L37: Faith

I don't know that I have the faith to encounter God would have me encounter.  To believe all he would have me believe.  To trust in so many things it seems I've no practical hope of seeing.  

But his faithfulness, mercy, and grace run deeper than my own unbelief.  

I want to have the deeper faith, the faith required to do, to see, to be, to experience all he would have for me.  

I've learned much from a life that, if all set before me, looks much longer than it feels.  But perhaps the most important thing I've learned is that God calls us to bold and brilliant things but his grace is big enough that, for the present moment, he simply asks for the faith to take the next step.

And he builds on that.  

Faith is not natural, and it is not granted.

It is grown.

-Zack

"Peel back our ribs again and stand inside of our chest.  We just wanna love you"

-John Mark McMillan

-

L36: Reason

I hate poetry because of the rules, and I probably hate it for that reason because I'm jealous of those who can write it when I can't.  I do not, however, hate dance when that is still very much the case.  I also don't hate singing or painting or drawing or film or any other art form in which I can engage, even if poorly.

But poetry, I hate, even at its most beautiful, I wish it could be sprung from the confines of meter and the shackles of rhyme and just be beautiful on its own.  And maybe it can, and maybe it can't, and I'm doing all I can to actively rip beauty from the prison it inhabited so long ago.  I feel justified in doing this, because artistically, poetry is somehow older than prose.

If you study dance, which I've not, you'll encounter post-modern dance, wherein anything is a dance if the dancer decides this to be the case.  And I agree (and not just because I have an affinity for the post-modern).  That's probably my biggest issue with poetry.  Prose exists, and thus the least poetic poems are cast off as not-poems, or, as it's called so derisively "prose."

Perhaps more than I hate poetry, I lament it and my inability to create it.  I believe in the ultimate pliability of words, the fact that anyone can do anything they want with a language and the passion, the fury, the beauty, will seep out if it is poured in with enough care.  And sometimes that care takes the form of a poetic arrangement, and I don't have the skill to do that, so, perhaps, I lament that it works.  Like post-modern dance though, the tenant still remains that artistic creation is more the product of an expressing heart than the end product itself.  Sometimes that heart soars, it leaps, it flies, it screams, it cries, it aches, it dies, it beats and pulses with life, sorrow, death, and rage, and love.  Perhaps mostly love.  And hope.  I hate that that heart can effectively be boxed into iambs.  But it can.

-Zack

"these days, mercy cuts so deep"
-Jars of Clay

L35: Patience

Uncertainty is both natural and naturally uncomfortable.  We do long, I do long, to always know the next step, to know what happens next, to see what's coming, in order to plan or really just to know.


But that's just wanting something I ought not have yet.  It's just desiring something that is not mine to desire.  


Without uncertainty, there could not be faith, at least not a faith in the promise that the future is brighter, that the future is where we're supposed to be heading, and in the meantime, we're where we're supposed to be in the meantime.


Patience, though, is highly inconvenient when you live in the tunnel of time as we all do, some more than others.  I'll admit that I'm highly impatient when it comes to not knowing anything, especially about my future.  


That is probably its own form of an unholy lack of contentment, a lack of faith that what is now is what is supposed to be, even just for now.  


Sometimes I'm less a fan of the now and throw all of myself into the next because the next might be better than the now.

There's a right place, somewhere in the middle of it all, of positively seeking real change, patiently looking forward to what comes next and being ready for what it may be (not holding too tightly to what is now because it might just be for now), and having the faith God asks of us to simply be where he has placed us and to know he's placed us there for a reason.

I'm not sure how to straddle all of that right now, but I'm trying.

-Zack

"the answer's obvious, we switch the consonants, change the sword to words and lift continents"
-Flobots

L34: Bright

There are so many metaphors for God and for the life lived with him and to him.  But there's one particular metaphor that I question in its symbolic use:

"Walk in the light, for you are children of the light and in the light there can be no darkness"

Maybe it's just because I think in metaphor too often that I substitute it for reality, from time to time.  But I swear I've seen the light in people, not as something else, but really, as light.  Light and darkness are a necessary dichotomy, but it's unfortunate that modern dichotomistic thinking gets to think about this one, because it's only a dichotomy because it has to be.  Most of the time, it seems we think about the light as the absence of darkness, and I think it ought to be the other way around.  Darkness is the absence of light.  Suddenly, walking in the light isn't just a righteous life, but something more glorious, something more than just not sinning...something more than what it's not.

