Tomorrow is a new year. Another artificial marker in time... another rollover of some arbitrary counter. Another opportunity to make some sort of resolution on exercise, habits, goals, etc.
I don't feel any different today than I did yesterday. And tomorrow, I won't feel any different than I did today. Today, the sun rose and it set, and so it shall tomorrow. Any "resolution" that we want to start tomorrow might as well be started today. I don't believe "tomorrow" is a special "tomorrow." We have opportunities every day to start new.
"Behold, I makes all things new."
And yet, as I go through the journals, writings, and poems from this last year, I cannot deny that a string of days has wrought change. Or rather, retrospectively, I can say that God has remained faithful. Reading my journal from 12/31/08, I can humbly say that I didn't accomplish all my goals or resolutions. I have fallen short on multiple levels... community, holiness, academic goals, spirituality... and yet I am still here, enveloped and surrounded by an acceptance and love that is not rooted in the successful accomplishment of my goals, no matter how noble they might be.
I spent the year quite selfishly, and have found it rather vacuous. I frequently cheated myself with the cheap and easy when depth and substance required work and sacrifice. Despite all that, He has been faithful, and I will not make the mistake Israel made, which was to forget God's faithfulness.
So tomorrow is like any other day, albeit one in which I will probably miswrite the date as '09. Today I give thanks, and tomorrow is a day in which mercies are made new.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
What is man that you are mindful of him?
There is something about being alone in the wilderness. All the Jack London stories read around a campfire cannot do it justice. There is security in the other. There is safety in company. But when the cell signals of civilization do not penetrate the deep woods of wilderness, one is left eerily alone with oneself. The ceiling of stars loses its romance and strikes with its vastness. A residual image of beauty before floating into dreams is engulfed with an immense feeling of insignificance and finitude. “If an entire star, a burning fury of grandeur and power, is so infinitesimal in the blackness of night, how much smaller am I?” The breeze is a wind, and the wind is a howl. Darkness swaying all around does not promote warmth. For all I felt with my -20 degree bag, I could have been lying naked and exposed on the ground. And I was, if perception was reality. There were no walls around me, no ceiling above me. The dark recesses of my primal psyche, the part that has been repressed by modern lights and noise, tested its newfound territory.
In the wilderness alone, in the dark, all your accolades are stripped of you. Your degrees, your job, who you are as defined in relationship to others, the brands you wear and the lies you maintain, there is no one to perceive them or give them value. There is no one to affirm you or console you, to stop or encourage you. There is no one to feed your addictions or to reciprocate your codependence. There is no one to save you. The amount of knowledge and illumination you have in your life at any given moment is directly proportional to the strength and radius of your headlamp’s beam. Who are you, in the darkness of your own thoughts? When naked vulnerability is the frigid air you breathe, what is it that keeps you warm? When there are no brick walls to separate you from an untamed and wild reality, what grants you security?
It is rare to be truly alone, if only for a night. I will not soon forget it.
“What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” –Psalm 8:4
In the wilderness alone, in the dark, all your accolades are stripped of you. Your degrees, your job, who you are as defined in relationship to others, the brands you wear and the lies you maintain, there is no one to perceive them or give them value. There is no one to affirm you or console you, to stop or encourage you. There is no one to feed your addictions or to reciprocate your codependence. There is no one to save you. The amount of knowledge and illumination you have in your life at any given moment is directly proportional to the strength and radius of your headlamp’s beam. Who are you, in the darkness of your own thoughts? When naked vulnerability is the frigid air you breathe, what is it that keeps you warm? When there are no brick walls to separate you from an untamed and wild reality, what grants you security?
It is rare to be truly alone, if only for a night. I will not soon forget it.
“What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” –Psalm 8:4
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sense
At work, we tell our kids to try and understand their anger or their actions. We challenge them to see if there are other factors contributing to their frustrations. “It doesn’t come from nowhere,” we say. Our day, earlier events, stress, anticipation, relationships, a lack of sleep… yet when it comes down to it, those of us who are staff, seeming to have all the answers and insight, are not immune from such things. I sit here and I enumerate all the reasons why I’m in a shitty mood. 14 hours of travel. Drained on socializing. Not enough time with the family. Hating the process of packing for work. 2 hours of sleep last night. Yes, it all makes sense, but sense doesn’t always make things better. I think about the conviction in which I speak my hopes to those kids… my hope that they would learn to express themselves, to feel better after they share their emotions… hopes that they won’t be discouraged at setbacks and learn to accept what is out of their control… hopes that they would wrestle with the hurt, wounds, and disappointments they carry. Those phrases roll of my tongue like sweet honey, and it sounds so good when I say them. It makes so much sense. But my sense pesters me in the back of my mind… questions me vindictively on why I struggle to do that which I preach with such ease.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Coal Trains and the Red Line
I have a theory. At my job, I work 8 days on, and then get 6 days off. With this kind of schedule, months fly by in the blink of an eye. My theory is that instead of 30 some individual days, I live my month in 4 segments. With the beginning of each shift or off week, the end is in sight, and so that segment passes not as a collection of days, but as one block of time, similar to how everyone else would view one day. Thus, the four segments disappear much like 4 days would disappear.
