i SHUT THE WORLD OUTSIDE `til the LIGHTS COME ON .

I feel like I haven't been here in forever. Weirdest part about it is that I've tried to start blogs, but I end up falling asleep, or not doing them at all. Hahah. I'd like to blame a few of my friends, but, honestly, it's not that big of a deal - you all are doing splendid without my reverberating of things you may learn on your own.

So, it's the third of March, and I wanted to do this last night, but I got home pretty late, considering I went to my KPS girls' play. It was a student-created play, and it was so good, so hilarious, so dramatic, and so entertaining, that I would have never presumed that it was just created by a student. Kudos to the girls of Yeah, Well. Life. and its Playwright. Nothing short of a fulfilling expectation - great as per usual.

Yesterday, my class had a retreat. We went approximately half an hour away from our comfort zone, from our school, to uncharted lands. Well, not exactly uncharted, but I had never been there before. It was an interesting place. We got off both our buses and trudged in, a bit indifferent and not entirely looking forward to the retreat as boys would be. We went into a relatively small room with four walls, a ceiling, a floor, and four pillars that supposedly held up the ceiling.

We started off with introductions and games. The games were fun. They livened us up a bit and made us a bit excited enough to pay attention.

Brace yourselves, this was a religious retreat: I try not to impose a particular faith upon anyone, but the message of the retreat was the key point.

It was interesting because it coincided with my Month by Month word for March:

H O N E S T Y .

The man pieced his identity together for us with his story. His name was Mike Rose, a friend of one of our religion/ethic instructors. He told us his story, opening up the stitched wounds of his past for a better relationship of understanding. He stated that he was a disbeliever of God's Love. He recounted different instances of when individuals had told him - after going on retreat after retreat - that "God loves you", yet he was completely dissuaded from the notion seeing as how all the things in his life were wrong. That all the things in his life were headed downhill, so he decided to take the pain in his own hands and dole it out to others.

He realized at that time that it was irrational and the wrong decision to make.

All the while he spoke, I was thinking of my personal dogma: "Everything happens for a reason."

He then cropped his story at one point when he had been asked by an attractive girl if they could spend the weekend together. He was bewildered as to what they were doing, but concurred all the same. She said that her mother would pick him up at a certain time - seven in the evening, I think it was - and to bring some money and a sleeping bag, then they'd head on out. He was curiously confused at what that meant - if he wasn't getting the right idea.

His anti-faith persona had been so deeply rooted that he shut God out of his life. He was of a Catholic denomination, if any of you were particularly curious.

He got in the car, and they didn't drive very far: they went to the church not too far from his house. He had been duped. He scowled at people for the rest of the night, inadvertently forced to be here, his sour mood permeating from the back of the room, where he sat, cross-armed and glaring at them all.

He delivered his story so well that we all could feel the emotions that swayed with the occurrences.

He then paused so that we could do another activity. I'm think it was in this order, but if I'm wrong, then it doesn't make that much of a difference, I don't think.

We were split into groups. About eight groups or so, I had five other fellows in my group, all relatively great friends if not my closest. We were given a large parchment and markers and were told to "write down the different ways and God shows his love to us."

My group was the best, for certain. It's a pretty silly assignment, you may think, but within the moment, we were all putting "our future wives'" names, our favorite things, family members, names of one another and what have you. He cajoled us into writing more when he told us that we still had too much white space on the paper.

So we wrote more, words overlapping one another. So very proud of our progress, each group presented their posters and its contents to the rest of us, some things more comical than others. All the while, he smiled and laughed with us. He recounted things from the different posters and, as he each inquired of the people who liked these things, he requested that those who didn't like them should turn around with their chairs and face the back of the room, because "God doesn't love you."

It was a strange thing. At first, I didn't realize that he was actually telling us to turn around. As he repeatedly read off entries, more and more people turned around in their chair. Eventually, everyone had turned around in their chair, and he went on the other side to greet us and acknowledge that, if those things are why God loves us, then we must not be loved by God. He then held our posters in our hands, and looked at us. He stated that those things restrained us from God's love - confined us to a realm that was completely dependent on materialistic things that could be taken at any moment.

