In Sproul’s rendition, Immanuel Kant taught that knowledge comes from experiences and experiences come through our senses, so that our knowledge is limited by what our senses are capable of. (I am trying to summarize the noumenal and the phenomenal; forgive my hack job.) This is the modern philosophy almost universally agrees on; the reality we talk about can only be the reality that we perceive, and all of our perceptions are subject to mistakes and errors. Therefore what we say about reality we can never say universally or absolutely, since we cannot perceive universally or absolutely.

Now Kant, according to Sproul, did not at all mean that universals or absolutes cannot exist, but that when we talk about them we must go beyond reason, that is, beyond our perceiving, thinking, and concluding. With respect to God, his existence, while real, cannot be observed through anything natural–eyes, ears, brains–if he exists as a supernatural God.

Sproul said that this contradicted the writing of the apostle Paul. (Any time someone tells you that something is simple they are probably trying to force you to accept some unjustified connections; Sproul his disagreement with Kant was a simple matter of believing the Bible.) According to Sproul, Paul (and, he says, Thomas Aquinas) teach that the supernatural God is revealed through the natural. To quote, “His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.”

But Sproul is confusing the results with the methods. I do not deny that God is evident to all, and revealed in his own creation. But is this by logic? Do you hear the sun? Do you see the voices on the other side of the wall? Is the knowledge of God coming to us by the power of our brains?

Kant, and post-modern, relativist philosophers who have built on him, make valid critiques of human knowing. Everything that a man knows of himself comes through his senses, which are not reliable; everything that he concludes depends upon his understanding, which is not complete. Therefore man, from his own intelligence, cannot make conclusions that are absolute and true. Amen.

This does not mean that nothing is absolute and true. It does not mean that man cannot know of things that are absolute and true. It only means that if man has such knowledge, he has not got it by his own powers.

Reason requires predicates. To say “That is a car,” you must first have some idea of what a car is. We look at the Mt. Rushmore and say “Man must have done that” because of our predicate knowledge of what man can do and what can be found where man has done nothing. But what of the mountain itself–not its shaping, but the mass itself? We do not conclude that man put the mountain there so he could shape it. We reject out of hand that man had anything to do with getting the mountain there, and only conclude that he shaped it.

There are other rocks that are shaped in such a way that we think a man must have shaped them, but none did. Our conclusions can be false.

In the last year or so I have had several christian philosophers trying to convince me (via recording) of how thoroughly rational my faith is: Del Tackett, Jason Lisle, and now R. C. Sproul. They all generally seem to say such things as this: When we see a mountain we know that God must have made it. We know it was not made by a man. It could have been made by some other thing (say an extra-terrestrial alien), but then something had to make that other thing.

We have this assumption that everything has a cause because we currently see everything having a cause. The entire universe is in motion–it is, in fact, “going downhill”, and it can’t just spontaneously go up, so it must have started higher up on the “hill.” And if it just suddenly appeared there with a big bang, the question becomes: what happened to all the other bangs? The little tiny ones and the medium sized ones and all of that? If an entire cosmos can bang into existence, smaller things should be banging away all the time. (There is some evidence of this with subatomic particles, but it leaves the question of the medium-sized ones open.)

So the great conundrum is this: either the universe is not entirely consistent, because it began with a great big irregular bang but has continued in a regular fashion after that, with no more banging, or else there was something else that caused the bang. You could call that God, and you could say that something else cause him or it, but then that would be God. You could say that everything is going in some kind of cosmic circle, so when it winds down it goes bang all over again; but once more, that is not consistent with how everything we observe now works. Any one particular thing or system of things is winding down and requires outside power to re-set it.

So: the consistency of the universe was set in place by something that is not consistent with the universe.

The Christians are telling me that this is rational proof of God. But it isn’t. I agree that it is proof of God but it is not rational; there is no logical requirement to call it God nor indeed any rational basis to say anything about it. Conclusions require predicates; “That is a car” means that you know what a car looks like ahead of time. “That is God’s doing” means that you know ahead of time what God’s doing looks like.

