My bad (very, very bad) funk lifted at about 11:00 PM tonight. I have no explanation other than I was out of the house, not thinking at all about work, and doing something I enjoy, which is talking to people I have no emotional investment in whatsoever. Maybe I just needed a distraction for a few hours.

Lately I've been struggling mightily with feeling guilty anytime I'm not actively working, even if I'm just sitting still trying to solve as work-related problem in my head. And it's not a slight twinge of guilt, it a full-on almost-shame guilt.

See, to my way of thinking, I'm in so much debt and we;re so lacking in money, I feel like its a sin against God for me to rest at all, because to me, God wants me to work really hard, even until the point of exhaustion and beyond, to get myself out of it. The problem here is two-fold:

A) That's not Biblical, and God even goes so far as to command us to rest.

B) For some reason, working myself to death (and I mean literally, like have a heart-attack and die death) feels more acceptable to me than taking a day off.

I'm not being a drama king or melodramatic - I really feel that way; that it's morally superior to die trying to pay off debt than it is to live with debt.

I know of a man who once told his son that as long as his son was in debt, any money his son spent on anything that wasn't debt was stealing from the person he owed money to. As the man was an elder at my old church, that really stuck with me. Ever since then, I feel like I'm stealing from somebody when I buy food, put gas in my car, take my wife to Taco bell or rent a movie. I feel like I'm stealing if I buy Christmas presents for my wife or my daughter, or if I buy a t-shirt to replace one of mine with a hole in it. I feel too guilty about spending money to take my wife on a date, or take my daughter out for ice cream. IN fact, I'd rather assuage my guilt by working that try to maintain my relationship with my beloved wife , just to alleviate the feeling that I'm stealing from the institutions I owe money to. I definitely feel like I'm stealing i I buy anything at all for myself, including food, because I feel like I should be living off of day-old bread, plain rice and tap water until I pay off everybody I owe money to, because that would be The Right Things To Do. And hey - if the guy was a church elder, he must be right, right? I mean, don't the elders represent God to us common folk, at least a little? Don't they get appointed because they're wise and Godly men, men whose words we should heed and examples we should follow? If this is the case, am I really stealing every day from the folks I owe money to? if I buy food to eat, is that stealing? because it feels that way to me, and is has for a very, very long time.

And don't get me started on my Dad, either. He's 73, and he out-works me every day. He doesn't take weekends, holidays, birthdays, Christmases, Easter, Thanksgiving's off - ever. I've never seen his not work a day in his life, save on a camping trip or two where he wasn't near anything to do. It's like he'd rather work than eat. he's up every morning at like 5:30, and he's working on something by 6. He quits working outside when it gets dark, and then he comes inside and works until he gets tired. He says that I should be able to get by on an hour of sleep a night if I have to. People love him for it. I hear people say how hard he works, and how great a worker he is. Is that what I'm supposed to do, too? Am I just too weak to do the same thing? Am I a weakling because I either don't have that same drive or can't do it as well as he can? Is the standard God holds us to, my dad? If he's the example I'm supposed to follow, if He's the ideal of how God wants us to work I'm going to spend the rest of my life in poverty, man. I don't know that I can do that, man, and I feel guilty about not being able to do that, either.

During the week, I work 30-40 hours at the theater. On the weekends, I work at the theater for 8, 9 or 10 hours , and then I go to the bar for another 4 or 5 hours. After three days of this, I'm pretty tired. I start work at 10:30 and I finish at about 3:00 AM, and I don't feel like I'm working hard enough. I spend an average of 3-4 days a week driving my daughter around for no less than 3-4 hours car in he car just so we can spend time with her. I also working on our little home business as well - I spend about 15 hours on it the past three days, and those were my days off.
And yet I still feel lazy, and I'm willing to sacrifice time with my daughter and my wife because I feel like I HAVE to, because that's what Men do.

And don't get me started on how much I want to buy my own house again. Not for myself, but for my wife and daughter, and hopefully for our children. That's a hearts desire I can't even conceive of right now, and some days I don't even see how we're ever going to move out of my folks house, and that feels terrible sad to me, and makes me feel like a huge failure.

I have to force myself to accept gifts, too, because all I can think about is the money that went to by me a gift could have gone to somebody I owe money to.

So - that's where I am tonight. I don't know how to fix it.

And the funk is back a bit, too.

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