Category: General

Goals

You know, it’s amazing how predictable people are. The job market is pretty crummy right now. I have heard more people tell me this semester that I ought to be an English teacher than ever before. The argument goes something like this: One day, Kyle you’re going to realize how important stability is. You’re going to realize that it’s much safer to have a guaranteed 30K a year than to risk everything for a job that’s fun and pays well, but where you could actually get laid off. I just don’t get this mentality. I once knew a lady, who had an adopted daughter, who was unwilling to take a day off from her minimum wage grocery store job to apply for a job that paid twice as much.

Now, understand, I believe in stability. I understand that it’s necessary to prove that you have a steady income before you can get a loan to buy a car or a house. I understand that most places frown on faith in God as a form of ready capital. I even understand that it is necessary for a Christian to be able to demonstrate stability in their own personal walk in order to be a good witness. But, “I have never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread.” And, for that matter, “All things work together for the good of those who love Him and seek his commands.” There is a distinction to be made between stability in your actions, and fear of instability. Fear of instability leads to looking for stability in a place where it can’t be found: in your employer, or in the government. True stability comes from the God who ever watches over you, who wants to live inside of you. True stability is important, but to make it the number one priority in your decision making process will cause you to achieve something else: mediocrity.

In my own mind, at least mediocrity is one of the ultimate evils in the world. Mediocrity means fear. Mediocrity means a lack of trust in God and an insistence in achieving only what you know you can accomplish. Mediocrity means gradually giving up on goals, dreams and ambitions, giving up on a little bit of those things that God has given us to separate us from the animals. Mediocrity means taking the little setbacks in life as punishment, as a sign to stop, instead of as an opportunity, as a chance to learn and excel. I believe that all things work together for the good of those who love Him and seek his commands. In my mind, that means that everything always works out to my advantage. I always win. If, in any occasion, I completely and horribly fail, I believe that the Lord will so arrange it that I have an opportunity or a chance to learn, so that at the end of things I will be able to say that I could not have been so successful had it not been for that failure.

All that to say, I have no intention of becoming a school teacher. Not that I have anything against school teachers. I know some really great people who are, or plan to become, teachers. They have a divine calling to teach in school. I don’t. I love knowledge, and I love spreading knowledge, setting little hearts on fire. Some people have even told me that I have a gift of teaching. I plan to teach my children. But for me to teach in a classroom, as a kind of career…? My only motivation for doing such a thing would be a kind of fear. Life is hard right now. Next semester I’ll be going to school part time for the last nine credits of my degree. I’ll be living off campus in an apartment where half of the lease is covered by school loans, and the other half will have to be covered by a job I don’t have yet. I just earned the lowest grade I’ve ever gotten in a class since maybe grade school. (Same basic reason too: The final essay, worth 60% of the test was “What are the most important things you have learned in this class?” The professor was very lenient too. The only answer he wouldn’t accept was the one I wanted so badly to give: “This class was totally irrelevant.”) But I am confident that even now, all things are working out to my advantage. Once again, the righteous will not be forsaken, and His seed will somehow manage not to be out begging bread.

Our school internship/career office puts out a weekly newsletter of all the new job offerings in their database. In this week’s list, fully fifteen of them were clerical positions that required an undergraduate degree and several years clerical experience. Nearly all of them practically described my resume before I sent it to them. Perhaps clerical work sounds like a step down from teaching. It probably is. But if you want to be a businessman, you’re better off doing grunt-work at a business than a higher paying job somewhere else. The issue isn’t the money; the issue is the dream.

On a personal note: Having miserably failed my ethics exam and been completely blindsided by a music history exam, I was reminded yesterday why I am an English major. I drastically reduced the effort I put into the other classes in hopes of getting somewhere with this ethics class. The ethics class I still did poorly on. I went in completely blind to the Chaucer class. I don’t think I had even done all the required reading. I am absolutely certain I aced that test. God is good, and He gives us grace in unexpected ways.

Blessings, all!
KB

Worse and Worse!

When we last left our hero, he was about to leave for Maryland with his beloved friend. He had four papers to write and little in the way of prospects for getting it done. Visiting relatives is a bad time to have backlogged homework. Well folks, it doesn’t get any happier for our proud commando.