Classically, it goes like this:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

We already know what a man is and we already know what mortal means, so we can understand the original argument. If we didn’t know any of those things ahead of time we would have to reduce our argument down to the basics, like this:

man

Not much of an argument, is it? If we have to start with the basics then we really can’t reason at all. So the Christian philosophers are saying that,

Everything in the universe has a cause.
Only God can cause the whole universe.
Therefore, the whole universe is caused by God.

But first we have to know what the universe is (which we only know through our faulty senses) and what God is. Otherwise, our argument is just

God

And so it must be. Immanuel Kant and the post-modernists and relativists and sinners and liberals (in descending order of vileness, of course) are all right to say that man cannot know anything universally or absolutely or rationally, and least of all God.

The Christians are still right to say that there are absolute truths and we can know them in a meaningful way and we can learn about God using reason. It just can’t start with reason; it can’t start with man.

God is not rationally consistent. He is consistent in himself, yes, but in talking about the origin of the universe we have already figured out that it is not consistent. It was not; it was. That’s not consistency. God does not fit inside of reason, even though reason fits inside of God. If you have got those Russian dolls that stack up inside each other, God is the biggest one and reason is a smaller one.

So it is not correct to say that Immanuel Kant is contradicting the Apostle Paul. He may have meant to, but saying that God is not deductible by the human mind is not necessarily the same as saying that God is not known. You don’t hear the sun, but you still know of it. God is revealed in his creation, but not altogether by your brains. It requires your spiritual organ to see him; which you have; you cannot excuse yourself by saying that your brains could not deduce God.

I have never been truly financially straightened, but from some muddled circumstances I was not perceptive of as they transpired I have gotten credit far below my means and have passed the meager limits on certain cards. I’ve overdrawn my checking; I’ve missed bill payments. I don’t think of myself as being one of those people; in principle I believe in paying bills in full, on time, from my savings. I have the savings. I don’t scheme to pay bills as late as possible. But I don’t behave the way I believe.

I tried to pay for my routine dental work using my credit-debit card (underwritten by a major credit agency, provided by a bank, arranged by a health care company contracted by my employer) but the card was declined. The card I am supposed to be using now was sitting on my desk in the envelop–activation not permitted when the card actually arrived, and thus set aside for later.

Meanwhile, I also got a form letter from a previous health care provider, contracted by the same employer, inquiring about a check not cashed that was written out to me two years ago. I definitely remember cashing a check of that value, but as far as my records show I had two claims for the same value within six months, and only one deposit. I can’t find any checks amidst my layers of accumulated paperwork, but all I have to do is agree with them that it is still owed.

I still feel like a shmuck for not knowing what is going on.

And that, hour by hour, day by day, is how I feel at my job. You fumble the glass and it tumbles toward the floor–alarm, dread, resignation, a desperate attempt. Telling yourself it doesn’t really matter. Getting angry anyway. The glass, at least, breaks quickly.

From the day I set foot out of my parent’s house I have been telling myself to remember my priorities in life; not to get caught up in things that don’t matter when they are over. Remember to do the things you be pleased that you did later, when the doing is only a memory. Remember that family comes first.

For a few years now I have been tempted with the opportunity to move several states away to get a better job. I could do something more interesting, work on something I enjoy with people who can help me, and get paid more money, with better chances of doing even better in the future. I have been eyeing that pasture through the fence but I have stayed away from the open gate.

Then earlier this year I faced the loss of my current job. They began plowing up my pasture with that gate still wide open into the green fields beyond. I held my ground. I turned them down. Family comes first.

In the meantime, I have been looking for other opportunities in this area. I have not been doing a robust professional job of searching, but I have felt like I ought to be. I told everyone else who was losing their job not to wait–find your next job now, before someone else gets it. I took the job search coaching right away, rather than delaying until my actual job termination. I rammed my way through some of the material.

I started thinking a little further out. If I get a different job and I don’t want it to be further from my family, there is a very good chance I won’t be able to live here any longer. If I move, the best place to get decent apartments is in town. I don’t enjoy living in town and there aren’t that many towns closer to my family–especially that I would want to live in. Out in the country side renting is mostly either meth dens or houses that the owner is not quite ready to be rid of yet. So if I get a new job there is at least a healthy possibility that I will want to get a house.

