Fancy Things What I Seen in the Big City, pt 1

Just like John Mellencamp, I grew up in a small town. With the exception of one summer spent in Naperville, and a couple seasons in Lincoln for school, I've lived all 27 3/4 years of my life in a town of less than fifteen hundred people. I can't tell you exactly how small Assumption is because the population signs vary depending on from which direction you come into town. What I can tell you is that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve to sixteen hundred people here. We don't even have a four-way stop in town to give directions by, much less a stop light. Until a year ago there were three bars and four churches. Now two of those bars have closed (one of the building has been torn down) and at least one of those churches doesn't seem to be far behind.

There is a grain bin factory in town which supports the three small restaraunts, where you can get anything you want (provided it has been fried and smothered in cheese or gravy, excepting Alice of course), and the gas station which stays open by selling beer and cigarettes to the factory workers every day at 3:30 when the shift lets off. The evidence of said beer and cigarette sales can be seen strewn along the country roads leaving town in all four cardinal directions. (Appearantly people who do not see it fit to take care of their bodies also have a hard time wanting to take care of the earth). Last year when Casey's decided to build a new gas station and restaraunt in town, you would have thought our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Himself, along with at least half the Apostles and Moses and Elijah to boot, was moving to town. While I worry about straying close to being sacreligious with that statement, I'm pinched to find a strong enough metaphor to convey the fervor which is only now starting to die down.

The school district consolodated with the town up the road about twenty years ago now. Both towns have a grade school. Assumption has the middle school while Moweaqua has a high school. Every Friday night in the fall people swarm to Moweaqua to watch their sons, nephews, cousins, etc risk their bodies for the sake of attaining some false sense of accomplishment. While fleeting, this is important for those who will work at the grain bin factory so they will have something to look back on when they look around one day in the future and realize that life hasn't turned out as they hoped. It makes me wonder if there is a negative corellation between success on the field and success after high school, but we'll leave that for another time. When the team won the state championship back in '96 or '97, the aforementioned fervor surrounding the new Casey's was again in the air.

I write all of this as a long way of saying that I don't get out of the house very often. Although I didn't realize it until a few years ago, the rhythms of small town life seeped into my soul and took root somewhere along the way. While my church tradition does not keep to the traditional church callender, we mark the passing of the seasons by Easter breakfasts, vacation Bible schools, Labor Day get togethers, and Christmas pagents. I find myself more and more marking the passing of time by these events and others like them. I'm finding myself at a point where I don't necessarily distrust bigger cities (ok, that's a lie but I don't completely distrust them), but I do prefer to avoid them as they tend to throw a big old stick in the bicycle wheel which is the rhythm of small town life.

Turns out that a lot of neat stuff goes on out there in the wide world while I'm passing the time away here in Assumption. Every once in a while I will get out of town and discover one of the new ways in which the world has moved forward and improved itself and with appropriate slack-jawed amazement, I will come back and tell people about my discoveries. I like to think of these discoveries as Fancy Things What I Saw in the Big City. I still remember the first time I saw one of those electronic sensory operated paper towel dispensers in a men's bathroom at a Bonanza in Western Montana. I was almost speechless. No, there for about twenty seconds or so I was speechless. Then I washed my hands a second time, waved them under the sensor again, chuckled to myself and upon rejoining my party told them about the amazing machine in the bathroom.

Well I had one of those discoveries again last weekend. Alison and I were visiting her family in Naperville because she was preaching at a young adult service Sunday night. After the serivce, her dad suggested we get pizza at Lou Malnatti's. Now it was already well past my 8:30 bedtime, but Lou's pizza is well worth breaking any established rhythm of life, so I quickly gave my assent and decided I would catch up on rest later. As it turns out, I'm glad I went! Not just because the pizza was amazing (did I mention that the pizza there is A-mazing?), because it was (they have really good pizza there), but also because I made another one of my discoveries of Fancy Things What I Saw in the Big City! Once again, suffice it to say that I was speechless. Fortunately, this time after chuckling to myself I was able to whip out my fancy camera phone and get documented evidence




Now here's an even newer, even fancier way of drying your hands! Basically what you do is you stick your hands in here like this and then as you pull them out, this here machine blows air on them and dries them off. To be perfectly honest, I'm still a little bit speechless! I've even debated looking into seeing what it would cost to get one for my bathroom, but it's been a busy week with all the packing and withdrawing from seminary and all that, so I haven't got to it yet. The best thing is that it really dries your hands, not like those other air hand driers that only do the job so far and leave you to finish it by wiping your hands on you pants.

