UMAM

There is a thought discarded among a certain slice of young people: America is the land of the free, home of the brave, a blessing from God to the unworthy, white slaves. Yet in a quite different slice of elderly people another thought exists: America is infallible. And still another idea of "I don't care at all, as long as I have my cake and coke float."

My thoughts are as follows:

America,
My whore that won't leave,
my love that won't stay.



The history of the United States of America as well as its present state have brought me to tears for completely different reasons. I feel as patriotic as the president (an authority which I respect as God. should it be any different?) and have been moved quite a great deal more while saying the pledge of allegiance then while praying for God to bring my cat back from the dead. I use the prayer example to show the size of our prayers. Who is going to dream God's dreams for America (Matt Trivett, author)? What does it mean to be a Christian in America? What does it mean to be a man in America?

I know I'm being scattered, so is my heart. What can a man do in America to feel like a man? A woman to feel like a woman? A painful subject. Man: order black coffee, cut the lawn, stink up the toilet, grow a beard. The list grows short, mind you, for the average American man and what he is ALLOWED to do. Woman: I don't know I'm not a woman, first of all. I believe that the men of this country neither work hard enough, nor sleep well enough because of it. There is no Sabbath being observed. There is hardly manual labor to do. Everything is effecient. Things are simply not needed anymore. Americans do things in bulk. We are a large people seeking to allow more job opportunities, thus you end up with people playing sports for a living. A living. Totally not a living. America is not wild enough for the men, nor the women and miracles are far and wide, though we delude the word and say "Look around, they're everywhere."

I imagine I'll get a degree in something that I want to get a degree in for the sake of learning the trade. Then I'll go and do some manual labor for the rest of my life either in Trinidad in a garden, the coast of Maine as a fisherman, Canada as a lumberjack and probably the remainder of my life in Alaska, New Mexico and Iceland, living with the natives, hunting my food and getting tired enough to rest.

Where's God in this? I don't know yet. He is this, to me. His desires in me. We are a people far to easily pleased and not nearly hedonistic enough. We are lazy, we are proud, we are rich, we are careless. If we really sought pleasure, we would seek God (Piper).

A beauty about the Native American culture is their hate for waste.

So is my hope in some other-than culture? No, everything I have seen and will see can and will be taken away. I trust in God.