Philip's Tunnel to Nowhere 3

I wrote this up Sunday night but somehow stupidly locked myself out of my account and couldn’t post it until now. The formatting got destroyed in my copy/paste but I’ll fix it later.

On a day where I’ve been responding to a sermon by focusing on my idols, I want to scribble down a few more thoughts before heading off to bed.

Besides significance, the other great idol I’m struggling with is provision. I mean providing
both for my own needs and for those of some hypothetical
down-the-road family I might one day have. Providing for my own needs is
obvious — even grinding out a meager living playing 60 hours a
week has been a source of some satisfaction, because I’m earning my own rent.

Providing for others is obviously a consideration only in the hypothetical, but the impact on my self-image is very real. No woman wants attention from the proverbial guy who lives in Mom’s basement, right? Especially at my age, the inability to at least work out an acceptable d ?tente with the evil mysterious world of careers, whereby I spend all week doing something I despise in order to pay the bills so that my (yet hypothetical) family doesn’t have to go hungry — my inability to work that out is troubling. Should be troubling, indeed.

I guess I need to have more faith that those issues will get resolved when the time is right. That’s why provision is an idol.

I’m tired of being mediocre at life. I’m desperate to find something at which I’m excellent. Maybe that’s my idol. Maybe I can only find peace when I let God take over my need to be good at something.

My thoughts run way too fast for a human being. Way too fast.

It’s sort of a weird time for me. But it’s always a weird time for me.

Just to orient us, it’s been around a year and five months since I moved to Memphis, and a year since I lost my last day job. I’ve been trying to make it work playing poker for a living as a year-long digression before starting grad school, and results have been mixed. But at least I have gotten it to the point where it’s paying the rent and most of my monthly expenses.

However, Tunica isn’t really the ideal place to spend the rest of my year trying to grind, because of lack of game selection. So now I’m planning yet another in a long series of “course corrections”, to move back in with family for December and January in order to save up some money, and then possibly set out again, possibly for Vegas or California for a few months. Then in March it’s time to start finding an internship and preparing for school in the fall.

So for the present I’m in a bit of a malaise, I guess you might say. I’m not really unhappy, just…. blah. Well, I expected to be bored of Memphis after about a year, so I’m not surprised the newness has worn off. Beyond that, well, here’s a prayer request I wrote up on a Facebook group:

It’s a mix of loneliness (yeah, being 36 and single is harder than I want to admit), alienation (sort of disenchanted with the church I have been going to), personal failure (I’ll soon be moving back with family – long story), physical sickness (I think I’m catching cold), and some other stuff.

And indeed I was catching a cold, or something, which has sidelined me for the past two days. I’ll have a little more to write when I’m not sick. Like, why haven’t I moved forward since Cornerstone in the whole “underground outreach” thing?