The Weight of Glory

Here's a simple but (I hope) useful observation: Most of us don't want the glory that has been alotted us. This point seems counterintuitive, and I wouldn't have believed it had I not been brought to such a realization via the back door. But it's true: Most people don't want their share of glory.

But let's not move too quickly in all of this: We want glory all right--and that's the biggest smoke screen of all. Many people live primarily to gain glory for themselves, whether through the eyes of others or according to some standard, some idol, they set up in their minds. What about me? I'm rarely an exception. I want to receive glory for how good-looking I am, I want to be praised for how smart I am, how interesting is my blog, how proactive I am, how studious, how wise, how carefree yet knowing. From my mother, from my father, my siblings, distant relatives I hardly know, teachers at school (whether they speak English or not), the principal, the preacher, the girl who takes my money at the convenience store, the girl who takes my money at the community center (especially her, actually), the crazy children I pass every morning walking to school, and from almost every other human being I ever encounter, I seek praise. I seek glory.

And that's a huge chunk of my life. I may be more cosmopolitan in the group from whom I seek glory, but whether gleaning glory from many or from an elite few, many of you probably run your lives by roughly the same formula. So let me be honest: None of it's real. These hardy, fibrous "Good job" 's, "My, he's so smart!" 's, and "Oh, I'd like to date him" 's, they're nothing--a whim, a whisper, a joke.

What matters in the end is how much correspondence there is between those "Well done" 's and the "Well done, good and faithful servant" we will or will not hear when the last stone hits the water. And the hitch is this: There is no formula for figuring the correspondence between the two--it's completely indeterminate, mystery to its core. (To all except the One who will judge the living and the dead.)

And that's what upsets me so often. Here I am working the floor, raking in the dough on all this good praise, heaping up glory for generations to come--and deep down, I know my purse (my wife's) is completely riddled with holes. Deep down, I know it's all meaningless, even unprofitable.

And still every day, to some degree, is a struggle to put aside the glory that corrodes even as I grasp hold of it, and to seek the glory of which not even the slightest molecule can become tarnished--the glory that has yet to be revealed. The glory I often cast aside.

On a side note, a good amount of the complaining I do comes from the same error: Why is life so hard? Why is it my lot to have to do this or that? Why can't everything just be ideal? I curse the world upon which God intended me as a blessing, because I cannot seem to accept what has been placed upon my shoulders, my crown or accuser, the weight of glory.

Those are my thoughts for tonight.

By the way, I just found out yesterday: My apartment here in Japan is 247 square feet. What a monster!

What It Means to be a Runner

Yesterday, I ran the farthest I have ever run in a single day--I ran a 16-miler. It hurt, and today it is still hurting. But the long and the short of it is: I feel good. Running that far, and still having some gas in the tank at the end of the run, was an amazing confidence-builder for the impending marathon--and I think my co-runners felt the same.
In addition to our recent run, we have begun to square away plans for traveling and staying in Okinawa--flights, hotels, cars, beaches, women (we have to call our mothers, of course). So the whole thing is beginning to emerge out of the surreal, shadowy corners of the warehouse and will soon be frighteningly close to getting slung flat, wrong-side up, onto the rusted bed of my grandpa's old Ford pickup. Time is short!

As I sit here, I find myself bombarded with all kinds of life-metaphors to draw out from this marathon--things about starting speed, training, companionship, refueling as you run, etc. But here's a matter in which the marathon offers no parallel that I can perceive: When it comes to running a marathon, you do most of you training and indeed most of your learning beforehand (though you of course learn things during a marathon, and while most of that might well apply to a later marathon, little of it, I think, goes to the race at hand). So the marathon, beast that it is, is still just a performance, a brief moment on the stage--it belongs on the highlight reel of life, not to the desperate, interminable hours spent prepping for, editing, and producing the thing. One does not (ideally) figure out the bulk of his strategy as he runs the race--that was all mostly taken care of in the countless hours of preparation long beforehand. So my tentative conclusion is that, while there are marathon-events in life, the race of life itself has boarders stretching far beyond the 26.2-mile mill stone against which I intend soon to hurl my own weary collection of bones.
And that is a comforting thought.

