"I'm like a vault baby, locked down..." -Alex Hitchens

Two weeks ago, I finally won the softball tournament in the church league for the first time in my life and I will be writing an entry about that sometime soon. First, I wanted to write about a concept I got inspired by in a dream. [don't have any dreams of note recently
Maybe cause God already knows I'm now wide aWake to his strong calling but definitely wouldn't hurt to write the dreams down the next time I have them for building up my experience with dream interpreting...]

To be honest I'm not really sure I can remember exactly why I capitalized that W, maybe cause of the theological concept of a "WAKE". Anyhow, it's really loving of Jesus that every time I reflect upon the about the blessing that is R, there's always something the Spirit will do to reaffirm just how much of a blessing He has given us to remind me of my need to be faithful both to the Lord and my err 'loRd' :P LOL... I used to know a W, in fact, 'not the only' W, back in my undergraduate days and turns out her major shared the same abbreviation as R's full initials.

LOL, I'm not really sure why I used this as the title to do a draft entry in some years proceeding when this post was actually posted as I've never got around to finishing it and turns out I may already have another entry that shares this same name. Not to mention, I recently forgot that the main female character in this movie, her name happens to be Sarah! It was like, OH YEAH...  [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386588/?ref_=nv_sr_1]

I once had a professor who told us he never locks his car and never locks his house. His point was that if something got stolen, it was never really his in the first place. When I think about it, there is something that does belong to us that we often don't 'lock' and I will start to talk about this with some verses in the bible:

"Above everything else, guard your heart. It is where your life comes from." [Proverbs 4:23]

I think sometimes we do need to 'lock' certain things... not necessarily to protect from actual theft, but to defer the temptation to steal or cause others to 'Miss the mark'. I recently started to take this to heart a lot more when it comes to people unfriending me on Facebook; as wherever the spirit leads, one should follow without question but others may not necessarily have a subjective understanding of the situation and as I have been learning neither does the subject himself at times.

I'm in the middle of posting some Draft posts I wrote in my "7 year sabbatical" [as per one of my drivers when I broke my left ring finger during one of my summer courses 'Sometimes God speaks very loudly through our circumstances' -DK] after I had left my 'full course LOAD' at seminary; little did I know that I would also be taking a similar sabbatical and it again would also be related to this finger as well....

Perhaps the best course of action is to begin with trying to summarize what God has been showing me in these past 7 years since my exile/exodus... 

In the first year, it was very similar to Jane's powers in the Twilight series, nothing but a whole whack and a lot of pain. I may still be suppressing a bit of the memories from that year as I can't even seem to recall if I even played Christian softball that year. Hmm actually if my gift of memory serves me right I think I did play and I was on TW's Rangers team. I also started to learn about marriage from other people's testimonies of their own life experiences starting with some close friends of mine. I was also able to compare and contrast a lot of the theology from both the paper I wrote and the one J wrote to current day interpretations of how following God works in ideal and non ideal situations and how all of these factors influence our effectiveness in Ministry. "Capital M" as DK said. I believe the end of 2011 was also the year I suffered from an extreme anal fissure combined with hemorrhoids (according to another physician as I saw a few of them about it) so the physical pain was also quite unbearable at the end of the year, so much so I really wanted my life not to continue just from the physical pain of those few months alone. Suffice to say I've been taking a lot of really strong medically prescribed drugs from the summer of 2010 onward.

In the following year, I did try to return to my Roots more and was very much focusing on trying to stand on my own two feet. God also showed this ideology to be futile, particularly in the circumstance when I dropped a polished railroad spike onto my left foot and eventually my previous psychological wounds also reopened most likely from losing sleep due to the physical pain and I was once again hospitalized. iWonderWoman: I also briefly volunteered in the children's ministry at my local church for a brief time this year and ran into some old friends also volunteering such as WC. I assume this is 2012, which was also the year my mom pushed me to sell the Accord, had I kept it, I probably could have gotten at least another 2-3 years out of it if I kept up with the maintenance. There are still people I know personally are driving vehicles made in the 1990s. I haven't seen the first Wonder Woman (with Gal Gadot) movie, but I assumed maybe her significant other passed away. I just recently watched Justice League to find out I have that in common with this fictional character as well in some ways.

