From the mind of Paul Jones

It was recently, in a conversation with my brother, that my ears laid hold of something profound. We were knee deep in a conversation about living life when he mentioned a friend and something that he found incredibly frustrating about him. The conversation had steered curiously to the way the some people live, or rather, don’t live life. In the midst of his descriptions of his friends activities and inactivities he uttered a phrase that landed smack dab in the middle of my psyche like a pallet of bricks. “He lives his life in his mind; he doesn’t actually do anything, he just sits around thinking about doing things.” His statement crashed heavily, as the pallet of bricks broke the bands that held their form and spilled out awkwardly in a pile. “Ouch!,” I thought, “This is going to take some time to clean up.

Over the few weeks since that conversation I have returned to my pile of bricks and attempted to sort them out. Having crashed so heavily, it was clear to me that my brother’s statement resonated in a very personal way with me; I found myself clearly reflected in his observation of a friend. A great deal of my time is spent thinking about life, and very little time actually living it in any real substantive way; this was flushed out a further this week when my brother directly challenged my manor of living. During our six and a half hour drive from Nashville to Dothan, AL to surprise our mom for her birthday, Matthew turned to me and said, “you think that you are a filmmaker, but you are really just some guy sitting alone on your couch in your living room, surfing on your computer and watching TV.” My psyche flinched, awaiting the crash of whatever heavy object this realization was determined to embody.

However, despite my expectation of some kind of weighty crash, this statement seems to have taken a different form–no longer something chaotic and obstructive, this realization seems to have taken the form of a spade, or possibly a plow head. I think that this has become a true epiphany and could possibly be resulting in a paradigm shift. For years I have bemoaned my state of existence, blaming it on other people or some sort of cosmic joke. Lately, I have been undergoing some major personal evaluations which have resulted in a series of life changing realizations and it is entirely possible that this one will join those ranks.

I never seemed to put together such a simple thought. For many years, I have sat around expecting things to happen in my life and it seems that nothing ever seems to happen; however, this is not entirely true. Things happen all the time, but rarely do those things live up to my imagination of them. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons that I have been so bad a having a relationship with someone… too much thinking. In nothing is my pattern of “too much thinking, not enough doing” more obvious that with filmmaking. I know a lot about filmmaking, I have loads of gear and have read plenty of books. I’ve studied it and spent countless hours thinking about it. However, thinking about things like that rarely result in anything. The most vivacious people are those who are out there doing stuff, not those inside thinking about doing stuff.

I have been looking at my recent past under this new lens and finding some really destructive patterns. I don’t think this is any more evident that in a recent interaction with my relatively new friend Kim. It is odd that our initial connection happened because she had read some of my blogs and thought that we were so incredible similar. In retrospect, that thought seems so incredibly odd since, in many ways, we are polar opposites in terms of our personality. Regardless of personality, we do share a bunch of things in common, one of which is filmmaking.

Kim and I have had many conversations about my desire to become a filmmaker, and it was almost two weeks ago that I was set up for one of my clearest examples of how I practice that art of “thinking, rather than doing.” In light of our many conversations about making films and telling stories, and fresh off our participating in Nashville’s 48 Hour Film Project (www.48.tv), Kim posed an opportunity to shoot a small documentary about an interesting local character that she knew. Over the duration of our conversation, I spent the whole time talking around the project. I explained all the things that we needed to and should do, I passed off the initial work and directed her to find a way to get the project rolling without me. At the moment, I thought I was being pragmatic, but in hindsight I realize that I was possibly blowing off a project because it didn’t fit my minds model of a documentary I would do.

No wonder it seems that things don’t seem to happen in my life; because when things do happen, I am quick to dismiss them if they don’t meet up to the standard that I have formulated in my imagination. The funny thing is, that I know that I am creatively at the best when I am working in collaboration with someone and an opportunity to do that was in my face and I baulked. While Kim is a dreamer, she is also a doer… I, on the other hand, am just purely a dreamer. How is it that I, with the desire and capability to become a filmmaker, seem to find my way out of work? It seems so simple, so I can’t help but wonder where I got this self-defeating mentality? Some period of life must have instilled me with it, but at the moment, I haven’t discovered it.

The more I think about this… thing, the more I see how pervasive it is in my so-called life. Way too many areas of my life are infected with it. I fail to build relationships because of it, and I am pretty sure that I can’t seem to find a direction in life because of it. I think that spade of this new epiphany has broken the dry and impacted soil in my mind and seems to be tilling up a whole bunch of things that I have been completely ignorant of. I certainly don’t want my legacy to be that of someone who never lived up to their potential or left behind a life unlived. I deeply desire to awaken to the light of a day when I spend less time thinking about things and more time actually doing them.

I have always prided myself on the products of my mind, but it is becoming more and more clear that I spend way too much time there. I believe I really do live some sort of imaginary life in my head–a life where I am much more exciting that I presently am, at least in practice. So, this week I got of my ass and got out there. I finished a few projects and joined a film crew for the last five days of their shoot. I need to change the way in which I think about things and begin to spend more time doing things. I am not quite sure I know how to do that yet, but one thing that I am sure of is that I no longer want to live the most colorful parts of my life in my mind. In essence, that IS filmmaking, taking the figments of someone’s imagination and making them visible to others. If I hope to do that with someone else’s imagination someday, why can’t I do it with my own imagination now–only for real?

It just hit me as I began to think back on my life. I started chasing back my history in association with film, trying to figure out what path lead me to where I am today–considering a life in filmmaking. It all started, in full, during the summer of 1982 when my family passed through Atlanta, GA on summer vacation. My aunt and uncle live in Atlanta and we stayed with them a few days, before continuing our annual trek to my Grandmother’s house in southern Alabama. In 1982, I was 12 years old, and near my peak as a dreamer, perfectly prepared to be bitten by the bug.

In order for you to understand just what the gravity of that summer involved, you need to know a little about my history, because there is probably much about it that few people can connect with today. I grew up in a strict Christian household. For most of my childhood my parents were members of a Fundamental Baptist church. Unless you have some connection with this particular breed of Christendom, you would have no reason to understand just how strict my household was, and by strict, I mean religious. My particular church was pretty extreme when it came to religious rules. Women did not wear pants, men wore suits and ties to church and nearly all worldly pleasures were anathema.

