Posted on by Abe Austin

Unfulfilled Dreams- It Isn’t the Same

Years of Longing)

I’ve wanted a dog for as long as I can remember. I used to watch movies as a boy like Old Yeller, Beethoven, Benji, Homeward Bound, Iron Will, and Balto, then beg my parents to let us get a puppy. I honestly don’t know how my mother felt about it, but my father was always against them. He had grown up with pets, lots of them, and had no interest in dealing with them again. We did get goldfish a couple of times, but that was it. Left to no other recourse, my siblings and I would make pets out of whatever we could. We would catch bugs and put them in jars, make “alien baby dolls” out of paper, and play pretend where my sister would discover the rest of us as wolves in the wild and lead our pack.

It just wasn’t the same.

Of course, eventually I grew up. And for a long time, I had many distractions to keep me from getting a dog. I was going through school, I was starting my career, my wife and I had a newborn, and then another, and then another. We’ve been building our little kingdom for thirteen years now, and just a few weeks ago it started to dawn on me that we had reached a certain level of stability. We have our own home, with a fenced-in yard, no major projects going on, and the kids just got on summer break. So I spoke to my wife about how this was the first really convenient time for us to have a dog of our own. Things moved very fast, and 48 hours later I introduced our new dog to our children!

Since that day, it has been a lot of fun! I’m really glad to finally have the dog that I’ve wanted for over thirty years. But…if I’m being honest…it isn’t the experience I’d always dreamed of.

Shifting Dreams)

In hindsight, it never could be. My dream had always been to have a dog in my childhood. I imagined going out exploring on summer days with my “good boy” by my side, letting him sneak into my room to sleep on my bed, and having a friend and a protector who would never leave. But things just don’t work out that way with a dog at this stage of life. These summer days I’m shut in the office, working to provide for the family. The dog tries to sneak onto the bed, but I can’t stop thinking about how dirty those paws are and tell her to get off. And I’m much more the protector than that dog will ever be.

Like I said, in hindsight, this is obvious, but in the days following getting the dog, it came as a real disappointment. I can still have a good experience with this dog, and I really am doing so, it’s just never going to be the “good experience” I had always dreamed of. That dream was inseparably connected to being a specific age, and I’m simply not that age any longer. That dream is gone, and that’s all there is to it.

But you know who that dream isn’t gone from? My kids. From my ten-year-old to my three-year-old, each one of them has spent hours each day playing, chasing, and laughing with the dog. They’re excited to feed it, excited to bathe it, even excited to scoop up its poop!

And so, my dreams need to shift around a fair bit. I have to let go of the old dream that was no longer possible. I have to accept the new dream, which is still good, but different from what the old one was. And I have to be content to see the old dream live on in my own children. This whole experience got me thinking about other dreams and hopes I’ve had for my life, including ones yet unrealized for my adult life. I realized some important lessons there, too. Ones that I will share in my next post.

Posted on by Abe Austin

If You Can Change One

If you can clean up your house, you can clean up your bad habits and build good ones instead.
If you can build good habits, you can build new friendships and cure your loneliness.
If you can cure your loneliness, you can cure your boredom and find something good to do.
If you can find something good to do, you can find something good to help others.
If you can help others, you can help your home have more peace and bring order to it.
If you can bring order to your home, you can bring order to your mind and calm it down.
If you can calm your mind down, you can calm your lusts and free your spirit.
If you can free your spirit, you can free the downtrodden and given them hope.
If you can give hope, you can give attention to what really matters.
If you can give attention to what really matters, you can give attention to God and praise Him.
If you can praise God, you can praise what is good in you and let Him purify your soul.
If you can let Him purify your soul, you can let Him purify your family and clean up your house.

If you can change but one, you can change them all.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Best Lessons Must be Painful

The best lessons in life must be painful, because the best lessons require us to change. If they didn’t require us to change, they couldn’t be as meaningful as those that did. And to change means, to some degree, breaking and rebuilding. And breaking and rebuilding is painful.

