Deliver us, O Lord

With this post, I am simply adding to the swirls of hot, vapid e-air that circulate our e-planet these days.

Yet today my goat was gotten such that it felt appropriate.

I found it tough to complete this story this morning without getting too worked up. You see, something dark has happened to America under Bush. Me and those in my profession might end up holding the blame, I don’t know-time will tell, but it isn’t really complicated.

It is usually at this point in these sorts of discussions that my Christian faith gets called into question… or the facts of the Iraq War, whichever prove more damning witnesses to my viewpoint. (Notice: Christian faith or matters of history-of equal value for character assassination!)

So I won’t speak to any of that, as you likely wouldn’t listen anyway.

If you’ll keep reading, though, I’ll share a story with you. However fact challenged or politically myopic you might be, perhaps this will rouse you to think a little more about our world and your faith.

I was talking to two former students today at the school where I teach, both two of the very sharpest in their 9th grade class (no correlation there, obviously).

At random, one of the girls asked me, “Hey, are you Obama?!?” [in obvious reference to the Obama bumper sticker I sport these days.]

“Yup,” went my weary mumble as I attacked my pre-Finals-grading salad.

The look of bumfuzzlement was classic that this incredibly bright girl and her friend shared, such that I don’t remember what her exact rejoinder was. I’m sure some standard interrogative to the effect of, ‘why,’ ‘how,’ or even ‘how could you!?!’.

I’ll save the bulk of the conversation for the Whammo! Special Edition DVD version and skip to why you care.

She asked me why I didn’t support McCain, which I thought was a fair enough question. I don’t get that one often, to be honest. As I’ve shared before, though, for me all things come back to the Iraq War. So, I told this girl that I did not support the war (her friend’s eyes got as round as a donut at this point) from its genesis (eyes to about the size of the face of my watch) but of course support the troops now (back to skeptical but otherwise almond-sized).

“But they attacked us!”, said Interlocutor #1.

In my rush to verify what I thought I heard I stumbled over my next question, but indeed it was what I had assumed: this rising 10th grader, one of the sharpest of her class, a student of history, politics and religion at a pretty nice private Christian school (if I should say so myself), believes that a war willfully initiated by her leaders, preemptively, under false pretenses, was done so because of the terrorist actions of a rogue group based in an entirely unrelated country some 15 months prior.

The alarms weren’t quite going off in my head. This girl has a few years left with us, and then college will clear things up for her. But to be alive and roughly aware of major world events taking place (she would have been in 6th grade when the war on Iraq started), yet still hold that we attacked Iraq because they were somehow involved with 9/11… Such a rare find as that seemed something more the realm of Indiana Jones than of Mr. Parnell, and she has certainly been on my mind all day since.

We ended our conversation on a pleasant note, with her promising that she was going to ‘do some research’ and that we would have a ‘debate’ about this. I eagerly anticipate that, although I’m not really sure through what issues of fact she and I need to reason. (Either way, I told her to hunt down some sources beyond just Wikipedia.) 

With that in mind then, here is the memo that I would send to the President, Vice President and Karl Rove:

Mission Accomplished, sirs. You have successfully perpetuated a lie to multiple generations of patriotic Americans within your own lifetimes.

A legacy indeed.

Now as I was piecing this post together in my head, all I could really think of for trying to end on a note of hope was to simply say, “come Lord Jesus, come.” We pass dark times in a dark world, and the power men trade amongst themselves is still shuffled between bloodstained hands.

We have no other hope but you, Lord.

Do come soon.

The night I called it a day.

Well, today I finally pulled the trigger, as it were, on ending my seminary career as I’ve known it so far. I’m still a seminary student, don’t get me wrong, but I’m pursuing a much different degree, which will yield far different options as life carries me forward.

Compared to stuff on other folks’ minds this ain’t much but for me, it is a pretty big move.