If I want to get a house then I will want a good credit score so I can get a good mortgage. Cheated out of my credit history by an innocent-sounding legal technicality, I would need to build up my credit score by keeping good standing on some kind of significant credit short of a home mortgage–like a car loan.

All of this may sound like proper planning to support my first priority. But I was a little sloppy earlier when I said that my first priority was family. It’s actually not. My first priority is following God. It sounds an awful cliche because it is usually gratuitous; most people don’t imagine that following God in any way conflicts with keeping family as your first priority. And may God grant that the two are not in outright antagonism! But it is amazing how often the one will put the other in a different light.

For some people, putting family first means working fourteen hour days for twenty years so that the family has everything they should have and the kids get all the education they can handle. But then the family has stuff and the kids have their education but there is no family left. Just stuff and education.

In fact for pretty much every person, being a Christian or an American or a good person from anywhere means planning ways to take care of your family. And this is not by itself wrong. But following God is not the same thing as giving God a business plan and expecting him to fund it, either. The first rule of following God is that God doesn’t follow rules. Not yours, anyway. Even if God does want you to take care of your family, that doesn’t mean you have to do whatever you were planning on doing.

If I really wanted to do the right thing to prepare for the future, I’d move away and earn loads of money and come back fabulously wealthy 40 years later and take care of everybody’s needs for good! Whoever is left, anyway.

Shirking my career is making me miserable. Nobody is going to go hungry if I don’t have a job on January 1, 2011. Even if they were that doesn’t mean I am doing the wrong things right now. So forget it. I may throw resumes at jobs that look interesting, but I won’t worry about the rest of the fuss and intrigue that is supposed to be part of scoring your next job.

I got to watch R. C. Sproul make himself look unintelligent. The man is intelligent, but he went ahead and broke his own rule, on video. He explained the difference between a contradiction (two statements that cannot both be true) and a paradox (a seeming contradiction resulting from inadequate understanding or definition of terms). Then he proceeded to tell a story about Paul Tillich lecturing a class on his concept that God is neither personal nor impersonal, but rather the ground of being.

“A student asked, ‘Professor Tillich, is God personal?’” Sproul said. “And Tillich got very angry and said, ‘I told you that God is neither personal nor impersonal,’ but of course, that is not possible! Impersonal is defined as that which is not personal, so everything must be either personal or impersonal.”

Alas to be teaching philosophy with such an inflexible mind! Paul Tillich is wrong in his teaching, but he is not making an invalid argument. It is a paradox, not a contradiction. If we accept that all humans are either male or female, then what is humanity? Male or female? Neither, of course, because a distinction belonging to one category is applied to another. Or even if we accept that everything must be either personal or impersonal–what then is everything? Collectively, all together now, considered at once: what is everything? Personal or impersonal?

This of course is very close to what Paul Tillich was getting at. But since Paul Tillich’s theology is not correct, we are reduced to saying that a studied philosopher is running around babbling brute contradictions. Play fair, sir; play fair.

It wasn’t even a phone screening. It was an online survey and I was unwilling to lie enough to pass through the filter. On my resume I just avoided the awkward bits where I didn’t quite meet the requirements, but then to submit it I had to check boxes and enter numbers–cold, hard numbers–which won’t align with the hard-coded requirements for being considered.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how to spin this or that detail, how to re-focus on the positive, all of that good interview stuff. But the form didn’t care.

• How many years have you done x?
• In what subject is your degree?

Even worse were the “soft” questions with choose-one answers. “To what would you attribute past successes?”

I cringed as I selected “Mostly individual effort.” Wrong answer! But, even though I could talk all kinds of pep about the great and knowledgeable people that I work with, all of the work I have done relevant to the job I was applying actually got done mostly by me. It’s not that I am so great. It’s just that the work I have done relevant to the job I applied for is way outside of the scope of the job I am in, beyond even the department I am in. I did the work because it helped, I could, and I loved it. But there wasn’t anybody around who could help me, really.

It’s actually possible that I’m not sunk. I am going outside the system as well as through it. Maybe the someone who knows someone has enough influence that I will still get a call for a real interview.

But I won’t hold my breath.

