Tag: That Vision Thing

About seven years ago, I left hearth and home and moved a thousand miles away to go to a ministry school and be a member of the only church in the world that was doing it right. By “doing it right,” I don’t mean that I expected everybody in my new church to be sinless. I mean that I expected the church not to hesitate in pursuit of the glory of God. I was convinced that the biggest flaw in any given congregation was that either the leadership, or the congregation as a whole, was unwilling to make the radical decisions necessary to become the kind of people God wanted us to be. Where I was going, there was a unanimous agreement to make those kinds of wholehearted decisions.

I got burned out.

Actually, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. Continue reading “In Search for a Paradigm (part 2)”

I’ve discovered something. People don’t comment here when I say something particularly profound. Or at least, they don’t comment when I talk about something esoteric and theoretical. The only assurance I have of a good readership happens when I talk about making a fool of myself.

Fortunately for all of us, I’m in no danger of letting up on the foolishness. Continue reading “In Search for a Paradigm”

Things are fragile right now for me.

I’m not really sure what that means, even as I’m saying it. My situation itself is remarkably stable. Overcommitted, but stable. I’m earning a very decent living wage, if not one that reflects the assumed value of my degree. If I’d gone to school for the money, I would have gotten an IS degree, with a minor in web design. My church has finally decided to become what I have hoped they would be for over a year now. My current “recreational reading” is a 1200 page theology textbook. I’m on page 120 after three days. Things are steadily moving in the direction that it seems to me they ought to go.

Yet it is my nature to fluctuate between the worlds. It is especially when I am most free in the temporal world that I feel most inclined to fade into the eternal world. I am, and ever will be, a reluctant mystic.

So I find that I am fading, like I am drifting off into sleep. Except I’m not so often asleep. It was Edgar Allen Poe who said that those “who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night,” and that’s about as good a summation as any of how I feel sometimes. Especially lately.

In the last few days, I have been feeling more and more aware of… something. Perhaps the Lord is moving. Moving on me, moving in me, moving around me, or through me—I don’t know. But… moving. Or perhaps I am only feeling. People do that sometimes. Wake up in the middle of the night… feeling… not even feeling what, but… feeling. I guess people do that sometimes.

Two days in a row now, I’ve woken up feeling as though I had done some terrible crime—and I had only just woken up. How many evil things can you do in the 15 minute’s space between getting up and taking a shower? Perhaps it’s some evil heinous attack by demons, trying to catch me off guard and throw off my life. Or, again, it could be me. I’ve been getting over my yearly cold this week, and it has been most unpleasant and most sleep depriving. Perhaps getting lack of sleep combined with improper medication can combine to simulate the sensations of mortal guilt. Stranger things have happened.

Or perhaps my experience is simply the normal result of the confrontation between an increasing awareness of a holy God and my own convalescent spirituality.

Much as I’ve been enjoying slogging through my theology textbook, I keep running into the oddest sorts of conflicts. Like this quote: “Different theologians and segments of Christianity have suggested various answers as to what is the abiding element in Christianity: (1) an institution, (2) acts of God, (3) experiences, (4) doctrines, (5) a way of life.” Of course, every element of Christianity tends to at least acknowledge all of these elements, but simply tends to emphasize one of them as the “key” aspect of Christianity, like feathers are the defining element for birds. I looked through that list of options and thought that my own preference would be whichever one our Covenant fit under. My Christianity is a direct expression of a highly defined relationship between me (and also us) and my God. However, I’m not all that certain which of the above categories that is, or even if the Covenant fits under any of them at all.

I suppose that dilemma is a direct result of the whole “It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship” creed. I don’t know if I could summarize my position quite so clearly, but it would involve a much greater emphasis on the subjective. Not Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, which insisted that a person felt passion on a subject in inverse proportion to the objective reality of that subject. I don’t believe that the most important things are the ones that are least likely to be proven. I do believe that the things that are the most real to a person are the things that they have the most direct contact with. To a child raised in deep space, gravity seems a very ephemeral thing.

