glasses

i am twenty five and for the first time i admit aloud that i may need glasses. i look out my truck window in my thirty minutes of quiet during tonight's shift and the trees are indistinct. Every day the reality of my mortality settles on me. there is a sadness in my bones where before, however gripping, it had always been outside me. what is this half-colored time i have come into? i remember a year ago (how horrified i am at the swiftness of the months) sitting in the park on my first visit here - the stoic silence of the tall forest finding that I was outside the drawn-up bridge. racing now swiftly towards the end...i hope to reach some break in the current where i might slow my passage for a time.

the end of winter

this is the end of my first winter. walking out the door my skin braces itself only to find that the cold has gone...my mouth smiles at its passing.

the blue steely siege gives way to the sun. these gray-fingered stalks, these grass's tendrils - are they bones? have they lasted through the frosts, their fingertips the shells of months-dead flowers? Will they live again or are they clinched fists defiant, now triumphant over the long night.

a child turns the stone in his hand and asks "why is it pasty white on this side?" the stone settled in the hollow of my palm like the Eucharist.

inevitably a vulture lands on the far-off cross-beam of some power poles every time i come to this meadow. My eyes strain to watch the silhouette to see if it moves or if it is just some indistinguishable feature of the poles-No there it shifts and adjusts its wings rocking two or three times back and forth as birds do to balance their weight atop their clutching feet. then folding its wings again like a slow sigh...my fingers idly turning the rock between them until i hear it hit the little knot of grass at my feet. I've dropped it, my fingers having apparently become distracted with the bird themselves.

Pretending

Sometimes i have thoughts like these:

for now I can think that I have some strange anonymous importance to every person…but I know one day my skin will sag I will have grandchildren and I will be reduced to being written off by secret narcissists like me. I will be an event one afternoon and people who are free from self-awareness might be haunted by the strange fact that something so seemingly endless as a person can vanish forever from the earth? But I will be gone and there will be green felt on the folding metal chairs. The tent poles have been hammered into the ground for a thousand other dead men like me…it’s a business it’s like a latte…we are a disappearing deceptive triviality passing our days…i can fight it I can deny the sickness when it comes and the fat when it gathers around my midsection my chin when it begins to sag….but I will be just a grandpa a novelty if I’m lucky…I will move to the shoulder while others speed by because the world isn’t mine anymore. One of millions one of millions millions millions who lives and goes away. And the world will not shudder and people will scarcely blink at it…they won’t even blink!
No more lies about me, I will be ashes soon soon I will be forgotten I will breath my last and make room for another to pass his days in turmoil and wonder and vanity. A pebble dropping into a glassy water but making no ripples… My face is melting, my hair is thinning, my knees betray me, my colon stops and my organs find a reason to rot inside me, and a senselessly determined foe claims me while the young ones pretend I’m not there. I’m pretending.

Dec. 30th
Perhaps it is just time that my heart behold the land I have left behind me, or perhaps I look back so as to scream in this present place “I am important! I am more than you think I am!” I am unpacking cardboard boxes behind Starbucks.

These past days my job has lost its power to define me. I am afraid that this will not last. None the less, I have apparently gone long enough shrugging off the things that most feed my soul and wasting all my energy on either necessity or entertainment. Entertainment, obviously, is something I have control over. There was a time that it was too absent from my days…but as of late it siphons away almost as much of my useful time and person as Starbucks does. I think that for at least a couple of months I began to believe that the normalcy of American survival was the reality I was doomed to – the rigorous prophetic life I crave was a distant dream or something that was my responsibility to create at best.

So, finally, I have been making priorities, saying “no” sometimes – and mostly not feeling bad about it, reading about the stuff that makes me most excited, praying the Advent collects throughout the day, meditating a bit, trusting my wife’s character more, and not obsessing over the life-cycles of mayflies in trout streams. It has occurred to me that many of us, disenfranchised with the church, have begun to trust our passion, intellect, experience, and ideas, while almost completely distrusting our need for God to accomplish in us and in the world all the stuff that we’re writing about in our savvy blogs. This has completely exhausted me and left me feeling essentially hopeless. Maybe I am the only one who thinks that I know better than the vast number of ministers who have come before me, but, assuming I am not, we must not merely trust the things that are new, flashy, intellectual, and – most importantly – nothing like the churchiness we’re all trying to disassociate from. Some of the least “emergent” people are so doing so much more in God’s kingdom than the rest of us.

In defense of the analytical and critical minds – it has been said that all of the prophets were cynical. I am not suggesting that we ought to snuggle up with the travesty that we see. If the canon of Scriptures attests to anything of humanity, it is that we are damnably prone to disloyalty to our Father and to self-obsession. We are not above this, but if we float completely free from Church Heritage and even current denominational conventions we are bound to misguided and probably somewhat godless destinations. We have great need of submission to God, and we ought not discount all that has come before us.

