Simple Journey

I want to know a song can rise from the ashes of a broken life... --Mike Donehey, 10th Ave. N.

Friday, June 6, 2014

A New and Unusual Song

Hi,

It's been a long time. So much has changed and sea-change has occurred. Life is so much different now, more than I ever could have anticipated.

I am going to see what I can do with this blog. I am hoping it will be a fun new adventure for me. I've already begun one that will make me money - housecleaning for a cleaning company. But I want to bring in as much as I can as fast as I can, to pay off debt quickly. So I'm looking in any direction that can possibly make me some money. Maybe this blog can help as well.

I didn't want to focus on money. It's not who I am. But when you're cast adrift with nothing else, you're not hired in the jobs you thought you were able to land, and nowhere to turn, that's what you do. Or at least that's what I'm told. I think it's good, in a way. It means I won't be able to listen anymore to the voices in my head that are really just my "inner critic".

In the book, Cash In A Flash, authors Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen talk about our "inner winner", as the part of us that knows us best and recommends actions to flesh out our souls, so that when we listen to our "inner winner" we ultimately become the person God intended us to be from birth. I think this is true. I've tried to do this all my life, and it has led to accomplishing much more than I should have had any reason to expect, given my family and financial status in the world.

But what about when listening to your "inner winner" doesn't result in the wins you expected? What about when you suddenly realize your "inner winner" is a bit out-dated or over-the-hill? What do you do then?

I don't know. So I've embarked on a journey to find out how to make a living FIRST, and then listening to my "inner winner". Hansen and Allen say that's the wrong way round. Maybe that's true. Or maybe they are barking at the moon. But either way, I've begun to do both, and I'm not quitting until I find some answers.

When my daughter was about a year and a half, I saw a poster on the wall in a pastor's home with a few, poignant words, and I never forgot them. They were from some writing by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and I have always tried to live by them. Here is the passage in a fuller version:

"I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..." (quoted from the front of a greeting card I have in a frame).

I had some questions back then too. I've lived some of them, and in so doing have now wound up alone in the world, and I do not like that. That is not what my "inner winner" would have prompted me to do, to strike out all alone in the world. So I'm going to continue to live the questions I now have, and pray and hope that in the future I live along into an answer that includes another person. It's the only kind of faith I can come up with at present.

Thanks for staying with me all this time. A true friend can be found by applying my father's test: A friEND is a friEND to the END (which is how he taught me to spell the word).

Have a nice day. Now go live your questions, and hopefully that will include being a true frIEND to someone!