Hmm...I had previous started writing a summary of some of the things I learned from year 3 on wards, but both the draft on my cellphone is inaccessible (because it is currently not functioning) and the other text I typed the other day, it seems I either shut off the computer before updating or it potentially crashed. Anyhow so year 3 was kind of the hardest yet most interesting years too I suppose. It didn't take much for the holy spirit to be able to direct me to knowing J got married to someone else, on the same year where I had finally won the softball tournament in the Christian League I was always usually like the Leafs in most recent years (before they stopped being able to make it to the playoffs after 2014 I believe), always being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.  Ironically, I finally completely my aspiration of winning, but nobody I had in mind at the time to complete the other initial aspiration linked to this one. I did start to meet other people, but seemed one by one God circumstantially eliminated them too...In addition to J getting married, I also lost both my biological father in 2011 and his mom, my grandmother in 2012, so definitely had quite a big back of mixed feelings that year.

Year four, not an very eventful year in of itself. It marked a one year mark since I started to play ice hockey but I guess this is also the first year I didn't lose a physical relationship in my life. I think prior to this year I had still given marriage some brief consideration, but this year in particular, God started to change and work in my heart in terms of the longevity and amount of joy one can expect in an earthly relationship is incomparable to that of an eternal one with our saviour. This is probably also the year as I had told some of my friends and my immediate biological family (mostly when my mom asked) that I had become more firm in my decision to no longer proactively seek out marriage. Perhaps a better way of stating this is I no longer was going to take marriage 'into my own hands and try to bring God into it', but rather I would just 'continue to live my life for God and if God wanted to bring a marriage into it, I wouldn't fight him on it...' My mom termed this as "giving up", but I never stated it as such to any of my friends, more so I would just tell them that I had "no expectations regarding marriage" because at this point in my life I was already getting cozy/comfortable with the idea of being single and didn't like the concept of potentially putting my heart "out there" again only to let some other experience with naive thinking bring it to another heartbreak. As title of this post itself, it was like that line in the movie, I had decided to become like a 'vault' and 'lock down' my heart. 

Year 5, I well... it is kind of hard to do a non-hindsight account of this year in some ways perhaps. But I will try to be as 'bring myself back to 2015' as much as possible. Again I will Google "Popular Movies of 2015" (as I did with 2014) as a memory aid. It is interesting what movie IMDb.com highlights at the top of their 2015 list LOL... Anyways, focus.... So in 2014/2015 I had unfortunately gradually came to a decision to pretty much stop attending Sunday church services altogether for various reasons. So I would say that 'not being in a relationship/marriage' wasn't the only thing I was being or getting 'comfortable' with. There were various reasons for not attending besides just perhaps the overall lack of accountability to attendance as a Christ follower. Finances were definitely one. The Altima we had was already starting to run down and maintenance was starting to become an issue in addition to it already starting to use more gas than before due to lack of maintenance. And unfortunately I also sided with my mom that attending church was a 'waste of gas', which for the most part held some degree of truth to it given the circumstances at the time there wasn't much different I would be doing attending versus not attending from a physical perspective. I guess I focused too much on my own struggles in years prior to 2015, the fact that it became so difficult to see other couples at church, how difficult it was to find a job (outside of doing ministry/school). All of these things added up, in addition to I often found myself playing hockey late on Saturdays and wouldn't be until home 1AM or later most of the time. So there's that... I think the worse part of it though, is that both my faith and actions [James 1-2] were starting to wilt and unfortunately I did kind of 'lack conviction' [EW] in terms of wanting to do much to rectify the situation.

Year 6, I think it was the year of just being metaphorically 'lost and wandering' a lot [like the Israelites wandering the desert/wilderness for 40 years]. I think somewhere in early 2014, maybe 2015, I had declared bankruptcy and it didn't really help that if I had found a job they would garnish my wages as that really limited my motivation to find work in general, unless it was an extremely high paying job and I would rather they garnish my wages rather than not have a job. However, it made it difficult for me to stay motivated to just take any job without increasing my income by much, if any increase at all just for the experience and in all honestly, I think God did make use of the time to continue in my healing process because I continued to leave more and more things 'in His hands' rather than my own including the fact that I never stopped looking for work entirely, but still continued to put myself out there to see whether I would be hired/not... 

[post in progress]





When year 7 started rowing around my mom was getting impatient always asking me 'is this all you care about nowadays? Playing hockey and Pokemon?