So I hung out with three awesome friends tonight; had a great time. However, at one point in conversation I made a joke about how I need to hang out more with people who swear. This was meant generally in jest, as I hang out with plenty of people who don't exactly hold back on the four letter bombs. When I really thought about it tonight, I realized that if there's one element of my walk with God that needs the most work, it's my language. I've been feeling invigorated and energized recently by a lot of things, and I'm more involved at church and with the youth than I've ever been. But the bottom line is, I swear a lot. I do it on the road when people make stupid driving moves, I do it with the guys in class when we're discussing the latest football game or attractive celebrity, and I could name about a hundred other places where I feel comfortable just letting loose with my language.

In reality, I set a terrible example. I don't hesitate to tell people why I live my life; my music, my school, my work, everything I do is for God. I try to be a decent person, and I guess I don't fail as miserably as I could. But my language is one area where I have absolutely no credibility, and I haven't improved. When I stub my toe, it's a four-letter swear word, not a replacement word that pops out. It's almost second nature at this point. If I'm really going to continue taking myself seriously as an example for people younger than me, it's something I need to really deal with and eventually purge from my system.

Thoughts?

I've got something to admit tonight. I don't know if I'm the only one who does this; as a matter of fact, I highly doubt I am. But I want to share this, because it reflects a larger perspective that I have towards life right now.

In the words of Mae, "sometimes I drive with my eyes closed tight." Some evenings, as I'm driving home from class with scarcely another car on the road, I roll down my window, blast my music, and close my eyes. Now it's never for more than a few seconds; five, maybe seven at the most. But let me tell you something. There is no feeling more invincible; more reckless, more impervious to common danger, than flying down the road at 85 miles per hour, the wind screaming through the open window and Yellowcard shaking the car down to its smallest parts. Especially when you put in "Ocean Avenue," where every song has a meaning to me.

Way Away; every window pane is shattering.
Breathing; you're keeping me awake and I can't let you go.
Ocean Avenue; if I could find you now, things would get better. I remember the look in your eyes, when I told you that this was goodbye.
Empty Apartments; when you get lonely and no one's around, you know that I'll catch you when you're falling down.
Life of a Salesman; father, I will always be, that same boy who stood by the sea and watched you tower over me. Maybe sometime I'll be as good as you.
Only One; broken, this fragile thing now, and I can't pick up the pieces.
Miles Apart; I'll keep you keep inside, you're always in my heart.
Twenty Three; so much that I said to you that I know I can't take back.
View From Heaven; i'm sure the view from heaven beats the hell out of mine here.
Inside Out; don't want to drag it out, don't want to bring you down. I never wanted it to end this way.
Believe; everything is going to be alright.
One Year, Six Months; I'm falling into memories of you; things we used to do.
Back Home; free to stand beside the ocean in moonlight, and light myself a smoke beneath the dark atlantic sky.

By the time the soft guitar fades out on Back Home, I'm fittingly sitting in my driveway, returning home after a long day. This is the taste of life; there is no focus on the future, romantic love, making new friends, or even lashing out at the old friends who find themselves too cool or too drunk to relate to a simple guy from that big high school.

I'm not upset tonight, nor am I unhappy. Some days I'm upset and some days I'm unhappy, just like the rest of us. However, I am tremendously blessed and as such, find it impossible to get too down on myself for more than a day or two. But I suppose the conclusion of this post is that I find myself almost accidentally living in the moment right now, because I have no other choice. There may be a new college, new location, new job, new everything in my future, and it may be closer than I care to admit, but for right now, it's all the same.

Because of this, I find a simple beauty in the moments in the car where I can feel invincible; on top of the world, untouchable. Eventually there is always a return to reality; a household on edge from the moment I walk in the door, a homework deadline, a friend in need, an old memory resurfacing out of nowhere, fill in the blank here. Life has a habit of finding you when you feel invincible and reminding you how mortal you are. But as for today, tomorrow, and the weeks after that, I'm simply trusting God to show me where to go from here. I know Yellowcard will make the journey with me, and just like their amazing album, I know I can always end up back home.