It seems that the Fundamental Baptists were really concerned with worldly living, and had hosts of rules for members that were sanctionable, meaning, if you were too worldly, you could lose your membership and be excommunicated. Granted, I never new anyone who was excommunicated for worldly living, but the fact that fire and brimstone was awaiting such a person, it wasn’t really an issue–at least not that people would make public. Part of this hyper-legalistic religion’s job was to make up rules about what was off limits, and I my parents took great effort to ensure our compliance. Among the prohibitions was nearly anything that the average person took pleasure in. Not only were we prohibited from the normal vices like smoking, drinking and gambling, but we could not listen to rock music, dance… or go to movies.

So, until the summer of 1982, I had never been to a movie theater… that was until our visit to my aunt and uncle’s in Atlanta. For those of you who where not around in 1982, there was a great deal of buzz about Steven Speilberg’s latest movie. My aunt and uncle were former Christian missionaries for a more liberal wing of the Baptist Church… Southern Baptist. It seems that the Southern Baptist had no problem with going to the movies and this somehow allowed them to prevail on my parents to allow us to go to see E. T. the Extra Terrestrial.

Sitting that summer in front of the big screen, eating popcorn and watching kids fly on bikes–I was mesmerized. The magic of the movies fit so well with my youthful imagination and I felt like I had been missing something all my life. It was at that theater in 1982 that I was bitten by the movie bug, something that has taken many forms throughout my life. Upon our return home my mom suffered some criticisim when my youngest brother leaked our movie going experience to others in the church, something we were warned not to do by my parents.

By the end of 1982, my parents began visiting other churches and by 1983 lifted the embargo on movies on their children once they turned 13– convenient, because I just happened to turn 13 that May… just in time for the release of Return of the Jedi which my dad took me to for my birthday. Actually, the bug bit me earlier in my life when I watched a TV show in the making of the Empire Strikes Back. I remember that, because I made my own stop-action animated movie at home sometime around 1980.

Since that time, I have seen many hundreds of movies in the theater and it has even been during several depressed periods of my life that I sought mental and emotional refuge in the theater. Many summer Saturdays spent hopping from screen to screen during all day movie fests. I’ve even been through dry periods, most notable in the early 2000’s when the magic of movies eluded me and studios produced some of the worst schlock since the 1970’s. For nearly 4 years I didn’t enter a theater and had no real desire to.
My history with film has been a rocky path filled with many twists and turns, but in 1998 I worked on my first film shoot in Atlanta and after learning the jobs of a dolly grip and jib arm operator, my love for filmmaking took on a whole new persona. Today I wrestle with how to pursue my passion and where to draw my boundaries. I want to tell stories for a living, but I have no idea how to go about that the right way.

As I laid sleeplessly in my bed early this morning, I chased the dream back in time. This is a dream that has haunted me for over 25 years. When I juxtapose the life of a filmmaker on that of a Christian, I still wrestle with some of the residue of my youth. Can such a worldly profession be something pleasing to God? I have spent years fighting it, wondering where God wants me in life. I worry that somehow I will choose a path in life that is not according to God’s good pleasure.

As these thoughts spun in my head, a verse from the Bible bubbled up from the midst of my confusion. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.” Such a verse is both comforting and confusing to me. At the moment, I can only trust that the verse was God’s speaking to me in the midst of my current wrestling. It reminds me that He has the ability to direct my path. If I trust in Him, I also trust in his leading. If God allows my path to head down a road that leads to a film career, I shouldn’t question and doubt it, I should just trust in Him.

If I trust in God and in His leading, I have no other choice than to believe that 25 years ago, while sitting in that theater under the glow of the big screen, that somehow God was directing my path. Whether that path leads to or away from a career in film, I do not know; what I do know, is that I trust not in my own understanding, but trust in the greatest Director of all, the One who is capable of directing my path.

Ok, I have been reading the Potter series to get ready for the last book. I had not seen anything but the first movie when I started. By the time I finished the second book, I made several predictions about how I thought the last book would end. The author said that two main characters will die and I have my idea who they are. Since the book goes on sale at midnight tonight, I wanted to get my predictions down before anyone reads the last book… just in case, I can say I told you so So, here are my predictions–nearly all of them I suspected since reading the second book.

• It turns out that Dumbledore is actually evil and Harry has been his puppet, but in a twist of fate at the end… he is actually good. (I originally thought that he would be one of the two that dies, but that is because I didn’t know he had already died in the sixth book).
• Snape saves Harry’s life and dies saving him - I think that there is some major plot twist hidden behind his relationship with Harry.
• Harry saves Malfoy’s life, and rescues him from his evil heritage
• Harry brings his parents and Serrius back from the dead
• The Invisibility Cloak somehow plays an important role in the story
• awkward Neville becomes a hero (think Hobbits)

So who do I think are the two main characters that die?

• Voldemort (don’t know if he counts)
• Snape
• Haggrid

Does Harry die? Yes, but in some magical twist of fate is resurrected from the dead (think Neo in the Matrx)

Let’s see if I had any clue what so ever… the fact that Dumbledore died in the sixth book totally caught be by surprise, but I still think that he was up to something and I think that we will find out what. Like, somehow he had to befriend Voldermort in order to defeat him or something.

I think that the book will end on central Christian themes like “love conquers all” or “no greater love is there than one that lays down his life for his friend”.

Right now, I am sitting in my living room typing on my computer and forcing myself to be creative. It is something that I have been trying as an experiment– sit down at a computer and start typing and hope something profound comes out. My latest thing has been to pick something in the room and just start talking about it until I figure out how it represents something relevant in my life. Lately, I haven’t been that successful as my new experiment usually results in some sort of unfinished abnormality–like most experiments, there are a lot of misfires.

Today, I sat down and the object I am to going to focus on became immediately apparent. My living room’s boundaries are defined, like most rooms, by four walls. My four walls are unique though, and most likely not like your walls in at least one particular way. The story of their uniqueness began ten months ago after I purchased my cute little 1950’s brick cottage home. My house was custom built in 1953 by the owner of the home and contained several features that were highly fashionable at the time but do not rise to the level of “vintage charm” in the twenty-first century. Most notable among those features was the liberal usage of pine board paneling. Now, don’t get ahead of me; what sets my walls apart from yours does not include wood paneling, but it does however, begin with large quantities of blonde pine paneling and a very large framing hammer.