Saturday morning we packed up and left the station by about 7:30. It all looked well. We actually got four college students and their bags into one Chevy Plymouth Sundance. It was Valerie (er… Constance) and I, plus two friends for whom we were giving a ride to Richmond. Of our two backseat companions, Gladys was going to somewhere on the North Side of DC (her mom was picking her up and taking her the rest of the way), and Lynn, an Irish (that is, an exchange student from North Ireland) was picking up a bus ticket and going to who knows where. We got to Richmond around 11:30 and dropped off Gladys and tracked down the greyhound bus station for Lynn. By 12:45 we were visiting some friends of Valerie’s for lunch. The family was that of Jon and Kris Hinley. Jon was the former Music director at Valerie’s old church in Knoxville. They had moved into their new house all of two weeks ago and were glad to have an old friend and her strange boyfriend to lunch. We made nice soft noises about their new home and their two adopted children (at least, I think they were adopted—they had dark skin and curly hair and Jon and Kris are both white and ) and headed off for Hollywood, MD. Little did we know that Doom was about to descend upon us.

That’s right I said Doom. With a capital “D.” When we got back into the car, it started making some funny noises. Well, only one funny noise. It sounded like there was an extra motor going on in sync with the engine. We would accelerate, the engine would go “RRrrrr!” and the other sound would go “Wwrrre!” Right along with it. Now, unless you don’t know, half way through an 8 hour trip is a bad time for college students to have car trouble. There wasn’t really much we could do about it. With much consideration, we decided to drive on (I mean, our options were?) and have somebody look at it before we came back. Unfortunately, it was not to be. We got just on the other side of Richmond when the car went “Wwrrre ya hahahaha!!!!” and decided to permanently stay in first gear. I wasn’t happy.

We pulled over. We prayed. I prayed for everything from cheap car service to supernatural automobile repairs to instantaneous transportation. Valerie started the car again and managed to get it all the way up to 30… in first gear.

A quick recap: It’s now 2:30. We’re in Richmond, VA. We have a broken car. This is not the miracle dispensation of time I had been praying for. We pulled into the nearest shopping center we could find and into the parking lot of a local jiffy lube type place. They were very nice. They couldn’t work on our car, but they did lend us use of their phone for about an hour and a half. We called everybody. We called Valerie’s parents, we called her uncle (that we were going to visit), we called the family that we had just been visiting. We called all these people over again. Ok, so Valerie called them all and I just looked helpful and got important documents from the car. But I looked really helpful! So here’s what ended up happening: Anybody want to guess how many mechanics are open on the Saturday before Thanksgiving? That would be about right. Zero. We were pretty much stuck till Monday. However, the nice people at the generic Jiffy did recommend a place just up the street which was so close that we wouldn’t need to find a tow truck. The Hinley’s decided they just hadn’t gotten enough to see of us, so they invited us to stay with them until Monday. After we got the car looked at and made our decisions about what was to be done, Valerie’s uncle John would come pick us up and take us up to Hollywood (MD, that is). So we impinged on (what were to me) strangers for a weekend, visited a strange church that Sunday, I got all my reading done, and we were back at the generic Jiffy come Monday. We drove the car to the mechanics, had them look at it, wend to McDonald’s for breakfast, and came back for the diagnosis.

Wanna guess what it was? Oh come on, you’d never believe. No really. Fine. We needed a new transmission. But, relatively speaking, it was good. They found a salvage yard that was willing to sell one for only $500. With parts and service it was estimated coming to $950. We had heard warnings from friends, family and random acquaintances upward of $1200. And the phone calls again. Valerie called her parents; I called my parents; Valerie called her parents again; Valerie called her uncle for a ride; Valerie called her parents again (she kept getting a busy signal). She tried calling her parents for a straight 45 minutes. Apparently the phone was off the hook. We made the decision to repair without them. The other option was that somebody had an 11 year old car they were willing to sell for $500. But it was ugly and we were scared. It just so happens (thanks be to God) that Valerie is a pinchpenny. She opens up these accounts, puts money in them, moves and opens up a new account, and completely forgets that she ever had the old account. This is a good thing because when some emergency comes up, she suddenly remembers that she’s been saving up for years for just such a time as this. If it had been my car, I would have sold it (wait… I did sell my car under similar circumstances). She was upset about it, but now that it’s all over with, I think she still has more money than me. Probably always will. I think I must somehow devise a way to claim access to all her assets… hmm… mwahahaha!