Home is not just where the heart is; home is where the heart will be, even when you may not know where home is.

"Watching the days burnin' out like a cigarette, just a few drags to go."

You know, I try to live a pretty open life, especially here on Xanga. But tonight just isn't one of those nights where I can sit here and spill my innermost thoughts.

Hey, rest of my life? I think I'm ready for you. Feel free to show up anytime.

Dear Xanga,

It's been almost 5 years since I started posting here, and unlike most of my friends, I've never stopped. I haven't changed my page layout in almost 3 years. I like my page the way it is, and I love your site. Please stop trying to send me to my new profile home. I don't like it, and I don't intend to use it.

Thanks,

Ben

Truth be told, I'm terrified right now.

See, as I was talking with Kelly last night, I realized why I'm so scared. She asked me why something so exciting would be scary, and I was finally able to come up with a response.

I've never taken "the plunge" before.

By the time next summer rolls around, I'll be coming up on 21 years old; the final measure of adulthood. If I get this job with Group Workcamps, I'll leave for Colorado at the beginning of the summer, right after classes end, and I'll be gone essentially the entire summer. I can't even begin to explain how excited I would be to work a job like that. To get paid for spreading God's good news through music, service and homebuilding... well, you would be hard-pressed to find an experience that I would take over that opportunity. It has everything.

But there's one problem, and it's pretty simple. A lot of you who read this have made your college choices and moved forward in life. You were nervous, scared and unsure, but you went for it. You took your plunge. But me... I haven't done that yet. I've been living in the same house for almost 20 years now; it's all I know. I still wake up on the same street that I did for my first day of kindergarten, 6th grade, high school, and so on. For me, this would be the largest change I've ever experienced in my life. I know, it's not the same as going away to college; I wouldn't be moving away permanently or relocating to a new state with no job certainty. On the scale of risks, it's moderately low.

But it means completely redefining summer the way I know it, at least for one year. Essentially, I would be taking myself and saying "God, I'm just going to trust you here, completely and totally" ... and I'm not very good at that. I'm a control person; I like to know what the outcome is going to be, before I throw myself into something. This can work both ways for me; It has helped me handle extraordinary amounts of responsibility without cracking, and it has assisted in the self-destruction of a relationship. For better or worse, it's an element of who I am. So letting go and handing the controls to someone else is daunting, to say the least.

Maybe I'm overhyping this; there's a strong chance of that, and more than a few people have said that to me. I'm thankful that God has given me the self-confidence to even take a step like this; it's something that wouldn't have been possible even a year ago. There is so much good that can come from it, and I can honestly say I feel God's hand moving me in this direction. I want to serve and give back, and I see this as an opportunity to gain all of that and so much more.

There's just an element of this decision that is a challenge in and of itself, and that's the decision to make a decision. I have to force myself to keep moving my comfort zone, just like I wrote about earlier this summer. Some of life is about being content in where you are, but so much more of life is about never siting still. Who are the best athletes? The one's who are never content; always working to be stronger, faster, and just a little bit better than the competition. Same goes for the doctors, writers, you get the point. So this is how I feel that myself, as a Christian who does his best to live for what I hold to be true, should exist. To be just a little stronger, faster, and better than I was the day before. And what better way to move forward than to try something completely new?

In the end, it's simple. I'm combatting the natural human fear of change with the strength of a God who cannot accept complacency when there is so much more to accomplish in life. Once I can learn to stop fighting that fear, understand that it's there and may never go away completely, but set it aside as something I can't afford to cave to, then I'll reach that coveted point of reckless abandon.

Until then, I'm just going to have to keep trying.

hello there, old memory. wasn't expecting to run into you tonight. funny how one forgotten picture can bring back a wave of nostalgia and longing for those simple days. cliche? perhaps.

but still true. just like all of us, i waver from strength to weakness.

tonight is a night of weakness.

