The Beginning

The sky just opened up for a couple seconds and let loose a couple drops into my back yard. That was two minutes ago. Now it stopped...and everything's dry...
It was my birthday seventeen hours ago. I turned seventeen. It's a good number. Prime...i guess that's something. And it's the only number in the teens besides eleven that has three syllables. But at the age of eleven i didn't have the mind to understand how amazing the number was. So seventeen is the better of the two. Friends took me out for coffee and a movie. It meant so much more to me than planning a party for myself. I think that's the way things should be- friends take over the party and throw it for you...not the other way around. Anyway...it was nice. We watched Elizabethtown.
Ben sent me an exerpt from Through Painted Deserts...and it's really amazing. i think i'll quote some of it.

I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

It's just an excerpt of an excerpt, but it explains alot to me. We all need to change. Staying the same is not what mankind is supposed to do, in the long run. Evolution does exist, and it exists very obviously in human hearts and lives.
I want to be the character at the end of the story that has changed for the better... that has gone through this plot called life and has come out in the end as an unrecognizeable man. I'm sure everyone wants that...right?
As of right now...i should be doing homework for Bible class. I'm doing a word study on idolatry. I'm sure you're really interested. But lo, homework and me are far from each other...and i discovered blogging.
I've been invited to a youth event at my mexican church. it's kinda nice...they're pretty persistent in letting me know that they want me there. So it's a talent show...i think i'll just watch.
Anyway...homework calls...