The priority behind this essay, and much of the talk in my crowd, is the (re)establishment and preservation of culture, worked out through a Biblical context. Note that sequence: first, there is a problem with the world around us; second, how do we fix it? But what we ought to have is an understanding of the work of Christ in the world, and then a determination to cooperate in it.

There are lots of people claiming to represent me, the decent everyman, with lots of different programs for change. Most are too far out to require comment. But this niche is so close to home that I could not fault someone for thinking that I did agree with it; as I do not, it is worth explaining why.

We need first of all to revisit what it means to have a “Biblical context.” This catchphrase usually signals correctness and validity. For me to say that this cultural program has a Biblical context and then to disagree with it would seem to be self-condemnation. There is no denying that people in the conservative Christian crowd have a Biblical context, as allusion to Biblical stories and direct quotation of verses amply demonstrates. But knowing what is in the Bible is far different from understanding why it is there. Barrett’s handling of scriptural reference is presumptuous–not only does she make assumptions about the case to support her context, she gives no indication that she is aware of making assumptions.

Take for example Barret’s statement that “God rewarded those who sought marriage actively (ie – Isaac, Ruth, etc.)” This is assuming that the blessing of God was because these people sought to get married, and further asserting that the same situation is equally available to us. Clearly Isaac and Ruth both married; let us not dispute that they were blessed. But were they blessed because they sought out marriage? That is a huge leap.

If we say that marriage is the gateway to God’s blessing, what can we say about Ezekiel and the death of his wife? Or what do we say about Hosea, who married an unrepentant prostitute? Or what do we say about David? We know that he married wrongly, taking several wives and committing adultery, but he is also the famous psalmist, the man after God’s own heart, and surely he was blessed at least as much as Isaac and Ruth, was he not?

What even should we say about Esther? She married, and her marriage was certainly the means of great blessing upon her people. But do we want to point our daughters after her model? To marry with no spiritual unity, without even a relationship–to be married to a powerful man because of physical attractiveness, and then with food, wine, and beauty to manipulate the man in power? Is that the model our daughters should follow?

Now who were the sons of Isaac, the marriage-seeker? Were they not Jacob and Esau? Are these feuding sons the blessings we are to expect from pursuing marriage? Is the wife who works to confound her husband’s purposes and defraud her own son the blessing we should be pursuing?

Also upsetting is Barrett’s assertion that “the reality is that the science of love and romance starts with facts and statistics.” While I am sure Barrett and I would both say that nothing in life should be done apart from prayer–from a spiritual listening to God–there are certainly problems that we approach more mechanically, such as building airplanes, and problems that we approach more philosophically, such as where we will live and what kind of work we will pursue. These questions begin as a choice of values before they require practical actions. And it seems that Barrett classifies marriage as a question of engineering; that we should do it is a given; there is only a mere question of how.

Marriage is perhaps the only life-long commitment we make voluntarily. We are pledging ourselves to one person in a very like manner that we pledge ourselves to God after we become aware of his redeeming love for us. Bought and wholly owned by God, in marriage we are sub-letting our contract with him; this is not a question of whether it is good (in a neutral sense) for people (in an unrestricted sense) to get married, but whether it is in line with the master’s particularly assigned work for this servant to marry that servant. Taking that statement carefully, it is neither for nor against marriage–that is determined only as an outcome of the decision of the master.

With one casual reference to “be fruitful and multiply,” Barrett assumes that it is God’s will for all of his servants to get married unless a particular exception is handed down as a special circumstance. I have heard others just as easily assume that multiplying contains an implicit but obvious qualification that we ought to stop multiplying when we run out of room. I disagree with both self-assured interpretations, but neither is more necessarily invalid in the way it is constructed; both merely assume.