So, if we are going through lessons that are painful, but which are causing us to change, it’s not that we are doing something wrong, we’re actually doing it exactly right. It’s just that growth is hard. That change is painful. It always has been this way, and it always will be.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Leviticus 6:10-11

10 And the priest shall put on his linen garment, and his linen breeches shall he put upon his flesh, and take up the ashes which the fire hath consumed with the burnt offering on the altar, and he shall put them beside the altar.

11 And he shall put off his garments, and put on other garments, and carry forth the ashes without the camp unto a clean place.

The priest was to arise in the morning, put on the clothing of his office, and collect the ashes off the altar. Then he had to change his clothes and carry the ashes out of the camp and dispose of them. This seems unusual. Why two different sets of clothes for the same chore? The general understanding is that the priest could not interact with the holy altar without wearing the official clothes of his office, but also he could not leave the tabernacle while wearing those holy garments. Thus, he wore the holy garments for the part that involved the altar and then had to wear his everyday clothes for carrying the ashes out of the camp.

This, of course, is not to say that we are meant to be two-faced disciples, faithful and religious in church, then carnal and sinful when we leave. But there is a special gravity when we commune with the Almighty, which is absent in our other business. We should have a seriousness in our sacred works, and a levity in our mortal labor. The two parts are connected, and each affects how we show up for the other, but they are also distinct.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Moral Growth and Decline

If we think that people hundreds of years ago had morally despicable views, and that now we have a better view of the truth, we ought to consider why. What beliefs and values did our forefathers foster that led them to become more moral, leading to where we are now?

And if we are now prying those beliefs and values from the public square, if we are rejecting the faith of the very people who made the world a better place, what do we expect to happen to our morality in the next hundred years?

Posted on by Abe Austin

Stop Trying to Change the World

Stop trying to change the world. When people use that term today, all they mean is finding fault elsewhere and making others change.

Which doesn’t work, because they are doing the same thing, finding fault in you, and trying to make you change.

And in this cycle no one actually changes. They only become more entrenched.

So, stop trying to change the world.

Just change yourself.

Posted on by Abe Austin

How the World Can Ever Change

Maybe even if I change
The world will stay the same
But on the other hand,
How can the world ever change
If I’m still staying the same

Posted on by Abe Austin

Taking Accountability- Conclusion

Big Problems)

In this little series of posts, it was my sole intention to act out the principle I had recently espoused, to put my behavior where my belief was. And so, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death I identified a way that I contributed to the culture that got him killed, and I took steps to change my behavior accordingly.

But that wasn’t all that came out of these posts. By going through this exercise, I was able to more fully flesh out some of the vague ideas that originally inspired my call for us to find our own personal responsibility in every ill that besets us.

I realized that a major reason for us all to seek out our own slice of responsibility is because that is the only way that the world will ever be healed. Some problems are just too big for some of us to solve it for everyone else. Everyone has to tackle the part that is directly in front of them.

We must not have the arrogance to think that we can divide ourselves into fixers and problems. We all have to see that we are each a fixer, and we are each a problem in and of ourselves. And so, we must take our fixer part and use it on our own problem part, and only by doing this individually can we heal collectively.

A Call Inward)

I invite all of us to start looking at the big problems of the world in this way. I suspect it will be best if we look at the deepest problems, things much more fundamental than politics or ideological divides. Let us consider the hate, the poverty, the deceit, the confusion, and the loneliness. For once, let us set aside who is most responsible for these issues, and just ask, “to what extent am I responsible?”

Is there something negative that we are doing that we could stop? Is there something positive that we should be doing that we are shirking? Can we truly say that we have a clean conscience? That we have contributed nothing to the problem? That we have done our part to contribute to the solution? Or is there room for improvement, room for taking the beam out of our own eyes, room to re-establish heaven in our little corner of the world?