As Stacy and I prepare for our big move three miles away from our current home, re-locating to the beautiful suburb of Norwood, we find ourselves opening up boxes that we haven't opened since we packed them to move in to our apartment two years ago. Do you have boxes like that in your home? I hope so...I'd hate to think we're the only people on the planet who would go two whole years without ever unpacking a few boxes. As I unpacked the stack of boxes in my basement, I found the huge box that I have been lugging from dorm room to dorm room, apartment to apartment ever since I graduated from high school. It is filled with all of my various high school memorabilia...pictures, newspaper clippings, awards...and hundreds of notes. Notes from my friends, notes from the girl I had an ignorantly sweet crush on for four years, notes from my parents, teachers and classmates...and a few dozen notes from the two girls I dated before I met Stacy. It was these notes that got to me the most.

You know what struck me the most about these notes from these high-school flames? How incredibly passionate about each of these two [then] girls when I was in high school, and how not passionate I am now. I welled up with tears on several occasions as I read...not mourning the way my relationships with these girls worked out...God knows I got the best of all things...but simply sentimentally reminiscing. I relived four years of powerful living in the course of about an hour...that'll git ya every time. I realized how far away that time seemed. So much has changed for me in the last seven years...so many good things have happened (Stacy being the top of the list there), and I've been hurt and humbled enough to begin to realize how much more I need to be hurt and humbled before I really begin to know much of anything.


Reading these old notes was like sitting for an hour with a young man I've known for a long, long time, but can barely identify with. Even though he is only seven years my junior, I feel quite removed from this guy...I love him; I find him charming, well-spoken, and a lot more handsome than I am, (though I will concede that I mostly like him because we think and talk the same way), but I don't know that I could be great friends with him. He is insecure, he is overzealous, and he is quite needy. He fancies himself very smart, I think, and unfortunately, I get a sense that he doesn't realize that there is an entire world full of people much smarter and more charasmatic than he is, each running around with bigger ideas and better words to express them. He is idealistic to a fault, and seems to have his entire world built on the premise that, in the end, everything fits some kind of order that he will eventually find or be given. I love his enthusiasm, though, and I am enamored with his belief that, for whatever reason, he was built to do something amazing. I want to believe him...I still do believe him a bit, I think...there's something about the young guy that I see in these letters that makes me believe he may be the Owen Meany for his community...that he may be the guy who does something truly powerful. But I'm afraid for him, because he doesn't seem to get that as long he keeps trying to be that guy, he will fail. I want to grab him and shake him and say, "don't ever lose your belief that you will be amazing...but you HAVE to know that you cannot MAKE yourself amazing; you must choose to be thoroughly good, and you will be used for something amazing." Most of all, I want to remind him that he has everything left to learn...that he always will.

Of course, I would have learned nothing if I didn't sit in front of all those notes, looking back at that guy...and wondered what 32-year-old Justin would want to shake me and tell me right now.

Sigh.

Peace,
Justin