Monday, May 31, 2010

Discovery

Late late late.

And up against a wall.

But there I am, writing this again.

I will admit, this is probably a stand in, this blog that is.  A stand in for writing I should do that could be more important.  I will admit that this is probably not going to be as great of a read as you might have hoped, as you might have wished for when you decided to come see if I updated and might have got a little excited in seeing that I had.  But I will also admit that I'm glad you're here, reading this right now, because if I'm going to deflect writing other, better things, I might as well be writing for an audience.

It's a binary I guess, or many of them constructing the larger whole.  I could writer other better things for no one (immediately) with no sort of instant gratification at all, or I can write this, for you and others like you to read right away but it's a diversion from the better things I could be spending my time writing.

So why write this if I'm so convinced something else I could write would be so much better?  Mostly because I'm lazy and mostly because I enjoy instant gratification...also because I don't feel organized or devoted enough to anything else right now in order to spend the time writing it.

I also kind of feel duty-bound to update this from time to time.  That's not the fault of any of you...it's simply 6 years of conditioning.  I did, afterall, update my old (ancient really) xanga page daily for something like 8 months when I started it.  I'm self indulgent, so here's a shameful link to it if you want to see it: click these words!

I feel like I'm walking on a wall between two gardens right now.  Opaque metaphor is my specialty.  Luckily it almost always translates into "liminal."

But I digress.

Ever since I joined InterVarsity staff (or really, more correctly, since graduation which is now more than a year ago...wow), I have felt like my life is some kind of uneven collection of colored glass pieces (opaque metaphors about transparent material are really my favorite) that can sometimes pass around by each other and look like something with meaning, but mostly it's all just a jumbled bit of many things, often beautiful, but without any real unity, without specific purpose.  I shouldn't say without specific purpose because I haven't felt purposeless...but I have felt like my life, as a whole, is more a collection of things that share but me as me and don't really fit together to form a solidified whole.  I wonder if that's how all recent college graduates feel or if it's simply the real form of adult life.  I'm not sure but I am sure that if anything, it seems to become more and more the case as time goes on and that doesn't seem like its altogether completely logical.  The further I get from college, shouldn't more things fall into place?  Maybe that's the case in the long run.  But one year out, I'm still in the fracturing phase, or at least have been for awhile.  Maybe I'm not anymore.  But it was a good phase.  It was a good place to be.  It's not that I like things kind of seeming to fall apart or at least become disparate, but it seems to me that life is really a set of build ups, orderings, then fallings down and apart so that something somehow more glorious is built in its place.  Maybe that means I'm afraid of permanence and have given myself a transient lifestyle because I don't want to become something that will stagnate.  But If I think about myself in those terms, then I guess I'm well on my way to losing a bit of that transience, and I'm okay with that...but it's not happening, not yet.

Next year, I will have sort of 3.5 homes, depending on how you count...but all at once, will be somewhat without a permanent residence.  I'll be living in a cottage not far from Hillsdale during the week but probably won't spend many weekends north of Ohio, and my weekends will be pretty split up between different places in Ohio, depending on the ebb and flow of life.  I wish I had some sort of commentary on all of this, but I don't really.  I wish I could divine some deeper meaning from the lot of it, but all it really is is a collection of facts that are.

But from where I stand I stare boldly into that coming future and embrace all of it.  It's not time for me to have a home yet, but I will know when it is.  Maybe it's because God has brought me this far without any debilitating snags, maybe it's a naive refusal to be tied to places as places, maybe it's a faith that borders on irrationality.  I don't know.  But I don't fear anything and I don't worry.  And that's alright.

I feel like I'm being prideful and arrogant about all of that and I apologize because not only would that be wrong of me, but it's not even really something worth being prideful and arrogant about.

But I look forward to the summer and the coming year richly.

I'm at about 55% of my funding for next year, I think.  If anything, it's probably more than that.  It's shadow time, wherein the next fiscal year is close, when the new budget kicks in, so it's like a game of waiting and coin-flipping, to see what the final remaining balance will be and how much less I need to raise.  I don't know that that's actually how I ought to look at it because we're supposed to be striving for monthly gifts that sustain...I'm something of a one-time-gift magnet though, and I'm not going to insist on any specific form of giving if someone wants to invest in God's work at Hillsdale.

I've been learning and thinking some pretty simplistic stuff about God lately and I think it's simply things we've wanted to overlook:  Jesus' commandment is to love God and to love others...and that's all.  The entire wealth of Christian morality is derived from that and explicated in Paul's letters, but those are letters to people who are already Christian whom he is urging to act in ways that will best show that love to the world.

That is more radical than it sounds...as love often is.

-Zack

"strange how you fit into me"
-Vienna Teng

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Back in the Saddle

It's summer.  Well, it's the school-year rendered version of summer, per the Hillsdale College academic calendar.  There are certain aspects of my job that make it feel more like a job than it often does, and when I think about the summer, that becomes one of them...it's full-time fundraising time once again.

But Fund Raising, I'm learning, isn't as bad as it sounds or seems and Faith goes a long way.  It might be the most "job-like" thing I have (depending on how you define "job"), but it can be one of the most exciting.  It's a risky, vulnerable business, but it's also highly relational and it's fun to get to catch up with old friends and family members as part of my job.  I also kind of like the regularity of my daily schedule.  It's not something I could or would want to do full time forever, but I am, at the end of the day, thankful for the seasons of life, even, as it may be, the seasons of fund raising in my life.

It helps, too, that this fund development season has a set end when school starts, unlike last year...of course, that's largely because of the work I had to do during that indeterminate season on my life last year following graduation.

And as I re-enter this season of my life, I remember what life was like this time last year, and even more what became my life by the end of the summer and the end of 2009; it is drastically different, to say the least, and ultimately, it is better.

