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.

A Brief Celebration of Trent Pettit and Other Excellent Friends

Now here is a fine specimen of man. This is Trent on our epic mountain biking trip to birmingham back in 07. In the past couple of days I have been struck with the sheer quality of some of our friends. This week has been a difficult time for Holly and I...in the midst of a move and such. The other night around ten I was talking to holly - still in Louisiana. She had worked ten hours that day, she was taking medicine that made her exhausted, and she needed to go to the grocery store. I called trent to see if he could take her to wal-mart so she didn't have to go alone at night...it was an obscure inconvenient request but he was on the way before I finished asking him. I can't tell you how much I experienced the love of God in Trent's willingness to take care of my wife in a way that I couldn't that night.. Similarly holly's friend Megan Dollar spent the entire night with her last night...and slept on the floor of our empty house so that Holly wouldn't have to pack and clean alone on her last night in Ruston. In truth I am convicted by the love of these people. They are compelled by something beyond obligation. They have a love that I pray to have myself.

Johnson City Starbucks

The Starbucks here in Johnson City is quite a bit different than most I have visited. The manager who interviewed me says it has the second highest volume of any Starbucks in the state. I have spent probably four hours collectively here today and I have never seen a less private coffee shop. People come here to be with other people…all day they have all been thoroughly engaged in conversation.
I am beset with the warm ache of humanity’s weight. There are so many people. Every face is a rich life…every seat here is filled with layers of waking and rising, thinking, indulging, guilt and joy, interest, honesty and façade. There are hobbies represented here, there are shames, there is the rickety scaffolding of ego, there are secret loves of simple things like beautiful undiscovered creatures in the ocean – hidden even from their owners.
I have known men and women set free. I tell you I have seen and heard them with my eyes and ears and they breath. They have shed the metal, jamming hinges from their joints and their iron corsets. They have let go their ponderous smiles. The hands of others have lifted them and born them – tasted their sweat and wiped the salt from their eyes…born them down the narrow corridors of weeping stone into the stale deep. And together they have emerged and they breath.
I witness the genuine earnest conversations here and I ache for the words of life in them. I hope for these talking patrons to be cherished…and I hope for their crutches to be eased from their hands.
People who live far beyond the boundaries of the savvy emergent movement are chewing on the threadbare seams of the church. I’ve heard it all day long. Today’s unspoken protestant creed is a burden that has been born by its last generation. It is like a deep splinter that has festered and swollen the flesh with pus. Its expulsion from the body is an inevitable, painful relief.
Through the negligence of her employer my wife was stuck with a used needle at the doctors office she works at last Friday. She went to the emergency room yesterday for blood testing. We won't know anything till late this week and she'll have to get tested again in six months. Please pray for her.

August 12

Crawling from the banks of America's momentous dream. Possibilities are choked by the necessity of the immediate tomorrow. And so the old - hopefully matured - notion emerges that there must be something more than this Christian take on conventional Americanism. How shamefully comfortable I am in my demographic, and how alarmed I am at the people who have always been my servants. The successful walk upon the sweat of the working class...our homes are built with hands that will never make what we do.
Christians became so occupied with the bustling of "church life" that our maintenance of what exists consumed the part of our minds that itches and dreams of what could be and who is not yet at our table. Today's Christians inherit ceremony and pseudo-tradition from their parents: as they learn to put out cookies and milk Christmas eve, so they adopt half-hearted asceticism as a hobby to discuss over four-dollar cups of coffee. From verses have been constructed schematics - the doctrines of men - our new lenses...our new glass foundations.
I am so easily preoccupied with material security. The sin of control and safety is lurking outside our door. Its desire for us.