It’s been a while. I’m un-sure why I have felt no compulsion or desire to write lately. There is an after-taste of apathy in my soul. There have been some real high times (my new job, vision, music, dreams of co-housing, etc) and some seemingly normal times with Brenda.

But recent events have also exposed that I am still mired in self. It seems I have made little progress from the time of my first entry in this journal: September 2003. Almost 5 years. It feels like I’ve gone in circles, slightly expanding circles, yes, but the distance from where I started 5 years ago to where I stand now is a tiny fraction of the distance I have actually traveled. At first, I pictured a swirl shape, beginning from the center and moving outward. But then I pictured it in three dimensions, as a cone with each successive turn around the center not just moving away from that center laterally, but also moving UP and away from that center vertically; like a spiral staircase that slowly widens as it rises.

Perhaps things ARE different. Perhaps the path to transformation is not (to paraphrase Lewis) tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried. I just have to keep trudging.

(I don’t recall the circumstances that lead to calling for help, but I remember something happened between Brenda and I that threatened to drag me backwards to the other side of the valley, where I had been months before. I called in three of my dearest and trusted friends who rode up beside me. I call them my “Personal Board of Directors’)

When my “board of directors” came over the other night to save me from ruining everything, one of the key themes I heard from them was “it’s getting better…it will continue to get better.” That’s just so hard to FEEL..but that  little vision of “spiral staircase” the helps me.

Thanks God.

I am now in day three of what I plan to be a 28 day fast. I don’t know if I can make it. I don’t know if I’m supposed to make it. This morning, the sense of waiting for God to feed me was powerful again. I haven’t felt that in a while. It was good. My hope, my prayer is that like any other addict, 28 days without my “stuff” will serve as a psychic BREAK for me.

Food is an idol. I don’t want to want it anymore. I want to fast every day, and take from God only what He gives me…I want to truly live like a lily or a sparrow.