Once I had set my mind on replacing the paneling with sheet rock, it didn’t take me too long to bust out a load of man-tools–you know man-tools, those tools that seem to make men to produce an overabundance of testosterone because they are used to do violent or destructive things. I will not bore you with the details of the removal of the paneling, but I will let you know that about 3/4 of the way through it, I asked myself what the heck I as doing. By the time that everything was ripped out, I had no solid walls in my kitchen, my dining room was completely naked from the waist down and the largest wall that runs a good portion of the length of my house from the corner of my living room under the stairs and to the wall on the opposite side of the hallway was striped to the studs. I looked that the skeletal remains my home and wondered what kind of trouble I had gotten into.

This is the point where those of you who know me might go, “Oh Crap!” That response would be appropriate if you knew my history with large building projects. In Phoenix, I got the itch to tear out my carpeting and replace it with tile. As with everything, the tear-out was easy but laying 750 square feet of tile in the diagonal afterward was a project I wasn’t ready for. To make a long story short, I lived in a house with concrete floors and torn out appliances for about 6 months before I completed enough of the project to get my house back to normal. The worst thing was that I stopped tiling after I finished my kitchen and left my walk-in laundry and pantry unfinished…well, it eventually got finished–three years later when I was getting ready to put my house up for sale.

Don’t draw any conclusions yet, because my walls are not unique because there are no walls. I knew myself well enough to hire someone to install the sheetrock. Four days after I had finished stripping my walls to the bone, the walls were then adorned with the pale gray paper backing of sheetrock panels joined together by seems of bright white plaster. In some way, I was eager to begin to work on the blank canvas. I stopped by Home Depot and started looking at colors. Here is where I need to let those of you who don’t know me, in on a little secret–I love color. After years of living in apartments with blank walls, I was eager to get a hold of my first home so I could finally have colored walls…but not just color…COLOR! I don’t go for taupe or cream, I go for colors that make your brain go into overload. An my first house in Phoenix, I was going for a different color in each room. From a fairly tame mustard yellow living room, to a Home Depot orange hallway, to a Kermit the Frog green bathroom… I’m always looking for color that stands out.

But before sheetrock is ready to be painted with wonderful vibrant colors, it must be primed. Primer seals the sheetrock so that it doesn’t absorb your paint and make it patchy. Sure, you can paint directly on it, but that would require you to paint multiple coats to get uniform coverage… and in general, primer is cheaper than paint, so using a primer is usually the best bet…but, that means that you have to basically paint everything twice. Now, I established earlier that I love color, but the reality is that I don’t like painting. I am very anal about detail work, so it usually takes me a long time to paint a room. But before I get to paint the room, I first had to prime it.

I got knee deep into priming when I realized that I didn’t want my crown molding to be stained, I decided to paint the crown molding white, so I started priming the molding as well. For those of you adept at painting, you might be predicting my next experience, if you were thinking “bleed-through”, you are correct. You see, stained wood doesn’t play well with the average primer, the stain, which it chemically designed to bleed into the wood to color it, bleeds into the primer as well and will also bleed into the paint. So, in order to cover a stained wood with a primer, you have to use a sealing primer to seal the stain and prevent it from bleeding–when you are planning to paint something white, it is pretty much a necessity. Enter the Killz.

Kills is the most popular brand of sealer primer–and it isn’t cheap. I had abandoned the priming of the dining room walls in favor of getting the molding primed. Even using Killz, it took a few coats to get the stain thoroughly sealed. After sealing all of the molding in my living room, it became clear that more prep work was going to be needed. Now that the molding was white, all of the spaces between the molding and the sheetrock became obvious, so I was going to need to fill the crevasses with a paintable caulk. Yeah, another trip to Home Depot. With the trim molding primed and caulked and the living room wall primed, I felt to abandon priming the dining room and kitchen in favor of selecting a color for my living room and getting started. I had feedback from others on the colors I was considering. Some liked a darker, some a lighter; I abandoned all the choices I was considering and went for a bright medium yellow. I marked the paint chip and headed out for my favorite home improvement store once again.

Now the story, thus far, might seem like a normal weekend for some, but my adventure is far less normal. Instead of being a host of chores over the period of a weekend, I managed to stretch such a simple task out over a period or three months. While we are moving rapidly toward where I am today, we are still not there yet. You see, I bought two gallons of paint, brought them home and set them in my dining room, where they sat unused for four more months. Yup, you guessed it. Procrastination raises its ugly head again and many weekends are squandered as I spent my time in a living room with one large primed wall and random blotches of white plaster patching on other walls. All the while, two gallons of paint yearned to realize their full potential and live the life for which they were created.

Over the months, I had many excuses for not doing the painting, though none of them were valid–they were just excuses. Eventually, I awoke one Saturday and because of the recent drought, my lawn was not in need of mowing and I had nothing else to do, so the painting spirit fell. I ran around my house prepping everything, getting out all of the needed painting tools, moving furniture, laying painting tarps. It was just before lunch, so I figured that I should probably eat before I started. Without any food in the house, I was off to the Waffle House down the street to fuel up for the task ahead. Food service was exceptionally slow and it was almost 1:00 before I got home. So as not to be distracted, I dived right into it and started rolling on the paint. The coverage wasn’t that great, so it was going to take two coats. I got the large wall and the first half of the second wall done before I changed gears and moved into trim work on those walls. Somehow I figured that it would be less work if I only had to move furniture once. As I was winding up trim work, a friend called and I became embroiled in a conversation about paint and painting. Next thing I knew, was that it was 5:00 and the sun was dipping below the trees. As the light faded in the room I started thinking that I could finish the next day after church since coverage was poor and painting by bad light always results in having to go back an repaint–at least that was the argument the Procrastination used to convince me to halt my progress.

