How do I want to live my life? HDIFAMA?

Dear LORD:

Thank you for my beautiful and loving wife and daughter. Let us become entranced by your transforming life. Amen!

Dearest Ruth:

Your MEQ today was that you were glad to see me when I came home. Your smile was warm and inviting. I love you!

The way that I want to live my life is as a part of a loving community that includes you and our daughter. I am terribly lonely and longing for community and a sense of belonging. I feel very isolated and cut off from the rest of humanity.

I also want to live in a state of continuous transparency and intimacy with you as my wife, and with Jeanae as our daughter, as well as with other members of this community.

I want there to be total freedom in the community, though. I do not want to be controlled or dictated to in any way. I want us to submit to one another in love, and to esteem each other higher than ourselves.

I am so ready for this kind of humbling, simple life.

I want to move away from a life filled with complexity and demands. I want less stress, and fewer demands. Less income in exchange is fine with me. I am no longer impressed by money. I have been wealthy and that mostly just stressed me out. I would not turn away great wealth at this point, but I would pray to God earnestly for wisdom to handle it better than I did the last time. I was sooooo foolish. I want to be like the millionaire next door who lives a simple life in a simple house with an old beat up car and a yard that needs to be mowed. In other words, not a big deal rich guy who drives a fancy car and has fancy stuff. I want to be more of a normal sort of guy than I am now.

I want to be loved and respected for more humble, simple qualities than I am now esteemed for. I am tired of being a big deal IT guy. I just want to be someone simple and normal. I do not want to be seen as being brilliant or special. Why can't people just see me as being like them? I have been cut off from so many relationships by the masks that I wear in that way.

I guess the single word that I would use for this is simple. I want to live a simple life. Another word is community. I want to know people and be involved with them in their daily lives in a way that affects them deeply. And I want to be in a side-by-side equal relationship with them, not one in which I am somehow perceived by them as being superior to them either by making a lot of money, or having a lot of brains.

Simple. Community. Yeah. Like that.

The way I feel about this is relieved. I am glad that I have come to this point. It feels like you feel after eating a big heavy meal which leaves you very uncomfortable, and you finally burp. Then you feel much better! I feel that my life has taken the form of that big heavy meal. I want to be lighter and less filling from now on.

Another way would be like having a big tax bill or other obligation off your shoulders. My life has been kind of like that. A big heavy burden I have had to bear. Not you or Jeanae, I would never regard you or Jeanae as a burden at all. Please do not misunderstand me. I mean the notion that I am some kind of big deal IT guy with lots of money and a nice car. I am so tired of that. It just feels like a burden to me now. I want to be lighter and less heavy in that area as well as what I eat.

Maybe there is a way that we can be OK together with me as a simple, regular guy, not some body special. What do you think?

My feeling of relief is kind of tentative, since I don't really know what this will end up looking like yet. But it's growing. Right now, it's about as 2 or 3. I think it could become a 10 if I could get unhooked from IT, find another way to make a living, cut our living costs, and so forth. And then just live with you and Jeanae (or if she wanted to leave and start a family of her own I would be OK with that), and we could spend more time together, with less stress and demands on my time.

I would like to be free to travel with you and for us to have fun together. When you and I are together, that's the most fun I have in my whole life. As well as being together with our daughter, which is just as special too. The best, I guess, is when all three of us are together, like last night when we had dinner as a family. That was such a simple, relaxed time.

You are waiting for me, and you just made this very plaintiff sigh, so I guess I had better stop now.

Love,
Me