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fcb4 · 5 years ago

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My eulogy to an old friend.

“I grieve for you...my brother. You were such a friend to me. Your love for me was more wonderful than the love of women. How the mighty have fallen and the weapons of war have perished!” -2 Samuel 1:26-27

I don’t know how many heterosexual men can say this about one of their male friends, but I can confess this about a handful of men over the years of my life and Ken Masterson was the first.

I had become a Christian in high-school during a pretty significant decent into my own personal darkness resulting from a poltergeist of common cultural devils. Through a series of events, conversations and an eventual reading of a gospel tract, I responded one afternoon with a prayerful, private confession, surrender and invitation to the Lord to take over my life and I was born again. For me, it was a small match of a moment that led to a wildfire.

One unforeseen consequence of my spiritual rebirth was the impact it had on my social circle. At 15 friends are life for most teens, and for me they were my family, a dysfunctional one, but the ‘Stoners’ were my tribe. I quickly discovered that there wasn’t going to be much enthusiasm mixing Jesus with dope, drinking, doing drugs, sleeping around and all the other general madness and mayhem that went with such pursuits in Garden Home, Oregon.

I began to feel the pain of dissonance, debate, isolation and disregard and after some acute rejections, I began to pray earnestly to the Lord for help. I needed friends that could understand, support and hang with in my new life.

One day coming home on the bus, I noticed a new guy and he had a button on his jean jacket that had ‘777’ in red letters on a background of white. I was familiar with 666 from my affinity with death metal and all things devilish,dark and spooky, so I imagined it had to be the counter reality somehow. So I asked him what the button meant and he explained to me that it was a pin put out by a Christian metal band called Stryper (http://www.stryper.com/).

We chatted some and as we approached my bus stop, I started getting my stuff ready and noticed he did as well. When we came to the stop we both got up to my amazement. As we exited he explained that his mother and him had moved into the same apartment complex where my father and I lived. It was one of the first profound answers to specific prayer that I witnessed.

God had heard my cry and sent me Ken.

Through my friendship with Ken, I was introduced to a group of other young men and women my age, a new church and an unfolding journey of faith that would forever impact my heart, mind and soul.

Our hearts and lives got intertwined in ways that I now know as I approach 50, isn’t the norm for many. We really loved each other and that love grew to expand and connect with others who were before my introduction to Ken and others that followed.

We prayed, witnessed, read and studied the Bible. We listened to untold hours of music, went to concerts, services and bookstores and drank ungodly amounts of bad coffee. We read fantasy novels, watched movies and made our own, we hosted stick battles in the woods that always ended in bruised, battered and mud covered wildness. Our band of brothers, and a few sisters, held our own retreats, traveled to musical festivals and slept in the car. We started small groups on our own, did door-to-door evangelizing, spent weekend nights downtown Portland on Burnside witnessing to drunks, addicts, gutter punks and the homeless.

In our street evangelization we saw God do some amazing things, answer prayers and stun us with His love and power. We would often word wrestle with a certain sectarian barefoot, robbed prophet named ‘Rollo’, who had one of the best churchy lines ever said to me. I was holding a bible down in Pioneer Square in Portland one night while we were witnessing and I stopped to smoke a cigarette. He looked at me with one of those penetrating fundy looks and said “You should have left one of those at home.”. We never did make any headway with him lol.

We caused a bit of trouble for the church folks caught up in our whirlwind. Poor folks didn’t know what to do with us using the handshaking time in the church service to go out and smoke cigarettes. We were too pagan for some and too religious for others and the zeal we had was often out of control, self-righteous and obnoxiously legalistic. We were full blown immature zealots. We were radicals and started more fires than I want to admit, not all were holy fire. But I wouldn’t trade those days for anything, they were heavenly, holy, heroic and harrowing, hellish and hurtful but Jesus never gave up on us, even when we did on Him.

Inter-personally we were often a mess. We fought, punched, screamed, argued, pouted, rebuked, shunned, confessed, repented and forgave. We sinned, backslid together, or judged each other when one of us lagged behind or stumbled.

As time went on, I got married, and Ken was my best man in my wedding. He lived with me and LeeElla a number of times and once we had his mother living with us too. We shared life, faith, hearts and home in a deep manner that I don’t think will ever be quite reached again in my lifetime.