The next day was Sunday and I didn’t have any plans. After church I opted to go to lunch with a bunch of folks–certainly I still had plenty of time to still get the painting finished after lunch–I thought. It is funny how time runs away from you, especially when the suggestion to do some go cart racing after lunch is offered up. Little to say, I ended up burning a few hours, caught up in joys of bumping and grinding on a small racetrack adjacent to a local putt-putt golf course. The rapture of such an enjoyable distraction failed to get my walls painted and when I arrived home, the walls still sat unfinished.

Fast forward one week and three days. I sit here on my couch in a room with some very distinct walls. As you might have guessed, the thing that sets my walls apart from yours is that mine are partially painted. Many days have passed and Procrastination has prevailed again. It bugs me every time I walk into this room, because, unlike the white primer walls, the partial yellow is hard to ignore. Yet, despite all of the things that should move me to get this project done, the paint still sits waiting, watching, hoping that the spirit of painting will fall again and my room will finally assume the status that it always should have–painted.

With that said, I find that this “unfinished” thing is a horrible pattern in my life. The highway of my life is littered with thousands of unfinished projects. I have a portfolio full off unfinished art and a computer full of unfinished writings. What is it that allows that fire of motivation to quickly smolder and die? One of the challenges that I now have is how to take ownership of this tendency. For years I have condemned myself for being this way, I harbor a great amount of guilt for the unfulfilled promises of my life. In a quick conversation with my pastor the other week, he kind of laughed when I bemoaned my proclivity towards procrastination. After his quick chuckle he looked intently and the eye and offered a profound question. He asked, “Did you ever stop to think that it is OK to be that way?” He went on to challenge my personal condemnation by proposing that God created me that way intentionally. I never really thought that God would have personally made me this way. The idea that I am this way because it is exactly the way that I need to be for God to work on me in the unique way he needs to work on me seems almost unbelievable.

There is something liberating about embracing you faults. Not in a reckless way, but in a way that simply allows you to open to the Lord and and allow Him to work on you in whatever way He needs to. It seems that for the longest time, I thought that God needed me to be different than I was, but I am beginning to believe that I am exactly who and what I need to be for God to reach me in a way that is intensely personal; a customized visit from the God of the universe, who is not waiting for me to become something, but able to visit me in a very personal way, simply because I am exactly the way that I am. Not necessarily with the intention to be the same way forever, but in a way that allows you to appreciate the changes God makes or doesn’t make in your life.

At some point, the walls in my living room will be painted, the art will be hung and the space will be enjoyable. But you know what, when that happens, I will appreciate it in a way that I never would have if I didn’t deal with it being so horribly unfinished for so long. Maybe that is a point of life, so many things unfinished an incomplete for so long that one day when they are compete, you have a greater appreciation for them. Much like the way that the story in Genesis put Adam alone in the garden. I’m sure he would have been aware of how alone he was. But God doesn’t simply create a mate for him, first God passes all of animals in front of Adam to name them. Certainly, by then Adam was clear that no other animal could be an adequate companion; this is possibly why, after naming all the animals, Adam asks God for a companion. Eventually, God takes a rib from Adam and forms Eve–a match for Adam. When Adam meets her he finally sees his completion. Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones, he declares.

If you are familiar with this story, have you ever wondered why God didn’t simply create Eve at the same time He created Adam? I’m sure that there are plenty of theological interpretations, but at the moment, I choose to believe that He waited so Adam could recognize his need for Eve and appreciate her in a way he never would have unless he experienced how incomplete he was without her. Sometimes, being unfinished is simply a waypoint on the road to completion. The fact that things don’t get finished instantly, certainly allows us to appreciate the final state of completion.

For the time being, I feel content just thinking that I’ll finish painting tomorrow.

Well, some of you might have heard that this past weekend, Micheal Moore’s new movie, Sicko, was leaked and found its way to YouTube. By yesterday, it had saturated the online world when it found its way to BitTorrent. For a movie that hasn’t been released, having a high quality version get out can be devastating… but I think the leak was intentional.

Anyone that knows my politics, knows that I can’t stand Michael Moore. While I don’t agree with him politically (for the most part) I have always respected him as a filmmaker and a social provocateur. One of the things that I have disliked about Michael Moore’s approach to politics, it his usage of disinformation. Often, Moore will misconstrue or misrepresent the context of information to underline a point. One of the things I most admire about his skills, is his ability to make people believe that he said something that he didn’t. He is a very skilled manipulator.

I really enjoyed Roger and Me when it came out, but couldn’t stand Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 911. My dislike for Moore was clear to me when I got wind of the film leak. I immediately thought this was to the detriment of the film, and I sort of rejoiced inwardly. Yeah, that will teach him, I thought. But then I saw the film.

I have always been on the receiving side of the good part of American health care. But I was never a sickly person and with the exception of an ankle twist and mono in high school, I didn’t go to the doctor. Later in my life when stuff seemed to be going wrong with me, I had mack daddy health insurance that let me do whatever I wanted and go to whomever I wanted. I visited a psychologist regularly for panic and depression problems, had EKGs and emergency room visits because of panic attacks. Had MRI scans of the brain and did two sleep studies for sleep apnea, none of which strained me financially because my insurance paid for everything.

Just a week ago, I got into an argument (aka discussion, aka monologue) with a friend about health care in America. I went quickly to bat declaring that we live in a country where people that need health care, get it. Somewhere down deep I believe that even though I have watched my mom as she struggles to pay the mounting costs for her and my terminally ill father’s health care. I have frequent conversations with her about the pending switch to Medicaid for my dad and how that with pretty much deplete any money they have and probably take the equity in their home away, leaving my mom with nothing to pass on. Despite this, I still seem to think that everything is OK.

But everything is not OK, and there are places in America where sick people are loaded into cabs by hospitals and dropped off in front of public clinics in hospital gowns, dazed and confused, simply because they can’t pay the outrageous costs of health care in America. Why is it that I think this stuff doesn’t happen?

Moore’s movie isn’t exactly an objective unbiased look at health care, it is a campaign for socialized medicine. And if you believe the picture of socialized medicine he paints, who wouldn’t want that? But I don’t buy what he is selling. You see, his movie is about American horror stories, it is about worse case scenarios. When he goes to the countries with socialized medicine, you don’t get a single horror story–you see, he didn’t take out an ad to find the people who hate socialized medicine there like he did here.