In the same way, while it is absolutely true (and I suppose, important) that God is Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent, it’s much more compelling to consider the fact that He is also El Roi, the God who sees, not only everything, but also me, in my situation; He is El Shaddai, the overwhelming, almighty God; He is Jehovah-Shammah, not so much everywhere as *right here*.

In these cases, it is not so much that the subjective is more *true* than the objective, as it is that the subjective is more *concrete*.

When last we checked, our hero’s forces were in disarray. The corporation’s financial accounts were rickety at best, infrastructure was failing, and there was a potential move on the horizon. (you didn’t know about the move? I’ll get to it.) Nevertheless, on the news of the upcoming merger alone, stock was holding, even rising, and management was optimistic. Life is transition.

Infrastructure:

I never knew a computer could self-destruct so completely. Valerie’s dad, in order to get the thing to work, had to replace the hard drives, the motherboard, the processor, and the case itself. While he was at it, he went ahead and upgraded the video card. The only thing I have left from the original machine is 768 MB of RAM, a CD-R drive and a floppy drive.

All my data was completely lost. There was no backup. This has completely crushed my college dream of keeping a copy of everything I ever wrote for all eternity. In the future, I think I shall have a much more cavalier attitude toward what I have to say. If it’s really really important, I’ll keep a hard copy. Otherwise… oh well! Eventually, I’ll get another CD Burner and start keeping useful backups of my data. But as it is, I’ve already written too many “important” things that have been lost for me to worry too much about what might be lost in the future. If I one day become a great internationally known figure, the scholars will mourn my carelessness. But as it currently stands, nobody will care anyway.

Finances:

This is the happy part. For two months now I’ve been totally and helplessly broke. It’s been a result of two conflicting situations: First I’m a graduate from a liberally expensive arts school, with the debt load of a new Lexus hovering over my back. And no Lexus to show for it, alas. Secondly, I had a part time job. Those two things don’t really go together. I won’t even discuss the paying off an engagement ring and the ever present opportunity to worry about acquiring funds to pay for a honeymoon, and eventually, a lack of co-paying roommate.

Both these prior burdens have been at least temporarily removed from me: I’m back in school (albeit a correspondence program), which means my $200 monthly payment has quite suddenly withered away (but oh did it linger in the withering!). There’s some extra cash. And I’ve now got a full time job. Same department, new position. I am now Chief Gopher and Lord High Lackey. Same wages, but 8 hours more a week, plus an amazingly good benefits package. I’ve never had any benefits whatsoever, so I’m doubly impressed. I’m still trying to figure out what the heck I’m supposed to do with vacation days. When I was a kid, if I wanted time off from work, I just quit my job. (You think I’m kidding, don’t you?). What’s more, part time people at my company are paid “in arrears” (i.e. a week late), while full time people are paid current. So when I switched, there had to be an adjustment . This came about in the form of about 3 weeks of pay in a single paycheck. It was a very happy day for me. I’m still in shock, though, from two months of paycheck to paycheck and bouncing check sneak attacks. So now that I have money, I’m terrified to spend it.

Moving:

Last of all. I’m moving at the end of the month. It’s not you. It’s not your fault. It’s my roommate’s fault. If he didn’t have a red sports car, none of this would be happening. It’s a used sports car that he bought for $4000, but it’s red and people have been breaking in to it. Our apartment complex is on a major intersection and there are no walls. So people just walk right in and do stupid stuff. Last month, some idiots drilled a hole in the lock of his car and made a botched attempt at stealing his CD Player. All they got was the face and some of the plastic molding on the dash. They also took a new leather overnight bag he had in the trunk. It was the second time in 3 months. So he decided he was moving. Now. Our lease ends July 31, so he’s out on July 31. I had two choices: I could move too, or I could find a new roommate. I chose the lesser of two weevils.

We’re moving together. I gave him an ultimatum that my payments could not go up the year before I got married. His personal mission: find an apartment in the ritziest neighborhood in town. The amazing thing is that we both got what we wanted. An apartment around a mile from Queens University for only $700 a month, utilities included. If you do the math, my rent may have actually gone down.

Meanwhile I keep packing. I was not prepared to move in a month. I’m stealing boxes from everywhere, and looking desperately for a free moving truck.

