Torn Sky

On Deleting

The other day, I wrote a horribly depressing blog entry. I was exhausted. I was hormonal. I had a lot of things on my mind.

Good writers are disciplined and write frequently, and professionals coax the muse to produce the words regardless of circumstances… but exhausted, hormonal, and distracted are rarely conditions that deliver a great final product.

So I deleted it a few hours later.

For most of my life as a writer, I’ve written with the capability to easily delete, alter, reformulate, reorder, rearrange, revise, reimagine. Writing on a computer allows me to do this, and I’ve been writing on computers almost exclusively since before I was 10 (except for a few diaries here and there). I take it for granted that I can delete things, and I can’t imagine writing without that ability. The very thought of sitting down to write with a pen and paper, just the physical effort involved, to say nothing of the alarming permanence of ink, strikes me as terribly cumbersome and off-putting.

I suppose I would do it if I had to, because I can’t imagine not writing at all. But it’s interesting to me to reflect on how the tools I use to write influence my writing, and what happens when the cracks show – like when I post a blog entry and delete it, because I’ve always had the power to delete things – but then people email me to ask why they can’t read it because they got a notification saying I posted something, or one of the 3 people who did read it before I deleted it brings it up in conversation.

Anyway, I’m a little less exhausted today, and I don’t feel quite so hormonal. I still have a lot on my mind, but it’s not weighing quite so heavily or pushing down on my soul quite so insistently.

There’s space. There’s breathing room. There are possibilities. There’s time – maybe not enough of it, maybe not ever – but yes. Some time.

This weekend, I’m looking forward to maybe watching a lot of Mad Men, reading, being around my sweetie, and not really having any big plans at all.

You?

 

What I Really Do

Short, but sweet. I want to discipline myself to blog more often, but there's no way I can do that if I always sit down and try to write 1,000+ words.

This interweb-meme-thingy has been all over your Facebook for the last few weeks or so. I assume that’s true because it’s been all over mine, and these things tend to come in bursty, over-enthusiastic waves, marked by a pattern that quickly moves from clever, funny, true thing to funnier, truer thing that relates more directly to my life to wow, there sure are a lot of these things heh heh, to Sweet-Mother-in-Heaven-does-everyone-still-think-these-are-funny-they’re-so-over!

I’m talking about the “What I Really Do” pics. There are, like, a zillion of them.

I think the reason this particular interweb-meme-thingy has exploded so much is that it speaks to a deep truth of the human experience that we desperately need to express, but we’re afraid we’ll sound like big sticky balls of emo if we say it plainly:

My life is terribly complicated and I am a many-layered little onion. I have a nagging suspicion that even the people closest to me don’t really understand even the surface of me, the simple truth of what I actually do with my days, to say nothing of the deeper truths about me like my passions or my fears.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the whole thing is just a funny commentary on how perception is so frequently different from reality, although I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly so ubiquitous if it wasn’t striking at something that goes pretty deep.

That Jesus and Religion Video Guy, and How I'd Rather Just Read Tolkien

So, I was a little surprised when my last blog entry got 3 times more hits than all of the previous blog entries I’ve ever written combined. I’m grateful that something I wrote could have such an impact on so many people, and if you are reading this blog because of that particular entry, well, hi there! I mostly write about spirituality/religion from a not-terribly-orthodox Lutheran perspective, my own life and foibles, how much I like using words like foibles, films, books, et cetera. I never write about politics and I don’t really see the point in debating for debates’ sake, although I’m happy to hear what others say and try to better articulate my own perspective when necessary. 

So this video with the guy who loves Jesus but hates religion that everyone is posting on Facebook.

 

Sigh.

It mostly reminds me of Tony Jones' Writing a Book About How RADICAL Jesus Is? Please Stop Boring Me. 

There have been some good responses written by others, so I’ll just link to them… one by Becca Clark, who I’ve never heard of, but she does a good job teasing out the pros and cons, and one by Nadia Bolz-Weber that was apparently written at the request of the ELCA. She is pretty much the closest thing the ELCA has to a rock-star pastor right now, and one of the people that always draws me back to the beauty of the church when I start getting too annoyed with the ugliness.