Actually, the most misleading thing in his film, is the lack of sick people in the socialized systems. He didn’t talk to a single cancer patient who was dieing and get their opinion of the system (like he did with Americans). He talked to people who had broken limbs and stomach aches, people who had babies and people sitting in waiting rooms. At no point in the film did he talk to a foreigner who’s life was eminently in the hands of a socialized system.

He did talk to people who had recovered from a major illness–those that left America to seek treatment in a socialized system, but when he spoke to them, they were well. People who are well, have a much better view of everything… which is one subtle point of the film.

The film is rife with leftist propaganda that props up Hilary Clinton as a sexy intelligent woman who is full of moxie while at the same time portrays a host of Republicans as automatons for big business and idiots with their hands out. Everywhere you turn there is some political slant that colors what is presented. While it might not make you run out and get a Vote Hillary ‘08 bumper sticker for your car, it might make you wonder just who is piloting this ship.

While I can’t say that Moore’s latest film is a masterpiece of filmmaking, I can probably pay it the comment that Moore might find most pleasing of all… it made me think. Actually, it actually made me reconsider what I really believe about our current health care system and truthfully, it actually made me think about the possible value of socialized medicine. But it made me think about a lot more than just that.

This film made me question my disdain for France as well as reinvigorate my desire to see Cuba opened up to America again. I think that this is all part of Moore’s brilliance as a social provocateur, he shifted my view. This is obvious because I woke up this morning thinking about it. It made me think enough about it to look at John McCain’s site to see if health care was an issue–enough for me to write him a note inquiring about his thoughts and plans for making heath care affordable.

I don’t think that Moore could be offered a higher complement than to know that someone in the opposite political camp was moved to think about an issue. While I am sure that the film is full of misdirection and misinformation, I think there is enough of an issue there to make people start talking again.

So, was the leak of the film some nefarious act by someone seeking to destroy Moore, or was this a planned leak to get people talking? I think it is the latter. It is probably very likely that I would not have seen this film when it was released, but post it on YouTube and guess what…something happens. As a filmmaker who wants to see profit from his work, I am not sure how this leak will effect him, but as someone who wants to stir the pot and get people talking, I think he might have hit a bullseye on this one… at least if I am any indication of what this film can do.

It is 6:40AM and I am sitting on an old sofa that is situated facing at a blank wall; this is not what you might think of as a traditional furniture arrangement, but it is absolutely intentional. You might, if you were to enter this room for the first time, think that the sparse and somewhat awkward arrangement of furniture was due to the fact that the room is located in a condo, owned by a young bachelor, who has as little design sense as he has money.

What you may not know, is that arrangement in that room is both intentional and purposeful; because behind the ratty, ancient sofa, beyond the small white oak dinette set, in a small built-in bookcase, is a shelf that holds the key to understanding the large blank wall opposite the sofa. On the second shelf from the top, among a collection of books about the Christian life and Christ and the Church–is a box. If you didn’t look closely at the shelf, you might never notice a small number of wires that snake their way behind the books and emerge from a small gap in the corner to cascade down from the glossy white shelf, along the beige textured wall, to the floor–if you did see them, you wouldn’t probably suspect that some sort of technology that is fed by those wires.

On that shelf opposite the large blank wall is a magical box that has the power to change the boring and blank into something colorful, bright and full of life. An ingenious collection of technology has offered up a way for a young bachelor to turn his 14 foot wall into a giant TV screen. Until the magic is conjured, you may even be puzzled by the small black boxes positioned like odd rectangular satellites throughout the room; but once a complex set of sequences is performed on a varying collection of remote controls the value of such an awkwardly arranged room become abundantly clear. As the image of William Wallace comes alive on wall, the small black boxes enrich the atmosphere as polyphonic life escapes–suddenly the room is a digital cinema and everything makes sense.

I find it amazing what happens in our mind when we don’t have the bigger picture. How often we misinterpret what we see around us, because some critical piece of the puzzle is missing or unobservable to us. Today, I awoke with a profound sense of how much I don’t know and don’t see. So much of what is going on in my life seems unobservable to me; it that the longer I live life, the less it seems I really know.

Yesterday, I flew into Phoenix after having been away for about a year. For seven years, Phoenix was my home and I have a great deal of history here. As time rolls on, I find that when I return to visit someplace that I’ve left, the experience is always bittersweet. There is a sense of familiarity in an old hometown which, for me, can be either comforting or haunting; at the moment, Phoenix holds a little of both. I still have plenty of friends and people that I care about in Phoenix, but at the same time, it holds also many ghosts of the past.

One “ghost” that Phoenix holds for me is my old church. Many of the people that I will visit with while I am here are members of my old church, so there is no way to escape the haunting. Maybe “haunting” is a bit extreme of a word to use to describe it, I guess a ghost can be something that haunts, but I think that often they can also be a “familiar spirit” that is a vague reminder of the past. For me the vague reminder, the familiar spirit, brings me right back here to my friend’s condo in this room with the large blank wall.

I have had a long history of misinterpreting my life. Just when I think that I know something, a previously unobservable thing will present itself and cause me to reevaluate the way that I understand that thing. One of my largest personal failures in life was to believe that I actually knew something–truth be told, I thought that I knew a lot of things.

One of the categories that I thought that I knew well was the Bible. I thought I had a good handle on what the Bible was about and who Christ was and what He did and what He was trying to do with His church. My church was a largely responsible for this, or probably more accurately, the ministry that my church was associated with was.

In some way, I think that my know-it-all personality is one of the personality types that finds itself attracted to a ministry that seems to have a corner on the proper interpretation of the Bible and I feel that I became an example of that of that type of abnormality. I certainly don’t want to convey the idea that my old church, or the ministry it is under, is just a group of know-it-alls or that their opinion that the have the most accurate interpretation of the Bible is errant; what I do know, is that I don’t know anything.

My previous manor of know-it-all living caused me to speak in most often in definitives. I don’t think, in my mind, I wasn’t so much “telling” people something as much as it was, more likely, I was challenging people to tell me something I didn’t know. In my mind, if somebody knows something that is true and someone else speaks something that not true or inaccurate, the person with the truth has the obligation to declare the truth. My technique, as flawed as it was, simply eliminated people who “thought” they knew something and favored people with reasoned belief in what they knew… and had the guts to speak up.

