The Life I Live and the People Around Me
Posted by jacobroecker on 18 January 2009 under Chrissy, Family, Friends, Nostalgia, Rainey | 
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I’ve told Chrissy that she’s not the woman I married. No, that person is gone, and she’s been replaced with someone else. Someone I love better. I don’t take the time to comment on this blog about how much she means to me, because it takes a lot of emotional energy to put down in words feelings that I consider beyond words.
I prefer to leave certain emotions in abstract. They are better left as the colours of my mind. Although the English language has an immense lexicon of words, and an immense amount of flexibility with adopting new ones, none seem adequate. Sure I meet new words every week. This week’s word was pulchritudinous. It’s a rather poetically clever word. I like it a lot, but it just doesn’t seem good enough. Pulchritudinous has part of the colors of my mind, but it’s awkward to pronounce, and doesn’t match the sounds that go with the colours.
So all of this is a bit abstract, and maybe too complicated to understand. There have been times when I’ve highlighted some of the people in my life on this blog, and there are some who are wondering when I will highlight their influence on my life. Honestly, I’m just not ready to do that. For the same reason I can’t say good-bye to people. I simply let them leave, and after a time, pick up life from the last encounter. To me describing a person’s influence in my life, is confining that influence.
I recently was asked to write a letter of recommendation for a professor. It was a difficult task, because as much as I knew I had learned from her, I wanted to leave space to learn more. It’s uncomfortable to write the obituary of influence about someone you care about
The few times I have practiced writing about people here on the blog have been hard tasks to be sure. I have had to train myself to construct something on paper from a “thank-you” perspective or a “hello” perspective. Trying to write others though, it feels too much like I’ve said “goodbye.” It’s considerably easier to post blogs with neat little youtube videos than it is to write about the people who’ve helped make me, me.
What’s brought this all on? I’ve been facebooking and finding old friends from High School. Some are just now getting married, others celebrated their second Christmas’ together. A few have children. A small number of those have more than one. All of them have politely responded to seeing the photos on my facebook account. “You have a gorgeous family” and variations, have appeared in response recently. “Certainly you are blessed.”
What did I do to get these blessings? Well, some of it’s me doing the right things. A lot of it is God’s influence on my life, and a LOT of his influence comes from the good people I’ve been surrounded by, and how I’ve framed the learning opportunities in each relationship. Looking back it doesn’t feel like it took a lot of effort from me. The same thing would happen while hiking. The climb upward would be exhausting, but after reaching the summit it would feel like I could tackle more.
Constructing the obituaries for friendships also feels a bit like putting a limit on the hand of the Lord. Unlike Handel I don’t think I could claim to have seen God on his throne, but I have felt the influence of the angels he has sent me in the friendships I cherish deeply.
I will try and muster the courage to write thank-you introductions. My abilities seem lacking in the very thought, but there’s a void of “thank-yous” hitting the media, and since roeckerfam.com is a media I control, it should be used to this end.
We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.
It seems to me that this is not just a call to what we should be consuming, but also what we should be writing, and I will try to do my part.