One last hurdle have I to climb
And then my life will look like…

Normal?

The image that I seem to have given everybody of my total abstinence from the ‘Net for the last week has been a little misleading. My roommate happened to have a spare computer somewhere in his closet that I’ve been using for the bare essentials. It’s actually a quaint little piece: it has a cute little wind-up key in the front you have to turn three times to get it to boot up. To connect to the internet, I have an empty can I set on the cable moden and a little string I run back to the computer.

I can check my mail and read Schlock Mercenary. The rest is just too much effort.

I also have pretty good internet access from work, and with my new job, I have enough time to additionally check my bank ballance and verify that I am, in fact, more broke than I have been at any other time in my life. I had more disposable funds than this when I was 12. (That wasn’t a joke–I had a nice little outfit going when I was 12.)

Things are, however, looking up for me. My new job is everything that I had hoped and imagined, which is to say, it’s a big hairy mess–but a fun mess. I’m the low rung on the ladder, but I’m mostly in the thick of things, being sent on errors, and generally the only person in my office who gets to meet people from other offices. I make stupid mistakes and correct most of them before they get caught.

As I was getting stuff moved from one cubicle to the other, and getting permissions for all my new responsibilities, I had several opportunities to run in with some of the IS crew. One of them told me he was surprised I had taken the position I took, since there were several positions open in his department that he was sure I was qualified for. I felt this was a very great compliment, considering I had just single-handedly obliterated the entire insides of my own computer.

Speaking of which, my computer is now in the capable hands of my fiance’s father. He’s an old school pro at this sort of thing. He doesn’t cut any corners, righ up to actually unpluging the machine and running a ground wire before doing surgery.

As far as I can tell, though, it was a lost cause in my case. The only thing that seems to be left is the case and a CD player. The motherboard, processor, two hard drives, and the power supply, all toast. I have no idea how this happened. It seems oddly suspicious that they would all go out at once like that. What I do know is that I have no money at my disposal with which to pay for all those computer parts. Valerie’s dad has been most understanding: he has agreed to take care of everything himself and merely take payment out of my hide. It’s the standard contract: seven years of indentured servitude. My only satisfaction is in the sure knowledge that Valerie does not have an older sister.

Life without a computer has been very surreal for me. I come home and find that there is little left to do. I make some dinner, grab a book, read a little, and collapse into bed: a very simple, orderly, ordinary day. Granted, part of that is that I’m still recovering from two months working the night shift, but I think there’s something more to this than the fact that I’ve finally removed that thick blanket from off my window.

Last year, during the height of the war, I had my radio perpetually set to NPR, mostly because it was the only radio station my car could pick up, and I was bored of all my CD’s. But if you eat a food long enough, it begins to find a way into your cravings, and you begin to desire something you never before really hungered for. I knew I had passed some sort of barrier when I was listening to their saturday news-gameshow and answered nearly every question right. As I smiled and nodded to their jibes, I realized I had become a current events junkie. And then, like too many concurrent bowls of strawberry ice cream, the flavor was gone for me. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to just keep listening until all the important events stop happening. It’s their job to go around making sure that something important is happening. Instead, I discovered that even the important things weren’t really all that important.

They’re just events. They keep on happening. Only the cast and setting change.

I think I’ve had the same sort of revelation forced on me by my recent Net hiatus. I had been frantically scrounging around, looking for good new blogs to read, trying to say something important enough to get mentioned on blogs4God, trying to be a big dog, noticing to get noticed, discussing ideas that other people were discussing. Being forced away helped me to realize that all of it is a bit of a vanity. It’s not like they’re saying anything new. All the Evangelicals are saying evangelical things, and all the Catholics are saying Catholic things, and all the Republicans are saying Republican things. All the business sites are just oozing with free prize inside and this radical new concept called transparency. And I’m not any of those things. I don’t suppose I’m necessarily against any of them, but there’s really no need for me to discuss whether Saved! is a movie worth seeing. The only reason I might discuss such a thing is that other people are interested in it. And I like people.