But maybe I just confuse what I want to see for what I actually see, but I know there are those in whom I've seen something, some sort of brightness, some sort of effluvial joy and it's a lot more than simply not doing bad things.  There is certainly merit to the pure life, or as pure a life as we can live, but the glory of the gospel isn't that it stops us from sinning, it's that we can live a life no longer bound by the chains of our ultimately flawed personal strivings, and feeling that freedom, breathing in the glory of truth and grace...that is the presence of light.

-Zack

"See the most important parts are the ones that are unseen; the wings don't make you fly and the crown don't make you king"
-Lupe Fiasco

L33: Shepherd

"The God of love, my shepherd is."
"What shall I want?"

It's not just that we're being led by the almighty maker and ruler of all.  It's not just that we're in the hands of he who holds all in his hands, by whose will and word all came into being and all continues to be.

It's that that God, that maker, that ruler of all, loves us deeply.

I know I'll only ever comprehend the smallest bits of that love.  If I could dive the depths of human experience and feel all the love all loving is ever rendered, I imagine I'd still have a very incomplete understanding of God's love.

But there's something reassuring about even knowing that we can't know how much he loves us.  It suffices to say that we're, even collectively, too small to understand it.

And to know that someone who loves us that deeply, that completely, that incomprehensibly, is the one directing our paths, if we will follow, is, perhaps the best hope I can muster.  Even when things are brilliant and hope seems less necessary, that's but an illusion; things are only brilliant when hope is at its highest.

Above all else, his love, his leading, his very being, compels us to hope.

-Zack

"I was born to shine"
-John Mark McMillan

L32: Again

They, whomever they may be, say history repeats itself.  I'm generally and principally skeptical of maxims, especially reductionist maxims, no matter how true they hold to be; that seems a process of dumb luck or conditioning.

But I do wonder how God uses experiences to prepare us for what's to come, if circumstances are to, at least on some level, repeat.

There are some things I never want to go through again and the Lord has graciously prevented them from repeating and I've gained lessons from those experiences that I don't think I'll need to relearn.  But as God is omniscient, as he knows our future, and as he grows us through life experience, there's a certain place where lesson in principal and training intersects with preparation.  Indeed, I sometimes wonder if God ever has us learn lessons we don't end up using.  I don't know, but I do know he knows a lot more about our future than math teachers who remind students daily that they never know where they might need math in the future.  God knows where we'll need what he teaches us in the future.

I don't know if that's exciting or scary.  I'm pretty sure it's both.  I'm not necessarily excited to need the knowledge I've learned from some life experiences, but I am utterly grateful he's prepared me for what is to come.

-Zack

"'Anyway' she says, 'I'll see you around'"
-Vienna Teng

Beneath the Starry Threshold

I was looking back through old entries just now, trying to pinpoint when I did my first blog redesign, about this time last year.  Last year I was entering my last full month of college as March unwound.  I could go on and on about how I was wrong and right in surprising ways about life now, and about what I know now and didn't then and all that's happened since, and all that.  A general catch up reminiscence post, and maybe I'll do one of those someday, but not today, not right now, because, though I resist it as much as I can, I'm realizing a theme to my writing, and I guess, if my writing has to have a theme, I'm honored to have this one: Betweenness.  Liminality.  Indefiniteness symbolized by spacial uncenteredness.  As college came to an end, I felt the betweenness of life's changing tide, the now and not yet of there and the rest of my life.  As it turns out, circumstances change but I still feel the sharp pangs of betweenness and I'm kind of a walking example, at least in my own mindset, of the livability of the post-modern ideal.  I don't know if there can be such a thing as the post-modern ideal, but if there is, it is the ability to live liminally.  That's not to say it is to be tried for- it is to say that we all live liminally and are at our best when we fully acknowledge that we're between centers at all times and can't really know anything about the centers till we step back and let ourselves exist between them.  And that's what I do.  That's what I've been doing for at least a year, subconsciously and most definitely super-consciously at times.  That's not to brag, well, maybe it is a little bit but I don't mean it to be...it's just that I've thought recently, quite a bit, that I've felt the most in-between things in life as I ever have, and reading through what I wrote last year, I wonder if that's true or if I'm simply more aware of it now than ever before (perhaps largely brought on by the forced introspection of forcing myself to average one post per day during lent save for Sundays).  I do know I'm living and feeling in between many things now, but I have been for awhile.