Well there you have it. Although the terrible disasters of the twentieth century went a long way towards destroying the blind optimism inherent in the liberal, secular nineteenth century mindset, the twenty-first century still gives us glimmers of hope in social progress :p

A Pleasant Walk

Alison and I went for a walk with our little boys this evening and it was absolutely beautiful. Although I talk a lot about how I would like to live in the desert or up high in the Rocky Mountains, there are times when I deeply appreciate the flat lands. The corn and beans are almost ready to be harvested and right now they are giving off a scent that is almost intoxicating. No, as much as I hate to say it, the smell is intoxicating. I can't even describe it other than to say that when you smell it in the cool of the evening it smells like all the black dirt and sunshine and fertility of these plains has been sprayed into the air. It's as if the corn stalks were geysers and all year long pressure has been building until this time of year when it explodes forth from the earth and fills the air with the smell of life and sublime goodness.






After smelling that smell, all I can say is, "Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit!"

A Five Day Long Post After a Three Day Long Book....

Two things have happened in the last couple days that have given me the opportunity to sit down and write something on here. The first is that I finished a book! That's really nothing to write home about I guess, seeing as to how I spent almost 8 years in some kind of college or another, but I so rarely finish a book I start reading. For example, as of right now I'm about half way through N.T. Wright's New Testament and the People of God, about a quarter of the way through Richard Foster's Freedom of Simplicity and Streams of Living Water, and about two thirds of the way through Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart. This summer I've also started Steinbeck's East of Eden and I've been slowly reading through the Philokalia during my lunch break at work. But yesterday I finally finished a book I started (I'm not counting Max Brooks' World War Z, although that was a fun read :)

The second thing that happened is that God, in His infinite mercy, finally sent that rain storm I've been asking Him for these last couple days. This allowed me to come home early from my job on the golf course because you can't run a weed whacker in the rain. Or I guess you could, but when it is thunderstorming I don't think you call it a weed whacker, I think you call it a lightning rod. As I was riding my motorcycle home and getting soaked I was thinking what it would be like if I got hit by lightning like the guy on the that old John Candy movie, The Great Outdoors, just before I started my first preaching job. One thing about it, I would only need about half as much content to make a 25 minute sermon :)

Anywho, I finished a book. My wife recently had a birfday and her grandma sent her a copy of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. It was sitting on the living room table and as I was on my way to have my afternoon meditations in the bathroom I picked it up and started reading it. As it turned out, this book was perfect for reading during my meditations because the chapters weren't too long for me to finish a chapter at a time but they also weren't too short so that I finished them before my meditation time was over.

For those of you who haven't read The Great Divorce, you need to read it (I know, I know, it's no 23 Minutes in Hell, or 90 Minutes in Heaven, but you should give Mr. Lewis a chance) but I will give a brief summary. Basically, C.S. Lewis finds himself in Hell in a dream. Hell is a dreary city where it is always raining and it is always almost sunset. This city is huge and sprawling but it is not densely populated because as people disagree with one another, they move farther and farther apart. In extreme cases, those who really can't stand to be around others wind up living millions of miles away. I think Lewis portrays Hell in this manner to give an idea of what it might be like if people are left to their own selfish devices. While Lewis left out all the good medieval stuff about the fire and the little demons tormenting people with pitchforks, he also left out any sense of joy or love from Hell. When people are left to their own selfish wants for long enough without the grace of God to help them to see past themselves, sufficient torment ensues.

I'm going above and beyond the stating the obvious when I point out that the idea of Hell doesn't get much attenion these days, even in most Christian circles. Part of the reason for that is an over-reaction to a previous generation's over emphasis on Hell. I remember growing up and being prodded into morality with the threat of eternal damnation. If you want to really mess with your six year old's head, put him or her in Sunday school and tell them there is an all powerful Deity who demands good behavior and will torment for eternity all of those who refuse to comply. I'm still struggling to understand God as a lover of His Creation rather than a sadist holding it over the eternal fires of Hell like a sociopathic 13 year old boy might dangle a live mouse over a bon fire. There's this little voice in the back of my head that warns me not to get too carried away with this whole "God is love" thing because that's only going to make Him more angry with me. Christ have mercy!

