Hope in a half written journal entry

I opened my journal, and it's only fair to say, that I shouldn't even call it a journal. I should call it half prayer book and half "to do list" keeper...anyway I did have a journal entry/prayer yesterday and, I guess out of my a.d.d. or busyness I didn't finish it. This strangely gave me hope, as if I went through a break up and had one more chance to get a few things off my chest...or a broken friendship having another shot a redemption, or an opportunity to apologize to an enemy. In any case, maybe it's cuz I'm 30, but I've been really wanting to get up and finish the race. "The race" being a metaphor for so many things. My pursuits, dream, life, character, walk with Christ. Specifically I've been thinking about how I've lost my confidence in comedy. There was a time, whether I was ever good or not, I'd walk on stage with out a shred of doubt in my head and heart. Call it bravery, or call it ignorance, but either way I wasn't scared. Matter of fact, there were times that I so felt the rythm of comedic timing I felt like I could control the laughter of an 800 person crowd at the palm of my hand...prideful or confident? Maybe neither. If it's pride, I'm so far removed from that feeling it's hard to feel pride about it any more. Confident, I don't know. I think it was more enjoyment and unexpected, kind of like Matt Damon talking about equations comparing it to playing the piano...and how when it came to equations he could just play...that's how I used to feel about comedy. Maybe I was really confident because I never cared. I never was trying to be funny, it was just a repetative comment that I heard over and over and over and over, till I finally believed it. Maybe this was my mistake. I believed the flattery. Either way....then the paint began to chip off the building. My life met the depths of my selfishness, immaturity, and moral depravity years ago, what feels like another world or rerun of an old movie that I played so much I wore out the vhs tape...and I not only found my comedy....my art...but I also found my whole person floating out to outerspace...and I would reach for it...and it's been a painful reach...I imagine floating in outerspace, with my life, my identity, my comedy within arms reach, but yet cannot grab it...bummer, huh? A few years after the collision of failure, that set my life in a direction of misery (at least it's felt like)...direction of misery filled with blessing, fun, and laughter too!...there's my trying not to be a debbie downer moment, or my moment of gratefulness despite my own screw ups...or recognizing that God is still good even when I act like the prodigal son...the spoiled selfish little brat I can be...anyway after a few years, I got my rythm back, I was booking movies, traveling and performing, I was "funny" again. Then..something horrible happend that didn't just strip me of confidence, it broke me. Like in half. And ever since I've been trying to crawl back to recovery, and it's a crawl. Why? Well, I'm not 20, I'm married, I've got bills and responsibilities, I don't have the time to just dive head long in to just being funny anymore. I've got things to do. Oh, I hate it. But, I am thankful I'm not 20, that I'm not single, that I have things that cost, and jobs...so it's a push pull thing:-) What does give me hope is that there's still another day, more room in that journal to find my way home to a gift that never belonged to me in the first place. Maybe I'll find my way to the 20 year old version of myself and he'll kick my ass for taking life so seriously in the places where it doesn't need to be taken seriously at all, and then after he's done kicking my ass, maybe he'll teach me a knock knock joke or two.

thanks for reading.

Be God's,

David Leo Schultz

procrasti....i'll finish spelling it later...