It’s not that I hate the video… I don’t. But I don’t really love it, either. There are parts of it that are really beautiful and parts that make me go “huh?” and parts where I want to say, “Well, wait, actually…”

For one thing, I’m so desperately tired of the “spirituality vs. religion” or “relationship vs. religion” thing. There was a time I said, frequently, “religion is for people who are afraid of hell, spirituality is for people who have already been there.” How arrogant. As if all people throughout all time, religious or not, don’t go through hell in some way, and as if the only possible reason a person would feel drawn into a community gathered around certain ideas about God would be fear of hell.

For me, at least for the last 6 or 7 years, it’s spirituality and religion, like the two contact lenses I put on my eyeballs each morning (and isn’t that a weird thing to think about, if you really think about it) that allow me to see clearly. If I leave one of my contacts out, everything looks weird. If I leave them both out, I’m blind as a bat. But with both in place, things look right. So yes. Both-and. That’s the only thing that works for me. Your mileage may vary.

But more than that, I think, was that as soon as I saw the video for the first time, I knew it would be reposted. A lot. And I knew that the inevitable “backlash” blog responses would come, and so on, and so much of what I see online lately feels to me like so much preaching to the choir and I’m just really bored with it.

It might be time for one of those Facebook breaks people talk about, I’m thinking. Just for a little bit. 

And what perfect timing to do it, since I need every spare minute because I’m reading The Lord of the Rings again! The first time I read it was 12 years ago, when I took a Fantasy & Science Fiction class at NDSU. I took that class because I had enrolled for a Women’s Lit course and realized I’d already read all of the books for it, some twice, and I really didn’t want to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening *again.* I saw that a Fantasy/Sci-Fi course was offered and thought, “Isn’t that stuff pretty much romance novels for boys?” And I took the class and found out I was so wrong, so wonderfully wrong.

The first time I read LOTR, it was in the last years of my drinking, which really took off and took over after I moved to Fargo, even though I somehow managed to stay in school and even do some darn good work while I was there. I can’t say I was particularly spiritual or religious then, and so a good deal of the beauty of LOTR was lost on me. I liked the story enough, and I really love the movies, but the richness of Tolkien’s writing and the depth of it were mostly lost on me.

But it’s so beautiful now. He treats the problem of temptation and sin and the human condition with such real consequence, while at the same time always treating his characters with such grace and mercy. Gollum is maybe the ugliest and most beautiful thing in the world, and ever since I saw this scene from The Two Towers early in my sobriety, I feel a special kinship with him:

 

Aww. It still makes me tear up. The inner conflict and the giddy tense nervousness near the end when he’s finally free… it just, like, nails it.

I also see in the Smeagol/Deagol story echoes of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the whole thing really just has so much depth and weight and grace and beauty to it, more than most books I read. It’s the end of the week and I’m not about to write an in-depth theological study of it just yet (mainly because I’m only 1/3 through the first book), but suffice to say, it is filling my soul with good things, and that’s always necessary.

For Minot

“The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.” – Faulkner

Every media outlet in the world seems obligated to do a year-end roundup of important things that happened or important books or movies or albums that came out that year… I usually like year-end lists; on the artsy lists I learn about things I missed, and I’m reminded of things I loved. On the news lists, I think, “That can’t be six months ago, it seems like just yesterday,” or “That was only six months ago? It seems like ages.” Sometimes both.

But this year, those lists were incomplete. This year, those lists were wrong.

My hometown, Minot, North Dakota, was hit by a flood at the end of June unlike any other in its history – unlike any flood that most communities will ever see.

The dread started at Easter, when I visited my parents’ house and already the river that runs through their yard was rising. But real danger seemed far-off. I’d seen the river high a few years earlier. It rose, it crested, it fell.

