offer a quik fix. They offer to cover up or distract us from our pain or brokenness. We experience immediate relief. And we oh so much want relief. So we take it. Peace. But it wears off. So we take more. Peace. But it wears off. So we take more. And the cycle goes on and on. And destruction comes along with it. The cycle is destructive. But all too soon we are too trapped to get out. We are addicted. As my friend appropriately stated, he was addicted. He took relief and got it. But it wore off so he took more and again got it. This is the behavior of an addict. And an addict begins at some point to not be able to function without relief from the pain. And the cycle creates more pain so you seek more relief. And it slowly eats you up. It destroys you.

I also hesitate to bring up Dr. Drew Pinsky for the same reasons as Dr. Phil. He is a pop-culture figure, but I also think that he too has some good things to contribute. Maybe you do or maybe you don’t know about his VH1 show, Celebrity Rehab. Whether or not you like it is not my concern. I would encourage you to do something different, keep an open mind, and watch it sometime because these people play out exactly what I have described above. And you rarely get the opportunity to see this happen in front of your eyes in our culture where looking like you have it all together is considered virtuous. In some way they are all broken. Every single one of them had something happen to them in their life that was significantly traumatic for them. Something that deeply changed them. Something that caused them to seek medicine (as my good friend Dr. Paul would say). Their fame is irrelevant. It just added fuel to the flame because quick sources of relief (drugs, alcohol, co-dependent friends, enablers, sex, money, food, surgery-and people to give it to them) were more readily available, but don’t for a second think that we, the unfamous, are not like them. Our hurts and hungers are the same and lead us to the same places in the end. Destruction.

So contrary to what the commentor on Jason’s blog said, I think our actions are probably correlated more closley with where we are broken than with what we believe. In fact, I’ll go a bit further and say that where you find you have an appetite that is hard to control, it is at that place that you have something broken, something painful, from which you are seeking relief. Those troublesome appetites are a beacon for where you need to be looking to uncover your deepest scars. And I’ll bet that most of those scars are somehow connected to a broken relationship in some way. Which is why just having more faith in God or being a better Christian or being a better Jew or being a better Muslim or trying harder will never work. It doesn’t fix the problem. It doesn’t fix the relationship. And in fact, it may do more to cover the problem. It just adds another layer of crap because when God doesn’t “deliver you” you are left more angry and confused than you were before. Don’t get me wrong. I deeply believe that God will help us with our scars and in fact a whole relationship with God is part of the solution. But, it is a principle in this world, this universe, this life that God created, that you have to struggle to gain ground. Getting it for free brings about more destruction. And this is no different here. Without the struggle of being brutally honest with yourself and owning your troublesome appetites and doing the work, you will not get out of jail. God will do his part, but you have to do yours.

I challenge you to examine your troublesome orexis. I will commit to it with you in my own life. Let’s be a community that heals. Look for the problems that exist underneath your orexis. Be willing to be savagely honest with yourself about them. There is a reason that people often hit “rock bottom” before they start to heal, before they start to get better, before they start to get those appetites controlled. It is there that it begins to no longer work for them. But maybe, if we know where to look, we can find the problems, the scars, so we don’t have to hit the bottom. Maybe we can cut the destruction short by looking underneath our orexis.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, or whatever saying you most prefer imagine that it is right here ______________________.

My Spiritual Path

I have found myself on a spiritual journey over the last 5 years that began with my prayer to know God in the way he wanted to be known. For along time I had a sense that maybe the things I was being taught (which were really the same old things over and over) may not really be what God wanted for me to understand. I was relying heavily on what pastors, teachers, friends, etc told me about God without much searching on my own. So I have been on a quest. And have learned a ton.

One of my spiritual mentors posted on his blog a few days back his view of our stages of spiritual growth that I think describes my journey very accurately. I have copied and pasted a section of that post here:

Stage 1: Pre-Faith Stage
Stage 2: Institutional Faith Stage
Stage 3: Throw Away Faith Stage
Stage 4: Personal Faith Stage

Pre-Faith:This is the period of time before we come to accept/believe that God invites us to accept His acceptance. Some of us lived in that stage for a long time.  Others, like me, can’t even remember it. I was taken to church just a few days after my birth and was there several times a week for most of my life with my family.

Institutional Faith Stage:We we come to faith, it is usually connected with some religious system. That might be a church or para-church organization like Campus Crusade, etc. As newbies to faith we look to someone to explain what the content and practices of our faith looks like. It may through a Bible Study, Sunday School Class, or some discipleship process. It is not so much an education as indoctrination into our mentor’s faith. There may be a discussion of alternative points of view, but they are generally labeled as wrong, false, liberal, new age, heresy, etc. If we get the “correct” information and can repeat it, then we get a star on our chart. If not, we need to relearn the “truth” as they understand it.