I like people. But attempting to clamor because they’re clammoring is a pretty silly thing. I’m just not a clammerer(…er). I’ve got too much C.S. Lewis in me for that and not enough G.K. Chesterton. I’m fonder of ideas than of finangling.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to go from here and place some oath on myself to only write a certain way. Studying all these other people has already had the effect of putting too many limiters on what I do and say, while I tried to find some essential standard. What I’ve done is simply to rediscover what I knew before: that I find books far more fascinating than newspapers.

My seminary correspondence work arrived today—for which I’m very glad. Life has been very… boring for me lately. I’ve been in a kind of isolated spot, what with working weird hours and having all my loved ones away from me. I wasn’t getting lonely, but it seemed that, of the important things, the things to which I really want to apply myself, none of them were available to me.

At the same time, somehow, things have been happening suddenly very fast. Things I need to think about, that is, not things I need to do. Tom’s getting married and I need to be there so I can be best man at his wedding. My work is going through a major transition: in the next few weeks I will almost undoubtedly be promoted to a full time position. Out of the 9 full time positions available, some 11 people were applying. Pretty good odds. But one of the full time positions available is not like the others. It’s an administrative job, which I’d really like to have. I think it would be more fun and more fulfilling, as well as a job where I’d be much more useful. There are about 5 other people who are thinking similar things. But even if I don’t get a full time position, all of our schedules rotate in July, and I have to pick a new shift. So in less than two weeks, my work life is going to undergo a major revolution, and I don’t even know what kind of change it’ll be.

Add to this the fact that my pastor at church has started teaching some things that I’m not so sure I agree with, and I’ve been having some heady debates with Zac over epistemology. And then my seminary stuff arrives. So I spent about an hour and a half cleaning my room while listening to the most expensive CD I’ve ever owned (the entire class, lectures, curriculum, coursework and everything is on a single CD, and the class costs $500). After about an hour and a half, my brain shut down. I turned off the lights and went back to bed, and I spent a good hour in that half-awake slumber where you milk through everything that’s been coming at your mind and try to curdle it into something stable (my apologies for the unwholesome metaphor).

As I was finally coming around, I realized what it was that was really bothering me. “Lord,” I said, “I feel so distant from you.” And he spoke back to me, so very clearly: “That’s because you’ve been trying to meet me with your mind.”

It crystallized for me then. That’s exactly what I had been trying to do. And it’s exactly wrong-headed. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The thing we do with our mind is secondary; that is, it’s what we do after we have met with God. St. Augustine had his whole life changed, then he wrote the confession.

To take from a completely different source, this is exactly what Wordsworth talked about in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that launched off the romantic poetry movement. The quote is “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” Attempting to write poetry without having any powerful feelings usually results in pretty insipid poetry.

But in the face of conflation, I was attempting to worship God in truth, with only a nod to that whole spirit thing. It wasn’t working. But the beautiful thing is, in response to my question, he dropped an answer directly into my mind. He came to where I was to give me a way out.

That, my friends, is why I love him.

I’m going to work now. If you pray, please pray for me that I will continue to meet with him, for everything else flows from that.

Ok. Theology is just going to have to wait. I’m still processing what it is I think, I think. I also have a lot of projects that seem to have suddenly descended upon me. Let’s see:

• Building this darn website…
  
  I haven’t exactly—finished, if you can’t tell. I have upgraded to the new version of Movable Type, but I still have to re-install the newly functional comments and put in email notification, and a dozen other odd things.

• Building someone else’s darn website…
  I was busy showing off my mine at work and a coworker asked me if I could set something up for his denomination’s prison outreach program. Hey, it’s not like I learned HTML yesterday. It was at least 2 weeks ago.

• Seminary…
  Yeah. As soon as I get my financial aid worked out, I’m back in.

• Fiction…
  This does not refer to all of the above. It refers to what’s below. I’ve been reading (and listening to) a lot of non-fiction lately, and it broke in me. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to need some fiction or I’ll die. Part of this means I’ve stopped reading Wasted on Jesus, and started reading stuff like The Chronicles of Narnia instead. But it also means that my interest in nailing down my theology has waned and been replaced by some new creative writing projects. So here’s my new project:

I’m thinking about writing a novel.

