the beard

My name is Brandon and I sport a fashionable beard. [You can see my picture up above. It’s my pouty face. Can you imagine a pouting 3-year-old with a beard? Go ahead. Let it out. It’s funny isn’t it? Laugh, laugh, lau…oh, sorry….] Mostly because I like it, the rest is because I have so much facial hair and I hated having to shave every 6 hours to keep up with it, so I let it grow. My fiancée, Amanda, likes it a lot. She doesn’t want me to ever get rid of it. I’m thankful for that. 

I’m a very laid back person — to a fault sometimes. For the last 5 years I’ve been planning to go into ministry and going to school for a Theology degree. Yeah, that changed. I wasn’t planning on it and I didn’t expect it, but as my interest grew in becoming a healthier person by exercising, detoxing my body, and eating good, clean, whole foods, something started screaming at me. It kept me up one night until well after five in the morning:

“Are you even paying attention to what you do everyday?! You haven’t enjoyed studying Theology for 3 years now! And you haven’t really enjoyed ministry for almost half of that time! What makes you think you’re going to like it any more after another 3 years from now!”

That screaming little voice was right. I didn’t enjoy it. The passion was gone from my full-time ministry plans. Recently I had started reading books on health and nutrition, real and organic foods, and changing my dietary lifestyle. I was hooked. Could I really change paths now? Should I try and move from ministry and the arts to nutrition and the sciences? What’s Amanda going to do to me? What are her parents and my parents going to think…or do to me? God, is this really happening? Do I need to do this or is this going to fizzle out in a few years too?!

I couldn’t lie to myself. I’m not going to do full-time youth ministry without my heart in it. I needed to make this change. My whole life I grew up in the church volunteering for different things, I only saw my dad as a pastor except for a few blurry visions of him wearing a blue lab coat taking apart computer-somethings, and countless people told me: “Brandon, you have the heart of a pastor” or “Brandon, you’re going to be a pastor”. Sheesh. My future was subversively planned out for me.

But now I’m breaking out of that mold. I still like youth ministry, but not as a career. I’m headed for nutrition and then I was thinking naturopathic medicine or something more specific like that. Not sure what, though. I’m excited. I’m scared. Amanda is feeling the same. Not sure if her parents know. They don’t really ask questions that would extract those kinds of revelatory (or surprise) answers. My family knows, but I’m not sure how they feel about it. They probably think I’m going to turn into a health nazi. My aunt verbally smacked me with the question, “You’re not turning into a tree-hugger, are you?!” No, Aunty, no I’m not. What has that got to do with naturopathy anyway?

It’s funny how anybody might look at one person that they’ve known for a long time and if that one person has done something for a long time a certain way, they’re stuck in everybody else’s mold, just like that, for the rest of time. Brandon : ministry : lazy college student. That was it for me. I grew up doing it, I was going to continue doing it. Until I broke the mold. I did pretty well in high school. Then my mom died a few months before I graduated and I still finished strong. Then I escaped from all that I knew and fled to Seattle to go to school. Except I took along ministry with me and kept that as my constant. It grew old and ragged and stale, but I kept with it because it was all I knew. No more.

Yeah, so I’m going to end up getting a bachelors after the amount of time it takes for an honors student to become a doctor, but this is where I am and I’m not ever going to live a lie — even if the truth takes me longer to accomplish something. I want to be set on fire when it comes to something I want to do. So many people live a life of a dying, smoldering match. Not me. Not anymore. I’ve sown the seeds to see which ones grow. I think I found the right ones. I’m changing the crops. Ready to reap something new. 

So as of March 11, 2009, what you just read was the literary explanation of the life of The Beard.