The dread continued in May, when my parents came to Minneapolis for my graduation. We spent time together, we ate at my favorite restaurants, we visited the Science Museum, I heard a great sermon and donned a robe and someone important put a hood around my neck that I had to return an hour later. In between, my Mom used my computer to check the river levels  multiple times a day on the Internet, and told me they had a friend checking the house every three hours to make sure their septic system didn’t back up.

And then in June, friends and family who live in Minot started posting on Facebook about mandatory evacuations – first a false alarm.

And then not a false alarm.

I started watching the local news channel’s live stream for hours every day. I prayed. I kept checking Facebook. I felt like I should be in Minot, but I couldn’t be, and anyway what could I do to help, really? My gifts mostly have to do with words, not engineering or disaster preparedness or how to lift sandbags for 16 hours without collapsing.

My parents evacuated.

And the river rose. And crested.

I watched the local news feed as they flew over the town and surrounding area. I tried to locate landmarks. I found myself hypnotized by Facebook photo albums, focusing on street signs, timestamps, descriptions, trying to remember the way the river winds through town.

I saw pictures from the street where my childhood church is. The river was down the block. Then a few feet closer. Then in the parking lot.

After a few days, I stopped watching the news feed all day. I was finishing my final seminary class and just starting my current job, and I told myself that I had to focus on those things.

I was struck with waves of guilt – it was wrong for me to turn off the local news feed when so many hundreds of people I loved couldn’t just turn off what was happening in their lives. I ping-ponged emotionally between feeling helpless and feeling like I had to focus on my own responsibilities and feeling like I had an obligation to watch without turning away because after all, they couldn’t turn away.

But another hard part was feeling like this was all happening to so many people I cared about, seeing how my Facebook wall was covered with updates and laments and little glimmers of hope and everything in between in the weeks following the flood…

…and it seemed like no one around me was paying attention or even knew it was happening.

There was some national news coverage, for a day or two, but not much – a few aerial photos, and then nothing. They prayed for Minot for many weeks at worship services I attended, and I was grateful for that. When I told someone at my new job where I was from and what was happening there, he shrugged. Hadn’t heard about it. Offered a mumbled “that’s too bad,” as he walked away to focus on other things.

I went back to visit on Labor Day weekend.

I’ve always had a weird connection to houses that I see in my day-to-day life. I’ll feel a special affinity for a garden gnome, or a little Victorian cupola, or the way a porch looks so inviting. In my own neighborhood now, I have the Mayberry House, the House That Looks Like California, the 1955 Driveway, the Hippies With a Pile of Plastic Pink Flamingos, and many, many shoddy, slapped-on-looking additions that warm my heart.

I didn’t realize how many of those connections I still had in Minot until I drove around near 4^th Avenue Northwest. And I saw the little blue duplex with the round porthole windows. The long, low ranch house with the ferns that looks so 60’s. The dark brown house with turquoise trim, so unashamed of its ugliness.

Hollow. Dark. Port-a-potties on every corner like periods at the end of tragic sentences.

House after house after house after house after house. Block upon block. Haunted and empty and wrecked and the tears were rising with a tightness in my throat. The thing that came to mind, and I mean in no way to minimize anyone’s suffering, was rape. A violent taking and a violation of trust. A devastation that can’t be undone. And blood and sweat and tears everywhere, poured all over the only place that I’ve ever lived long enough to really call home.

My mom and I visited a family friend, and walked with her through the husk of her home, where I had spent countless teenage hours hanging out with friends.

She showed us where their FEMA trailer would go and worried about whether their dog would do okay in such a small space.

She showed us a statue of the Virgin Mary that had mysteriously washed up in their home.

She told us about the red tape. There is a lot of red tape.

In October, I went back to Minot again to preach at the church where I grew up, Christ Lutheran. The church no longer had carpet or pews or heat or plumbing. It was their first time worshipping in that space since June, and I was humbled that this community who had been through so much would even bother to listen to me, someone who’d watched it all from the comfort of a couch 500 miles away.