Generally, it is a simplified version of their faith and can sound pretty black or white – as if there is an answer somewhere in the Bible for every question we have or decision we confront. The problem is that life presents all of us with issues and situations that are not so clear cut. Some faith systems very effective help people transition from the early stages of faith to learn discernment about living out faith in a complex world and others don’t. You may know people whose faith is stuck in the Institutional Stage – that is, they depend on the institution to define how to live life, answer questions, never question what it declares to be the “correct” answers. In fact, people can be so trapped it the Institutional Stage that they live in denial about the complexities of the world. We all have an amazing ability to not see what we can’t handle within our belief systems.

Throw Away Stage: If we grow beyond the Institutional Stage, it usually involves some degree of throwing away the faith we have been given. We really don’t have to grow and some people choose to stay in the Institutional Stage so long that changing would feel to them like they had wasted their entire life and change is just too hard. “Throw away” may be too strong to fit the experience of some who move quite naturally through this stage where they question what they have been given. For others, it does not look like they are throwing anything away because the still attend services and talk the talk but they have become closet non-believers. They really don’t buy what they once believed but choose to keep quiet for the sake of others in the family (like keeping quiet about the tooth fairy) or they enjoy the social networking so just go through the motions. Others are more open about throwing away their faith and may loudly express they feel betrayed by God, the church and friends.

Personal Faith Stage:Some feel so deeply betrayed and justified in their disillusionment that they never move beyond the Throw Away Stage. If we grow beyond it it would mean coming to a new view of faith but this time it is not about asking the institution to define what we “should” believe but a personal exploration of what we choose to believe. Hopefully that includes an honest search of the history of ways the faith has been viewed – few of our questions are so new that no one has never thought deeply about them. We might even come to accept things we had decided to throw away, but now it is because we choose them. (We have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath in the Throw Away Stage).

I would have to say that I feel I have one foot in the “Throw Away Stage” and on foot in the “Personal Faith” stage. My re-examination of the faith of my childhood continues. Sometimes I drop an idea or two. Sometimes I retain an idea or two. Sometimes I drop and idea and then pick it back up later on. One thing I am finding for sure is that I am closer to God than I think I have ever been, and it is mainly because I quit trying to meet the expectations that other people told me were God’s expectations and instead started searching for myself. And I am in a better place for it.

Where do you find yourself in theses stages? Do you agree with them? Do you have a different idea?

Ironman Arizona Countdown

Just wanted to post another countdown update for my race Nov 22, 2009. I am in the very beginning stages of training. As I get more into the season after the new year I will post in more detail about what I’m doing. The occassion for this post is to mainly remind you that the NBC airing of this years Ironman World Championship Race in Kona, HI, will be this Saturday at 2:30 EST. It is my goal to race in Kona some day. I will do it (and hopefully my wife will be over the fear of my swimming in the ocean).

Ironman Arizona 2009 Countdown Clock

 

More Lyrics

I haven’t done this for awhile but heard a new song today that I downloaded from iTunes a few days back. The lyrics are really quite good so I thought I would put them down. I recommend getting ahold of a copy of this song too. Now be aware that I am not much into Mozart and Bach and all of that “educated” music. I am plenty into educated reading, but when it comes to music, I like rock. Other styles have value of course but good old rock is what really gets inside me. It actually calms me. I’m not sure what that says about me. Probably not anything good. Anyway this is one of Nickleback’s new songs, If Today Was Your Last Day. I realize that not everything in the song may be right on for everybody, but I like it because it speaks of living in the moment, not getting too caught up in your past, and offering grace. And I realize that Nickelback may not be about everything right and clean, but I am a firm believer in claiming truth anywhere that I find it, and here some is.

Nickelback: If Today Was Your Last Day

my best friend gave me the best advice
he said each day’s a gift & not a given right
leave no stone unturned
leave your fears behind
& try to take the path less travelled by
that first step you take is the longest stride

if today was your last day
& tomorrow was too late
could you say goodbye to yesterday?
would you leave each moment like your last?
leave old pictures in the past?
donate every dime you had?
if today was your last day

against the grain should be a way of life
what’s worth the price is always worth the fight
every second counts ’cause
there’s no second try
so live like you’re never livin twice
don’t take the free ride in your own life

if today was your last day
& tomorrow was too late
could you say goodbye to yesterday?
would you leave each moment like your last?
leave old pictures in the past?
donate every dime you had?
would you call those friends you’ve never seen?
reminisce old memories?
would you forgive your enemies?
would you find that one your dreaming of?
swear up & down to God above
that you’ll finally fall in love?
if today was your last day

if today was your last day
would you make it up by mending a broken heart
you know it’s never too late
to shoot for the stars
regardless of who you are
so do whatever it takes
’cause you can’t rewind
a moment in this life
let nothing stand in your way
cause the hands of time are never on your side

if today was your last day
& tomorrow was too late
could you say goodbye to yesterday?
would you leave each moment like your last?
leave old pictures in the past?
donate every dime you had?
would you call those friends you’ve never seen?
reminisce old memories?
would you forgive your enemies?
would you find that one your dreaming of?
swear up & down to God above
that you’ll finally fall in love?
if today was your last day

