So lately I have been sleeping in my sleeping bag. It reminds me not only of being on a trail off who knows where but this kind of thing reminds me of college. I showed up at college as a kid who didn’t feel like he fit in. I was going to a bible college but didn’t want to be a pastor, I thought it would be fun to put roadkill on my RA’s car and I liked to sleep outside. One morning in January I woke up to my roommates standing over me. I was covered in snow and they had their books in their hands. They where on their way to class and had noticed this black hump on the top of a hill that they figured was me because I didn’t sleep in the dorm that night. Later in college a few guys figured out that I would sleep out in the woods near campus and they came looking for me. They filmed a video that was called ‘Searching for the Rinker’ or something like that but they never found me.
Another group of guys joined me out there. There was some great pillow talk those nights about life and God and everything inbetween. Once when I woke in the morning no one was there. I was a bit confused like you normally are when you wake up outside but then realized that I had gone to bed with people next to me. I don’t really believe in a Tim LaHaye kind of rapture thingy so I figured they were just murdered. After about a second I thought maybe Mr. LaHaye was on to something then I woke up fully and realized I was left outside. It was no big deal the night air was probably to cold and they must have gone in one by one through out the night. The sun hadn’t quite rose so I leaned over and I watch the sun burst and dance over the morning drew. I had one eye open with the other behind the hood to my mummy bag and I think I was smiling, comforted in some way or maybe even feeling rewarded by the rays of the sun for making it through the night. I thought I could do stuff like this forever. Living with people, learning, sleeping in backyards and watching sunrises with one eye.
I want to live with a kind of simplicity that is singular in vision. That doesn’t just want to live but actually does live with a calm awareness of the sacred and an eye toward the horizon smiling at what God might bring around even in days that start in the dirt out back behind a school. This was a greek phrase that Jesus used when he talked about the eye being the light of the body and when your eye is singular you will be illuminated, open and fully you in God:
single eye
What is before our eye, that which we hold in front of ourselves to bate us out of bed is what fills us. It is the lens we see through and the colors of this lens have been often muddled for me. I have been told I am an intense person, if fact I was told that tonight. And so when I allow something to be singular in my eye reality is narrated by it. Love, adventure, thrill, persons, religion, things and self have all drifted their way into my way of seeing-blurring the beautiful reality in which God invites us daily. Now sure love and adventure even persons they may be good to focus attention toward but singularity is a different category, it is what affirms your existence. And their is only one who is capable of this. Only one who is able to be singularly one and whole to give you sight and focus illumination.