P.S. to my previous blog

In my last blog, I made a comment about women that I was immediately (and still) to regret, not because I think it was untrue, but because it will most likely come across as ungracious. I meant it as jest, a comment on the irony of the disparity between my own inclinations and those of most women I know when it comes to recounting life's "impressively broad spectrum[s] of banalities." I think it's funny that I should find such a thing so immediately unappealing and unnatural, when most women come across the skill of telling and retelling what are to me life's most unforgivingly boring chapters as if it had been wound into the fiber of their being--and I find it particularly ironic that I, a once-staunch watch-dog and yard-hound against all such phatic talk, have, through the agency and devious plottings of such women, found myself, alas, hopelessly, fatally longing to someday have just such an advocate and provocateur of life's boring monotony, its insipid, homey, warmly coazing stream, by my side, officially and until I die.

So please try not to take offense. I, jester, take aim firstly at myself.

Returning Home (again)

So after a two-week visit to my homeland, I'm back in Japan. I arrived last night.

The trip "home" to Japan took the better part of three days to complete, aided of course by the net loss of 13 hours. And I made the journey completely alone, at least in terms of familiar human companionship.

I have two things to say about my journey home--small things to note really, principles and not really that impressively broad spectrum of banalities that some people (generally females) typically hope to learn regarding such a wearisome event.

First of all, this was my first time to ever fly across an ocean without a friend beside me on an airplane. My initial reaction to having to fly to Japan alone was one of disappointment and maybe even a slight feeling of intimidation, but I eventually found respite from any subtle worries in the realization that traveling alone has its own unique benefits--especially its penchant for character-building and presenting uncommon opportunities to meet new people. I won't be foolish enough to comment on the first of those benefits, but I will say I think I certainly cashed in on the second. I met a very interesting, intelligent man on my flight across the Pacific. He's a marriage and family therapist employed as a civilian on a US military base here in Japan. Not only did he give me a lot of good advice about grad school and career options in the counseling field, but we also had about the best conversation on psychology and faith that I have ever had. Like me, he is a person of faith (though we didn't discuss his precise background), and the insight and the experience he was able to share regarding the interaction between faith and the various counseling theories was priceless. He helped me brush up on some of the better things I learned about my field while in college, but he also introduced me to a few things that were new. And it was enjoyable conversation too! (though I imagine any eavesdropper, even one whose native tongue was English, would've found our words arcane, if not downright boring).

The second thing I want to comment on was also unexpected, but the surprise came not from the situation in which I found myself--but from the very me that should be supposed to be doing any finding. When I arrived in LAX after a peaceful night at a hotel, I immediately found myself among a group of Japanese tourists composed mainly of teenagers. Here's when the shock came: Seeing those young faces, hearing those jaunting, lively voices, I was struck by a sense of pleasant familiarity that nothing else in that particular segment of my American homeland (i.e. LAX) had even a smidgeon of enough power to evoke. Their little "sumimasen"s and "onegaishimasu"s were music to my ears! Not only did they ring out and strike in me a deep chord of familiarity, but I immediately found something within vibrating also with a shocking sense of rightness, a feeling of deep solace--something so inexplicably compelling I cannot deny it a share in the word "home." Falling in among those faces, those familiar but new voices, that language--all Japanese, all "foreign"--in the midst of the cosmopolitan, sprawling, impersonal LAX, I found myself to be in the last place I would have imagined possible--I found myself brushing against the edge of the garment of home. And indeed, I have returned home, again.
Now, lest my mother read this and find her heart stopping in its tracks--Japan is not my home, and it never will be. I am forever, indelibly "gaijin," and Japan is with equal, insurmountable force, "gaikoku" to me. Now, I may seem to have overstated my case early: All I meant to say was that Japan, and the beautiful, hilarious, indecipherable people who comprise her, now in some small way has earned a share in the word "home," for me. Has Japan stolen my heart? Will I live here forever? No. America is my native soil. And though both have varying share in my own version of "home," neither has a jots-worth of claim on my real, abiding, insuperable Home. And in that Home my true citizenship also lies.
God bless.