What am I chasing? Sometimes I think certain actions and habits and daily routines are illusionary. I even wonder sometimes how much of my obbsession with music is illusionary. At times I have an insatiable drive to get new music. That nathan, as hard as it is to swallow is illusionary. If I try and get the newest stuff just to say that I already heard it, then its pretty shallow. Oh ill admit it I have done that more than once. I found myself in this desperate action while listening to Belle and Sebastian. Definately not for me. Anyways. I started thinking about my parents and how much I dont spend time with them. What if something happened to them? Would I have left something unsaid? How would that affect my life? Or what about any of my friends or relative? I know when Sarah died it changed my life drastically. Reality is seen in the moments that you realize the fragility of life. In the moments after a close friend dies. After Sarah died I wanted to pour my heart out to everyone. Not an attempt to capitalize on pity, but to be real. Just look someone right in the eye and say I want to know you and what your all about. I want to talk to you and understand you and I dont care who you are or who I think I am. Every conversation was so real that week. Living life in that conviction is beatiful. I'm already approixmately 2/5 through my life. I'm gonna die one day. Thats hard for me to type. What if I died tommorrow? Would I be researching Shakespeare in AZ? Heck no.

"Sin belongs to hell and the devil; I as a child of God, beolnd to heaven and God. It is not a question of giving up sin, but of giving up my right to myself, my natural independence and self-assertiveness, and this is where the battle has to be fought." This is heavy for me. It seems to be like eating. Fregging the entire United States is a slave to the cookie, the pizza pie and the soft drink, myself included. Those times when I do not eat it, it is like I'm giving up my right to choose that option. I know, for an absolute fact that every time I eat one of these I feel like puking 15 minutes after I leave the dining hall. I wanna puke on myself because I know my stupid descsion to eat those "dead" calories was my fault. I did it. Now I pay for my stupid mistake. And I get fat and feel more dead and less alive in getting fat. Not fat but just out of shape and extra weight that cloggs my heart up and makes me breath heavy when I run up a single story flight of stairs. Get in shape Lazy Nate. Yet its the same way with sin in my life. I just comprimise and what not without using my head. I might think it's OK to be unfriendly, but I'm feeling like a dead man while I'm doing it, my heart freezing over and getting bitter about life. Not treating others as Jesus would treat them. How hard is to talk to antoher person? "It is the things that are right and noble and good from the natuarl standpoint that keep us back from God's best. To discern that natural virtues antagonize surrender to God, is to bring our soul into the center of its greatest battle." "Jesus said "If any man will be My disciple, let him deny himself," ie, his righ tto himself, and a man has to realize Who Jesus Christ is before he will do it. Beware of refusing to go to the funeral of your own independence." Oswald Chambers