Unfortunately, you won’t see it here. Oh, you may eventually, but I’m not going to immediately start putting up first chapters for review. I don’t want to put anything up until it’s finished porcelain. Right now I’m still looking for good quality clay. But here’s my background:

A few years ago, I was listening to a sermon on something or other, and the speaker was a pediatrician who explained that he became a doctor because of a TV show that he watched growing up that was the 1960’s equivalent of Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. It made being a doctor into a powerful romantic image for him. Going out, being a hero, saving the day, that sort of thing. Then he said that he might have gone into ministry if there had been a show on called Bobby Connor: Texas Prophet.

Ever since then, that’s been ruminating in my spirit.

I’m thinking I could do that. I don’t mean that I could come up with scripts and production for a TV show, but I’d like to write a book (or series of books) where the main characters were a group of Christians. Perhaps a something like X-Men, where instead of “super powers” they would have different kinds of spiritual gifts.

I could do it. I know I can.

What I’d like to do is set the story in high school, perhaps starting as early as 9th or 10th grade. I’ve got some basic plot ideas worked out in my head, but nothing worth showing off yet. The problem is, if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right, and for that I need more than my own memories of growing up in the church. I take that line about “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” pretty seriously.

So… If anyone is interested, I’d like to interview them. Please put a note up on the forum, or email me if you have that address. I’d put my email up on the site, but I’ve found that having traffic on a website and an email on the same website equals spam.

The next couple of days, if I get bored enough, I think I may put some of my own autobiographical stuff up just so I can hash through it for content (it has nothing to do with shameless egotism, really. J)

And with that, I’m off to church!

I just want to clarify. Going to MorningStar didn’t make my dreams any more real. They merely imparted to me, as Frank Herbert would say, “A terrible sense of purpose.” Before, I had plans. Now I am determined to follow through.
My apologies for all the introspection. But, it’s my site, and these are the thoughts that have been interesting me lately.

A quick (not) survey of my schemes.

A Christian Bookstore

This market is so underdeveloped. I have some major problems with nearly every Christian bookstore, chain or otherwise that I have ever encountered. There are three basic categories that I know for Christian media. The first is Theology, by which I mean textbooks. Original texts, Peer-reviewed journals, defining theological treatises, like Calvin’s Institutes. The thick stuff that your average reader doesn’t really want to read.

The second area is Didactic, by which I mean the vast industry I seem to have discovered for producing Sunday-school manuals for the denominations. Teaching aids, lesson plans, daily readers. This area actually ticks me off, because it seems that each denomination has their own specific publishing house that produces their propaganda, er, paraphernalia… oh! whatever, that they use to teach their people. So the vast majority of Christians, at least in the United States, is getting their theology dictated to them by for-profit publishing houses with clear theological slants. Most churches don’t pick and choose. If you’re a Baptist, you buy from Lifeway. If you’re a Methodist, you buy from Cokesbury. Each distributor is completely exclusive of the other irregardless of what may actually be the best teaching available. That strikes me as pretty stupid. Or at least narrow minded.

The third area, Retail (for lack of a better word), is by far the most dynamic. This is where all the books, movies, CD’s T-shirts and whatever else is out there is produced directly for people to just walk in, peruse, and buy. This is where most of our Christian culture comes from: Veggie tales, and Dennis Jernigan; Hank Hannegraff and Rick Joyner. (Yes, I did just use both those names in the same sentence) Ironically, though this is the furthest removed from the “theology” branch of Christian media, in the general public mind is where most of our theology is actually born.

And there are two problems with the way the market is currently being run. First of all, the Theology and Didactic branches of Christian media are usually completely divorced from what vendors sell retail. What’s more, Theology and Didactic materials are further divided by sect. You won’t find much Pentecostal theology at Lifeway, let alone a Pentecostal Sunday-school lesson plan. Secondly, and far more importantly, Christian retail is almost exclusively limited to major distributors. If a Christian CD isn’t distributed by Maranatha, Vineyard, or WorshipTogether.com, you probably won’t find it at your local Christian bookstore. Yet most of the Christian media that is produced is actually indie projects. How many itinerant preachers come to your church and at the end announce, “And be sure and check out my book, which is published by Nelsen Bible Distributors”? No. It was probably published by somebody you never heard of. Especially if the speaker has anything really new to say. Which means that if anything really new happens in the Body of Christ, you won’t find out about it until it’s already over.