There are two ways to handle most situations in life. You can handle a situation with maturity, speak directly with the people involved, have calm and pleasant conversation while resolving matters, and finding common ground even when you disagree. Or, you can be immature and avoid the situation, choosing not to face it or to really find out the truth, and just go on what you've heard.

I'd love to find a day where we could all use the first method. But something tells me that day isn't coming anytime soon.

Like I said, the beach makes me think.

It's been a long healing process for me over the last several months, and I'm glad to say I think it's nearly over. I have come an incredibly long way, and most of that time is chronicled on here through private entries. But tonight I have no shame in admitting something.

Perhaps just for one evening, I miss you. Maybe it's the romance of the beach, the uncertainty of life, or the longing for the support you gave me during those blissful days. But I would love nothing more than to be held tonight.

I don't have anything clever to add; no poetry, spoken word, or even half-hearted attempts at humor. This is just me, as raw and blunt as I can be. I truly don't understand where life is taking me.

I just have to trust You.

So I saw a bumper sticker on Facebook the other day; it said "hey, do you remember back when Pluto was a planet? Yeah, those were the days." For some strange reason, it made me think. Maybe it's a combination of this being a bit of an odd point in my life, and the fact that I'm spending the week at the beach with plenty of time to reflect back on myself and how much life has changed recently. Either way, it really made me laugh a little bit when I thought about what life was like back when Pluto was a planet.

On August 24th, 2006, Pluto was demoted from a planet to a "dwarf planet." (Thank you, Wikipedia). I was just starting my senior year of high school. My heart was in shambles, my faith was rock bottom, and I was still fighting the same self-esteem issues I battled throughout middle and high school. I didn't understand a lot about life and what was important. I still barely tolerated my younger brother, and my grades were pretty miserable. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Essentially, it was a time of uncertainty and there was a lot that I didn't understand.

But at the same time, there was a sense of blissful ignorance; a lack of knowledge of the challenges life still had in store for me over the next three years (give or take a few weeks). The struggle of finally learning to embrace school and perform up to my potential and actually begin to work towards a career path; the experience of truly having my heart beaten to shreds (for a number of reasons) and the joy in standing on my own two feet and finding my way back to the surface again. I could continue with a number of other things, but that isn't the point of this. I guess I just saw that bumper sticker tonight, and really realized that we have absolutely no idea what life has in store for us. In three years, I could be anywhere. I could be living in another country, I could be married, I could still be living at my parent's home in Bowie; heck, it's only through God's will that I'll be alive, if I am. We really have no way of predicting the challenges or obstacles we will face.

Part of me is scared by this; thinking back, I'm not sure if I would have done everything the same if I knew some of the hardship I would experience as a result of seemingly innocent choices. But I'm learning each day to trust God more, because I really have no other method of maintaining some sense of calm. You don't have to agree with my faith or even see the reasoning behind it; I take no offense to that. But for me, it provides a calm in stormy waters. For some, an 18 credit semester may simply seem like a minor trial. But for me, an 18 credit semester with four evening classes, combined with a job, responsibilities at church and a strong desire to be involved in the lives of the youth at Trinity, as well as the occasional time with friends, is terrifying. There's so much that could go wrong and it will be incredibly easy to become overwhelmed. Yet, I find calm in knowing that there is an exact plan for my life, and I am simply living each day to discover it. I can't help but question it sometimes; that's just my nature. But at the end of each day, I can lie in bed and know that I have some purpose for existing.

So thank you Pluto, for all the good times back when you were a planet. I can't wait to find out what else life has in store for me, and you. Who knows? Maybe you'll earn your planet status back someday.

I'm rooting for ya.

I remember the days when I used to post daily, just rambling about my day. I know I'll never go back to those daily posts, but I might try to post here more often with life updates as opposed to my usual idealistic meanderings about love and the meaning of life and things of that nature.

What do you guys think?