My B-Day, and religion

And Tamara was great. She created yet another fantastic dinner at home and breakfast too. And then we also went to a nice Jazz club for dinner in the Cities. The surprise was my 20 questions needed about 25] at dinner to find out what my present was. I was on the right track after 3 questions about vacation, on a lake, in a cabin... not sure why I even thought that. And Tamara thought I knew, but I didn't. Then the is it MN question made me think has to be WI and the earlier is it north of Duluth and Tam wasn't sure..... Duh, Camp Luther. So we have a cabin for the weekend there in the 2nd week of October. Awesome. It will be real nice to go there after a hectic Sept: New job for me with travel to NJ and Vermont, Tam with 2 trips to IN and CO. Crazy.

Different topic and a freak out... I have to think Max will read this someday and think dad, wtf? Growing up Lutheran made sense based on my German heritage, but for the last 15 years I've been wondering about religion in general and have done lots of reading... There have been those questions of how is my religion [what I was taught] better than someone else's religion? Many other questions that people have always thought about... where did we come from? our purpose in life? etc. These are the hardest questions in life to answer, bar none. I do believe in God. I'm kind of like Tamara in that she feels there is a God, but not sure exactly what that means. If you think like this and based on my strict upbringing as a Lutheran, then I would be considered a non-believer in a sense. Because of this, I don't quite fit into the strict Lutheran mold. But, I do believe in good and evil. I have no doubt. I know my upbringing has affected my thinking here, but there are things I feel that I _know_ in a spiritual sense, that you just can't explain. I guess this is one type of mysticism called Gnosticism. I surfed from Wikipedia topics on mysticism to Existentialism, Epistemology to Lutheranism.

I need to do more reading about religious studies [should have taken that course in college].

Here's the crazy part. Concerning this topic, I surfed into a link about "Synchronicity". I have read about this in the past with this word coming from Carl Jung. What got me there was how similar this is to my 'experiences' which really by definition are kind of mystic. I honestly do feel these synchronicity moments around generally topics of religion, faith, existence. I was listening to last.fm Internet radio and last.fm suddenly just stopped playing while I was reading about Synchronicity. Sometimes the connection to last.fm seems to get lost, but I still noticed it. I knew it was a Police song that was playing, but wasn't really listening until it just stopped. So I click on last.fm which was now blank and not playing and it took me to the song link on their website which was one from the album Synchronicity. Totally co-incidence I always tell myself. Here's the freakout. So as last.fm was in its state of not playing with the semi bad connection, suddenly, I hear part of a song play through with the connection being marginal. What was clear were the only words I heard: "Jesus Christ". Honestly. It was nuts. The words just came through the computer speakers and only those words. And the connection still was only partially there. Not sure the song, but I recognized it. Quite surreal at the time, and still surreal that now I’m writing about it. So there we go again, I just have these everything is connected sort of feelings. And to top it off, I take Max to daycare and come back home ready to start work this morning, I park the car and Cities 97 starts playing a Police song. It was familiar of course, but what song? The radio text shows the answer: Synchronicity Ii

Of course this has to be co-incidence. But, that is the crazy part of the mystic experience, you believe it, you feel like there's something, you can't explain it. Many people have had these experiences, or so they think. I had to write about this. ;-)

There is some kind of something out there in terms of God and there is some kind of communication that is trying to happen to me. It’s quite possible, its all in my head because I want there is be a God. But I know there is. There has to be. And I’m pretty sure Jesus Christ knew this too.