22:30.

Perhaps I am "just another writer still trapped within my youth", like (yup) Dan Hill sung in his wrenching 80s power ballad.

Quotes that comforted me today, derived from books I eventually exercised enough self-control to put back on their shelves at Word just now.

"The central story of my life is about nothing else. An unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." - CS Lewis

If I look back on my 23 years, one of the threads that has remained on the forefront of my consciousness and being is this dissatisfaction. It breaks me and keep breaking me. Whoever I thought I was has been shattered in the wrestling with the Almighty.

I sometimes - not unoften - half-kill myself questioning if this sanity-bending drive could be just because I am screwed up.

I am searching for the me before the world was made. Maybe I am searching for my face before the world was made, as wonderfully expressed by Yeats.

[And Bruce Springsteen's singing Hungry Heart now].

Today, I walked the streets and felt an infinite sense of my finite-ness.

The Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth wrote, "The will for life is also the will for joy. It is hypocrisy to hide this from oneself. A person who tries to disbar himself from joy is certainly not an obedient person."

Now and then, I have been bothered by how infinitely normal I am becoming. I have always thought that with the meaning of life, comes happiness and all else. I am back at a place where I still believe that but with a difference, the different-ness of now having felt personally the desire for happiness in an articulated aware fashion. And there were times when I questioned my desire, if I could want it more than Numero Ono, and I wasn't sure if this fairly new (in its clarity, it was new) want was right.

God, your love is teaching me how to kneel.

In You, I am both common and unique, child and adult, cynical yet trusting, alive and dead... being more contradictions that I identify as I live in You. Keep me Yours, Lord. My mind is a whirlwind and a firewall all at once, and my heart is out of control.

Jesus, You are my best friend.

And You will always be.