The bad thing is that I didn't go to a crazy fundamentalist style church! The crazy fundamentalist churches took it even further!

The history of Christian theology works a lot like a pendulum in a grandfather clock. Any time something is emphasied too long or embraced by too many people, the emphasis will inevitably swing back too far in the other direction. For example, take the trend towards universalism in liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which helped to spur the fundamentalist reaction against it in the 20th century. Hell has gone through that same pendulum swing. First it was used as a club to beat people into submitting to becoming good "Christian" moralists, but then when the baby boomer generation came into power all of the sudden Hell got pushed to the back of the bus (after all, what room is there for Hell in a world where everyone is OK?).

I think a second reason Hell has become overlooked in most Christian circles comes from the way our culture is so darned egalitarian about EVERYTHING! Now I'm all for universal human rights and all that good stuff, but I think we've taken it a little too far. Our society pushes for every single high school graduate to not only have the opportunity to go to college if he or she is sufficiently gifted and financially capable of attending, but for everyone to attend college regardless of gifting and finances because it is their right to have a college degree. I spent four years as a TA in school and I've graded a lot of students' work; let me tell you that not every person should get to go to college just because he or she was able to sign their mark on a piece of paper. It's wasteful in that it brings down the reputation of the institution, devalues the degree that some people actually do earn, and it wastes the time and money of these square peg students trying to fit into the round hole of academia.

Our modern sensibilities have turned Heaven into a big egalitarian party and for the most part, the church in North America has stood by and allowed this to happen. First we conceded that people of other faiths will probably go to Heaven as long as they respond to the Light they are shown in their lives. Then we pretty much tossed out the idea that Christians could ever be denied Heaven as long as they kept their Sunday attendance up and stayed away from all the socially unacceptable sins. Now it's all the rage to concede that monogomous, practicing homosexuals will get into Heaven because after all, they can't help the way they are and don't some of them make the nicest little moralists? We're pretty much to the point where everyone shy of Hitler, Stalin, and the Westborough Baptist Church, are going to Heaven.

I really don't mean to sound like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. I really do beleive that God's Grace is big enough to suprise all of us and we really will meet people in Heaven we weren't expecting to see. I'm just saying that not many of us believe, in a way that works itself out in our lives, that broad is the road and wide is the gate that leads to destruction and many are travelling that road.

Here's the reason why it is such a problem that Hell has been pitched out the window (and I'm preaching to myself as I think this out and write this down): we can't really take Heaven seriously if we don't take Hell seriously as well. If we don't take Heaven seriously, then we are not going to live out the fullness of the quality of the eternal life promised to us by Christ. I think this is why lukewarm Christianity is such a rampant problem in the U.S. today; we've lost the content out of what it means to be a Christian (again, the quality of eternal life now rather than the quantity of eternal life after we die) after we ceased taking seriously the gravity of the Christian message (namely that people have separated themselves from God and are therefore in desperate need of having that relationship restored).

The great thing about Lewis' book is that it reminds us that Heaven is not a reward given for being a "good" person, or even given for not being a "really bad" person. Likewise, Hell is not a place where a sadistic God gleefully and arbitrarily tosses His creatures in the name of something as cheap as "glory" or "justice." Rather, Heaven is a place where people who have chosen to submit their wills to the Will of their Creator, finding redemption and reconcilliation in a life of repentance centered on the Cross, find their relationship with their Creator growing deeper and wider for time eternal. Hell then is seen as a place where people who have chosen to live their lives apart from God, refusing to submit their wills to the Will of their Creator, are allowed to spend eternity travelling farther and farther away from the God who made them to live in relationship with Him. As Lewis said in Mere Christianity, in the end there are two kinds of people, those who say to God, "Your will be done" and those to whom God says, "your will be done."

Keeping a healthier view of Heaven and Hell forces us to acknowledge the role of our free will in this world. Free will in turn forces us to take seriously the call to live a life of repentance centered on following Jesus. While the gift of the Holy Spirit and heaps and heaps of God's Grace make it possible for us to live such a life, we are still called to play a role in it as well.

I'm reminded of the words of Cheech, "responsibility is a heavy responsibility." Maybe the real reason why we don't take Hell seriously is that it's just too much work!