Unfortunately our friendship was severed in a season when we all got wrapped up in a man, a message and a manner of being a ‘outside the religious system house church’ that eventually ended brutally due to the sin and error of the leader and others. LeeElla and I were excommunicated from the ‘fellowship’ for me confronting the leader and challenging, disrupting and seeking to divide ‘the work”.

In that unraveling, I lost my friendship with Ken and many others.

Ken and I never talked again.

I tried to connect in some manner through Facebook and if you look on his timeline, there are many public posts that reflect my longing to figure out how to reconcile, but it never happened in an honest and meaningful way.

To get a message that one of your best friends in life died, is a difficult pain to absorb. I realize now that I had an unresolved story-line that I thought in the back of my mind would someday resolve itself. Now I know It won’t and the finality of that reality has hit me hard in the last couple days.

In the last few years I have rolled through a string of significant physical deaths: my mother, my grandfathers, my father-in-law, a cousin, a friend and former leader in my ministry, a dear church member and this week...Ken.

I am grateful for you brother, I did love you and do still.

You will always have a place in my heart.

I remember you.

Your raised eyebrow, Spock look.

Your laughter.

Your strut.

Your love of miracle whip and ketchup on whitebread sandwiches.

How you ate spaghetti out of the can, cold with a fork.

Your dream of being a guitar god.

Listening to Bloodgood together.

The way you would smoke your Marlboros.

How I almost died in your apartment from doing too much crank.

Dragging you into that guys apartment to fight anyone who was there.

They way you spoke in tongues and how your mom tried to make me do it too.

Your passion for the Bible and the words behind the words.

Your eccentric premillennial oddities like telling LeeElla that you knew who the Antichrist was.

Your black raven hair and it’s inability to grow as long as you wanted it too.

The way you would wrap the car seat-belt under your armpit to the horror of my wife.

Your mom, and all the stories, oh the stories.

Me having to make a “no prophesying’ rule when you and your mom lived with us.

How you struggled so often in your walk with God.

Your pain and loneliness.

The day you walked off the job because of that lying manager who fired me.

The way you idolized Rick and his white leather jacket.

How we bullied Dan into burning his Journey and Amy Grant albums.

All the girl talk.

How I can’t listen to Guns & Roses and not think of you.

I could go on but I will close this personal eulogy with a quote from a fantasy world that we both inhabited in different ways.

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien:

“At last the hobbits had their faces turned towards home…“Are you in pain, Frodo?' said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side. 'Well, yes I am,' said Frodo. 'It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today.''Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,' said Gandalf. 'I fear it may be so with mine,' said Frodo. 'There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?' Gandalf did not answer.”

May your soul find rest

and I look forward to the day

when we will sit together in the Kingdom, again.

Much love to you Ken,

you were a mighty weapon of war.

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tatayanne · 7 years ago

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Material Baggage that’s what I had. I had accumulated a serious amount of debt from being material oriented. I had carried all of this stuff with me from season to season in my life and struggled with the inability to be organized and focused. I needed to do some serious decluttering.

People always talk about emotional baggage. Rarely do they talk about the things we collect in order to satisfy our need to look successful. I’m guilty of this! That’s the material baggage. The extra things that don’t have a valid purpose.

I don’t know how or when I came up with the concept that having things meant that I was successful. Maybe this happened when I lived in this huge bubble of comparison and I assumed that a car, a certain house, certain clothes or certain areas meant that I made it. Yep, that’s when all of this happened. It happened when I stop appreciating celebrities for their talent and begin to emulate their style and wanted there possessions. That had to be when it happened.

It happened when I figured out that moving into your own place doesn’t mean that you will have stuff! So instead of taking my time and finding affordable pieces like a dumbass who was already living beyond her means I went to a rent-a- center and got the pay here furniture. What a serious waste of money! I spent nearly two years paying on a couch that should’ve been no more than $500.00! My house was furnished! I looked like I had it together and I had a flatscreen in every room! However paying rent, car note, insurance, lights, daycare, grocery bill, cellphone bill and on top of all that add a damn $200 a month furniture bill..not the smartest thing I’ve ever thought of. Not at all.