I have a plan to fix that. And I could spend the next 3-4 pages explaining all of it. Suffice it to say that I want to create a system of stores that sell every form of Christian media available on a national level, and still manages to focus a good deal of attention on local writing, music, and art. If a book, CD, print, etc. becomes popular enough locally, it will then be distributed on a national level

Oh the plans I have for that… If I hit a high enough level of success, I plan to dabble a little bit in radio and the production end of the stick. Just imagine the potential if we ever hit the international level…

Moving on!

Ministry

 

I will get that degree. I’m not sure exactly what all I’m going to do with it. But I will get that degree.

Christian Fiction and Poetry

 

I’ve got a couple of novels, an epic poem, maybe a Christian TV series floating around here somewhere. I could go into detail on some of them, but I won’t do it now.

Bible Translation

 

This isn’t exactly high on my list. But my major pet peeve with English bibles is that the translators spent years learning to understand the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible. But they spent about zero time learning the language into which they were translating it. The result has invariably been only half a translation, because the translator knew exactly the meaning of the original word, but didn’t have at his disposal the perfect word out of the 1 million available in the English language. So I’d like to do my own translation of the Bible. You know. In my spare time.

Family

 

This is at the bottom of my list, but it’s actually the most important. I’m 25 years old and I’ve been preparing for at least 20 to be a husband and father in the best family the world has ever seen. I want the world to be able to beat a path to my door and say “here lives the most wonderful family anyone has ever been a part of in a thousand years.” If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. I could go on forever about that too, but I don’t want to scare off any interested parties just yet.

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Anyway. I expounded in some detail about the bookstore, but on each of these things, I’ve been scheming for quite some while, and could speak with some great depth on all of them.

These are a few of my favorite dreams.

When I was a kid, my parents used to tease me. (Yeah. It happens.) Normal boys, they would tell me, want to be something when they grow up. You’re supposed to pass through these stages of different kinds of labels where you want to be a fireman, or a policeman. And then you grow up a little and you want to be a pro football player, or an astronaut. And then you grow up a little more, and you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a scientist. And then the sorrows and cares of this life rise up and choke the life out of you; you discover that you’re actually pretty good at numbers, and you settle down and become an accountant. Little boys are supposed to be always looking for these pre-packaged niches they can slide into and feel normal and successful at the same time.

And then I’d think to myself, or sometimes I’d say, Yeah, but normal little boys are perfectly content to play with Hot-wheels cars and G.I. Joes. I couldn’t play with toy cars when I was a kid, not really. It was too mundane for me. Yes. Cars. That’s how most people get around in this part of the world. You can go left, or right, or straight forward. If you’re feeling really tricky, you can go backward. We’ve covered that. Nothing new or imaginative here. Let’s move along! What I really liked, though, were those really nifty-cool cars that had doors you could pop open, because then I could pretend that this car had special doors that could fold out into wings, and then they could fly. Now that’s something worth thinking about. Cars that fly. You don’t see that every day. At least most people don’t. I do.

So my mom or my dad would say, “Kyle, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. What I’d really like is this job where I think up these really great ideas and then people get together and make them work. I’d be, you know, an ideas man.” And then my dad or my mom would chuckle (actually, I think it was my dad) and they’d say, “Well, I don’t think they make jobs like that.” And then I’d sort of mentally shrug my shoulders and go back to playing with my flying cars or reading my favorite fairy tales. And that was that. No ambition, really.

Well, sort of. I really did want to be an ideas man. I get these really great schemes.

When I was in, maybe kindergarten or first grade, my house was just across the street from my school. It was a grade school with this HUGE playground, because it used to be the town high school. The town built a new, nicer high school, and turned the old one into a grade school. They took the football stadium, stuck a couple of monkey bars in one end and called it a playground. 100 yards of playground, I guess back in the day they had money, because the wall around our playground was made up of solid red sandstone, about four feet high, all the way around. On one side, though, the wall went up to eight or ten feet, or maybe even higher, because it seamlessly turned into stadium bleachers. There was a low wall sticking out at the bottom, about three feet, and then every foot, foot and a half, it would go up and back, like a series of gigantic steps, all made of red sandstone, topped with cement. It was gorgeous.

