[FuzzBall]

i hope by being new i am not breaking a bump rule….but i just to reply and say this was beautiful. truly it was.

as someone that from what i can gather is in the heat of “stage 4″(never had a name for what i was going through but that one thread around here seems to call it stage 4 so ill go with that) and quite frankly getting buried by i guess what we could call sand. there seem to be a few unchangeable unmoveable bricks that they are piled on top of and those bricks tell me Christ is in fact real and the gospel is found somewhere in this pile of bricks and sand known as the church and i do know i need to stick it out and reintegrate back into church….but again the sand of stage 4 is brutal. its sort of becoming all consuming at this point….but this was such an elegant way of putting it really is unreal. it helps me see that i should deal with this sand because from it came the bricks that i hold so dearly. that somehow i could not have one without the other….i suppose i had been trying to find that possibility but this post struck such a cord that i really see that is not possible though i am sure on some level i always knew that but i cant be sure considering stage 4 has drastically altered my worldview.

i will be saving this post.

i also want to say this is truly a great metaphor for my own family….like any family they are a brick with much sand….i have however taken much effort to try and expel that brick of my family from my life and failed. this thinking helps me realize i could not no matter what i cannot expel the bricks the church has given me much like i cannot expel the bricks created by my family and trust me i have tried to expel those. Good God i have tried.

perhaps with this line of thinking i can get out of the hell known as stage 4 and move to hopefully a much calmer stage 5. and perhaps with that reintegrate back into church as my attendance has been dropping drastically this year and ive barely gone in the past 4 or 5 months. and perhaps finally come to terms with the sand in the church and look for the bricks instead. bricks i suppose being good core gospel principles and the people and what we can do for each other at least theoretically.

[FuzzBall]

there is also the very real possiblity you or some of your kids function better in a mess or subscribe to “organized chaos”…me and mom for instance always fought on this point. while i do like certain parts of the house clean….kitchen and bathrooms for instance. my room i really do not care and have no method to its organization….what to her looked like a mess was a clear stack of stuff that i knew was right there and its proper place was right there not on a shelf in a box in the closet because in my mind the closet was clothes and everything else i didnt need immediate access to it. living on my own now i realize i am comfortable with a half way clean house approach. it is not spotless but it is not terrible either because if it is spotless within 2 minutes i will trash the place how or why is a mystery….but if it is halfway clean i wont trash it but ill actually maintain it. dont know why but that is simply how my brain functions.

there is also a chance you guys on some level enjoy the constant fighting over the mess it is what is your “normal”. for instance you cant just quit smoking as smoking is part of your “normal” you must create a new normal that no longer includes smoking. a better example might be an alcoholic his normal can no longer include frequent trips to the bar. he must make a new one. and it is very hard to make a new one….when quite frankly a messy house has been perfectly livable for all these many years there is no real desire to change it in some sense.

as long as you are not like the people on hoarders with bags of feces laying around i think your mess is probably in the realm of ok. though subscribing to organized chaos is a fine balancing act.

though your fundamental question of chronic problems that do not go away is a good one i am wondering about some of mine personally.

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