There's a sort of adolescent growing period immediately following college graduation.  There's a lot of adjustment that, at least for me, had to take place in moving back home, but even more, there's an adjustment to the idea that college is over, that life of some sort or another is beginning again, much like it did when college started, but somehow bigger, somehow more powerfully so.  At least that's how it felt for me last year...and I'll admit that I simply didn't have the best immediate support network for all of that when it all started after I returned home from Chapter Focus Week last year.  Things were changing and things were hard and there was little I could do but turn inward and upward for support because everyone I knew was elsewhere in the world and going through much of the same as me (but, of course different and sometimes including marriage and or coming marriage).  Maybe it's ironic, maybe it's just exactly what God wanted for some reason, and probably it's both, but I definitely do have a much stronger immediate support network now, so to speak, and it's much less necessary for my emotional state going into and going through this summer, one summer removed from college...very much the same but intrinsically different from last summer.

Being tied to the school year is like a science experiment; there are certain things that always stay the same, and it's by them that you can measure the changes.  In the past year, much has changed, but here I am with some key similarities nonetheless....as I look at where I am now and where I was then, I can look on, look back, look forward even, and say that while the past year was one of the hardest I've ever lived, it's brought me to a great place.  God has brought me to a great place.  Maybe it's because of that very fact that I feel like things are more than fine right now; God worked in and through so much in the last 365 days, how could I not make it through what feels like so much less (but could very well be so much more if I look from the right angle) if I made it through, better on the other side, everything that has happened in the past year.

Thank you all, to whom this applies, for your prayer and support in the past year.  I couldn't have done it without you.  If you don't know if it applies to you or not and think it might not...it probably does...knowing my parochial readership.

One of the first students I met at Hillsdale (when I visited before accepting placement during my senior year) got married on Saturday.  I don't know if that symbolizes anything but in a way, it makes me feel old.  In another way, it makes me feel like Hillsdale only masquerades as a school without religious ties (and it's not the only reason I feel that way...), and in a third way, it makes me simply feel joyful.

This Saturday, a woman is getting married that I met long, long ago, many years before she met most if not all of her wedding party.  We used to talk a lot but now, other than the stand-in-for-conversation that a facebook friend request acceptance is, we've not talked since those years (about 8 of them ago).  She's mostly a friend of a friend now, even know neither of us knew any of those mutual friends all those years ago. I don't know that any of that means anything at all..it's just interesting and I like writing about interesting things and seeing if something more interesting emerges.  I don't think it's happening right now.

This Sunday, I hope not to disappoint.  It's a bit of a rigged jury though...I could fail miserably, and I've a feeling I won't disappoint.

I don't know why I share such vagaries.  I just do.

-Zack

"He brought me to a spacious place.  He rescued me because he delighted in me"
-Psalm 18:19

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Great Life-giver

The past two weeks evaporated.  It often felt like they were going to last forever (and sometimes I hoped they would, just a little at least), but right now, it feels like two weeks were zapped from my life.  It's mostly because there's such a difference between being at Cedar Campus and being anywhere else that it almost feels like a dream...like I know it happened but the time it took to happen is unaccounted for in my mind.

Then I think about the physical exhaustion I had to overcome over the weekend and realize that it most definitely did happen.

And it was good.  It was very good.  Chapter Focus week is kind of more fun to staff when your students aren't there because it feels like you've got a vibrant social life for a week when you get to hang out with all of the other staff that don't have chapters there and, even without my bias, it's probably safe to say that InterVarsity staff are mostly pretty cool people to hang out with.  But I do have a bias, so I might be wrong.

That's not to say that the second week, when Hillsdale was there, wasn't great, because it definitely was.  Indeed, it was perhaps more great but in all different ways.  We had a very small group, by Hillsdale standards, but it seems that many of them at least understand the mission of InterVarsity better now...my main prayer request is that living that out on campus happens and, further, that it spreads.  The students we had are influential, but there is always the stark worldview contrast between me and Hillsdale students that translates into very different things from the same or at least seemingly same ideas.  There probably shouldn't be such difference between my worldview and that of the typical Hillsdale Christian Fellowship student, because we're all Christians...but sometimes it feels like all similarities end there....indeed, I think they often might...at least most of them.

I've been realizing, especially today and this weekend, that calling God the giver of life means a lot more than we let it.  Of course it means eternal life, but so often we act like eternal life is the only thing God wants to give us.  Perhaps it is the ultimate thing, but he wants to give us life to live abundantly now, here, in this life.  A rich, joyful, hopeful, free life is what he wants to give those who seek him in this life.  I think most people settle for so much less.  Many christians settle in and decide that this life must be terrible and look heavenward at all times, while non-Christians and especially irreligious people settle for a life that strives to be fulfilled by imperfect love from imperfect people and it can only lead to an unfulfilling life.  But God can and will grant a beautiful life to his children, if we would simply seek to see his world as he sees it, deriving joy from the beauty he places around us, in people, in places, in knowing that he loves us more than we can even fathom.  There's joy in the life he wants to grant us, if we would be open, and it's a joy that gives strength and hope, because he promises this world will be imperfect in its broken state.  But despite its brokenness, he offers hope for a brighter tomorrow and a better today.  It's amazing how far hope can get you, when it rests in the creator and sustainer of all things.  The best part about it is, perhaps, at least for now, that it's a joy that often, practically, comes from others, in the context of community.  God uses people to bless people with a rich life of love and hope.  To be close to God is to be close to others; it is some kind of profound, beautiful, mysterious circle that lets us constantly draw more and more and more into the fold of joyful, warm, loving embrace, if only we would stop pursuing the end and take a moment to love in the means.

-Zack

"What happened to the American dream?  It came true."
-Watchmen