You may think from the direction I have gone thus far that I hyper-spiritualize marriage as a cosmic union between two uniquely designed eternal soul mates. But no. In the longest New Testament writing on marriage, Paul shows that in the last analysis, marriage is an external state, and like all external states it exercises no mystical, spiritual bondage over us. If you read through 1 Corinthians 7, Paul begins by talking about marriage and ends by talking about marriage, and in the middle he quite comfortably makes some parallel comparisons with bondservice. What he says about marriage in verses 12 – 16 is very close to what he says about the rest of our external obligations in 18 – 24. And clearly the rule for both is ‘stay as you are called.‘

One must work quite hard at this to turn it into a program for cultural revolution. Barrett makes the bizarre statement “I’m not willing to see a multi-generational vision die with mine, and I don’t think the Lord is either.” It is hard to know exactly what Barrett means by a multi-generational vision from this essay, so I may do her an injustice with my representation; but I would hazard that it has something to do with having children, encouraging and conditioning them to have children–perhaps going right up to the edge of what we would call arranging marriages–and emphasizing to your children their responsibility to raise their own children up in the same pattern. Thus, by reproduction, filling the culture with right-minded people.

But a review of the Bible will show an absolute dearth of this very thing. Adam’s children, Noah’s children, Abraham’s children, Jacob’s children, Aaron’s children, Eli’s children, Samuel’s children, David’s children, and nearly all of the sons of the kings of Israel form a stunning example of godless sons following godly fathers. Indeed the great irony of the Bible is that the pure and faithful Bridegroom, Jesus, comes from such a famously debauched lineage. Yes, God has a multi-generational vision, but it is wondrously arrogant to presume that we for our part are so much holier than all these men that we can build godly generations by our visionary planning! The way God accomplishes his multi-generational plan is, historically, not at all what we would envision for our families.

This by no means contradicts that we ought to make every effort to raise God-fearing children. But someone who is going to make their case from an “historical and Biblical perspective” ought to pay a lot more attention to what the history recorded in the Bible shows. Saying that lots of people in the Bible and in history got married is a trifle too obvious–our existence makes the case–and really adds nothing to the question of what we are to do ourselves.

I fully agree with Barrett that singleness is not more holy than marriage (although I cannot say I have seen that attitude going around from my corner of Christiandom). Paul is at pains to make certain nobody understands him as saying that marriage is sinful. But I also see him making every effort to dispel precisely the attitude that Barrett advocates of presuming upon marriage–of seeking marriage as a default state.

To avoid too much presumption of my own, let me duly acknowledge the theory that Paul’s perspective in Ephesians was limited to a local event, “because of the present crisis.” I understand this as a remark on this entire age from the writing until the end, in line with Paul’s conclusion that “this world in its present form is passing away.”

Let us for the sake of argument say that Paul did actually mean a local, historical distress. Our present culture’s near future is not bright itself, by all lights; or at any rate by all lights that I have heard in this circle of Christianity. There are two contrary streams running through this valley, and some seem to drink from both: that a cultural revolution is just around the corner, when homeschoolers hit their third or fourth generation; and that a terrible persecution is right around the bend. Now Barrett may not hold the second view at all, but given how pervasive it is within our circle, she ought to at least treat with it when she is advocating prolific family-making with a long view. If restraints on family-founding are indeed temporary, are they not for times as these?

As I understand Paul’s advice to not be limited to his own time, let me repeat again that neither in Paul nor anywhere else in the New Testament do I see marriage prohibited nor described as second-tier holiness. Reading and contemplating the entire seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians will show that marriage is an external and secondary thing, neither necessarily bad nor necessarily good. But Barrett’s pragmatic arguments about making sure the vision lives on ought to have less force than Paul’s own advice (7:7, 8, 17, 24, 25, 26, 32, 35, 38, 40). What–did Paul not have a multi-generational vision?

I have heard before a phrase or two about Joshua–”Joshua Revolution,” “Joshua Generation,” something like that. I do not know whether this comes from the multi-generational vision camp or not. But it is ironic to me all the same that Joshua was not the son of Moses, nor do we hear anything noteworthy about Joshua’s sons. Nor was Timothy Paul’s son; nor do we hear about the children of any of the apostles.

Truly I cannot find any sound support for the culture-based or family-based gospel that so many today preach. They say that God works in families; I do not find it. They say that families are his covenant unit; I do not find it. I have not by any means addressed all the evidence or argument that is made out for cultural Christianity, but it seems from my survey of “almost every great person in the Bible” (Barrett’s phrase), which I sketched above, that the burden of proof must lie with them.