And then I went back again for Christmas. There were more FEMA trailers around town, many more. A whole village of them not far from my parents’ house, which had thankfully been (mostly) spared, although their outbuildings and property were hit hard. There was heat in the church, although the future for that building remains uncertain as I write this.

And then the year-end lists came from all the magazines and websites and news shows.

And no one said a word about Minot.

I’m not saying I expected the flood that came through my hometown to be number 1, or even number 2 or 3. A lot of devastating things happened all over the world, and some of them affected many more people than the flood in Minot did. I am troubled by the attitude I’ve sometimes seen in smaller towns that is suspicious or derisive of anyone or anything from a city of over 200,000, that thinks people in big cities are all uncaring jerks who don’t care about the “real” America. That’s not true, and I don’t think that that’s what happened with the year-end lists.

I guess I don’t know what happened.

I’m not saying that what happened in Minot was the most important thing that happened in the world in 2011. But it was the most important thing that happened in my world. And it was the most important thing that happened in the world of hundreds of people I know and care about.

And damn it, it may not be number 1, but it sure as hell belongs on the list somewhere.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If a river rages through a town and destroys thousands of homes and breaks thousands of hearts and leaves behind millions of dollars’ worth of damage and millions of tears and the national news media ignores it, does it matter?

Ask the families who celebrated Christmas in a FEMA trailer.

Ask my mom, who has to help figure out what to do with a devastated church community in between figuring out ways to remove toxic crud from hundreds of feet of vinyl fencing.

Ask the block after block after block after block of empty houses that still sit dark and hollow, six months later.

Haunted. Empty. Wrecked.

They will tell you the answer you need.

New Work, First Call, and the Ever-Looming Future

It seems fitting that as I’m still in limbo about my future/calling/career and coming to the end of a semester studying the Interwebs for a class, I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s novel Makers. I only wish I was getting some type of course credit for it.

Set sometime in the next decade or so, Makers describes an America a lot like the one you know, but a little bit different. Protagonist Suzanne Church sets out to profile the “New Work” movement, where small teams of inventors who are kind-of-independent but kind-of-financed-by-huge-corporations use Horatio-Alger ingenuity and 3D printers to dream up and create techy little tchotchkes. These include everything from a system that will tell you where any item in your house is located (cool) to a linked group of Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that can drive a car for you (even cooler).

Church is so enamored with the New Work movement and all of its freewheeling, freethinking techno-creative inventors that she leaves her job for a major newspaper to cover the movement full-time as an independent blogger. She transitions so seamlessly from the steady income of a corporate paycheck to a steady income from banner ads on her blog that it makes you think you could do it, too.

It would seem that this is a world where everyone is richer than you and smarter than you and cooler than you, but, y’know, cool enough that they don’t make a big deal out of it.

But it’s not really that kind of world that Docotow is describing. (I guess he’s left that to the likes of Seth Godin and Clay Shirky.)

There’s also a shantytown of Dr. Seuss-ish houses filled with junkies, criminals and the working poor, a wonder drug that lets formerly-obese “fatkins” eat 10,000 calories a day and maintain a supermodel physique... and a Goth Disneyworld.

I’m still in the middle of the book so I won’t attempt an in-depth critique (and please don’t tell me how it ends). I’m mostly just intrigued by the “New Work” landscape Doctorow describes… In a world where regular jobs are in increasingly short supply, this ragtag bunch of smart, creative misfits creates a counterculture where people can do work they’re excited about, make enough money to live decently, and live in communities built around mutual interest where people are in charge of their own life and destiny.

It’s not a rushing river by any means, but there is a trickle of conversation on campus and in the church in general that if you are a senior in the MDiv program, after graduation you are quickly and gracefully escorted into a call with an eagerly waiting congregation with whom you will live happily ever after.

(This trickle, of course, coming mostly from those outside the MDiv program and the assignment process, and not from those of us who are watching the calendar days slip by frighteningly fast and still have no idea what we’ll be doing with ourselves after graduation.)