I know that all that sounds really heady, I recognize that now. I also recognize how many people I alienated and put-off with my verbal diarrhea of asserted facts, or should I say, “fact challenges.” The Bible is an incredibly complex book, if you want to distill it into a systematized theology, you will have more than a single life’s work ahead of you. If you are lazy, you will simply make random observations, apply your personal hypothesis and declare something as true. Over the last five years or so, I’ve begun to come to a conclusion the value of the Bible is not so much in the knowing, but the seeking.

Sometimes, what you know allows you to unlock doors and understand things in a deeper or more complete way, but according to my experience, what people know or probably more accurately, think they know, tends to be the thing that keeps them from seeking. I personally experienced this as I began to accumulate large amounts of doctrinal knowledge. In my pre-knowledge days, I felt a huge commonality with other Christians, but as my knowledge grew, I felt more and more disconnected from them and began to feel more strongly the need to tell them where they are wrong.

I think that it was much like walking into my friend’s room with the blank wall. I know that he is a bachelor and that he doesn’t have piles of money; if I didn’t know that he had a digital cinema, it would be really easy for me to draw a number of conclusions about his decorating skills. It is the things that we do know that allow us to come to conclusions, but it is the things that we don’t know that cause us to make conclusions that are misinformed and often incorrect.

In recent days, it wouldn’t necessarily be true to say that I don’t know the Bible or don’t know things in general, but I have had a complete realignment in my thinking–I no longer think that my conclusions are correct and I am continually seeking to understand things more completely. The way the change is manifested, is that I rarely make definitive statements any more, and when I do, I often catch myself and rephrase something to leave a degree of uncertainty on the table.

However, what I am finding, it that people that came to me for advice and counsel have begun to be less comforted by advice. In the days when I made declarations with a high degree of certainty, there was something that was often comforting about something asserted with confidence. I feel in a world full of blowing winds, where the health value of eggs, coffee and wine change with every new medical study, people are looking for something certain to anchor themselves to. In a crazy twist of irony, I think that my change for what I assume is for the better has undermined a level of stability in my life.

I think my new mentality has offended fewer people, but also offered fewer people comfort and confidence. I don’t think that my personal experience is that far off from the Christian faith. Churches that make their teachings as simple and broad so as not to offend, offer little anchorage for those that require spiritual stability and certainty. This mentality has even caused some churches to adopt eastern philosophies and endorse multiple “paths” of spirituality.

On the opposite side, churches that make bold declarations that their faith and biblical interpretations are uniquely correct and superior offer little in the way of preventing offense of others and actually create the most severe divisions, but, those are the groups that give their members that strongest anchor and certainty.

Much like my friend’s blank wall, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The layout in the room with the blank wall is both the result of the need to support his digital cinema and the fact that he is a bachelor with little money and design sense. Like most things, they truth is somewhere in the middle. As I interact with the familiar spirits of the past, I am reminded that there were many great things that anchored me in my Christian walk, things that encouraged me and provided security and stability,

But with all of the positives, came the ugly truth that in much of my certainty and security, I became an unapproachable know-it-all. My latest experiences have taken me to new places and forced my to reconsider what I actually know. In a cycle of teardown and rebuilding I am rediscovering a seeking heart; the lack of certainty has stirred the seeking. The difference now is that I don’t trust any kind of teaching to be that cornerstone of my confidence. The knowledge that I seek now can not be found in any bound collection of words or in any man’s speaking. Maybe this is the intention of the Bible; so many writers, so many voices and nothing that seems systematic in its presentation. I think 2 Corinthians 3:6b carries the sentiment, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The words we read and the speaking we hear aren’t answers in themselves, they are simply those things that conduct us to the proper place to find our stability and confidence… the Spirit.

Right now, sitting alone in a room, it is becoming clear to me that my knowledge isn’t what should give me the confidence in my faith. By not resting in doctrinal knowledge I am able to be free in my fellowship with other believers, knowing that it isn’t the knowledge of some fact that gives me confidence, but a seeking heart that leads to the Spirit which gives life.

When I think back on my life, the further back I go, the more fond the memories are. There is something inherently safe about being a child and being taken care of. As a young child, your job is simply to live, all the anxieties of life don’t concern you… as well they shouldn’t. But that is the thing about getting older, growing up; the older you get, the more there is to worry about. In recent years, I felt overwhelmed with responsibility and concern for the future. I had a great job, a reasonable mortgage and a big car payment on my new truck, a terminally ill father and I lived on the opposite side of the county from the rest of my family. To top it all off, I was deeply unsettled at my church and was also struggling to hear God’s voice in my life.

At the time, I considered my life a rudderless ship being blown carelessly by the wind and tossed about by reckless crashing swells. I felt out of control and anxiety weighed on me enough to require medication to control the frequent occurrence of panic attacks. Things seemed to be changing in my life at a record pace and I had no idea where I was headed and, at some level, I felt helpless to change my situation. My great paying job was something I no longer enjoyed and at times, even disdained. I was physically, emotionally and spiritually unsettled and the sense of pending doom prevailed enough to keep me in a constant depressed funk. I felt trapped in some chaotic tempest–that was until a chance to travel to Kenya to shoot documentary video footage gave me the taste of something new.

At the the end of November 2005, I began an adventure of a lifetime to Kenya, Africa; at the time however, it didn’t seem much like an adventure. I always had a concept of what an adventure was–in my mind it is always fun and exciting, but that’s not how real adventures begin–a real adventure always begins with peril. My adventure began with a delay at the airport as security picked my video equipment apart enough for me to almost miss my flight. You would think that almost missing something wasn’t much of a peril, but the fact that I was the last person on the flight meant that all of the overhead storage was filled and I was forced to check $6,000 worth of video equipment at the gate. That wasn’t the end of it, before I was to arrive in Kenya I would lose my video equipment, miss my connecting flight to Amsterdam, get stuck in Minnesota in November with only a short sleeve shirt on, miss meeting up with the rest of my party in Amsterdam, fly into Kenya alone with no way to contact anyone and end up $2 short on the cash fee to get my visa endorsement to enter into the country.