To be sure, there are a great many promises made in the Old Testament concerning sons and descendants and so forth. It is not for want of sparkling promises that I discount God’s blessing being bestowed on families. It is what the Biblical record actually shows happening that so convincingly reinterprets what these blessings really are.

A great deal of the adultery, murder, and fraud recorded in the Bible was committed by ancestors of Jesus, as I indicated before. For all the want of family units of godliness in the Bible, there is abundant evidence that Christ fulfilled the promises made for a Son. For the promise to Eve, to Abraham, to David, and to Isaiah are fulfilled in Christ–and not satisfactorily fulfilled in anyone else. If you read God’s promise to David and then read of Solomon and his sons after him, there is something of the promise fulfilled but a lot of it left wanting.

It may seem too broad to roll up every single family promise in scripture as a reference to Christ, but I submit that it is an excellent way to get started. “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 1:20). For it is in him and by him and through him that we number our family. He makes God our father so that we can be blessed sons together with him.

What troubles me about Barrett’s essay is not the prospect of Christians (or anyone) marrying and having children; it is the careless way in which the motivation and justification for marriage is presented as unquestionably Biblical. Toward the end of her piece, Barrett suggests that Satan opposes marriage specifically, writing “Satan fully recognizes the power of two people yoked together towards a common goal, and he’s not about to see that take place on a regular basis.” One gets the impression that it is an act of spiritual warfare, nay, spiritual victory, to lead a fellow Christian to the altar. If Satan is opposing God in all his ways, then when God brings two together for marriage they may indeed face spiritual opposition–but that is not the same thing as making marriage a territorial victory in its own right. The idea is strange to scripture.

But Barrett is on to something when she talks about marriage’s historical importance. There was some concern about this in ancient Rome:

Toward the end of his life, Augustus passed the Papia-Poppaean Law, which supplemented the earlier Julian Laws, to encourage the enforcement of penalties for celibacy and to enrich the Treasury. However, even with this new law, marriages and births did not increase substantially. Childlessness offered too many advantages. [Tacitus, Annals 3.25, quoted in Shelton, As the Romans Did.]

Permit me to emphasize, in case you do not remember clearly, that Augustus was a thoroughly pagan emperor of a thoroughly pagan culture. He died before the birth of Jesus. Loosely speaking, though, when Paul was writing his letters there were moral and social commentators gravely concerned about the rate of births and marriages in the population of the richest nation on earth.

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily that the birth rate of everybody in the nation was down; a lot of the concern was over the birthrate being low among the right kind of people, the fully franchised Roman citizens. How could the conquering Romans stay in control if the infidels were having more babies?

Knowledge has no part of panic; it is sudden apprehension of a profound and total ignorance; oblivion.

There were also times when I would keep after my exercises. I’ve never been really consistent, but htere was a kind of cadence to my negligence; two or three days one week, one day the next. Never consistent enough to really qualify as a regimen. But you know, after I had been after it for a while, I didn’t get as many strange aches and strains and cramps in my spinal cervical curve. Something was always a little odd in the general geography of my hips, but whatever it is, I think it keeps it at bay to do even little exercises infrequently.

Seems like it’s been a long time now since I even tried. My new routine is to shut off the alarm, and the second alarm, and keep a surly eye on the clock, daring it to go too late for me to make it to work. I live so close that I can really leave when I am supposed to be there and not arrive late enough to attract notice, if I skip some things like breakfast and a shower, that I like to do in the morning.

I’ve been through ups and downs before. I get the blues all the time, mostly without any reason. Anymore I mostly just wait for it to pass; trying to fight to stay at “reasonably content” to “ridiculously happy” without ever going to “irrationally depressed” inevitably ends in frustrated defeat.

Waiting it out doesn’t seem to be working this time. This has gone on too long. I don’t think I am even down right now. A couple of these past weeks have gone pretty well; I’m happy with what I get done in the day and happy with the week when it’s over. I would call it a really long gray streak if it didn’t have it’s own ups and downs, if it had any of the tell-tale sulks, if it didn’t just seem to be a new normal.

