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.