The sun is out.

Hey everyone. The sun is out and I am pumped about it. I thought I would tell you about what I did in the sun yesterday.

I went to Pike Place market and got free cheese. It was the cheese festival that happens every year. Fun stuff. Plenty of calcium.

I played baseball! It was super fun! Guys from my house and I played out in the sun and hit baseballs at a park in Queen Anne. This kid walked by me while I was going for my waterbottle and told me “nice hit.” He had a popsicle. That popsicle and his existence as a kid served to be the encouragement I never really got when I played ball as a kid. It was as though the past merged with the present and the embodiment of those kids on my team when I was little told me that I can actually play decently. Baseball was redeemed a bit in that moment.

I have been having dreams about racoons lately. Mostly in the dreams they make the same noises they make in the attic right now. 

I had this great moment yesterday with my friend Andrew. We were talking about the beatitude in Matthew where Jesus says “Blessed are the poor in Spirit.” It occured to me that so many times I am totally jonesing for this state of being with the Lord that is more or less having it all together. I want to be good to go. I want to be on top of the world. I want to have successfully built the spiritual equivalent of a sugarpacket village at Denny’s (an impossible feat). Yet, when you read some of this guy named Tozer’s book he points out something along the lines of the fact that our preferred spiritual state is to be like the beggar on the streets of Jerusalem. 

In other words, going off of this poor in spirit idea, the place where we ought to be is continually in a place of realizing the reality of our own lack of “having it togetherness”. Going from the beattitude it seems that this is really what Jesus wants from us. The One who said “I can do nothing by myself” (John 5:30) wants us to share that perspective. The state of blessedness here is for those who get that they don’t have it all together and that they never will.

I suppose that it is in that place you trust God above all because you know yourself to be spiritually poor. You need God to pull you through. Poverty back in the day was hard (if not impossible) to get out of…I don’t think that being poor in spirit is something that you get to stop being. It may be that it’s one of those things that you probably have to find out to be true and deal with the reality that though you have nothing spiritually to offer God, He still wants to be with you. It would seem that  it was never really about what you could give Him to begin with…