I could go on. I could tell you of the contrasts between staying under duress with a mild-mannered suburban couple, who had matching towels for their children, and staying by invitation with a wild gregarious couple out in the countryside, who both had masters in computer science and a total of maybe 10 computers in their house. I could tell you of the generosity of people lending their cars and how many times we used that car to drive across Richmond. I could tell you lots of stuff. But I can tell you’re already getting bored. Suffice it to say that we picked up the car today. It runs fine. We carpooled all the way back to Hollywood.

Now it’s Wednesday, and I still have four papers to write. I’ll be getting on now…

All things come to an end

Well, you didn’t think I could keep it up forever, did you? I had to stop sometime.

Actually, the supply of things to publish has not slackened. But my time has. Things are bad now. Really bad. How bad are they? Pretty darn.

Let’s see, I’ve got about four papers that are more or less late. That’s the biggest thing, really. Homework overload freaks me out, and then I procrastinate. I juggle very poorly.

The other thing is less traumatizing (for me at least), though by far it is more important. The state of North Carolina had decided that I am no longer a resident of NC. This means that I have lost about $4000 in grants from the state. As if this weren’t bad enough, the school, assuming that I would get the same grants I’ve gotten every year, went ahead and credited my account and gave me a $500 refund. I’ve literally had the carpet yanked from under me as I suddenly owe around $2000. If I don’t find alternative sources of funding, I get to get a job next semester, move off campus and go to school part time. Yippy Skippy! And yet this is somehow less bothersome to me than 4 overdue papers.
I think it’s because it’s easy to prioritize my financial problems, and break them down in to steps to viable solutions. I considered getting a bank loan to make up the difference, on the grounds that with an extra semester to look for a job, I’d have a better chance of finding a job. Unfortunately, it seems that they got this here recession on, and the chance of getting a better job in three months doesn’t seem to be any better than getting a “good” job now. It appears that I’m best off to save me the cost of the loan. My other solution involves politics. My advisor (in her indignation) wants me to take this to the president. She thinks that the school owes it to me to make up the difference. I don’t know anything about who owes whom, but I am more than open to other sources of funding. J So I went to the president. The president’s secretary sent me to the dean of the college before I could talk to the president. The dean sent me to the head of admissions. The lady who was the head of admissions left me with a voice mail saying that the school would not allow me to get funding as a NC resident because my “permanent address” is at the college. Tell me something I don’t know. Thus ends the first loop of the runaround. I figure by the third loop, I’ll know whether I have any chance of getting anywhere.

It’s the weirdest thing, though. I’m miserable so far as my classes are concerned. But my finances… happy as a lark. I know that it’s completely outside my responsibility and that I haven’t done anything I shouldn’t have. I’m in a place of absolute helplessness before God. This is a good thing. I know I can finally expect a miracle when I finally need one. The day I found out about my troubles, I was happy as a lark, laughing and ing jokes. I don’t think it was one of those “stress induced” thingies either. I’m upset about my classes, and happy about my finances. What’s the problem? I know I’ve been slacking in my classes and have done everything I could for my finances. No shame—no pain.

However. This here’s Thanksgiving break. Regardless of our classes or our finances, they kick us out for Thanksgiving. I’m going with Constance (and all her sisters and her cousins and her aunts) to visit family in the DC-Maryland area. I’m not taking my computer with me. Homework, yes. Computer, no. You know what this means. I suppose it might be possible for me to borrow somebody’s internet access for long enough to post something over the break. It’s also possible that I may pick up a lotto card while I’m getting gas and win the state lotto and resolve all my financial difficulties. But since I’m not a big fan of the lottery, I really wouldn’t be expecting to read too much of mine. And after I’d done so much to get my readership up…

Check out the archives and nibble on your fingernails until I get back. You’ll hear from me first thin, Monday morning, next week.