It was also old. Old sandstone crumbles. I remember grabbing a friend and pulling him over to the bleachers and taking a stick (or maybe it was just my finger) and scraping along the stones, around the edge of the mortar. The stuff crumbled into powder in my hands. Yep, said my friend, and that red dirt? It’s only found in Oklahoma.

Well, I knew enough about economics, even at the age of six, to know what that means. If it’s rare, it’ll sell. Within days I had an operation going. We were going to harvest some of that red dirt, haul it across state lines, and sell it at exorbitant prices. We’d be the richest first graders in the world. I even had a giant 50 gallon bag (formerly for dog food) to carry it in. I don’t remember exactly what happened to our venture. I probably couldn’t get enough man power together to get anywhere with it. But anyway it fell through. Years later, having moved away from Oklahoma, I have to confess to my embarrassment that red dirt can be found almost anywhere, though perhaps not so often and not so bright. It also doesn’t seem to be much use to anybody.

When I was 13, I was on a swimming team, first though my local YMCA, and then through my high school. It was a different town—my family moved a lot. However, there seemed to be a vast shortage of Olympic sized swimming pools to practice in. The Y had one, and the Goodyear plant had one, but most pools in town were for recreational swimming, not for swimming laps. The only really good pools were to found on the neighboring army base. They had about 4 of them, all 100 meters long. Beautiful swimming pools—that couldn’t be used without a direct military connection. I saw a scarcity, and I jumped on it. I broke the news to my mom: I was going to build a series of Olympic-size swimming pools all across town. By virtue of their superior size and quality, all the teens would come to my pools and everybody would be rich. My mom’s only response was that I’d better wait to see if we were even still here in a few months. In two months we moved.

Understand, these weren’t “what do you want to do with your life” ideas. They were just schemes. Little schemes. The summer before my senior year in high school, I calmly stepped into my parents’ bedroom one night and explained to them my plan to drop out of school, get my GED, and open a new Christian bookstore to pay my way through college. I was completely bewildered that they insisted I complete my schooling. None of these ideas had the ring to me of “I want to be a…” They were projects I wanted to do not be.

Somehow MorningStar changed all that. I’m 19 and suddenly I decide I want to move across the country and attend a school that gives no solid guarantee of exactly how they are going to benefit you. For some reason my parents decided they no longer had the right or need to be my calm voice of reason. So I come lolloping over the mountains, thinking I’ve got the world in my pocket, ready for who knows what. I know I didn’t know what.

And the first thing that I really learned at MorningStar is that I am unimpressive. I just don’t have the star power. I mean, I’m a good talker, when I’ve got something to say, but I stink at jumping on somebody else’s bandwagon. I’m a relatively good writer, but that’s a mediocre skill in a land where hardly anybody really reads. There were a lot of other people there who were a lot more frighteningly beautiful than me, and every one of them was trying to lead somebody somewhere. I had a lot of places I wanted to go as well, but every one of my schemes required some preparation, and a lot of followers, and there weren’t followers left. Or if there were, they didn’t really have the time to sit through any proper preparation. So I decided to be a follower. And I discovered that I’m a terrible follower. Everybody was going the wrong direction.

Then somewhere, in the midst of all that, somebody had the audacity to imply strongly that there was something that I couldn’t do. It wasn’t even at my church. It was my then friend’s dad. I announced one day at his house that I was tired of living off my six dollars an hour at the grocery store, and that I was going to get me a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. He kind of looked at me, rolled his eyes a little, and made a sort of hmph-ing sound. The ever classic snort of derision. And something inside me snapped. If there’s one thing that can get my goat, it’s even the slightest implication that I can’t. I can do anything I set myself to, and don’t you forget it. Within a month, I had a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. I also had no friend, but that’s a different story and will be told at a different time.