The Lutheran even printed an article about the increasing difficulty and complexity of the first call process this month... an article that didn’t exactly fill me with hope or joy, but I suppose it’s good in a general sort of way so people know what it’s like right now for those of us awaiting first call.

Anyway. New Work. The future. Possibilities, not panic. Those are the things I’ve been thinking about lately.

I try to think about ways to put together a resume that downplays the fact that I’ve spent four years outside CubicleLand and plays up the fact that I have plenty of relevant and useful gifts and skills for doing many different things.

I try to think about ways I might be able to use those gifts and passions outside the path I’ve assumed I would take for the last four years, and also outside the career paths I've taken in the past that inevitably led to frustration.

I also continue to believe and hope that a call will open up – one that I can be excited about and one where the people will be excited to have me as a pastor.

I’ve been praying that God would show me God’s will for my future and my work… and if you’re the praying kind and you’re reading this, honestly, maybe throw a little prayer for me into your own prayers. Hey, it couldn’t hurt.

Because I do still panic. Maybe more than a little. I believe and hope there’s something awesome around the corner for me. But as I sit here and write this, I have no idea what it is.

I know, I know.

One day at a time. God is in charge. That Buechner quote about the world’s deep need and your deep gladness and all that. (Here it is, if you’ve never heard it.)

But seriously. Two months is not a very long time at all. And I am terribly impatient. And not terribly optimistic.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not also full of hope. And I am daily sustained in faith. And also aware of how terribly blessed I am in so many ways, not the least of which is my relationships with all of y'all who are on this walk with me.

Blogging and The Partially Open Door

I had a conversation this past weekend about this blog... about what people seem to respond to / comment on vs. what I wish or think people should respond to / comment on.

Almost always, the posts where I reveal some vulnerability about my own life or something I'm going through and then relate it to some insight about faith / spirituality / life / etc. are the one's y'all seem to like the most. I suppose that's because everyone can relate to feeling stressed out or experiencing doubt, but not as many people watch The Real World: Las Vegas or listen to death metal... and those of you who do probably don't care as much as I do about analyzing these things theologically.

(Actually, though, "Keep Jesus Out of Death Metal" continues to weirdly be the most popular entry on this blog... I wrote it a few months ago and it's still being read a few times a week on average. I have no idea who's reading it or what they think, since they never seem to comment. I'm kind of curious.)

I suppose all this goes to show that the things I'm most interested in writing about are not the things that people who read my blog are most interested in reading about. That kind of stinks, because I really love to geek out about God and pop culture, but I also understand that I probably need to be writing about shows that lots of people actually watch or music that lots of people actually listen to for that to be interesting.

(I bet if I wrote about Mumford & Sons, the indie rock band that every God-geek and their dog is slobbering all over lately, I'd get tons of responses. I tried. I really tried to like them. But they just don't do it for me. The closest I can get is maybe Foo Fighters. Or John Mark McMillan. He's amazing.)

So I suppose I could just write the stuff about my own life or struggles and faith... but the problem with that is that every week isn't really blog-worthy. Sometimes, I got nothin'. Other times, like last week when I was a big emotional mess and going through all kinds of doubt and despair and despondency and other D-words that Andy Root likes to write about... I didn't feel like telling you. I didn't want to write about how I was crying for no reason off and on all day on Tuesday, because I felt like the last thing I wanted was a bunch of e-hugs and frowny-face emoticons on my Facebook...

...or I felt like maybe there was something there for me to say about lament and despair and how they're a part of spirituality, but how far am I obligated to open the door of my own experience, my own emotions, my own life... how much of the unvarnished truth about myself do I have to reveal in the service of talking about the bigger kind of truth?

Especially to a bunch of people who don't even care what I have to say about the pornification of American culture and The Real World?

(That was kind of a joke and kind of not a joke. I don't know.)

