"i'm going to live again"

today i stopped home to grab some cold meds and my phone rebate(long overdue). This past Sunday my Grandma Bierma was hospitalized with pneumonia and the last week has been spent basically waiting for her to pass away. This isn't a sudden development because ..well, to put it simply, she's old. She's spent 92 years on earth, and recently, each one of those years has weighed down on her health. I think our whole family has been anticipating this day, and not anticipating in the excited sense of the word, but has seen this day coming, especially in the last several years. On my sixteenth birthday, she passed out in our living room chair, and ever since, I've slowly been preparing myself for when this would happen, and now it is. At home my mom stopped in the house in the middle of calf chores, and just reminded me again of how uncertain the next few days are. After talking to her a little bit, I drove back to Dordt, and since its cold and I rarely use my car, I don't leave any cd's in my car. Driving in silence is not often something I relish, so naturally, I turned on the radio. Confession: I usually skip over the Christian music station in my browsing. The music doesn't always interest me, and I usually use it as a backup plan. However, today I checked it and the song Smile by Chris Rice was on.


blogger is being ridiculous and not letting me copy and paste

but the chorus goes

i just wanna be with you

i just want this waiting to be over

i just wanna be with you

and it helps to know the day is getting closer

every minute takes an hour

every inch feels like a mile

till i won't have to imagine

and i finally get to see you smile

and the second verse:

my journey's here but my heart is there

so i dream and wait, and keep the faith, while you prepare

our destiny, till you come back for me

oh, please make it soon

After my grandpa died 7 years ago, I distinctly remember hearing this same song on the radio. And I remember feeling the same comfort from it that I did today. While this song is more about our time left on earth and hoping for heaven, so it would seem to be a great song for those us with years and years left on the earth. However, here it felt so applicable to a dying grandmother. She's spent ninety-two years toiling her way through the good times and bad of this life, and it appears that her days of struggle will soon be over. Her wait is short, and her journey is almost done, but she's about so see what we should be hoping to see. She can sing this song more authentically than anyone else I know.

We rarely think of life as a time where we wait to go to heaven. Our lives are like standing in line at Walmart with the coolest product we could possibly imagine, just waiting for finally be checked out and get to use this sweet product. We should be excited and want to get through the line so we can finally open up the box and rip out the packing products and own it, but we're so occupied with standing in line that we forget what the point of standing in line is. We distract ourselves the whole way to the register, looking at magazines or grabbing a few more trinkets to buy, occasionally letting other people go before us. We stall as long as we can, choosing to just stand there with the box instead of checking out and opening it to what's inside.

Maybe thats a bad metaphor, but I feel like that's how I'm living my life, and that's how a lot of us do. Do I really just want this waiting to be over? I can't say I'm spending my life anticipating leaving this world, and if I was told "the day is getting closer" I'd be freaked out that my death was coming up(and even more creeped out someone knew that), not excitedly waiting to go.

My extended family has exchanged many emails the past few days, and one included some of the few things my grandma has been able to speak during her periods of consciousness when my uncle, her oldest son, was with her this morning. She said in distress,

"I'm going to die. I'm going to die"

Seconds later, she spoke again.

"I'm going to live again. I'm going to live again."

Oh Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight

The clouds be rolled back as a scroll

The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend

Even so, it is well with my soul

surprise!

thats right, loyal readers, your eyes aren't fooling you.
I've decided to try to start blogging again. exciting, isn't it. I originally started this blog because I thought it'd be a nice way to let out all those pent-up thoughts online on a blog where no one would read them. Well, either those thoughts obviously didn't need to be released all that badly, or I didn't have the time or desire to write them. When I quit, I thought to myself, "when you're a college student with loads of free time and inspirational deep thoughts, you'll blog more". "You'll be so bored you'll have nothing better to do but blog". "you will be a sophisticated young man attending college and your words will be read by all those other sophisticated college students whose blogs you'll also read." False. ha. free time? False. Its hard to be bored with no free time and girls who force you to hang out with them(which i guess is an ok problem to have). False. I am not sophisticated. And do not currently read any blogs.
So why start blogging again?
Beats me. Maybe this will last even shorter than it did last time. Maybe I'm just thinking I'll start again because I'm very bored on this Sunday evening, but when real life starts again, this will fall to the bottom of the priority list(don't be surprised if that happens). but maybe I'll keep writing. Just because I enjoy it. And maybe you will too.

