I arrived back from our Memorial Day trip to the mountains of Upstate South Carolina yesterday afternoon, my two older boys in the car with me.  It was a comforting trip for me, even if the 55 hours seemed much too short.

For the first time in a few months, I slept through the night and had intricate dreams in the process.  I got to chat with Hillary in some lonely, empty diner with her husband  on the cell phone and Obama walking through.  I also was at some bizarre conference whose content escapes me.

I haven’t received Media Credentials for the WSOP this summer, and I’m still unsure if mine just didn’t get acted on or if there is some systemic problem. I’m emailing with Harrah’s, and the resolution may determine if I wash my hands of going at all or if I sneak out for a different, shorter look into that world.  We’ll soon find out.

My own view of the causes of my bouts with insomnia:  business/career stress for the future and spiritual decay.  I’m celebrating my tenth year of founding my company and being away from corporate America, and I don’t particularly like this mistress called unclear future revenue.  It is by far the biggest downside of being on your own, and I’m afraid I’ve gotten worse in dealing with it not better.

The more fundamental issue in my life, though, is stagnating spiritually.  That is a fairly fancy, nice description of things actually.  I’m living an indifferent life in my faith.  It is something that hurts my wife greatly yet she pushes through it.  That in itself should be enough cause for me to figure things out.  More fundamentally, I just wish I was back giving of myself more, using what I’m good at and living more intimately with God.  It is frankly one of the defects of the Christian faith:  that I can be a flunky, rarely pray, not read the Bible, not do anything for God’s work here, just basically wallow around as a sorry excuse for a follower and believer.

It pains me to pain my wife, but I long more for the man I used to be.  Sure, I’m a good person, a boys soccer coach that everyone loves.  There needs to be much, much more than that.  I’ve become a person who eschews superficial materialism who has become superficially spiritual.  Rocky steps ahead, and I hope I can take the first one with help from my wife.  Need another metric?  Look to the left at the posts marked Believing.  I went back and categorized a whole bunch of posts, and this is the first that fell into the Believing camp.

I want to want to want more.  But I know that it is enough to simply bow down and reach out to Him.  I don’t have to do fifteen things to prove that I really, really mean to recapture that spark.  He is that spark, and His gentle breath can absolutely reignite my fire.