Here is a somewhat related chunk of something I read today that I agree with a lot.

It is true that, if one withdraws the unifying pattern of the creed, then the harmony of Scripture can be easily destroyed. Someone who is not attuned to the melody of the creed will soon find a cacophony of christologies in Scripture…

The creed is integral to scripture as a properly functioning nervous system is integral to the health of the human organism. Those who undercut a vital connection between scripture and the creed, usually end up discarding for a variety of historical philosophical, theological, political, and ideological reasons significant portions of scripture. Such a scholar is like a person who stumbles upon a beautiful garden of canonical heritage, tears out all the flowers but one – scripture – and then proceeds to peel off the petals of that flower until she is left with a bare stem or nothing at all in her hands. She then looks at the remains and marvels at the fact that they bear no resemblance to the garden in front of her!

Paul L. Gavrilyuk. “ Scripture and the Regula Fidei: Two interlocking components of the Canonical Heritage. Canonical Theism

Swanky Loafers Guy

Hey swanky skinny guy
with your elvis hair, your cheekbones, your designer sunglasses, and your triceps
you have some nice loafers and you think your americano is really cool to drink
you don't even think about the gas prices - just swipe that card it's all expensive anyways
way to tote that sophisticated messenger bag!
have you ever read a book or are you a rich highschool cheerleader in a swanky loafer-guy suit?
i don't know...
lets go buy something.

April 08 Intern Newsletter

I haven't had time to write anything lately so here is one of my favorite newsletters I wrote as an intern at the LA Tech Wesley Foundation:

The summer after my freshman year, I woke up one morning in West Monroe and decided that I was going to go backpacking in Colorado. I left that night at midnight and the following evening found me sitting alone on a Rocky Mountain outcropping, eating Ramen noodles from an aluminum pot in my lap with the setting sun warming my back. Three days and many miles later I happened upon a new morning and was surprised to discover still another altogether unique landscape. This day was a gentle descent that testified to the elegance of the mountains’ lower slopes. I saw green and gold grasses and wild flowers in narrow folds of valleys. I crossed modest creeks with a single step, and walked beside strong, nobler ones flanked with the famed aspens. Finally my feet found the last miles to be startlingly open over the lowest of plains bold in their vast width beside the sharp height of the peaks and trees behind me. It was gold, it was quiet, and the thin line of the trail before me was beautiful. The day was altogether different from the days before and as I walked a little slower to savor it I remembered the spots of the trout I watched, the jagged slopes of fallen rocks, and the cool of being above the tree-line. I remembered all the days and moments before as individual pictures.

It’s April second, and I remember the days, months, and quarters of this school year as though they are books on a shelf that I’ve read. I have a thousand moments of a thousand shapes. I pick them up and turn them over in my hands and remark at their uniqueness. They are vivid as the present and yet they seem years passed. The days behind me have ended. Today is new and I am a different man.

The greatest change that has taken place in me since I began this internship is that I no longer live by fear. I used to live my life analyzing all the possible things that I could be doing wrong and constantly fearing that I was unknowingly bringing disaster upon myself. To believe positive things about myself or to hope for positive outcomes were things I was almost unable to do. In the book of Matthew Jesus makes some remarkable commandments regarding anxiety. He says not to have it…not to worry because it doesn’t accomplish anything. Somewhere in the midst of this school year I began to believe that worrying was not advantageous to me, and that I had a choice about whether or not I did it.

I believe it takes horrible courage to live our lives to the degree that they should be lived, and that safety is the greatest threat to God’s desire to use us fully. In talking with students I continue to see that fear and hopelessness keeps people from going after the things they care about the most. Last Wednesday Scott told me he would be out of town part of this week and he asked if I would like to teach The Well, our communal Bible study and worship gathering. Initially I said no, but I found myself structuring my week so that I could prepare to teach if I changed my mind. My wife told me I would regret it if I didn’t, and of course she was correct. More than almost anything I want to teach Scripture, and for that very reason I am tempted to avoid trying. But last night I taught The Well.

I am sad that my time with these students is limited. As an intern, I continue to remember the things I have learned before – especially that listening enables love. Today I am able to live with greater tenacity because I have begun to believe that my heavenly Father knows my needs. The threat of failure has lost its power because I know that I am not loved for my success but for my being. My own story, my own encounter with the healing of our living God is what I bring into my meetings with students. The change moves me and drives me on that others may know it in themselves.

May we not remain in the familiar for the uncertainty of the unfamiliar. May we go.

Thank you for your prayers and support.

A Brief Announcement

Holly has a blog. You should read it it's funny. hollyford.blogspot.com More from me coming soon. For now - Good night and good luck.