I wrote that week ago..and i'm just posting it now. i thought about just not posting that and pretending i never wrote it and leaving the blog out in the cold even longer. but obviously i decided to try it. wish me luck.

stuff

So..random update..I'm in college now..but its kind of pointless for me to have this..because people don't ever read what I don't ever write..if you feel strongly that i should start my weak attempt at blogging again..then i don't know what..start a petition or something

i play in the biggest soccer game of my life today..district game vs. Unity
i graduate from high school tonight 3 hours after that game starts
just an average day, in other words

its not going to prom alone..because i have my friends to go with and i don't mind being single
its not seeing most of my friends with dates...because i'm happy for them
its not watching guys put their suitcoats on a girls shoulders..because i would have been chilly without mine
its not singing a love song to no one..because i do it all the time

its singing a love song to her while she doesn't have a clue
its standing outside in the rain at two in the morning picture-perfect, minus the girl
its looking at her without her ever looking back

its knowing that she'll never know

band nerds unite!

we had the band festival on friday at dordt..it was ok..

(enter Jon Bierma from the future who just read this old post)

Hey Jon-whose-still-a-senior-in-high-school, you're going to play in concert band in college. And like it.
A lot.
so don't go dissin' the band festival.
oh.
And you're not going to be playing any sports.
Who'da guessed.
Just thought you should know that.
-
-
ha! that means you're going to actually become a REAL band nerd! How ironic!
-
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(Jon of the future returns to the future and works on Calculus homework)

lost my charge, i've been degaussed

so now that its been two months, a week, and two days since my last post, i've decided to return..the whole sweet-i'm-gunna-blog-a-whole-bunch-and-talk-about-every-detail-of-my-life phase is officially over. or, has been for two months, a week and two days. i guess i could have blogged more. noteworthy things have happened. i guess i just didn't feel the need, desire, or freedom from time contraints to blog. or maybe i forgot about it. thats a distinct possibility.

so that whole paragraph was me pretending the whole world missed me and is glad i'm back as i come riding in here on my white steed. not a horse; a steed. but i figured i should talk myself up a little so i regain the interest of the faithful who check this thing daily to dissect my brainwaves. being as there are none, do i blog in vain? whats the point of writing if no one reads it? if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, can the tree hear itself? if a deaf tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does the tree hear itself? better and more useful question; to quote my friend Trevor Boon, "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, who cares?" well, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around, big deal, right? but if a tree falls and triggers another tree to fall, and the chain continues, we have what Mr. Hospers would call the "domino effect." with all these trees falling, eventually someone will take notice. (then tell the logging company. who will get all their lumberjacks. who will be happy because all the trees are down already. so they have a head start. so they can take them to the mill and build something constructive with them).that is my logic. that is why i've decided to keep writing.

that is not why i write. i just made that up. but its pretty convincing, so i'm going with it. even if no one notices the forest's demise for a few years.

i hope you caught that already, but if that made no sense, it was a metaphor(really..i never woulda guessed). my thoughts/blogs are the trees that are falling. the person who notices is the person who reads it. the logging company is the people who discover this later on. the head start is people's minds being stimulated by this. the constructive objects that are constructed are people's thoughts.

wow. that was not worth it. you should have stopped me as soon as i started on that.

so i have literally said nothing. i'm sorry that wasn't worth your time. but i think i'll return and make good on my plans to keep the trees a-fallin'.

except hopefully next time they'll be like friggin cedars and red sequoias or something.that you can build palaces out of and stuff. not dying saplings that hardly even make good firewood. but the fire does keep you warm for a little bit. enough with the metaphors. adios