The short of it is that I changed from the Th.M. (Master of Theology) degree to the M.A.C.E. (Master of Arts in Christian Education). The Th.M. is a very prestigious (and incredibly long and bloated) degree, and the M.A.C.E. is well, a lot shorter and clarifies my “long term ministry goals” a great deal.

I started my DTS adventure in the fall of 2004 a deeply confused and unstable person, and didn’t really give much thought to the degree, or even ultimate plans I had for my life. I knew I loved academics, I knew I loved people, and I knew I wanted to serve others in a way in which those two giftings might come together. I knew coming in that all this would just sort of work itself out, probably after I graduated. And that was as far, as impassioned, as specific, as things got.

From almost Day One of my current job I have battled the tension between how much I loved that gig and how much, well, I hated having to deal with my interminably long commitments at DTS.

Something was very obviously broken, and I feel like this past month or so something very obviously has gotten fixed.

One virtue I’ve really revisited over this past month is that of just slowing down, to think, to let things stew, to partake of a rest stop once in a while. Because of that, I can say that I am excited and that I am cradling a deep peace over tomorrow, next week and next semester.

I promised myself I’d keep this short, so I am scuttling every urge I have to torture some meaning out of the form I faxed to the DTS Registrar this morning at 10 am. There’s a story, a lesson, some point to be made in all this I’m sure, but just like a cherry pie that isn’t quite cooked all the way through I’m gonna just let those scattered fragments dancing ’round my brain bake a while longer. I think I need to do a lot more of that.

So for tonight at least, I’m calling it a day.

A Life More Honest.

Well, a funny thing has started happening this week.

Think of it as simple “out of sight, out of mind” I guess.

Think of it as hope delayed fulfilled at last perhaps.

Think of it as the perfect set up for “well, what took you so long?!?”

I’ve started thinking of myself as a “former seminary student.”

I’ve started saying things to friends like “back when I was in seminary,” or thinking about no longer having my student discount at the Angelika, or noticing the ever louder din of that drip drip drip asking me again just what makes exegeting from the Greek so important.

And I’ve started doing normal people things, like stress only about my job when I’m at work, ponder things I’d like to do with world class friends I’ve neglected, get all Wahhabist about my finances, try and talk to a wonderful female friend from college regularly on the phone (it’s platonic, Mom), get some new recipes, read with more depth, think about picking the guitar back up…

Simply put, just be alive again.

I am not going to try and put you in my shoes to see how hard I pushed myself, and how far out of balance the cost of what I was willing to sacrifice for the thing(s) I had decided to pursue was compared to simple life affirming things. My life was pretty empty when the days were all said and done, and now well, I’m trying to fill them up with the things I’ve thought only true heroes neglected.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to replace, however. You probably remember this post from few weeks ago. Yeah, that’s one of my more bare, and stupid, moments-but it was honest then and I’m trying to live honest now.

In the honesty department I’ve been doing no small heavy lifting as of late, but I am convinced to my core that the best God has for us is found when we risk a life lived more honest.

I’m not entirely sure what’s next for me, school-wise. I’ve got 81 of the 120 hours I need for my degree in the can, and most of what I’ve got left to take, well, it will apply to any other degree I pursue; the only unique part of it are my last two semesters of Hebrew. There was a time when I was nuts about that Hebrew, any sort of theology, trivia about NT manuscripts, what fed into Martin Luther’s thinking on Bible translation, what a Mike + the Mechanics song being sung in Christian circles these days says about everyone you and I know, different theories on the nitty gritty of the Incarnation, etc. and etc. and etc.

Those parts of me are on hiatus right now, or, to use a recent phrase in my world, “indefinite bedrest”. That one turned out okay for my friends, and I suspect it will for me.

So what I’m doing in the meantime is simply loving my job and slowing down enough to apply all these years of school and daydreaming about “when…” to well, now, and doing a life more honest.

We probably haven’t seen each other in a while, so here’s a picture I shot just tonight:

Me, 11/1/07

There’s more stirring behind those glasses than in a long time, that I can promise you.