procrastination

I have a ton of things to do, but I really don’t want to do it, so I think I’ll write another post so I can procrastinate working on all the things I should be working on. Ok, so what should I be working on? I need to re-write this comedy I’ve been working on, and actually shelved for awhile, but a comedy writer (like a real real comedy writer) is going to take a look at it to see if he wants to help make it better, and maybe help get it made…I have an audition on friday to prepare for, I have a table read for a pilot on Saturday to prepare for, I am working on the script for a movie about Rich Mullins, and continuing research on his life, and preparing for a meeting with another screenwriter to potentially join the team on Saturday. I should clean my car, which i never do cause even though I’m married, i still drive so much it’s still a second home, all that to say i know it’ll be dirty again..that and I guess I’ve always been more comfortable in the mess than the clean…anways you see where I’m going with this…taxes, writing, rehearsing, etc…etc…or as my san diego friends taught me, which by the way is a city that loves brevity in lingo, leedle leedle…again for those of you that are lost leedle=etc…weird and unimportant I know, but leedle has inserted itself into my vocab so i guess your gonna have to deal….okay, my a.d.d. has catapulted me into the abyss, let’s see if I can float back to earth….Anyways, I’m not sure if it’s my never ending list of things to do that is bothering me, or that having a never ending list makes me feel purpose…and if that’s true…that bothers me. Rich Mullins once said, that discontentment is a slap in the face to God. I am so challenged by this. I tend to be the debbie downer, the naysayer, the pessimistic, the negative nancy, leedle, leedle…I want to be different, I want to be different at so many things. Maybe it’s cause I’m thirty, maybe it’s because I see how my laziness and maybe it’s because I fell into the trap that is so well laid before me by generations and generations of 20 somethings that declare that career is King. Career is identity. And even if it’s a moment or the next 4o years of my life that finally teaches me that all that matters truly is Jesus. Not what people think of me. Not the people that admire my accomplishments, sit in awe at my achievements, not the competetors of my career opportunities, and not the pharisees in my life, not the nay sayers of my journey, not the critics at my professional sports game that is called my life, the enemies of my tender heart, the one’s that hold the pitchforks and burning tourches as they hold up the magnifying glass to my life and only see the sin and failure and not the why’s or brokenness behind my acts of evil and grossness and immaturity. I want so much. I want all of my dreams, and yet I want none of them. You ever felt that way? I think there is a certain purity in desire, in it’s most innocent state my heart wants to accept what I’ve been given: life. No matter how long or short, it’s no mistake that I’m alive. And even if you believe that there is no fait, destiny, predestination, forsight into the fact that I was once nothing, would become something, and then one day will die and be no more on this planet…it is no mistake that right now I have an opportunity to live, to love, to be loved, to let myself live, and let myself be loved, to do my to do list filled with leedle leedle leedles…with a heart that is both restless and hungry for more and less at the same time. Maybe I should stop writing and get my list of leedles done, maybe I should throw out the list, maybe I should smile because I have a gift called life, and no matter what this is good, what I do with it might not be, that is uncertain, but what is certain is it’s staring me in the face, and the clock is ticking away day by day, and I can sit and stare at my list, throw it away, but either way I need to live, or at the very least enjoy procrastinating, and offically just call it rest…even if it is just a label to make me feel better about doing nothing. Honestly procrastination is very healthy for me, I work way to hard. My biggest fear is that one day I will be on my death bed or I’ll be sitting at my lovely wife’s death bed, and I’ll regret being so busy and not enjoying the gift that is my wife enough. Either way, I do have a prayer, a prayer of surrender about all this ramblings tonight. God/King/Father/Jesus/Holy Spirit/Lover of MY Soul/ Forgiver of my Sins/Graceful Great One/Daddy I pray, help me know I don’t have to have it all figured out on this rainy night in the city of Berkeley, CA, help me lay tenderly in your compassion. Help me fall madly in love with you, and help me fall out of love with myself (at least with the self focus that I seem to be so wrapped up in) let me work hard, because you gave me work, but let me rest and not slap you in the face with my discontentment. Save me from myself and my generation, save me from my own damaged brought on my by “20′s”, save me from feeling like to matter I must be something other than who you want me to be, or accomplish something other than just “being yours”…Heavenly Father help me not procrastinate, yet if I do procrastinate, let me procrastinate doing the things that are mere distractions and will lead me away from you, and let my a.d.d. draw my attention to the things that will bring my heart to rest in you, that my only hearts desire and cry might be for my dad, my Dad who loves me, likes me, dreams bigger dreams for me than i do, or like B. Manning says, expects more failure from me than I do, who haunts me with compassion and desires of growth, Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus, thank you for not procrastinating in loving me, like I procrastinate in loving you.

Amen.

Thanks for reading ya’ll.

Till tomorrow or a year and a half from now when i remember that i have a blog.

David Leo Schultz

For you Ben

A buddy said to me a few weeks, maybe a month, ago that if I wrote a blog, he'd read it...or maybe he said he might read it.

