Week 2; nice to know people are watching

Andy this is for you.... I wrote this one a couple days ago, but never posted it, so there. The commitments still there, man, even if you can't see it.
Again, I seem to have come up with two characters this week. These two are from books. Sort of. One a character, one an author.
1) Adrian Mole - character, age 24, male, prospective writer, from the book Adrian Mole; The Wilderness Years. Very true to life, I think. He is a believable character, and the author, Sue Townsend doesn't shy away from making her characters lovable hypocrites. Adrian Mole seems to me, like a typical guy.. which begs the question, how did a woman write so clearly and truthfully about the male sex? Is it really truthful, or does it just seem truthful to me, a girl reading a woman's idea of what a guy is like growing up? Anyways, I like Adrian. I love his cynicism and slightly odd way of looking at life. I think the book portrays humans truthfully - thoughts I have that I would never think to write down on paper, thinking them too arbitrary or odd, are written down here.

2) Henri Nouwen - author of Here and Now which I am reading at the moment. So clear, so simple, so obvious, so many OH, OF COURSE! moments. I'll write one of his passages here:
To pray is to listen to that voice of love. That is what obedience is all about. The word "obedience" comes from the Latin word ob-audire, which means to listen with great atentiveness. Without listening, we become "deaf" to the voice of love. The Latin word for deaf is surdus. To be completely deaf is to be absurdus, yes, absurd. When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between the past and the future.
If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love.
For me, this is important, because I have a hard time really praying.. really setting aside a special time to listen to God. Terpstra this week also brought up the idea of living a life of prayer, everything that we do should be in prayer. So I've been trying the past couple of days to remember that and to be prayerful(?) in everything that I do. Not necessarily praying about EVERYTHING, but making sure I'm in that.. accepting state of mind instead of thinking "I don't want God to be a part of this part of my life." Also I think for me the idea of listening is so important. I normally just throw all my troubles, and the troubles of people I know at God's feet, say "please?" and get on with life. I forget to hear what God has to tell me, and I expect its much more important than what I have to tell him. He already knows what I have to say.
I notice that Henri Nouwen makes things lovingly clear. Throughout the book, he does not point fingers, he merely nudges in the right directions and I find my brain doing the rest. I can't wait to finish the book!! yay