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