East and West

I've been praying and thinking a lot about the Muslim part of the lands around the Mediterranean lately. I'm not too positive why.

The East always holds the questions and the West offers the answers. At least, that's how I read it. The mystical oriental, the practical yank. Twain's character from Connecticut Yankee even begins his tale with something like "I am a yankee, and as practical and unsentimental as they come..." Western philosophy generally works for the natural world; Eastern looks completely past it. Hard to understand.

Please pray for me as I struggle with starting a career. I really want to serve God, and I'm so afraid of getting too caught up in life to admit that I, too, am supposed to be some kind of missionary. I just want to do what's right. I'm afraid that, out of a desire to take care of Amy, I'll settle for something that's adequate. She doesn't want anything close to that, but when we talk about what kind of material things will be necessary when we're married, I worry that we'll be too tied down to something unimportant to serve the only Thing that matters.

Maybe I should just head East, where people care less about this world. There's a definite truth to transcendentalism: we, for the most part, do not exist in permanence.