Drink to Change

I remember that time I tended bar and told bawdy jokes.  As I laughed and pranced, quite proud of myself because, after all, I had no talent for jokes, a guy stood up from one of the wing back chairs he had been sitting it, quiet and unnoticed.  We had been very busy that evening, two conventions in town.  At this time of the night only a few remained – my captive audience and this gentleman who stood up.  One of our groups was a convention of military chaplains.  Tim was his name and he was a preacher and he felt the need to tell me.  I grew up in the church.  I knew all about churches and pastors, certainly, so I thought.  He shattered that image for me and do you know it was me who sought him out afterwards to go get a couple of long necks and talk about a God I didn’t remember.  It has been hundreds of wild nights and hundreds of no longer wild nights since then.  I didn’t change overnight.  In some ways I haven’t changed at all.  I am still a small girl who wants to know the way, a girl that wants to stop seeking approval from others, and a girl who ultimately wants to look up to God and claim him as her Father.  If it is a choice then I must still be straddling the fence.  But I am different than I was that crazy night.  Not sure why I am thinking of you, Tim, but here’s to you.  Cheers.

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Borrowed Art

His borrowed art makes me want to weep.  The words, the sound, amazing in their own right, and yes, he only borrows it, but it still makes my heart swell…  When will I learn to stop being jealous?  How do I change these pangs of pain in my heart to pangs of pain in action?  Here is a quote that I need to take a lesson from: Create ambition.  Ambition creates motivation.  Motivation creates a motion.  I would probably replace Ambition with Desire, but it admittedly doesn’t flow as well.

I want my soul to continue to ache at beauty.  I think I will always be this way.  I think I was made this way. 

Anyway, this is the same old song and dance for me.  I long, I love, I appreciate.  Then I want my own.  I can say this a thousand different ways but it all comes down to that.  And I can say it to myself as long as I want to and nothing will ever change without the movement on my part.  Here’s to hoping that saying out loud over and over again constitutes as some form of movement…