The Good Word

It’s 10:37 pm here in Colorado.  I just got back from putting together my lesson plans for the next couple days. I’m leaving for my flight to Chicago in less than 6 hours. I have yet to pack.

Unless Retraria (the goddess of the internet) shows me some especial favor I doubt I’ll be posting again before Saturday.

On the bright side though, if you live in Hillsdale, I might just see you Friday evening. Give me a call 616-546-0841.

Now I will eat some mini-wheats and iron some shirts.

Today was day one of six of the CSAPs, which means that I spent the first half of my day administering a standardized test and the second half teaching an altered schedule to exhausted students.

You’d think there’d be nothing more boring than being a student, sitting in a desk, given an hour to make a final copy of a paper that only took you 30 minutes to write in the first place. You’d be wrong.

Being the teacher who is required by the state to “actively proctor” that test by walking around the room monitoring the students for an hour is approximately 1X10^18 times worse.

Luckily, I’ve got some pretty good friends and one of them (Pat) sent me an e-mail (before I was required to turn my computer off for the day) asking me to sum how I’ve changed and grown over the past year.

Last March, Pat, Brad, (two good friends of mine from high school) and I went on a week-long roadtrip which took us to New York City, Washington D.C., down the east coast to Cocoa Beach, Florida, then back up through the mountains of North Carolina. During that time we slept in Pat’s Jeep, ate my many variations on Ramen, and soaked up the experience and each other’s company.

So, during CSAPs today I contemplated all that had happened to me in the past 365. It went something like this.

How I Met Your Mother, whiskey, euchre, Ben Folds, Dionysus, Dr. Garnjobst, Eta Sigma Phi, relapse, Dr. Freeh, roommate issues, Young Life, Jon and Kate Plus 8, last security shift, TowerLight, last class, graduation, graduation party with the Hamiltons, VonSydow, FatNasty, falling into Baw Beese, packing up the Hamiltons, goodbyes, packing up Gretchen, goodbyes, cross-country trip with Brad, Leroy-Shack, Vinyards, graduation party for Chelsea, bike wrecked, Sunflower Management, homeless in Mueller State Park, East of Eden, Dean and Shirley, medicinal plants hike, Jenn from Leasing, kithkin, Corner Cafe, Bob and Virginia, Manitou Springs, party porch, College Pro. Painters, bike stolen, Jose, four wheeling and Mt. Evans, Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Fourth of July, Pike’s Peak, The Dark Knight, zoo, blog, Blondie’s, goodbyes, CMCA, classroom decorating, Gretchen totaled, first day of school, rented car, RCIA, house-cooling party, Animal Farm, Jose again, coffin races, Halloween dance, beardless, Mallory Visits, Todd Wallace (my new car), Scrabble, Thanksgiving trip to Boston, Long Wharf, Settlers of Catan, To Kill A Mockingbird, happy hour, Orientes Reges Tres, filling my students stockings, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, flight to Michigan, Kendra and Ashley in GR, X-Mas with Leroy, Dante, Motor City Bowl, Karen visits, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, Guild New Years, time with the guys in GR, Monroe, back, bearded again, blog again, 7th grade Latin, becoming a regular at Pike’s Perk, DVD binge, low, gun purchase, personal music renaissance, Slumdog Millionaire, karaoke, Valentine’s Day dance, done, Shakespeare Night, Ivanhoe, roller-derby, Joshua Radin, content, CSAPs, Hillsdale visit.

That’s my 365. Am I forgetting anything?

It’s been a big year and such a list doesn’t really do it justice, though it does make me feel good about how I’ve used my time. I’ve had a lot of ups and lot of downs – both of which see bigger in Colorado (probably due to the thinness of the air).

I know that without analysis this list doesn’t answer Pat’s question, but it’s a step in that direciton.

My first confession will be sometime next week.

How does one go about that? I mean, I understand I don’t have to enumerate every last one of my sins, but I would like to do this in earnest.

Do I start at age 3 when my sister first came home from the hospital and I slapped her in the face with a bib, and then end with that time I overdosed on Girl Scout cookies last week? That method would take me from now until Easter.

Should I just give a synopsis? “Age 10 - lots of anger at being so fat. Age 13 - lots of anger at being so tall and skinny, and at having a bowl cut. Age 14 lots of lust on account of sneaking R-rated movies with my friend Brian.”

Should I confess in installments? “And that’s when I made three girls cry because they thought I asked them to prom, but I didn’t – and next time we’ll talk about when I did nothing but watch MTV Spring Break and eat Oreos for a week.”

Should I just hit the highlights? “Pushed sister through a window,  that one time my car broke down and I had to spend the night at a girl’s house, spent an entire summer of Campus Security shifts watching YouTube videos…”

What’s my strategy?

