Today was a talking day. 🙂
It started off as usual, per lately, with me just doing some thinking and some pondering and some praying to start off the day.
If I’m remembering correctly, I didn’t come in until a bit later today, and when I got inside, Mom and James were chatting. So I joined the conversation, and we chatted for probably, what, two or three hours?
It was mostly gospel conversation related. Not sure how it all happened, but we were talking about a bunch of different stuff, and I started talking about my journey from where I’ve been, angry at god, and all of that jazz, talking about my recent return.
It was a really good conversation.
It was a bit hard on Mom, though, with some of the conversation referencing life and things that happened in years gone by.
I have an absolutely wonderful mother, but there are for sure lots of hard things in the past that are painful for her to remember and think about. No family is perfect, and we had a large number of imperfect times. 🙃
I think it’s the same for a lot of people.
Personally, I don’t really equate much of what happened in the past with where I’m at now. I’ve always felt pretty independent and pretty much fully responsible for my life and don’t really attribute anything really to how I grew up.
I wonder, sometimes, like my massive struggle with pornography addiction that I’ve had since I was like 5 years old. I wonder if maybe it was family culture, but I don’t have any negative feelings or what not toward my family or parents or anything for it. It’s just a wonder, and I guess I just feel like I’m responsible for myself, so I don’t really worry about who’s to blame if anyone?
I just assume that the responsibility falls on me, and personally, I think that’s correct. Of course there’s a lot that can happen that can influence and make things harder down the line, but… Why worry about it? What has to be done still has to be done regardless.
Anyway, James started getting a pretty massive headache, so he excused himself for a little bit, and Mom and I chatted, having been reminded of some painful things in yours gone by.
After a little bit, James came back out, and I grabbed him some of my ibuprofen to see if it would help with his headache that was coming on. He’s kind of like me, in that if he doesn’t eat fairly regularly, he can get a pretty good headache, and since we’ve been talking pretty much all morning, he hadn’t gotten anything to eat.
Fortunately, the pills seem to kick in and Get his headache to dissipate.
After that, we kept on talking the three of us for probably at least two or three more hours until Zach came home. He grabbed a sandwich, and shuffled right off to his room.
Mom and I decided to take a walk up and down the neighborhood streets where Rebecca lives, and we chatted for a good while longer.
When Rebecca came home, she took Zach on a little drive for some one-on-one time. James and I kept talking a bit longer. He showed me his new guitar that he had bought that coincidentally had a manufacturer date of the exact same day that his father died, and the guitar was purchased basically because of his dad. So that was an interesting coincidence.
James and I kept chatting, and Rebecca came home and took my mom for a little drive to show her the view of clear Lake from kelseyville where they live. Just a couple streets down, and you get a really nice view of the lake.
After Rebecca and my mom got back, can you guess what we did?
Yep! While Rebecca cooked dinner, my mom and James and I just kept right on yacking away. 🙃 The conversation turned again toward gospel topics. James had some topics that he had some questions about with what we believed and what not. He grew up Baptist but for much of his adult life, I think, he was part of the seventh-day Adventist church. So many of his beliefs are kind of an outgrowth of that experience, I think.
Anyway, after chatting, we ate dinner, took some pictures, after Rebecca asked me to sing the animaniacs opening song 🙃, then Mom and I drove away.
We stopped off at Walmart to grab some distilled water, having just missed getting to AutoZone by a handful of minutes. We were hoping to buy a water pump, just in case the water pump finished going out on our way to wherever we were going.
But with our taking a little bit longer to leave Rebecca’s, we didn’t make it to AutoZone in time, so we just bought a couple of gallons of distilled water, and crossed our fingers, and prayed for the best.
We hopped on the highway north, and then east to the freeway, where we once again headed back north, driving all the way to Redding before crashing at a T/A truck stop for the night.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 