But that's life in this world, between many things.  Ultimately though, it's a direct analog to the now and not yet that is the Kingdom of God.  There are parts of it here, there are elements ongoing.  But they pale in comparison to what is to come, and we're constantly between those facts.

There is however, one center that is constant and our own disparateness with it is our own shortcoming.  Hope in that, hope in Him, is the fuel to fire the engines of a life stuck between many things thanks to the brokenness of our suffering world.  But it's not eternal, and if nothing else, that's where we can get our hope.  I'm not positing the value of inbetween living, just pointing out its existence, because we're all always in between and we're all always in process and we always will be til He returns.  But He loves us and will not withhold all blessings prior to that day.

Even so, right now, I'm between many things, and he wants me to be that way for the time being, and when that time is up, I'll be between other things.

Last night I went on a very impromptu stargazing trip with 4 students at the University of Findlay.  My love for that particular institution and city will have to wait for another hypothetical post that may never take place.  I don't know that it matters the context, but looking up at the stars, even in our attempts to objectify them as our own constellations, always makes me feel small and warm and filled with wonder, like a child in his or her mother's arms not long after birth; there's a rightness and a warmth to the smallness and the fulfillment from the experience.  Somehow, gazing up, I don't feel inconsequential despite the vastness of the universe.  I feel small compared to its largeness, but I feel close to it all the same, and somewhere in that lies the love that passes all understanding, because the God that made all of that still loved us enough to not just die for us, but to come here in the first place, from up there where, even if not literally heaven that is the heavens of outerspace, I'm sure the stars look more brilliant.

-Zack

"I want to know if you feel the same way, cause if you do I want to stay forever"
-Ween

Redesign

You might notice the new title and the new layout.  It's not that I like to redesign my blog every march or anything, but I have decided to make it look and feel more like the aim the posts actually tend to go.  Instead of a look inside and through my life (although that's certainly, in a different manner, inherent in everything I write), I've been going in a more "art inspired by hope" direction, so that's kind of the new MO around here.  I simply want to create, and as someone who strives to see the world through the hope of the cross, I want to examine the world and this walk we call life through that lens.  Sometimes hope is the inspiration for amazing things and sometimes hope is the only thing we can cling to as the world falls around us.  But in Christ there is hope, and while I might doubt many things many times (often, indeed), I know the hope and it is through and by that hope that I am all I am and could ever be.

L31: Sun

I know that rain is necessary, to quench the parched Earth and all life to continue. I know storms come and winter is never more than 9 months away, and when winter comes in the north, the skies go overcast for weeks on end.

I know it has to happen, I know the storms and snows and floods come on the Earth and in our lives. I know it's necessary and can't be helped.

But oh to feel the sun, to see it burst forth behind and in front and all around. To feel the warmth dispelling the fog...oh to live in that place where the sun always is.

That would be supreme. Perhaps even and only divine.

But still the storms persist here, in this life and through it.

But I persist despite the storms, because somewhere, on the other side, I will feel the sun.

-Zack

"In an unreliable world, you shine like a star"
-Mat Kearney

L30:Eternity

I wonder what it means, that we live in light of eternity. Do our lives become much more (so much more) than the finite specks they are, while we're still living them? And what does it even mean, that a life lived in light of its own eternity has some kind of eternal consequence past its own self? We must be born as something unique already, if what we do, here and now, in this relative speck of time, matters for the rest of it. It's a great divine mystery I'm sure we're not quire able to comprehend, and I'm sure that's how it's supposed to be. But it makes me wonder, it makes me dream, of what might be on the other side, really literally, what is there? What is there that we can impact it from here but that it could make all of this seem like but a bad dream? There's no logic to that, and perhaps, that's exactly the point.