He then proceeded to rip them apart.

I flinched.

We watched, a bit inflicted by his sudden and drastic change of atmosphere. We watched the bits of our posters, if not offended then aghast, fell to the floor.

We turned back around and he showed us this video, but not before telling us the rest of his story. The retreat turned out to be the worst weekend of his life so far, until the day for Confession. He berated himself for going to the Priest and pouring his heart and soul out to a man, who then resounded the words that so many other people had told him in his years prior:

"God loves you."

He was furious with the priest. They went back and forth, the priest ultimately giving him the task to let God know himself how upset he was. The priest told him to go outside, kneel before the Crucifix upon the church, and recite this three times: "Jesus, you've done all of this for me, and I don't give a damn." So, Mike went and did so.

He got outside and knelt from the path and looked down. "Jesus, you've done all of this for me, and I don't give a damn." He glanced up in idle transition. "Jesus, you've done--Whoa." He was reenacting his motions during this spiel - he rose to both feet and observed the man hanging from his hands and feet, impaled by nails, from a piece of wood. The crown of thorns and the gash in his side led him into a stuttering second reciting.

"Jesus, you've done... all of this for me... And I don't... I don't... And I do give a damn" came his third response. He told us that, it was in that moment that he realized what love truly had revealed itself to him as. Not the way he treated the women he was with poorly or drinking through his days to be cool with his friends, but true and absolute love.

" [ When God Ran ] "

Sometime prior to that activity or what have you, our groups were set to recount songs with the word "Love" in them. Whether it be in the title or the links.

My group won. [ Total bragging rights. ]

We watched that video, and he told us of a dream he had, which mirrored the notion of God giving his only son - his only son in his eternal existence - to "rectify what we had done." When he explained it like that, elaborated on what I had been schooled in for quite some while, it blew me away. And, of course, the dream of his proved to be nothing short of intriguing. I very well may end up writing something based off of it in the near future.

As a premise, he included to tell us that he had been married, he had two sons, and he was very happy - he had made the decision to love whoever he married fully and completely, something I admire and respect very much. Chastity, he identified it as, "sexually pure before marriage and sexually faithful after marriage."

Anyhow, he told us of his attempts of building a family, but when they had finally conceived a child, he had a dream of the little fetus he had yet to meet but was very excited and happy to have.

It went something like this:

"I was sitting in the waiting room of a hospital with my wife and a little boy that was apparently my son. The entire room was in a frenzy, nurses running all over the place. On the television, there was news of an epidemic - people were dying all over the world. Europe, Asia, Africa - all dropping like flies because of this flu that was killing people. The television had told everyone to go to the hospital, to get your blood checked - in case you had the vaccine to cure this thing.

I grabbed wife and my son and we went into a room that a nurse had ushered us into to get our blood checked. As we were waiting, the doctor came running up to us, a nurse by his side, with the biggest smile I had ever seen in my life. 'Mr. Rose, Mr. Rose! You've got it!' He told me, 'You've got the blood with the vaccine!' He cheered, and I was happy to hear this: we could finally put a stop to this epidemic.

But, then the doctor's smile faded quickly. 'I didn't expect it to be a boy, though.' I said, 'What do you mean?' The doctor looked at me sadly and said, 'We didn't expect for it to be a boy. In order for the extraction to happen, we need a lot of blood.' I looked at him expectantly, my wife and son alongside me. 'Well, how much blood do you need, Doc?'

'All of it.'

I was then faced with the decision of sacrificing my son, giving my only son away so the rest of these people could live, or keep him for myself after all of the things I'd gone through to have him."

He had delivered it very well, in a realm of our understanding, how stupefying it really is. Any parent could act miserable because their children prove to be a bit more than they can handle at times, but they most likely would not dare ever thinking of relieving themselves of such a "burden".

We defined Love as a giving act. Not an emotion, not just something to say, but a giving act.