Kudos, and happy Thanksgiving!
KB

Zachari’s Song

Lost in the middle of a great big wind
My heart is on the fly
Then I heard Your voice and it’s drawing me in
I think I’m gonna cry

I heard mercy, on the wind
I heard freedom, calling… when

My heart is drawing
I will follow
Now I’m kneeling down

I am Yours
I cannot help me
What a thing is life to me?

Freedom found me
I must follow
You are life to me

I cannot
Help but listen
You are all I have

I stand up
My eyes are glisten-
ing I cannot see

Here’s my cross, Lord
give me a road
as I follow

I am not alone

Epiphany

“I fink I’ve just had an apostrophe”
“I think you mean an epiphany”

Either way, it’s not a new revelation, but something I always forget people don’t already know about me. I read a lot. And, being a good little Christian, I read my Bible a lot. Especially the psalms. I really like the psalms. I’m a worship fruitcake. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m gay. That means I’m mad crazy about Jesus and love singing worship songs. I just counted, and of the 75 poems I actually have on my computer, 26 of them are actually songs. That’s about 35%. But, having read my bible too much as a child, I tend to think in biblical imagery and make lots and lots of scriptural references. This is okay for the most part, but it leads to some complications after a while. I forget sometimes that people don’t sit around thinking in ancient middle eastern mindsets. So sometimes I’ll write a song that I really really like and then I’ll realize… no, that sounds like a homosexual love poem. It’s totally religious, but to a non-religious mind it doesn’t sound that way. It’s that technicolor thing kicking in again.

Somewhere I think I still have the poem where I was making standard scripture-like references to different body parts as the seats of different emotions and it ended up with me asking for bowels made of iron. I think I was aiming for something to do with courage, but it came out sounding like a dysentry problem. Yeah. I decided right then and there that I was going to have to make some adjustments before I went the way of William Blake. “Great Poet, but the boy makes no sense.” Took me about a year to completely switch, and I’m still not getting it right. I’ve got an entire episodic allegory about the bride and the bridegroom and the end times and stuff that I just dropped. My writing style shifted so much that I haven’t figured out how to finish the story. I have to re-write the old stuff, and I haven’t figured out how to do it without about half the meaning.

I think I went through a major theological shift in there somewhere as well, which hasn’t made it any easier. But I can’t quite really tell. It’s all bundled up in there together with the I was engaged to who broke up with me.

Long story. It’ll make a great essay sometime. Anyway, that’s sort of a long responce to a comment by SomeoneSpecial earlier today.

The Fire Inside Me

What am I supposed to do
With the fire I find inside of me,
That lifts the leaves of my awareness
And yet is not my own?

How could I subdue the flame
That burns beyond my regulation
The living light that is inside me
And cannot be my own?

I am enthralled by mystery
The fire that I cannot control
That burns within and is outside of me
And yet is not my own.

Hot off the presses! Yeah. I just wrote this poem about five minutes ago, as I was trying to explain to myself why it is that I will write poetry, even though I know it’s not exactly a profitable market. Do you ever have that happen to you? I know you do. This little imaginary guy shows up and tells you why you’re wrong and suddenly you’re on the defensive against a figment. Those figments are evil, because they know you really can’t get revenge on them. Right? You know you’ve been there, right? C’mon now… don’t leave me hanging…. Oh fine. Be that way. I’m the only one who ever actually argues with his figments. Anyway, I was trying to argue with my figment and I said (out loud, I think), “Well, what am I supposed to do with the fire I find inside of me?” And that shut him up pretty well. And the rest is… well the rest is in that there poem right cher.

You Are My Offering

You are my sin offering
You are my first-fruits offering
You are my only offering
Is you

And I am free to offer up
Everything I have
When all I have to offer up
Is you

(3-1-00)

Some theology goes with this poem, I think: Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that, in the Old Testament, there were three basic kinds of sacrifice.

