A Deeper Struggle

Christmas morning… actually when I finished writing last night it was already Christmas morning (4:30 AM). My friend called back on her way home from Huntington Beach and we talked about everything until about two-thirty. I was still working on mom’s computer until 4:30 when I decided I needed to lie down for a bit. That’s how I spent my Christmas eve (after the siblings left).

So now that it’s Christmas day and I’ve had breakfast (scrambled eggs and enchiladas!), I’ve returned to the scene of the crime and was hoping to blow through the rest of the Windows XP reinstall. Ha! Alas, even as I was just checking to see if I can figure out the sequence the 14 updates need to be installed I got the original RPC error message that started me on this damn XP-reinstall path in the first place (it flashes on the screen from NT/Authority that there’s been an RPC failure and that the machine has to reboot in 60 seconds). Ack! Damn. Return to square one! It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to just finish up here and run off. Damn computers! For all the time and effort I put into this damn thing I should just break down and get mom an eMac or something. Ugh. My mistake last night is that in my eagerness to run through the reinstall I didn’t set up the firewalls and updates that I had on hand before connecting to the Internet to get the other updates and … blah, blah, blah. Here I am 12-hours later reformatting the hard drive again and starting over. Ugh!

Technorati Tags: faith&doubt, god&sex, Internet, media, videopodcast

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Dualities

Christmas eve, Bustillos residence south. I’m re-installing Windows XP on mom’s computer because it was giving her weird error/restart messages when she went online and I’m waiting for a call from a friend about breakfast tomorrow morning. This isn’t exactly a normal Christmas reflection. I remember complaining one time about the realization many years ago about how sad it was to find myself sitting with my mom and dad on Christmas eve because, whereas my brothers and sisters have significant others to go home to be with, there’s no one in my life. Right now I’m not feeling that. It’s just where I’m at right now. Granted, I’d much rather be finding myself in my lover’s arms trying to find some way to consummate our love without waking up the boys or her mom and dad, but that’s basically an eight-days-a-week kind of desire that doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s Christmas or any other day of the week.

Technorati Tags: faith&doubt, god&sex

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The Lesson of Community

When I was driving down to San Diego last Thursday (for Thanksgiving with the folks) the thought struck me about a time when my then-wife and I considered moving to San Diego because I was thinking about going to a Presbyterian seminary near Encinitas. That was a lifetime ago. I remember at the time how I was trying to figure out how I could get my PacBell job transfered to San Diego so that I could continue to work (and support my wife) while going to school. That wasn’t a bad idea, but what I didn’t understand at the time was that what I was trying to do wasn’t something that one does alone. In fact I never understood that until I was in the middle of my Master’s program and one of the professors (Sparks) started asking us to talk about our mentoring experiences. Huh? What’s that?

I’d been so use to doing everything alone that i didn’t realize that a large reason that I wasn’t able to pull off these things before is because I never bothered to create or be a part of the larger support network that one has to have to survive and succeed the pressures that doing grad & post-grad work. Here I was thinking about doing seminary graduate work and it never dawned on me that I should be in a supportive relationship with the leadership of my home church and that that would make the whole thing much easier to do (or just plain doable). I do remember some comments that came from a professor and his wife about another professor about how this other professor was able to zoom through school because his family had money. Hmmm. This professor (and his wife) was struggling to finish his doctorate at Fuller, so their negative attitude toward the other professor was understandable. But it was just another thing that I misunderstood and kept moving in my independent (and unsuccessful) path.

Technorati Tags: faith, ministry, music, pepperdine, community

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