It’s not like I’ve tried to get back on track. Really, it’s more like I’ve tried to get as far off track as possible. Even well rested, I go back to bed, to goad the hour on to disaster. I try to construe reasons why I must be too busy to cook supper, so I can eat out. Then I don’t, either, because I don’t actually like eating out. So I go to bed without supper.

It’s starting to look like more than anything else I am just trying to live dangerously–as dangerously as I can while pretending to be a victim, anyway. And it’s reminding me of the way I always leave something around the house totally out of order. If I clean, I won’t pay bills; if I sort out one pile of accumlated junk, I’ll leave the other one. If I have time off work that I have set aside specifically for cleaning and catching up on everything, I will resolutely bore myself out of the house before I actually do all the work.

I guessed a long time ago that I was probably doing it on purpose. I think it makes me feel needed, to have unsolved problems waiting in the wings. If there is nothing to be done, why I am even here?

Not that there ever really could be a shortage of good work to do. But I save up a collection of little problems I could solve in a minute, just so I will know I have the power to make problems go away, until at last the little problems have grown into such a tower that I am really afraid of them. Then either I muster myself for a charge, or turn my back and slink away.

I think what is really going on is not so much a general depression as a desire for excitement. I am trying to precipitate a crisis so I can be a hero. I’ll do the same thing if a conference call is too boring; I will tell myself that something else urgently needs to be worked on, or maybe even two or three other things; or I will just raise heck by finding or inventing problems in whatever the matter at hand might be.

I am edging closer to getting myself in over my head with some commitments that are coming up, and it’s starting to make me feel better. I cooked supper two days in a row now. Tomorrow I might even get up with the alarm. Well, maybe. The votes aren’t all in until 7 a.m. tomorrow. But I have been going through some mental to-do lists and wringing out some little sponges of obligation that have been (in my mind) tied to long chains of casacading steps. I’m looking for trouble and it’s making me feel better.

Soon, I hope, I will be so busy I will once again have an excuse for neglecting things, and then I can be happy once more in my stressful, impossibly burdened life.

Things have been going along fine since then until more or less recently when I decided to get another card from a different company. They did not offer me very much credit at all which I thought was odd, but I figured they were nervous because of some recent changes in my residency and let it be while I dutifully paid bills, remained employed, and kept a single place of residence. After a little while I asked for a credit line increase, which was declined.

I asked again recently and I got a very sparing increase. So I looked up one of those free credit reports and found that all the years with my first company, going back at least into 2003, did not reflect on my credit history–only a very brief time when I was a secondary cardholder under one of my parents.

The credit reporting agency allows the history’s accuracy to be challenged so I asked them to verify my information with this company. Promptly, within a few days, they responded by expunging all history with this company from my credit history.

I am at a point in life where I would like to know that my credit is good enough so that I can get good rates on mortgages or major loans, should I need such. Here I find that I have a very feeble credit history due mostly to the shortness of my accounts. And the oldest thing on my account has now been expunged, at my unwitting request.

Today I finally got around to calling my credit company and inquiring if my history could be properly reported. No; the history on this card has been reported to a commercial credit reporting bureau. Okay, I said, can I at least convert my account back to a personal account? No; you would have to cancel your account.

I nearly said “Okay do it, then,” but I remembered that I am relying on this card to cover larger purchases since I have paltry credit on my other account. Due to my short credit history. Bwahaha. I am not reliant on credit cards in the sense that I can pay all of my bills from checkings or savings without a problem and I pay all my credit card balances in full; I just rather prefer the convenience of credit cards. At least it is supposed to be convenient.

So the moral of this story is: Do NOT let your credit company give you a “business” account.

Also, I may have good credit to launch a small business. I wasn’t planning on doing that, but God speaks in mysterious ways.

And Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

The problem is, I never would have chosen this company in the first place. I didn’t know it existed and if I had known it existed I would not have known that it could use someone with my talents. And once I got my first job here I would have never thought my second job would be in a part of the plant that I knew nothing about from my first job. And when I was thinking about the job I have now I would never have guessed that it would be the best way for me to survive this year’s layoffs–I thought it would be worse than what I had before.

If I am master of my own career, it is high time for me to start at least preparing to find another job somewhere else. You always need a back-up plan, you know. A safety net.

“So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and goods.’”