Whether or not this theory is correct, I don’t know. But talking to a friend about future plans, he pointed out that according to my timeline of desired events, I would finish grad school by the age of 30. Thirty!! Despite the fact that grad school may take 5 or 6 years, it is but another segment in my life. When one begins it, one lives with the anticipation and vision of finishing it. If we are not careful and intentional, these segments in life will pass quickly, leaving us at a place wondering where all our time, youth, and energy has gone.
I don’t presume to know what it means to be intentional, but I presume that it’s one of the few ways of living life without waking up one mid-life morning and wondering how one arrived there or what the hell one is doing. I fear that our scrambling and striving, without a certain intentionality, will dull our ability to be alive. With every self-interested step we make towards our unexamined goals, we fall further into a void of eventual uncertainty that sooner or later, will overtake us.
It was surprising last night, with the Chicago sounds coming through the window, what the rumbling of tracks and the pitch of a train whistle would do to my memory. It caught me off guard and brought be back to the frigid winters in the boys HNGR house, looking through a frosted window across the yard to see the long cargo trains plow through the evening, much like the grayness that rumbled through my being. Most of that hurt, by the grace of God, has been sifted through time, but I can’t get that haunting cry out of my ears. And now, most of these people who have walked with me during those years are one by one leaving the place that helped form us. One by one, we treat this time as a steppingstone and keep moving on. There is something I want to hold onto, people I want to hold onto because by losing them, I fear losing all that I once knew and all who knew me as I once was, all the while not knowing fully who I am or who I should be.
Whether or not this theory is correct, I don’t know. But talking to a friend about future plans, he pointed out that according to my timeline of desired events, I would finish grad school by the age of 30. Thirty!! Despite the fact that grad school may take 5 or 6 years, it is but another segment in my life. When one begins it, one lives with the anticipation and vision of finishing it. If we are not careful and intentional, these segments in life will pass quickly, leaving us at a place wondering where all our time, youth, and energy has gone.
I don’t presume to know what it means to be intentional, but I presume that it’s one of the few ways of living life without waking up one mid-life morning and wondering how one arrived there or what the hell one is doing. I fear that our scrambling and striving, without a certain intentionality, will dull our ability to be alive. With every self-interested step we make towards our unexamined goals, we fall further into a void of eventual uncertainty that sooner or later, will overtake us.
It was surprising last night, with the Chicago sounds coming through the window, what the rumbling of tracks and the pitch of a train whistle would do to my memory. It caught me off guard and brought be back to the frigid winters in the boys HNGR house, looking through a frosted window across the yard to see the long cargo trains plow through the evening, much like the grayness that rumbled through my being. Most of that hurt, by the grace of God, has been sifted through time, but I can’t get that haunting cry out of my ears. And now, most of these people who have walked with me during those years are one by one leaving the place that helped form us. One by one, we treat this time as a steppingstone and keep moving on. There is something I want to hold onto, people I want to hold onto because by losing them, I fear losing all that I once knew and all who knew me as I once was, all the while not knowing fully who I am or who I should be.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Morte Christe
During the Good Friday service today, we had a reading that incorporated the text from “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”. Those words aggressively threw me against the wall of nostalgia, since I had sung the song “Morte Christe” with that text in Men’s Glee Club. For the half an hour drive home from church, my car leaked at the seams with old Glee Club repertoire as I relived standing on those creaky risers and hitting those low D’s.
I talked with some friends these last few days, others like me who curse and spit at the mere thought of remembering second semester senior year for their own reasons, those who would have agreed with Eliot that “this is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.” An ugly stain upon our hearts and minds, we still graduated and moved forward, strewn across the country, chasing our dreams to move on, and moving on to chase our dreams, all the while hoping to forget the unforgettable.
Where are we?
Perhaps my emotions were primed by the Stations of the Cross. I mean, thinking about Jesus dying is a bit of debby downer. I wanted desperately for Sunday to be right now. Right after the line in the bulletin that read, “The service ends in silence,” I wanted the lift, the resolution, the fix. I wanted to know that everything was ok and to bask in the glow of that empty tomb in a garden, with an angel shining like a Thomas Kinkade painting.
But that’s not how it goes. Today, we sit with the reality of death. We will go to bed with it tonight, and wake up with it heavy on our chests, even if the sun sneaks through our shutters. And we will walk with it, make it our own, let it weary our souls until God lifts us up, as he does Jesus on Sunday. But for now, we are Saturday. Neither here nor there, but moving forward like time inevitable.
I talked with some friends these last few days, others like me who curse and spit at the mere thought of remembering second semester senior year for their own reasons, those who would have agreed with Eliot that “this is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.” An ugly stain upon our hearts and minds, we still graduated and moved forward, strewn across the country, chasing our dreams to move on, and moving on to chase our dreams, all the while hoping to forget the unforgettable.
Where are we?
Perhaps my emotions were primed by the Stations of the Cross. I mean, thinking about Jesus dying is a bit of debby downer. I wanted desperately for Sunday to be right now. Right after the line in the bulletin that read, “The service ends in silence,” I wanted the lift, the resolution, the fix. I wanted to know that everything was ok and to bask in the glow of that empty tomb in a garden, with an angel shining like a Thomas Kinkade painting.
But that’s not how it goes. Today, we sit with the reality of death. We will go to bed with it tonight, and wake up with it heavy on our chests, even if the sun sneaks through our shutters. And we will walk with it, make it our own, let it weary our souls until God lifts us up, as he does Jesus on Sunday. But for now, we are Saturday. Neither here nor there, but moving forward like time inevitable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)