thoughts while sipping coffee at starbucks

(sort of a continuation from my ramblings earlier in the week while waiting for an oil change)

PT. 2: sitting in a starbucks @ Washington square, sipping on a mocha and thinking about life and cool breezes and oversized comfy chairs. friday morning, 1.23.09

We are all put here n this green earth of ours for a reason. Finding that reason is a major part of our life’s quest. Our questions are tied to that reason. Our reason is tied to the questions. We don’t always know what to ask or where to search. we don’t always realize what the end result will be. But we know that there is a purpose.. a direction… a plan designed just for us. In the days of GPS navigation systems, you’d think it’d be a whole heck of a lot easier to find our way. Yet we still wander aimlessly.

Your hand in mine. As I type ‘your hand in mine’, an instrumental track by the band Explosions in the Sky is playing.

I find it to apply to my thoughts at the moment. We are none of us alone. You’ll never walk alone. We were never meant to be alone. But we’ve all felt alone. Much of my adolescence I felt alone, I think. At least I seem to recall feeling that way… maybe my memories are skewed… but even today there are many times when I think that no one understands me or the thoughts or ideas in my head.

Last on Greys Anatomy (my wife makes me watch it) Meredith said to Derek something like ‘ I know you don’t understand me… I don’t understnd me!’

I felt that way. Many people do, too, I believe. But WE ARE NOT ALONE… nor were we meant to be or feel alone. But feelings can deceive us so much of the time.

Thinking about Adam and Eve and the action steps they took after they disobeyed God. What did they do? they hid. They pulled themselves away and brought on the feeling and reality of aloneness (is that a word?). They retreated. They pulled back. They hid. And God took away, because of their disobedient hearts, the very thing that they desired most. The comfortable resting place for their mind, body and spirit.

I wonder if there is a connection to ‘feeling alone’ and ‘not knowing the path God has laid out for us?’

I wonder if aloneness, or the feelings of alone-ness are connected to the quest?

Certainly, part of the quest is ‘doing it alone’… or so it seems or feels. But maybe that is not the intended way. I don’t know. In movies and in books you always have this character who ‘has to make it on my own.’… who has to prove to the world and to themselves that they can do it.

But how tragic that can end up. I am thinking of Christopher McCandless, the true story of a man, featured in the book and movie Into the Wild, who ran off on his own on a quest to find himself. He wound up in Alaska… alone… lost… abandoned… trapped… and eventually he died there.

One of his final written words was this: “happiness only real when shared with others.”

How true. How true.

Thoughts of the prodigal son… or the lost sheep come to mind. The lost sheep was not meant to be abandoned. The shepherd goes after him… leaving 99. That lost one was just as important.

The prodigal son… he chose to leave… chose to go it alone. And it took some trials and tragedy before he came to his senses and returned home, like a bad dog with his head between his knees… but the Father was there with open arms.

The Quest brought him full circle. The Father was there with loving arms… was that or is that the fulfillment of the quest? Of our quest in life?

To return home?

Ironically, the song that no plays is ‘The Only Moment We Were Alone’ by Explosions in the Sky. Beautiful.

WE and ALONE in the same sentence, those words are kind of opposites.

We and Alone. Maybe it could be a metaphor… and I am taking creative license here… but maybe it is symbolic of the homecoming… of which the FATHER greets us with the kind of embrace that fills the heart with love and grace and peace and comfort and protection and purpose and willingness and desire.

Together WE – the Father in Heaven and ME… and I… whatever. Together we are alone. That is the plan? Is it not? Is that the culmination of salvation and love that God promises? Is that the rejoiced moment we await?