Crashing...

I do not feel safe in the world. There are some very sad things happening at my church. There are a lot of hurt feelings and sadness among the people there right now. So that is very unsettling. But there are also some very bad things happening in another part of my life. Unfortunately, because of the public nature of the Internet I can not be very specific but if you ask me privately, I will be glad to give you all of the gory details.

It's really hard to explain something without talking about - but I've never backed away from a challenge before. So let's give it a whirl. Two things happened this week. In some ways, they are very different events. In other ways, they are very similar. Both have very real and very difficult consequences for people I know. Some of the those people I actually admire and have respect for. It is very unsettling to see bad things happen to good people.

The first event could take about a year to play out. It's an odd mix of a challenging and exciting project with a terrible goal. Many years ago, I was traveling on business. The weather was horrible - dark, mean skies, thunder, lightening, wind, driving rain. My plane had already been delayed several times. Finally they decided to try and take off. Needless to say it was a very bumpy getting into the air and being at cursing altitude did not help. I kept myself calm by pretending I was on a roller coaster ride at an amusement park. I tried to enjoy being tossed around in the sky. It was really a bastardization of a technique from cognitive therapy, but it was working. I kept telling myself this was just an amusement ride. But then I went a little too far... I started thinking about the engineers and maintenance people who kept the ride in good working order. I thought about all the safety features that are designed into rides to keep the riders safe. All of a sudden my mind snapped to reality with the thought... "Hey this isn't a ride and there is no big, bouncy safety below." Immediately I was over come with fear and panic. I almost fainted I could feel the blood draining from my head that quickly.

That's what the first event from this week is like. If I can focus on the project part of it - it could be great fun. There is a lot of strategy - like a chess game. There is a lot I can learn .professionally. This is the stuff of upper level management. I'm not sure how I got a seat at the table, but I'm there and when I just focus on the work at hand it can be an exciting, heady experience. The problem is when I think about what we're doing. It's kinda like being the architect who designed Auschwitz

The second event is a lot less grand, much more immediate, and even more disturbing. My faith in goodness has been completely shattered. For months (heck it's going on years now)I have talked about suspicions I've had. In many cases I've presented these suspicions as firm beliefs because on the one hand the facts seemed to support that. Heck, there was even a Wall Street Journal article that discussed this issue. But, deep down inside I didn't quite believe it. After all, maybe I was misreading the events I was personally involved with. Maybe my performance really was lacking. Maybe I was fooling myself. And you know how the press is... you can't believe half of what you read. So maybe it was convenient timing that the newspaper article appeared at the same time I had these suspicions.

But this week, there was an event that proved to me without a doubt that my darkest and worst fears were true. All the things that I had dismissed as paranoia and ego self-protection were true and not just a convenient stringing together of coincidence.

My faith in humanity has been completely shattered.