Gasp! Shock! Sadness.

Well, Spring Break is going great and all. Benjamin isn't coming back when I hoped he would, but that's cool. Everything was going well. Went to the baseball game with Samantha and Shayne today. LeTourneau lost. I still love 'em.

And then it happened.
They asked me to clean..........
to clean.........
to clean......
MY CLOSET.



Which I don't mind doing for them. "Fun," I thought. "It'll be neat to go through my stuff and see what junk I have accumulated since I started college." They asked me to make three piles- KEEP, STORAGE, and GARAGE SALE. No problem, I said.
Then things got shaky.
I found something. A rock. Well, a glass rock I guess. I read it; it has a nice Bible verse on it. I thought I remembered my mom giving it to me. Which would be odd, as she typically doesn't give me things with Bible verses on them. Except for my rainbow Bible, which I will treasure for the rest of my life no matter what Stokes ever says.
So I read this verse on this rock. It made me feel good.
Then I found a piece of paper, laying next to the rock. And I picked it up, and could tell by the handwriting who its author had been.
So I read the note.
Turns out, the rock was not given to me by my mother (makes more sense now). It had been given to me by someone else. Someone very special.
I read the whole note, and remembered the significance of the whole thing.
That made me sad. I didn't know I had kept either the rock or the explanatory note.

So I decided to stop thinking, and start cleaning.
So I went through all my old airplane and car magazines. Fun times, reading those. It was interesting to see where those industries had been, just four years ago. I decided that the magazines could go into the "STORAGE" pile, as I want to keep them.
I decided to "GARAGE SALE" some of the other things I found. Things that had once been important, but have been replaced by maturity. By that, I mean that as a kid, the gift itself is important. It symbolizes the care that a person gives to you, and the emotion that a person feels for you. But as a man, That need for the gift itself is replaced by a preference for the memory of the person who gave it to you.

The coin bank my mother gave me now means less than the memory of my mother giving it to me.

So there I was, feeling like I have grown a bit.
And then I decided to go through my special box. It's a beautiful box, the most beautiful I have ever seen. It was a graduation gift to me. It is engraved with my name, and has part of my graduation invitation varnished onto the bottom. In it, I store my most precious pieces of paper. And, turns out, about $25 in rolled coins. What the heck.

So I was going through the things in this box, and I found a card my mom had sent me. And then I stumbled on three things that meant a lot to me at one point- my closing slips from when I quit working at the Wax Museum. That place profoundly impacted who I am. Were it not for that job, I cannot imagine who I would be today. So I was glad to find them, and be reminded of my long years of work there. I miss the simplicity I enjoyed in that chapter of my life. I realize that, someday, I will miss the simplicity I enjoy in this current chapter of my life.

And then I found them.
Letters.
Letters that I though I had discarded (thrown away? No, soaked in gasoline and burned) long seasons ago.
But I hadn't. They're right there.
And I read some of them. I knew it was a mistake. I knew better than to walk that road. But I did it anyway.
And now I don't know what to do with myself.
That age-old question--that I have put to rest time and again--is back.
And Stuk can't answer it. As much as I, in my worldly weakness, want someone else to solve my uncertainties for me, they cannot.

This week was really hard for me. Emotionally. Physically. Academically. And yes, oh yes, SPIRITUALLY.
And now this.

I thought I had thrown them all away. They're sequential- meant to be opened on certain dates while I was in Italy.

That's enough of this foolhardy crap. No more.
It never happened.
Goodnight.