Caleb e-mailed me this encouraging comic about confession today. At least I don’t have to confess that I’ve neglected the Whedonverse, though a few Hail Buffys wouldn’t hurt anyone.

I do, however, have to confess to subscribing to a “cute animal pictures” blog, then finding out that the creepy guy who runs the site actually intends it to be hip/humorous, then just liking it more.

I feel that the spiritual fog that has enveloped me over the last few months was finally lifted on Wednesday night. And it all began with a video. But let me digress…

In my day to day living and spinning on a giant ball in the midst of an even bigger universe I give very little thought to the wonder of creation. When I first moved to Colorado there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t notice the splendor of the mountains.

Within my first couple of days in Colorado Springs I had a co-worker inform me that if you really look, the mountains will look different every single day. And it’s true. Pike’s Peak at times varies in shades of grey, blue, green, purple, orange, white, and some days, when it is especially wintry outside, you can’t even see the top.

But for the last few months I stopped looking at the mountains. They in no way ceased to be impressive but they, like my life, seemed routine. My routine looks like this:

Wake up too late, shower, pick at my face, do my make-up, pause to look longingly at an old sorority hoodie and torn jeans and then find something that meets my company’s dress code, brush my teeth, grab a tumbler full of coffee, and drive to work—and then here I am again, an invisible chain around my ankle that ties me to my desk—answer emails, send emails, take phone calls, make phone calls—put  in my time, cram my evening full of social activities, stay up too late, go to bed. Wake up too late, frantically get ready…and it starts all over again.

In the midst of living an Office Space existence of 8-5, 8-5, 8-5, day after day, week after week, I do my best to demonstrate flair in the form of cute shoes and big jewelry. But I often feel like I’m missing out on the bigger picture.

It’s hard to pray sometimes when you sit in a grey cube and stare at a monitor all day. It’s even harder to really press into spiritual matters when your job entails spending all day analyzing other people spiritual insights in terms of how good they are at speaking and if their story would be a good fit on our radio broadcast. With such an overload of testimonies and stories I sometimes feel like my heart can’t take it all in so I just let things bounce off.

But on Wednesday I started reading a new book. It’s called Crazy Love and it’s by this pastor in CA named Frances Chan. In the first chapter he uses an analogy that hit through the wall of my heart and awakened me from my spiritual fog.  He states, 

“Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep–dependent lives.”

After reading that passage I watched a video he has on his website: www.crazylovebook.com Under Videos “The Awe Factor of God” and I was blown away by the images I saw.

Somewhere along the way how I interact with God had become routine as well as my prayers--saying the same things, thinking the same things, and somehow expecting different results. In chapter one Chan highlights Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4 as passages that magnify God on His throne.

The one who created the entire Universe created me. This God who sits on a throne with the appearance of thunder and emeralds with creatures covered in eyes that call out every moment of every day “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty” sent His son Jesus to die on the cross for me.

And so I fell to my knees and prayed in a way that I’ve never experienced before and I actually cried tears of gratitude for the wonder of it all.

The next morning I woke and I wasn’t bored of my life anymore and when I drove to work I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the mountains, and even later in the day sitting behind my desk I was amazed how nothing about God is within my comprehension and nothing about Him is routine.

Have any of you had any new spiritual insights? Or any books that you’ve read that have forever changed the way you interact with God? I would love to hear about

It’s been a long week. Not so much because I’ve had a lot on my plate, but because it’s the first five-day work week I’ve had since January.

It’s also been a good week. A nice dinner on Monday, happy hour on Fat Tuesday, Joshua Radin on Wednesday, Carraba’s Night (school fundraiser) last night, and who knows what lies ahead of me yet this evening.

I’ve been re-reading O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather this past week. I never finished it the first time around because I so tragically left it on the plane when I flew here last spring to interview. So it’s fitting that I’ve returned to it in preparation for my trip to Hillsdale next week (I’ll be in Michigan next Friday to interview potential teachers for next year).

It’s also fitting that I read it now because Cather spends so much time in her novels (especially My Antonia and O Pioneers!) discussing “home.”

So, today I’d just like to share a short passage and see what you all think of it, if anything.

It’s a dialogue from O Pioneers! between Alexandra, a farmer on the plains of Nebraska and the heroine of the novel, and her childhood friend Carl, a Chicagoan passing through his old homeland on his way to Seattle.

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a puzzled, thoughtful gesture. “You see,” he went on calmly, “measured by your standards here, I’m a failure. I couldn’t buy even one of your cornfields. I’ve enjoyed a great many things, but I’ve got nothing to show for it all.”

“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.” Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, we leave nothing behind us but frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at hundred of our own kind and shudder.”

Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He know that she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worth while to work…

…Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men……her folks sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been perfectly cheerful…

…She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”