No, I still didn’t get it yet. I wasn’t successful. I had a car that was paid off but it wasn’t new, it wasn’t as shiny as other people’s cars and it didn’t have Bluetooth or aux cord capabilities. How lame was that. I wanted to be able to hit a button and unlock all my doors at all times. I need to be able to play music from my phone. On my sidekick. I need a car that digitally exhibited how much gas was left in my car because the dial wasn’t enough. Looking at the needle to see where it was between full and empty was not the contemporary indicator I desired. I wanted the shiny and new shit! I wanted to keep up with The Joneses.

I remember being young and finally getting a job that paid $13.00 a hour. I remember thinking that was great! And you know what? It was great for me but instead of allowing that $13.00 to provide me with a lifestyle that matched $13.00 a hour. I took myself to Carmax and bought a car by myself with zero down with a payment of $457 a month. That didn’t include the expenses that I would endure from insurance and gas on this SUV. Oh but I was living. I had a truck and it was nice. I loved it. I felt important. I looked like I was well put together. That was until it came time to fill that truck up! In 2011 it cost damn near $65 to fill that truck up. The insurance alone was almost $300 a month. Here I am making $13.00 a hour with a $800 a month liability because I wanted a truck. Lol! Maturity is a wonderful thing. I can’t believe the things I allowed myself to accumulate all in the name of “looking good”.

Next, I was living good and I was driving good so you know I had to look good. The nails, the weave, the clothes, the shoes it all added up to a monthly expense that wasn’t essential but for some reason astronomical. For some reason I was content in my struggle. I couldn’t let the outside know I was over here making payment arrangements and robbing Peter to pay Paul. That wasn’t cool. They couldn’t think I was struggling.

It went on like this for a while until about four years ago. I stopped and changed my circle a little bit and encountered people who had money! Made good money but lived below their means because they understood that money didn’t buy happiness or create peace but so much in life. I watched them, listened to them and slowly and I mean very slowly I begin to make internal and external changes in reference to my connection with stuff.

I thought about why do I spend my money on the most. I knew immediately that my car was the money pit. So I got rid of it. I purchased a small sedan that payment was $100 a month and it cost $23 to fill up. The insurance was $85 and with the help of my credit union I was getting it all the way together. This helped me out a great amount. It allowed me to make space and have room. The great thing about furniture places is that you can either pay them or give the furniture back. Hello! Please come and pick up all of these items. I’m going to work it out! The great thing about nails and hair is if you take vitamins, drink water and find a great product line! It’s easier to come off the weave and nail salons! We all have our different vices.

As I begin to reduce how I spent my money which was the number one thing that created my material baggage, I decided to really examine what’s important me. I made a list Faith, Family, Goals and Love! That’s what I wanted! I wanted to be faithful in all that I pray for, I wanted a family!, I wanted to achieve my goals and I wanted to love and that be reciprocated! So very simple but I was allowing people and their ideas of happiness and success project on to me how that should look! So as years went by I not only dropped the cars and the weave expenses but I dropped the drama and the meaningless entertainment. I dropped the cable and all those premium channels. I dropped the cooking the huge Sunday dinners unless it was Potluck style. Incurring huge expenses just for the entertainment of other people?! Never again!

After all of this helpful but surface decluttering and all of this mental decluttering I finally reached the point in which I was like, you need to physically purge your home. It took sometime to arrive here. I was tired of losing thing literally and figuratively in my mess. So I started sorting, bagging up old clothes that I hadn’t worn in years, there was some items with tags. I begin going through shoes, I had gotten to the point in which I only wore the same clothes and a couple pair of shoes anyway. I didn’t need this extra stuff taking up my space any longer. The size 8 jeans I swore I would get back into?! The heels I hate and only wore once because they killed my feet! The jacket my friends Mom gave me but I knew I would never wear it. These things stressed me! I don’t have no hair but I had flat irons, curling irons, rollers, flexi-rods and so many other things! Why?!

I was over the invasion. I had been sucked up in the idea that the more I accumulated the more successful I had became because stuff was status! I was not hoarding. I just hung on to unnecessary stuff. Pictured above is my closet after I cleared all of the stuff. I have 11 bags total of clothes that I will be sending off. This organization has helped me to move better and focus on why I own I it rather than how much do I own.

Some people are envious of things that people have. I choose to be inspired by people who are extremely organized and disciplined. It grows me.

Blessings and Peace -BasicallyiBlog Tah 🌻

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