I want to keep blogging after my media class is over. And I want to keep writing about the things I like writing about - both the personal/spiritual stuff and the pop culture stuff and the metal stuff and whatever else. But committing to blogging in the way that I've been blogging means committing to keeping that door open at least partways into my own foibles, struggles, vulnerabilities, joys, exasperations, etc... and while sharing some of that is easy, sharing some of it is really hard, and some of it is so hard that I'm not willing to do it now and I might never be.

And sometimes it's easier to write about The Real World than about my constant wondering and worrying about what I will do after graduation if I still don't have a call.

And sometimes I just feel like writing about The Real World and that's the only thing that's fired my spiritual imagination all week.

Anyway. I don't have a profound insight to wrap things up today. I've been blogging for a long time now in various ways, but it's changing as I grow more and more into becoming a public leader and embrace that role but also experience the tensions that come with it. I'm still figuring out how to navigate all that.

So, uh, let's set sail for the seas of truth and tranquility... or something... (I'm trying to play with that "navigation" thing. It's clearly not working.) So, um... have a great week. Yeah.

The Woman Caught in Adultery, The Real World: Las Vegas, and the Line

Am I too old to be watching MTV’s The Real World?

Maybe.

I’ve watched almost every season faithfully (religiously?), from the most dramatic (Miami, Hawaii, the first Las Vegas) to the most yawn-inducing (Brooklyn). And as much as I realize that I’m no longer the target market and should have made the transition to VH1 years ago, I keep watching…

I don’t often reflect theologically about The Real World – it’s not made for that. But this week’s episode has me thinking about sin and redemption, the woman caught in adultery in John 8, and what kind of moral world we live in.

If you don’t watch the show (although I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t), you can watch it here for free, or see highlights here. In this week’s episode, the cast found out that one of the roommates (Dustin) used to work for an adult webcam site where viewers watched young people who lived together in a house with cameras filming their every waking moment.

Sound familiar?

The roommates were upset. Heather, the young woman that Dustin was kind-of-dating, felt betrayed.

(Understandable.)

Nany and Naomi, always eager to voice loud opinions that nobody asks for, were angry because their friend was hurt. Nany felt that this “lie” invalidated anything else that Dustin might have said or done, and Heather should obviously end the relationship.

(Both Nany and Naomi have had sex with other roommates in the house, and at this point in the series Nany is involved in a kind-of-relationship with a former roommate who got kicked out of the house for violent behavior and almost punched her in the face.)

Mike wondered aloud, “Who are you?,” as if Dustin’s choice not to discuss this part of his past indicated that he was hiding something more sinister.

(It should be noted that Mike, a self-professed devout Roman Catholic, gleefully asked to touch a porn actress’s breasts in a previous episode.)

Leroy, arguably the most reasonable and realistic, talked with Dustin one-on-one, said that he didn’t judge him for his past, and urged him to “talk to God” about his situation.

(Go Leroy!)

What seemed bizarre to me was that the roommates weren’t upset that Dustin worked for an adult website in the past…

…they were upset that he hadn’t come into the house (and on national television) and proclaimed it as a point of pride.

Dustin’s sin, to them, wasn’t that he had a scandalous past… it was that he wasn’t loud and proud about his scandalous past.

I couldn’t help but think of the story of the woman caught in adultery from the book of John.

In John 8, the religious leaders bring to Jesus a woman  “caught in the very act of committing adultery” and remind him that the law says they should stone her. Jesus bends down and writes something with his finger in the dirt on the ground. Maybe he draws a line in the sand, so to speak. Jesus says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” So then they all just kind of wander away, and Jesus says something like, “Hmm, looks like there’s nothing to see here, little lady.”

(The actual Biblical version is here, but I always imagine Jesus as kind of John-Wayne-y in this story.).

In the moral world of The Real World, apparently the woman wouldn’t be stoned for committing adultery, but only if she tried to keep it a secret.

No sin is unforgivable – which is a good thing –

… but every sin must be publicly confessed – which maybe isn’t a horrible thing –

… and contrition is strictly forbidden – which is definitely more than a little troubling.

What is the relevance of confession and absolution in a moral world where the only  acknowledged “sin” is... not being really proud of the fact that you’re sinful?