Thoughts on the Eve of My Marriage

Hey guess what? I'm getting married in two days! Woohoo!!

It's been a long time coming but it feels like time has gone by so fast! Alison and I have been engaged for the last 19 months. I remember a point in time where the wedding was something that existed off in the distant, hazy future. Now it's almost here.

Even though nobody will probably read this, let me recount for you a little bit of our story: I have never really been one who was good at coloring inside the lines. As a matter of fact, when we used to have coloring contests in grade school, I never once had my work exibited. I was threatened with summer skool to help me with my handwriting as well. For the most part, my handwriting still looks like that of a fifth grader. As I become more and more educated, one of the things that spurs me on as skool has become so wearisome to me is that if I just get some kind of doctoral degree, my terrible handwriting will be explained away by my over educated brain. Doctors are supposed to write sloppy, right? Anyway, I've never been one to color inside the lines or do things the easy or proper way. So, when Alison came into my life late in the August of 2007 (ok so technically I started Facebook stalking her about this time, but since she responded to me it was kinda like she came into my life), after spending three or four weeks adamantly refusing to define our relationship, on October 13, I proposed to her that we get married. Aparently she thought this was a good idea, or that it at least sounded interesting, because she concurred that that was in fact a great idea and we should pursue it.

So the first time I met my inlaws to be was when I sat down and told them I was going to be marrying their daughter. Yeah, I know most people don't do things that way, but given that my dad and grandpa had both met and married their wives within about 3 months and 2 weeks respectively, in a way I was just following Lawrence protocol. I figure since both dad and pops are still married after all these years, there's probably no correlation between length of engagement/knowing your spouse to be and length of marriage. After a lovely dinner (I think we had salmon), her parents suggested that I get Alison an engagement ring. Again, most people buy those BEFORE they pop the question, but how was I supposed to know I was going to ask her to marry me that weekend?

Given that we "dated" for such a brief time before getting engaged, when her parents requested we wait until Alison graduated before we got married, I figured that was a fair enough concession to make on my part. Being the open minded person I am, I knew that them city folks do things different up there :)

So, we've been engaged for 19 months now. I think Alison has had a ring on her finger for about 18 of those months :) In that time I finished an internship, finally got my B.A. and graduated with honors, started seminary, come to realize my hopes for seminary were sorely misplaced, and lived in three different places (including spending last summer living in Naperville with Alison and her parents). Alison and I have been completely goofy infatuated with each other, we have learned how to kiss (boy that was awkward at first, lot's of slobbering involved in that learning curve!), I've made her cry for the first time, we've had our first fight, we've had many many subsequent fights, we've put on winter weight and then got back on the road to being healthy again, and we've begun learning to live on very little.

One thing we have both noticed as we have been engaged is the negative attitude so many people have towards marriage. We've encountered this from just as many people within the church as we have from those outside the church or in the mindless drivel on TV like 2 1/2 "men" or everybody loves raymond. Now I'll admit, it's nine kinds of frustrating when you find yourself trying to be a good significant other and student and worker all at the same time. I've come within a breath of smashing my phone on the ground or throwing it against the wall at least twice in the last school year after a heated conversation over the text messenger.

When I look at the prospect of being married, I'm reminded of Peter's response to Jesus after a bunch of people quit following Him and Jesus asked Peter if he was going to hit the road too. Peter said, "Dude, where else is there to go? You are the way to life!" (my paraphrase). I think marriage is a lot like that. I think our society is so utterly selfish and bent on immediate gratification that there is a stereotype of the "independent" man or woman who is successful in business and cannot be hindered by being obligated to an other. Rather, this independent person is "free" to engage in sexual relationships as he or she sees fit without becoming emotionally atatched to the other person.

I guess this stereotype is great and liberating except for the fact that we have this innate, inborn desire to be known by an other (Other). And that generally in life the biggest disappointment we ever face is getting to do whatever we want or getting what we want in general. I would say it is amazing except that it ultimately creates people who have grown into materialistic, hopeless, selfish shells of what a human being has the potential to become through selfless love of an other (Other).