Why I Believe God Exists Part 4 : The Regularity Of Nature

I feel compelled to start off this post with a bit of a disclaimer. It seems that people reading my series here seem to do it with the idea in their minds as they read that I am trying to prove that God exists. This is despite the fact that I have said numerous times in both my posts and comments that I do not believe it is possible to prove that God exists for a myriad of reasons. The best for which we can hope is to find evidence that suggests or points to God’s existence. That is my goal. To show the pieces of evidence that I feel are personally significant to my belief in the existence of God. It is not enough for me to just believe God exists because the Bible says that God created it all and existed before it all, for if God does not exist, then the Bible is just a nice story. God has to exist outside of the Bible in order for me to even begin to believe that the Bible may be part of his revelation to humanity.

I also want to again state that the evidence which I am presenting in this series also does in no way point to the God of Christianity. Arriving at that point is an entirely different set of arguments which I do plan to present down the road. At best, the evidence that I am discussing points to a stance of theism as opposed to atheism. Yes, I am a Christian and have reasons for that (which I will get to down the road as stated above), but this series of posts is not in any way an attempt to convert or evangelize anyone towards belief in the Christian view of God. I am simply putting forth my journey and how I got here. If it helps or challenges someone along the way, that is enough.

And finally (this is a long disclaimer), if there are any athesits reading this series, I am not attempting to convert you either. I fully realize that all of these pieces of evidence can rationally be read in another light, and I value your reading and appreciate the difference of opinion that you bring to the table. I welcome the healthy debate that may arise and hope that we can, in the end, learn a bit more truth from each other.

Now for the heart of the post….( It may be that my friend John (titfortat) might possibly find this post especially interesting as I believe it may be in line with his “format” ideas).

I will open this section with a quote from Einstein (what an amazing thing to be known to all of mankind essentially by only your last name). I am currently reading a book by Antony Flew, There Is A God, in which he lays out how he came to a place of theism from staunch atheism. On page 102 he quotes Einstein, “Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.” Flew takes this quote from a work by Max Jammer called Einstein and Religion. Jammer was a personal friend of Einstein and believes and puts forth rather convincingly in this work that while Einstein did not believe in a personal god, he did believe in a “superior mind.” That belief was significantly impacted by the regularity of nature.

Antony Flew explains his view very eloquently, through many quotes from giants such as Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson, John Polkinghorne, Charles Darwin, and Richard Swinburne among others. Science has, through rigorous process, been at the work of uncracking the laws that govern the universe. Well from where did those laws themselves come? Atheists claim that these laws and universe are ultimately absurd, that their existence is reasonless. Ultimately, I find that explanation lacking. Oder exists everywhere and science cannot prove why it is there. And I like what Paul Davies has said, “There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted” (as quoted from Davies’ work God For The 21st Century by Flew on page 111 of There Is A God).

Tim Keller in The Reason For God adds a bit to this argument. His focus is more on the philosphical side. He emphasizes the observations that secular philosophers such as David Hume and Betrand Russell have made. The philosphers were, “…troubled by the fact that we haven’t got the slighest idea of why nature-regularity is happening now, and moreover, we haven’t the slighest rational justification for assuming it will continue tomorrow. If someone would say, ‘Well the future has always been like the past in the past,’ Hume and Russel reply that you are assuming the very thing you are trying to establish. To put it another way, science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature, it can only take it on faith” (Page 132 of The Reason For God).

I will close with a quote from Paul Davies as documented by Flew on page 107 of the above referenced work: “In his Templeton address, Paul Davies makes the point that ’science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.’ Nobody asks where the laws of physics come from, but ‘even the most atheistic scientist accpets as an act of faith the existence of a lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.’”

I think that sums up my take on this evidence pretty well.

Overtraining Syndrome – A Tiny Bit Of Hell On Earth

Nothing like a mixed theme title for this post combining athletic and religious terminology. Other than my countdown post a few days back, I have completely neglected one of my passions on this blog, that being my strange love for triathlon. I would like to explain what I have gone through in the last 2 years, not to brag at all but to get it logged for myself and to hopefully help anyone who may be searching for answers to this. By my use of the word “hell” I do not mean to demean any of the people who really are going through hell working in sweatshops, dying of starvation, suffering in ethnic cleansing, etc. I am fully aware that my situation here in the US dealing with overtraining for triathlons is actually probably heaven on earth to much of the world. So I used “tiny bit.” Read on if you are interested.