Maybe I’m missing something.

Maybe it’s because I don’t see how Dustin’s non-disclosure of this information to his roommates is dishonest. (Yes, he probably should've told Heather – but I can appreciate that he wanted to wait to do that… maybe until they were more serious… or maybe just until a few months later… when the conversation wouldn’t happen on national television.)

Maybe it was foolhardy for him to go onto The Real World in the age of the Internet and think he could keep his past a secret. But the difficulty of keeping things secret does not obligate him to announce it loudly instead.

Or maybe the real issue isn’t what Dustin did or didn’t do in his past, or what he did or didn’t tell his roommates, but the rapidly fading line between sexuality as it exists in shows like The Real World vs. the industry where people like Dustin and the woman Mike encountered earlier in the season work. Maybe that rapidly fading line is why such a convoluted and bizarre sense of morality has emerged here.

Because Nany and Adam and Naomi and Leroy can get paid to live in a house and can have sex on camera and they know it’s what the audience loves… but it’s different that Dustin got paid to live in a house and be naked on camera… because he didn’t have the benefit of bleeping and pixellation? Where’s the line?

Because Mike can openly objectify a young woman who works in the adult industry and everyone around him giggles about it, but they are sad and horrified when Dustin defends the man who hired him and convinced him to engage in behaviors he didn’t want to engage in. Where’s the line?

Because Dustin and Heather’s big heartfelt conversation happened in a restaurant called Pink Taco.

Because MTV will continue to make millions and millions of dollars producing shows about attractive young people who get too drunk too often and do things they regret.

Because I will continue to watch it each week, even as I’m more and more troubled by it.

Where’s the line?

Enjoy the Possibilities! Your Rut Awaits You...

The second half of this semester is officially kicking my butt. Perhaps taking five classes *and* auditing another class is more than I should have taken on… especially when two of my full-semester classes are heavy on the back end…

(They should call those Sir Mix-A-Lot classes.)

(That’s terrible.)

(This is the kind of thing that my classmates are probably correct to worry about when they worry about future congregations reading their blogs.)

(I don’t care, it amuses me and I’m stressed out right now, so I’m posting it anyway. Maybe someone on a call committee somewhere is a huge Sir Mix-A-Lot fan and will read this and think, "Hey, that's the kind of preacher I want!")

Because I don’t have enough to do with piles of books to read and papers to write and blogs to compose and PowerPoint presentations to make and then spend too much time making prettier and classes to attend, I’ve been obsessing lately about what will happen when I’m done with seminary in just over two short months.

Because the truth is I have no idea what will happen then. I don’t have a call. I haven’t had any interviews. I have to be out of my apartment by the end of July.

When I posted on Facebook about how I was freaking out about all this, my brother commented “Enjoy the possibilities! Your rut awaits you…”

That hit me… and I’m starting to see the whole situation now in terms of “possibilities” instead of “unknowns.”

Because the truth is that I wouldn’t think it was the worst thing in the world if I lived in St. Paul for a while longer. I love it here. The truth is that it might create space for possibilities and ease some of the tensions/unknowns/whatever in my officially-getting-pretty-serious relationship. The truth is that even if I don’t go directly from the classroom to the pulpit right away, there is somewhere that God wants me to go when I’m done at Luther Seminary.

Enjoy the possibilities! Your rut awaits you…

How much of life do we spend feeling trapped in a rut – whether it’s in boring, required classes, or the unsatisfying jobs that we have to keep working at order to pay the bills, or the commitments we’ve made that we’re no longer passionate about or whatever – only to face some big change and suddenly be afraid of the unknowns instead of ready to enjoy the possibilities?

Too much.

I’m not saying that I’m done freaking out about what will or won’t happen two months from now. It’s scary. It’s really scary. But I’m also realizing that it’s not only scary. That it’s a little bit exciting. It’s a little bit fun. And no matter what happens, there’s more than a little bit of hope.

Enjoy the possibilities! Who knows what awaits you!