[Sidenote: I took a couple melatonin about half an hour ago and now it's going on 10 so this may have to be a two part post]

Over the last year and a half, I have had to make some sacrifices. I haven't played nearly as much Xbox as I used to. I lived in a place that was almost completely antithetical to everything I value in life. I've spent about three times as much as I used to spend when it was just me (turns out most people don't want to eat pinto beans for supper 5 nights a week, go figure!). In general, almost every day I have had to suspend my own selfish desires for instant gratification and put the good of Alison as an individual and our relationship as a couple above my own selfishness. You know the funny thing? This has been one of the most liberating experiences of my life! It ranks right up there with getting sober and then realizing that sobriety wasn't just tolerable, but preferably to constant innebrieation.

To wrap this up, I'm not the same person I was 19 months ago. In a lot of ways, the stereotypes are right. I don't do as much of what I used to do since I've been engaged. But that's a good thing! Without realizing it, when I got engaged I entered into a lifestyle, a way of training and disciplining myself, that has helped me to begin to move beyond the hopelessness of fulfilling my own selfish desires by putting the good of another in front of my own.

I look forward to continuing to find myself as I loose myself in this covenant called marriage. By God's grace I will become less as Christ is formed in me through the process of loving Alison.

Bicycling and The Dark Night of the Soul

I think it's cool when you get one of those mornings where it's almost foggy out but not quite there but the air is so wet you can almost taste it when you breathe it in. This morning was one of those mornings and as I was riding my bike to school I noticed that the hair on my arms was actually getting wet as I rode.

It's so nice having it finally warm up. This winter has been so long and so cold that I got to the point where I no longer expected it to be warm outside. It's like my mind erased the folder titled "t-shirt weather." Now it is warming up and I can step outside in a short sleeve shirt without being assaulted by the bitter cold wind stealing the breathe from my lungs. The funny thing is that even though it's getting warm now, I still brace myself everytime I open the door because in the back of my mind I'm expecting it to be 25 degrees outside; I can almost feel the cold air pushing against me as I step outside.

But then I walk out the door and nothing happens. There's no cold wind. Even better, instead of that bitter wind hitting me in the face I actually feel warm. For the first time in months I can be warm again without sitting in front of the heating vent.

I'm noticing that the spiritual journey works a lot like the seasons. I go through Springs and Summers where I bask in the warmth of God's presence. I see a dead, brown world turn green and fill with the life of God's presence. These times are great, there's nothing better than basking in God's presence. But innevitably winter comes. St. John of the Cross called this winter "the dark night of the soul."

For some reason God, in His infinite mercy, grace, and wisdom, retracts His presence from us from time to time. Sometimes He does this for a few weeks, sometimes for months similar to the winter season. I hear that sometimes this dark night can last for years.

The challenge of our spiritual winter is that we keep our sense of expectancy for God to act in His world. Just like I lost my expectancy that it would ever get warm again this winter and then when it did get warm I had a hard time feeling it, we can lose our sense of expectancy that God will ever act again. As God's presence is withheld from us, we begin to question whether He was ever there in the first place. We start to ask ourselves if we were diluded and had only been fooling ourselves when we felt God's presence in the past and thought we saw Him at work in our lives and the world around us.

I am just coming into the Spring after a Winter where I did not feel God's presence. In the last few weeks He has been shining His light into the darkness of my soul. I don't know exactly what I was supposed to learn from this. I suppose it has something to do with my ability to be a faithful servant while my master is in a distant land. But what I do know is that I have been amazed at the way I had lost my sense of expectancy. I had pretty much stopped looking for God to act in His world.

But anyway, Spring is here. Life is coming back into the world and things are getting busy again. The good thing about the seasons is that they are always passing. Enjoy and embrace the times of warmth and life and don't lose hope when it gets cold and everything dies. Spring is always coming.

Where William Carlos Williams Meets Zoey the Dog

So much depends
upon

A small black
Dog

Sitting next to
Me

Warming up our
Chair

IDS Blah!

I've been hittin' some hard travelin'
I thought you knowed
I've been hittin' some hard travelin'
Way down the road...

I don't think I've ever hit some hard travelin' myself. But I wonder sometimes. Maybe I have? Have I hit some hard travelin' and out of a false sense of humility I refuse to acknowledge it? Downplay it as normal travelin'?

All I know is I'm sick and tired of sitting through IDS lectures. Maybe it's small of me to bitch about it when people are starving all around the world while I sit here dicking around on the internet?

Let's all be thankful for our thrownness in this crazy world. Historicity: Making me feel better about not being content in my cushy circumstances since way before Heideggar ever articulated it!