For a person who was prone to anxiety, depression and sudden bouts of panic attacks, the beginning of the adventure didn’t leave me in ruin, it actually set me free. When I stood at the carousel in Minnesota waiting for my video equipment, the anxiety began to build, I felt sick at my stomach and the sense of doom wrapped around me like a heavy wet blanket. Eventually, I was the last one left standing as the gears and belts eased to a stop and the realization the my video equipment was not there began to grip me. Like a punch in the stomach, I was left without breath an deflated.

As the idea of losing my equipment settled in, a dark depression overcame me and the feeling of retreat built–all I wanted to do was go back home to Phoenix. But if I had given up, the adventure would have been diminished and the release never experienced. A helpful employee at the airport (and probably the only helpful employee at Northwest Airlines) searched for my gear. In a last ditch effort, the employee fired up the carousel in the long shot that the bag was stuck somewhere in the bowels of the mechanical monster. After a moment of fruitless spinning, the monster belched up a blue PortaBrace equipment bag and the first reward of peril raised its head.

After being reunited with my equipment, the anxiety fog lifted and wet blanket of depression sloughed off like skin from a ripe boiled tomato. Suddenly peril was something to be overcome and not feared and the rest of what would become my African adventure was underway. When I returned home to Phoenix, it was clear to me that it was time to for me to leave. The storm that I experienced during my trip helped me find my rudder and aided in the rigging of the sails properly to power through the breaking waves. The next four months would pass quickly, I would beat the collapsing housing bubble in Phoenix and ended up with six full price offers on the first weekend that my house was listed. My transition from Phoenix to Nashville was smooth and I felt full of purpose and intention–four full sails to the wind and cruising at an even keel.

A year has passed and I find myself in a completely different state. I left my well paying job in November and began a planned three month hiatus in attempts to explore some creative outlets. During that time, several film projects went bust and almost nothing that I intended to do, got done. Now it has been six months since I left my job and I am still on hiatus, taking only a single web job in attempts to reverse the cash flow. For six months almost nothing has happened–well, that isn’t true, quite a lot has happened. What started as a creative hiatus, became a personal exploration that would lead me to personal revelations and force me to set new boundaries.

For such a long time, I felt tossed about and rudderless, now I find myself in quite a different state– completely motionless. Recently, I began to struggle with the sense of stillness in my life. I felt like a ship in dead water; no wind, no waves and no peril. For some, this might be a desirable state of being, but for me, it makes me restless. Nothing seems more useless than a ship in listless waters and I have been letting this state of being bother me; I yearn again for an adventure.

The other day, I had lunch with my pastor, and as often occurs in conversation with him, the vein of conversation finds just the groove that it needs to find. At some point in the conversation, I offered up my metaphor of the listless ship and explained that I have recently been feeling like I was trapped in dead waters. What I received as a response, caught me by surprise. It was suggested that I was reading the signals incorrectly. Perhaps instead of a ship at sea with no wind and furled sails restlessly waiting for change, I was safely docked at port repairing damage and preparing for the next voyage–something about that resonated with me.

It’s amazing what a change of perspective can do for you. I often find myself in a negative mindset, this is something that I have actively been working on, but this simple fresh look at what is going on in my life has allowed me to switch from restlessness to eagerness. I am now gaining a new perspective on what I believed was wasted months and it is turning out to be a period of structural repair work as I prepare a new journey ahead. While there is a new sense of eager hopefulness, I think that there will always be that sense of restlessness, I want to know where I am headed on this next major journey of life. Sometimes being uncertain about something can cause you to be still and listen; well, I am listening and hopefully knowing that I may be safely docked in one of life harbors might give me the opportunity to permit that still quiet voice to speak something exciting into my life.

Scattered all over America are small patches of land that have been set aside as a monument to some historical event. These spots are often marked with a placard that records important facts about that specific location. Most people would have no idea that the placard even exists, except for the occasional spot that happens to be located near a major road or highway. For those special locations, the State usually invests a few extra dollars to provide a green information sign that warns those speeding along that there is a historical marker up ahead.

Throughout my life, I have taken notice of many of those signs but have never actually stopped to read the marker. This week I traveled again along AL 231 to Dothan, AL. On this stretch of road there are several markers–and every time I pass them, I think to myself, “One of these days, I need to stop and read that marker”, but like all the other motorists, I keep speeding along and that little piece of history remains hidden.

Historical markers help us remember and without those little markers, it is possible that some event, person or location will become forgotten. I personally think that keeping memories is important. For me, a nolstalgic memory can be one of the more pleasurable things that I have access to–for that reason, I have many boxes full of mementos that are personal historical markers that allow me to revisit various points in time from my life’s history. Many people are not nearly as nostalgic as I am, they not only throw out concert stubs and souvenir cups, but they can toss out their High School yearbooks or boxes of old photographs. For those people all their memories are stored neatly away in their mind and things like yearbooks are just clutter.

For those of us that treasure links to the past, we often have a common problem… volumes of clutter around us. Some of us may be better than others at organizing the clutter, but more often than not, we have lots of crap that sits around serving no other purpose that to preserve an obscure link to some personal memory. My mom had nearly an entire garage full of them–I think the more bulky portion may have been my mom’s but a very dense, more organized, portion was also my dad’s.

This week I went down to join my sister at my parent’s house so I could visit with her and my nephews and nieces who I haven’t seen for six months. As fate would have it, it was also a time when my mom had finally agreed to let go of several hundred unimportant memories… or rather those pieces of clutter that linked her to those memories. This was an exciting event as all previous attempts to unclutter my parents garage was met with strong opposition, mostly because my mom was unrealistically concerned with losing something “important.”

Before I arrived, my sister pulled a monster Clean Sweep event, purging what could easily have been nearly 2/3rds of the volume of the garage. To ensure there was no way to re-clutter, my sister had a charity truck collecting anything that might be of value to someone else and removing it from the property on the same day. Additional items were placed on the street and were promptly snatched up as soon as the sun went down. Despite the massive purge, there was an additional purge left to do that was being left to me.

