On a lovely Friday evening, having some chocolate milk and spicy tuna sandwiches with my daughter while watching a live concert of Matisyahu and it hits — I’ve been needing to do some shedding of skin so to speak.
When you go through a lot of changes in your life — change of course in terms of career pursuit, divorce, studying to steer your career in the right direction, working while doing all of these things on top of being a father — it hits. You realize that in the midst of all of this, you haven’t shed the old skin and attire you’ve been hanging onto while going through these changes.
You can only put so many patches on a jacket until it comes undone with the main garment coming undone under the weight of everything being added onto it. Before you know it, Babylon is burning you and it’s time for a new garment to put on and let the old scales just fall off.
Such is my recent conclusion with my spiritual beliefs and faith. Born and raised in a Pentecostal background, eventually embraced being more of a non-denominational Christian, then having married a Jehovah’s Witness and now divorced. So many things cluttered around and thus I need to just sit down and re-sort all of what I know and believe and just empty my cup of soul.
I mentioned Matisyahu earlier because those of us who remember him when he first came on the scene, he was this full-blown Hasidic Jew who can rap, beatbox and so on but as years went on, divorce, soul searching and he just shaved his head and all of his facial hair, looking like a cross between a South Park character and an old skinny lady from Brooklyn (when he has his long hair). He still has his faith, just not identifying in the Hassidic sense.
I’m pretty much in a similar boat — amidst all the political mass of madness in the United States, my studying unveiling the fallacies in some of the things I once held as truth while reaffirming others and well — sometimes you just gotta start over and that is where I’m at now.