I finally decided to push for an Ironman length triathlon in Jan 2007. I had been doing tri’s for about 2 years and had done a couple of 70.3’s (Half Ironman). I had a plan to workup to the Ironman with a series of gradually more difficult races. I started training in earnest in Jan 2007. In April of 2007 I did a sprint distance event in Emporia, KS. Then in June I competed in the Buffalo Springs Lake 70.3 in Lubbock, TX. August brought the Pikes Peak Marathon. After this grueling 7.5 hour race I took a week completely off but then was back to reduced training schedule through September. In October of 2007 I began my 30 week training plan which led to my Ironman race in April 2008 in Phoenix, AZ. It took me 15.5 hours to complete this race, but my goal was to just finish, and I did, so I was and remain very happy about it. I took about 2 weeks off after this race and then was back to a reduced training schedule that gradually led into the Buffalo Springs event again in June of 2008. I took about a week off and then was back preparing for the Pikes Peak Marathon in August. About 3 weeks before the Pikes Peak race I had a sudden change in my performance, mental state, emotional state, and physical state. I cut back a bit but pushed through to the race. I felt terrible the week leading up to the race and underperformed during this race for the first time since I have been doing endurance racing. The weather was horrible, the worst blizzard I have ever been in on top of a 14er, and I logged my first DNF of any race that I have entered. It was time to figure out what was going on.

My symptoms….could not get enough sleep, felt tired continually, dreaded my training workouts whereas I had previously looked forward to them, either voraciously hungry or not hungry at all, no interest in sex, feeling down most of the time, easily crying, easily angered, frustrated all the time, inability to run or ride at levels that were previously easy, muscle soreness which I almost never had even after my hardest workouts, lack of interest in friends. I think that about covers much of it, but I am sure that I left a little bit out.

I did quite a bit of research on “overtraining syndrome” and concluded that I likely was suffering from it. Looking back, I had been training for about 20 months without much of a break. That 20 months also included 5 rather extreme endurance races. And I probably didn’t take enough time to rest after any of those 5 races. So, while I was concerned that many of my symptoms may just be plain old depression (do not mean to make light of depression in any way with those words as I understand how dark depression can be to those who suffer from it), I thought I had good grounds for overtraining syndrome. One of my sports med doctor friends whom I cornered thought much the same. Unfortunately, the only real way to diagnose it is to rest and see what happens. That is a scary thing to someone who has been used to working out a minimum of 12 hours per week. But things were not getting better at all on their own so I really had no choice.

So I decided to commit to 2 months of cutting back. For two weeks I did no workouts at all other than just walking. After that, I stayed out of the pool altogether. No swim workouts. Logistically it was just easier to cut these out than run or bike workouts. I then reduced to bike and run workouts of no more than an hour and at paces and efforts that were far below what I was used to. I limited those workouts to about only 4 per week. I also occasionally traded running for an elipticalt machine. And after about a month I definitely noticed that I was feeling much better.

I think in early October I began to feel rested after waking up. While I was previously sleeping about 10 hours a night and waking up tired and then wanting to take a nap at lunch instead of eat, I began naturally waking up after about 8 hours of sleep feeling rather rested. My appetite patterns were leveling out. My mood dramatically improved as did my interest in sex. Rather than jump back to early into hard workouts, I committed to staying with the reduced schedule through October.

By November I would say that I felt pretty much back to normal. I started back into my strength and core routines and even have ramped up the intensity there. I also got back in the pool and found that I could swim a mile with relative ease. I have gotten back to 5 and 6 mile runs and 20 mile rides without any difficulty. And I have incorporated TaeKwonDo 3 days per week and am doing it with one of my sons. I have begun pushing the intensity a bit with some interval training one or two workouts per week too. And I feel really good.

The Sunday prior to Thanksgiving marks the one year count down to my next Ironman. My racing schedule for 2009 will look like this: Sprint tri in April, Kansas 70.3 in June, Redman 70.3 in OKC in September, Arizona Ironman in November. I haven’t decide if I am going to do the Pikes Peak Ascent in August (not the marathon) or an Olympic tri in the summer sometime. I maybe will see how I feel and decide later on that one.

So this time I will not make certain mistakes that I made before. For one, this training season will only last one year. After the November Ironman I will likely take most of the remainder of 2009 off with just minimal workouts in late December. I will also religiously follow a schedule of 3 weeks of hard workouts followed by one week of cutting back and cycle that through the entire year. I will take enough time off after my lead-in races to get the rest I need to then begin preparation for the next race. And I will not add in much endurance work until Feb/March. Until then my focus will be on strength, especially core strength, losing a bit more weight, interval work, and rest.

So not any big revelations here. Just a post describing who I am and where I have been and to get something down about myself in the “online Journal” function of my blog. Maybe someone will read this who needs to learn from my experience. The right kind of pain results in tremendous gain.