In some ways, my sister is one of those people who could throw out a yearbook or some old photos if they seemed to be more trouble to keep then they were worth. Purging my mom’s stuff was no problem for her, since the vast bulk of the junk in the garage has no memorable context for her. For me however, my job was going to be more difficult, as I have shared many memories with my dad in relation to his work, and it was his work things that I was going through.

For those that don’t know, a little over four years ago, my dad began acting strangely and started doing things that seemed out of character for him. After a troubling set of misdiagnoses by doctors and psychiatrists, it was eventually discovered that my dad was in the later stages of frontal lobe dementia–he was only 64. As life would have it, this form of dementia was eventually going to rob my dad of all his memories.

It can be sad knowing that my dad’s entire history is gone with the exception of those memories held in common by family, friends and personal effects. As I am the sibling who is most familiar with my dad’s work, and it was determined that I was to go through the large volumes of my dad’s things and get rid of anything that had no personal value. I worked with my dad quite a bit over the years and when I wasn’t working with him or around him, I talked with him at length about the projects he was working on. For me, it was difficult to throw out things that were the only lasting links to many fond memories that I have, especially being that my dad is no longer the keeper of these memories and knowing, as well, that I am now the sole keeper of a large portion of my dad’s work history–especially since much of what now occupies some small spot in the Dothan City dump, is the last physical link to many of those memories.

Even though there was enough purged to fill the back of my truck, I didn’t throw anything out that can be appreciated by anyone other than me. There were many documents and technical schematics that have been archived. I kept anything that contained something representative of him and his work, but there were many things that no one shared with him beside me. Many of the documents were small personal historical markers pointing me back to a place and time in history; now the last physical link to many of those memories are gone.

As I drove back to Nashville, I passed several markers and continued to wonder what event they may try to remind us of–a Civil War battle or maybe the location of some important Alabama milestone? At one point along my drive, I passed a sign that read, “Historical Marker — 1500 feet.” I entertained ,for a split second, the possibility of stopping and reading the marker; only my mind began spinning and I never noticed the marker some 1500 feet later because my thoughts were back at the Dothan city dump where I deposited a whole host of my own personal historical markers.

I realize that once we collectively forget our history, it vanishes forever–but our whole life is a history and to create markers for every little event in our life would leave our highways and byways cluttered with tiny placards. I am beginning to think that is important to choose my monuments carefully; cluttering my life with pile of minor memories can become so demanding that few new quality memories are being created–the vast majority of my life has become so focused on serving small nostalgic memories of the past and not seeking opportunities to create new more memorable ones.

For the first time since moving to Dothan, my mom can now pull her car into the garage. Sure it was painful for her to part with her stuff, but the value of the freedom is so much more enjoyable. It is sad to see the ravages of dementia on my father, but as far as I can tell, it only bothers us–he seems rather content to be where he is at, with all of his current limitations. Having lost his memories of the past seems to have created the ability to deal with the reality of his new life without sorrow or regret. Maybe along the road of his new simple life, no longer cluttered with the memories of better times, exists a single historical marker which simply reads, “You are here.”

I don’t know if you have reached that point in your life, that point when you think that you should have it all figured out and know where you are headed in life. Well, I sailed passed that point a long time ago, but still at this point in my life, I have no idea where I am going. At 36, I should be knee deep into a normal life… marriage, kids, and an actual career… and I have none of them. Somehow deep within, I feel like I am still a college student–20 something years old with my whole life ahead of me. I’ll be 37 in a few months… that is only a handful of years away from 40!

Now, it isn’t like I can’t ask my self, “What have I done with my life,” and not come up with a good response. I have done a lot of things in my 36 years of life. I’ve joined the Army, fought on the front lines of a war, watched people die, helped save peoples lives. I’ve toured a good portion of the U.S., met important people, served as a Sunday School teacher, studied the Bible in depth, volunteered many hours, given 5 years of my life to youth leadership. I’ve packed my belongings and headed of to a strange state with no jobs and no personal connections. I’ve scratched my way through poverty, built a career, earned as much as most two income families in America, bought 2 houses, bought my dream truck. I’ve repelled of mountains, snorkeled in the Florida keys, peed of the edge of the Grand Canyon, dug ancient bones from the ground in the Bad Lands, driven cross-country–alone–in a ‘68 bug with no air conditioner, radio or working gas gauge. I have loved several women–and had my hear broken each time. I’ve sat wondrously beneath starry skies and peered into the cloud-like milky way. I have lost a close friend and watched as my father is stolen away piece-by-piece by the ravages of dementia. I have fought against anxiety, depression and several bouts with panic attacks. I quit an insanely well paying job to chase a dream. I escaped the grips of many tens of thousands of dollars of debt to become debt-free. I have done many things that I am ashamed of as well as many things of which I am proud. I have toured the Mara plains of Africa and met young orphans in Nakuru who sniff shoe glue to escape the miseries of life. I’ve heard a Mara tribesmen tell the story of how he killed his first lion and became a man–and somehow thought my life so much less exciting.

I have done many things in my nearly 37 years of life, yet it all still feels so incomplete. I feel I have yet so much to give. In some way, I feel like Moses who was called out of a normal Bedouin life to do something that he felt completely incapable of; or, maybe I feel more like Abraham who was called into a Bedouin life and had no clear leading or direction. Regardless of the example, both hold their legacies in their wandering–their calling wasn’t into something safe and easily defined, it was into something uncertain and seemingly reckless. I don’t actually equate my life to that of the patriarchs, but there is something in their stories that I find hauntingly familiar. I’m trying not to look to deeply at it, or project it too far into the future, but for now I am standing on the edge of something vast and asking, “which way Lord?”

Well, I’ve been farting around with blogging over the past several years, but I never really put much effort in it. Now, I am in the middle of a bunch of changes in my life and need an outlet for expression. Much of what I am going through has to do with faith or my attempt to transition into a filmmaking career. You will find that many of my musings are random while, at the same time, I have many stories that will cater to a serialized format. I don’t intend to post just for myself, so, I hope that others will eventually chime in with comments and feedback on my posts. I don’t really have much to say at the moment, but as soon as I feel something move within me, I’ll be sure to out it for all the world to see

Cheers,
Paul
Welcome to my life, feel free to comment.