We did another exercise. Take a piece of paper, draw a circle on it, and draw a line dividing it into two. Then draw a line perpendicular to that, intersecting the midpoint as well. Then divide each of the corners into two via two more lines. There should be eight pieces of the pie, and eight lines, each line will be titled as such: Physical, School, Spending Money, Social, Faith, Emotional, Sexuality, and Future; all number from one to ten from the center of the circle to its circumference.

You should try this: one being the lowest and ten being the highest, follow the criteria and figure out how you rank in with "God's Circle".

Physical - Attention paid in the mirror, how well you take care of your body or your appearance and what not.

School - How dedicated you are to your studies; your intent of completing assignments and making something of your education.

Spending - How prudent or whimsical you are with an allowance or budget and saving versus spending.

Social - Your recluse versus your extrovert qualities. How oft you go out with friends or how centered you are about spending your time alone.

Faith - Not exactly in a religious aspect or atmosphere, but your belief and convictions altogether.

Emotional - How well you deal with coping and opening up to others or even problems in your life.

Sexuality - How comfortable you are and how oft you think of sex. He wasn't trying to steer us in one direction or the other, but of how we'd interpret and understand it.

Future - How often you think of your future and if you have any particular, clear-cut plans.

Rating from 1 to 10.

Then connect the circles.

"Not so much of a circle anymore, is it?"

This made me chuckle.

You can see where I need some work. 

Ahaha... ^^;;

After this, we went to lunch and sat at circular tables and chatted it up. I jotted down some notes that I wanted to us for this entry. So far, they're proving me pretty grand.

When we got back, he challenged our faith. He said, "How many people believe that I could set a table on all of these balloons?" He had given us balloons when we returned, and after playing a game with a percher and a birdie that basically was impulse and collective coordination for jumping atop one another upon command, we inflated them with the labor of our lungs. It was fairly entertaining.

There were individuals who didn't believe he could set the table atop the approximately fifty-five balloons, and there were people who believed he could fit just as many as eleven or so people atop the table atop the balloons. The first person up there was a bit shaky, and we marveled, watching as more and more people piled on. Soon we got to eleven, and as the twelfth [ or thirteenth and a half, considering the joke was that, as a big and burly fellow, the next guy would step on and count as a pair of individuals ] stepped onto the edge of the table to steady himself, a balloon popped. He recoiled, but it was a bit too late, they mildly panicked as we were all taken by surprise, and the balloons started exploding from the pressure.

He then asked us again how many people believed he could get even one person up there.

It was an interesting thing, and, should we have been permitted to use electronic devices during the day, I would have taken a few pictures of it. My apologies.

We went back into our groups to conclude with the notion of our expectations as young men. We have been cocooned by the environment of our comfortable and enabling school, so it's molded us, shaved our rough edges into smooth corners and taken our oblong curves only to chisel them into defined features. Mike talked to us, with us, of the view of men, what it is to be a man, in society. The abstract and ridiculous things we said were so superficial that it was a bit offensive to hear such things, to realize these things were the sad truth.

He then requested us, each group, to come up with five or so qualities of a man that our school has instilled within us.

Our five were respect, strength, open-mindedness, confidence, and integrity. There were a lot of repeats, such as courage and integrity and responsibility. He then went into the seven virtues which are Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice.

Lastly, we closed with Mass. It was a very interesting day, to say the least. And I most certainly took the message to heart, if you couldn't've noticed already. Not so sure if the others did, but they were just as respectable as they needed to be for it to smooth over as such a thing.

Oh, so, yeah. That was about it. Nothing too much has gone on otherwise. I've gotten into college, for one! And my show last weekend was awesome. I'm purchasing a DVD, so if anyone cares to watch it, you can either purchase one or I'll watch it with you. =D

Thank you for all of your support and for those of you who bother reading. Even if no one reads this, it's good to know that there's a place where I can just dole these thoughts out for someone to eventually stumble across and use beneficially.

Don't forget, March is the month to be honest. Be honest with yourself, stray away from telling even little white lies. Responsibility is existent for a reason, and it's nothing short of robbing your own dignity and respect when you cross your fingers and curl your toes in deceit.

Be honest to yourself. Be true to you.

<3 ~ Monty.
=]