First was the sin offering, where an offering was made in substitution for what was owed to God. I commit a crime; I deserve punishment. The ideal repayment is that some or all of me must be destroyed to atone for my trespass. The sin offering made a substitution for my own life by offering up something to be completely destroyed in my place, the ideal example being a perfect, spotless, male yearling lamb.

The second kind of offering was the first fruits offering, where an offering was made in kind as a token of what was owed to God. The basic idea was that everything I have comes as a freely given gift from God. If it belongs to God, by all rights, I ought to give it to him. Unfortunately, the laws of nature (and of giving) prove that I can’t. If I give everything I have to God, and he keeps it all, I will die. This would sort of defeat the purpose of God providing for me in the first place. There’s also the scriptural principle that you can’t give more than God. He has assured us that he will abundantly return our gifts to him, so attempting to literally give everything to God simply leads to this vicious cycle. The solution is to give to God a portion (say, a tenth) of what he has given you, the first fruits of what you have gained from His benefits.

The third kind of offering is the wave offering. This offering has nothing to do with what is owed to God. This is the only truly free-will offering because it can only happen once all your real debts to God have been paid. If a person finds that he is particularly grateful to God for something, he finds some way to symbolically represent the thing that he is grateful for. He goes to the temple and he waves that symbol before the altar in the shape of a cross. It is entirely a ritual act, and has no value outside of its symbolism.

The cool thing is, two out of three of these offerings are covered by the of Jesus Christ. I think everyone who is basically familiar with the concepts of Christianity is aware that Jesus on the cross is the ultimate and final expression of the sin offering. The same goes for the first-fruits offering, in most ways. (I hesitate to say in the area of finances. That just occurred to me. Must think through…) There are scriptures (I forget where) that say that Jesus, as the first man that ever lived a wholly righteous life has become to God a kind of first-fruits of the sons of God that the whole earth is waiting for. Also, Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and perishes, it yields no fruit. Jesus would be the seed that was planted, and he would be the first fruits of the harvest that is to come at the end of the age.

What can be left for us, then? Jesus said that the law prophesied until John and that not a jot would pass away from the law until all was fulfilled. (please forgive me for the lack of references. I’m doing this on the fly.) It would be a very easy thing to say that, if the laws of about sacrifices were a prophecy, then when that prophecy was completely fulfilled, then the sacrifice would pass away. Jesus was our sin offering, and lo-and-behold, all sacrifices for sin, the whole world over, have passed away. (I know, I can’t exactly say the same for the first fruits offering. I’ll leave it be for now. I don’t have time to properly do research.)

The only offering that’s really left for us is the wave offering, and what is every act of worship, but a symbolic act of gratefulness to him. Literally, worship is the only thing we have left to give Him…

It’s an interesting idea, anyway. That’s the sort-of theological basis for the first stanza. The second part is just a statement of fact: I can only give everything to God once I have laid aside everything I have, so that Jesus is all I have left to give Him.

Yeah. And it sounds so much better in poetry.

Blessings, all
KB

On that Day that I First Met You

On that day that I first met you
And I looked into your eyes
A fire settled in my heart.
You burdened me that day.

With a love so great as that, I felt
That I must learn to love as well
And I have been burdened
By the depth of your love

In the days that I have born
Since that frightful day
I have strained, I have burned, I have cried
No love so great as thine.

I cannot do it
To love so great as thee
To fulfill my burden
You must love through me

Gifts

I could give to you a thousand kisses—
Each kiss made
By the power in you
To take my sin from me

Or can I give to you my beauty—
When my er comes from purity,
The devotion to your holiness
That you have placed in me?

I could give to you my mind—
Which tinkers on, unclear
Except by the lightening power
Of your revealing word.

Or would you take my body—
This beaten, twisted thing?
It was you who, in your mercy
Restored my life to me.

I love you—
You know that, I suppose
But is there nothing I can give to you?
Some proof—a symbol of my love?

And yet I see a token
Resting in my mind—
A simple ring of gold
These simple words inscribed:

You are the branch
And I am the vine
You are grafted in me
And you are mine

The only thing that I can give to you
Is the one that you have given me—
The miracle that somehow
You are one with me.