Since then I’ve been saving up my schemes, and I have determined in my heart that I will not let one of them fall to the ground. Which is why I pray, Dear Lord, let me live to be 300. I’m going to need every minute of that time.

What am I going to be? I’m going to be me—and I’m going to fly.

In the last month or so, quite a few people have pestered me, people back home saying, “why don’t he write?” Yesterday, it reached a new peak. I was bluntly informed that I had an extra day off and that I ought to put it to good use. What on earth was I doing?

My response is simply this: The good Lord ordained that, one day out of every seven, you should rest. Furthermore, He insisted that every seventh year be a year of rest. Even beyond that, he said that every fiftieth year should contain an additional year of no work whatsoever. This means that fully 14% of each year should be spent doing no work. Beyond that, out of every fifty years of your life, a little more than ¼ of it should be spent accomplishing absolutely nothing whatsoever. And that’s not including getting enough sleep at night.

God is very serious about this. Jeremiah said that the Babylonian captivity would last 70 years to make up for the period of 450 years or so previously where nobody took a break. That is to say, God is serious about this resting thing, even if we aren’t. And if you don’t rest of your own accord, He’ll find a way to make you rest, and you probably won’t like it. I prefer to take the “fall on the rock and be broken” method, rather than waiting ‘till the rock falls on me.

All that to say, what have I been doing the last few months? Well, the first part I was being run ragged by work and school and church all demanding more from me that I was fully prepared to give. The second part was spent recovering therefrom.

First the news: I finished my application, including the marvelously abridged 2-page spiritual autobiography, which will be posted as soon as a get a round tuit that lets me do some tweaking for the web. I got accepted to school (miraculously, since it was within days of the first session of the last possible classes I could enroll to).

I also got inducted to teaching the jr. and sr. high Sunday school at church. I want to say induced, but nobody will let me. Either way, as Dr. McCoy says, “They drafted me.” I didn’t really want to, but then I prayed about it and got told to go ahead, and it has been quite the roller coaster ride ever since. I gave up on using the official (kind of stupid) Sunday school lesson book after about the 3rd week. I think it was the lesson that included “the only true prophets of God are 100% accurate all the time. Everybody else is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, attempting to drag your soul to hell,” that pushed me over the edge. I can quote scriptures that disprove that. I read the lesson 30 minutes before I was supposed to teach, and said, “I can’t say that. I don’t even believe that!” So I gave them the world’s shortest evangelism message ever taught instead. I had their attention for a full 30 minutes (still my greatest record yet). Since then, I’ve been making my own lessons up, and I’ve been much more successful. I haven’t quite got the hang of teaching yet—one day I’ll aim too high, the next, too low, the third day I manage to hit the left fielder who is actually standing behind me—but I’m getting there.

At work, we’ve gone through probably three crises since I last wrote. Business has bottomed out for the mortgage industry… people have been fired, people who probably should have been fired haven’t been… I almost got hired (but then people who probably should have been fired weren’t)… My boss had jury duty and I had to manage the whole dang office while she was gone (all this while not actually being hired, mind you). So, lots of over time (which is good), and little rest (which is bad), and no real job (which is really really annoying).

So I finally came to this quiet open place and I said “I’m sorry. This sheep is munching right here until the shepherd moves me on. My experience has been, consistently, that when I try to accomplish something out of a sense of impending doom, the work is shoddy, half-done, and generally worthless. However, if I am already rested, I find that it is already within me to accomplish something, and the work gets done with surprising ease. That is to say, almost always, it’s better to go ahead and rest before attempting to meet that line.

Yesterday was a great boon to me. It allowed me to finally get caught up on my rest, so that today I’m finally ready to accomplish something. I know this because at work today, around three o’clock, my entire Sunday school lesson popped into my head. (Hopefully you’ll see that tomorrow, since the news here is already getting kind of long.) Already, sitting in my place of rest, I can see another line looming on the horizon: I have two 6-page informal papers due in two weeks, and I haven’t done anything but the preliminary reading. But, I know my deliverer is coming (yes, my deliverer draweth nigh…), and He will be sure to carry me, as long as I lean on Him.

Blessings everybody! (and don’t complain so much. Gee…)
KB