I brushed it off. I think when I was in college I think I thought I had something important to say, and the older I get, I don't know that I have anything to say. For me insight, is like sitting indian style at a campfire. I am mezmorized at the combustion of flames, the warmth that scortches my forehead, the ash and sparks and crackles that spit out at me...but I don't know or understand necessarily what fire is, how fire works, but I am thankful for fire, I need fire, and I can't think of my life without fire and what that has provided to my life and the civilization in which I find myself, and what specifically a campfire has meant to my life...the nostalgia of summer camp...church camp...great talks...prayer...communion with God...and contemplation. I only know what fire is to me, for better or worse. I am a mere spectator to fire. That's how I feel about my perspective about life, nothing more. So if I do continue this blog...(no guarantees since i discovered that apparently i did start a blog once almost a year and a half ago...and forgot about it)...than I can offer nothing more than my persepective, my thoughts, and my "insights"...but something in me does want to do this...and my buddy ben mentioning this...started a fire in my mind, heart, and soul to do this. Maybe it's cuz I'm a verbal processor and this will help me in my journey to live, journey to experience, journey to live with my eyes open versus closed, journey to wake up versus be asleep, journey to live versus just survive...either way I'll do it from time to time...check in...disagree...write me off as a Jesus freak, a nobody, a half hearted artist wannabe, a struggling actor, a hypocrite, a dreamer, a wishful thinker, a sinner, a saint, an idiot, a jerk, too mean and too sensitive, a bad speller, a writer?...more like a rambler...but one description that has haunted me almost every day that I've been alive is that I'm loved by God, not a nice love, not a sunday school love, but a angry love...a love that kicks down the door...knocks out the bad guy...kisses the girl...smokes a cigarette type of love...a bad ass love that see's through masks, doesn't give answers as much as faith type of love...but gives an embrace that even my pecimisim and self absorbtion and doubts can't ignore...as Brennan Manning once said (and I might get this paraphrase wrong) if you don't know God's name as compassion you might not know him.

I have inner faith friends and family that are every religion you can think of from Pagans, to wiccans, to buddists, to mormons, to religious christians to authentic christians. And I love them all, dearly and truly. I don't agree. A stinging truth that I must say in love is that I do believe Jesus is the one and only way, and I believe we all have faith, and as much faith as it takes me to say that Jesus is the only way, might be the same faith that an Athesist perspective would say there is no God. Either way, I hope, no matter where you can come from, that for a brief few minutes you could find a home for 5 or ten minutes or so as you read this blog...It won't always be comfortable, maybe it will down right piss you off at times...but maybe just maybe no matter your belief system, that you could find an inkling of encouragment, and inkling of compassion, and sensing of truth that goes beyond my rambling words...or if nothing else maybe you could just sit indian style and view the reckless fire that is stirring within my heart and mind for a few minutes, than get up and move on and wonder what all that was about.

Thanks for reading.

Be God's,

David Leo Schultz

p.s. i know the spelling and grammar is bad, but frankly i don't have that much time to write, so enjoy the raw and the humbling messiness of my writing.

"sooner or later life will kill us all" R.Mullins

I sit here, and I wonder.

As a Christian, I look back at my past and I gasp, and go "was I?" Thank Jesus, that salvation isn't dependent on my Christian Resume. I weep over my sin.

I look in the mirror and I go, "Jesus, how can you love a ragamuffin like me?" But he does. Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you.

I am an achiever, I am a planner, I am an actor, writer, comedian, actor, producer, wanna be preacher, truthfully I am a wanna be at all those things, wanna be lover of Jesus. I do sometimes. I wish I did all the time. I get in the way a lot.

When I think about the preaching of Mark Driscoll, the passion of John Piper, the writing of Brennan Manning, and the life of Rich Mullins I am compelled. I see in all of my hero's of the faith a hunger, a humility, and a love for Jesus that compels me to follow Jesus with all of me, and at the same time none of me.

I hunger to obey Jesus, and drop my nets, stop what I'm doing, and obey Jesus in taking up my cross.

The application for me: I don't know. I guess that's the big question of life. Some have picked a road. Some haven't. I'd like to think I kind of have, but I'm not sure if it's the right one. I just hunger to be about Jesus in all I do. Maybe I could work at Dairy Queen, sweep floors, preach sermons and if Jesus was truly the main occupant of my heart I would be content.

I guess I'll start there.

"Jesus be the occupant of my heart. Amen."