Jason ~
I don’t really know what to think of your motivations for staying on the ship. As we discussed on the phone, I think there are a whole slew of reasons for you still being there, and I’m willing to bet they are all so intermixed that I am nowhere near qualified to try to sort them out for you. I know the idea of you being away for so long makes me a bit anxious, but it is hard sometimes to think about short term / long term consequences. What would the long term consequences be if you left the ship? Or if you were away from the community for so long? Hard to measure, and I do not envy you the responsibility of trying to sort it all out.
I think it is interesting to observe how decisions affect other people you don’t even realize they will affect. When you went into this business, you never imagined it would affect me or Cuthbert or the other many members of our community, because you didn’t even know us yet. Not that this is a bad thing, but it just made me think about how we make decisions without always knowing how they will affect people we don’t even know yet… decisions I made when I was 16 affect my relationship with my husband who I didn’t meet until my 20s… decisions I made about the church 2 years ago affect people I am just now getting close to… it is an interesting thing to consider if nothing else.
However, I am definitely thinking of you and anxiously awaiting your arrival home! Please keep us posted on your thought process.
Velma ~
I like your thoughts and considerations. I think you are definitely on to something in that we have to reconsider the quality of our conversations and our assumptions that we can just jump in and fix things. I frequently have the conversation with my husband that I don’t need him to fix anything (in fact, he usually can’t fix whatever is wrong), I just need him to listen. Maybe that is true of many of the people we want to serve and love as well.
Let’s definitely keep this conversation going in our community.
And for me...
Not much new on my front. I just finished IT and had some thoughts about a few things I found in there:
Here is the first quote. It just made me think of our little community:
"Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good friends or
bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're
hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being
scared for, and hoping for, and living for, maybe worth dying for too, if that's
what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people
you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart."
The second quote gets to me because it is about my greatest fear - having gone crazy and not knowing it. That is the worst thing I can think of - for my reality to be completely false and for me not to even know it. I mean, what if everything I think is real is just an illusion. How would you even know? The thought of it just way freaks me out. So here is the quote:
"Maybe I'm not really here at all, he thought. Maybe I'm in
Dr. Seward's lunatic asylum, with the Count's crumbing townhouse next door and
Renfield just across the hall, him with his flies and me with my monsters, both
of us sure the party is really going on and dressed to the nines for it,
not in tuxedos but in strait-waistcoats"
Ugh, the thought makes me shudder - that I could be imagning all of this from the behavioral health unit of some fancy hospital and not even know it... very disturbing.
That's all I've really got for now.
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