(Thanks Andy!)

Grateful

Gratitude helps when I’m stressed.

I’m grateful for friendships that hold up despite years and years apart. You know the ones, where you haven’t seen someone in a decade and you’re worried that when you finally see them again you won’t have anything to say and it will be nothing but an awkward hour of concentrating on your straw and talking about the weather and mumbling promises to reconnect again real soon, but then it’s not like that at all and when you see each other on the street it’s like it’s been days not years, and you realize that this person who knew you when still knows you now, and those promises you make upon parting are sincere and you really mean them. I’m grateful for that.

I’m grateful for the people that are easy on me when I’m hard on myself. I’m always wishing I were thinner nicer more outgoing less self-centered prettier with better hair richer better dressed a faster reader more focused more disciplined more less more less more less more less. I’m grateful there are people who tell me that’s not the whole truth about me.

I’m grateful for long, good books.

I’m grateful for Spring even though it’s taking its sweet time showing up.

I’m grateful for guitars so loud I can feel them in my bones, the screams, the shaking fists and long hair whipped back and forth. The black t-shirts and unreadable band logos. The blistering of double-bass drums. The feedback. The beards and bullet belts and the sweat-stinking bars with inevitably disgusting bathrooms and broken doors on stalls marker-graffitied with limericks and band names and MySpace URLs and earnest young feminist voices. The ringing in my ears. The moment that I finally lose myself in the music and become part of something bigger and something transcendent and something profoundly cathartic. My sore feet and sighing hips as I walk to my car late, late after the show and turn on something gothy and mellow and head home and fall into bed exhausted. I’m grateful for that.

I’m grateful for the ability to let go, and for those who forgive me my trespasses and probably even more for those who forgive me my shortcomings.

I’m grateful for Fridays.

I’m grateful that days off are a commandment.

I’m grateful for a life so full of things I want to do that it feels like there’s never enough time.

Have a good weekend, world. What are you grateful for?

 

Grab A Sled

We got a bajillion inches of snow yesterday, and it’s still coming down. For the first time since I’ve been here, classes were cancelled due to the weather.

Snow Days are cool, but they’re not really as cool when you only had one class scheduled anyway and most of your “work” day was going to be spent doing homework. Because that homework still needs to get done, only now you’re doing it on a Snow Day… so you feel like you’re working while everyone else gets to bake cookies or watch Lord of the Rings marathons or whatever else you’d be doing if you weren’t doing homework.

So there I was, not doing my homework, wanting to go to the store mostly just to get out of the house but bemoaning the slippery, snowy streets. I needed a few things, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to deal with the snow and ickiness of driving to get them.

I was tired of stupid winter, and mostly just resentful at the snow for coming on a day when I only had one class anyway.

I looked out my window and saw the kids across the street.

They were bounding out the door, armed with sleds. In one fluid motion, the first boy jumped onto his sled and careened down the hill. A girl followed on another sled, and when she got to the bottom she took a big chunk of snow, held it up to her face, and took a bite out of it.

Within ten minutes, the smooth surface of snow was completely trampled. Four kids screamed and hooted together and took turns sledding and diving right into the snow and rolling down the hill.

I saw the snow and I sat behind a locked door and pouted.

They saw the snow and they ran out to enjoy it.

This week is kinda huge in my life. I’ll get some big news that I’ve been waiting on for a while now, life-changing news, long-term future-impacting news…

Depending on what I find out, I will probably react by either pouting or running out to enjoy it.

I hope I can run out to enjoy it, whatever it is. I hope I can always find ways to play around in the possibilities of life and take a big bite out of what the universe has to offer and dive right into it and roll around. Sitting inside and pouting isn’t just boring, it shuts you off from even seeing the possibilities, much less playing with them and enjoying them. Before those kids came running outside, I hadn’t even thought of the snowstorm as a potential source of awesome. They showed that to me.

So I hope that if I do end up pouting, someone will find a way to remind me that there’s always a potential source of awesome. I’m not always good at noticing it.