-Zack

"Surely we can change something"

-David Crowder

L29:Community

If the process of redemption is the process of placing Christ more and more at the center, then something has got to move out of the way. We're born at our own center, and we can't stay there if Christ is to take his rightful place. If we don't make the effort to take ourselves out of the center and put Christ at the center, we run the risk of making life an attempt at being the best at putting Christ at the center. That might not be totally bad, but there's a reason unity is placed at so high a place of priority in the New Testament. There's a reason what we do to the least of these is what we do to Christ, and there's a reason true religion is feeding the hungry. It's not because works have anything to do with our salvation. It's because Christ is most at his right place when we're out of our own center, inside the same periphery we place others, and then we see and feel their needs as if we have them, and helping others, doing things for others, thinking of others ahead of ourselves is the natural outpouring of the worldview Christ calls us to. People often rationalize the James passage as saying that true faith will produce good fruit. But that's still a bit too self-centered because it's placing the emphasis on one's own faith.

-Zack

"And the problem it seems is with you and me not the love Who came to fix everything"

-David Crowder

L29: Exodus

There's something to be said about the call to be a foreigner in the Bible. Throughout Leviticus and Deuteronomy (and elsewhere), God reminds the Israelites to show hospitality to the non-Hebrews they will share space with because "they were once foreigners in Egypt." Further than that, we're called people just on a sojourn here on this Earth, citizens, more truly, of a heavenly Kingdom.

In the words of C.S. Lewis, God does not want us to get too comfortable here, to mistake anything here as anything but temporary.

But there are pieces of eternity all around us, and it matters how we treat them...it feels a bit kitsche to say, but the people around us have souls that will last forever and we collide with them everyday.

So there's always a necessry tension. Life as a child of God is by nature always already liminal...because we're living as eternal beings with heavenly citizenship in a world that is nothing but fleeting.

-Zack

"we're so comfortable now the pioneers have settled in, a perfect blend of progress and pale skin"

-John Reuben

L28: Difference

It's funny how it works sometimes, that we intentionally end up in places and with people that aren't quite like us. And it's good too, but its' so far from easy. I don't know how it works for everyone, but I know for me, or well, I'm finding out everyday, that there's something in the difference, something in the places where everything doesn't quite meld, something there that I'll learn from. Every context has it's own levels of dissonance, but for whatever reason I find myself in contexts all of the time that don't resonate with me. Places where difference exists. Right now I'm learning from a place that is different from me due to its samenness in itself. I don't know if that's ironic, but life is rarely if ever dull.

-Zack

"with our hopes and our hearts and our hands, we're the architects of our last stand"

-Flobots

L26: Power

Michel Foucault, more rightfully than most of us would like to admit, claimed that no real truth really exists and people simply believe what they choose to believe because they subconciously believe it gives them more cultural currency to do what they please with their lives. This, in turn, sets up systems where the social deviants are able to operate on the margins; giving up certain things in order to accomplish goals in a sort of short-circuited rendering of reality. Everyone, Foucault claimed, works under an idea of a discourse that they hold to be true.

For the most part, this makes Foucalt both one of the least popular and most important 20th century theorists. He was kind of like Nietzsche for the common man with less memorable statements (although still very potent). I think though, for the most part, Foucalt was probably right, and I think that because I've seen things work how he set them up to work. I believe in truth a little more than he did, but I can't blame him for looking at people and surmising that they are doing what they're doing for reasons of cultural power. Indeed, it's a thin line we all walk, at best, and it explains how two contradictory viewpoints could be as compelling as we often see them- because the truthfulness isn't as important as the cultural power one gains by adhering to a certain perspective. It's a trap I see people fall into all of the time. How many people, afterall, are strong Christians throughout High School because it makes them popular with the cute members of the opposite sex in youth group, but abandon their faith when those cute members of the opposite sex are suddenly members of the party crowd? In the mind of anyone below 25, sexuality is probably our strongest discourse, even though I hate to admit that. Here at Hillsdale, things are a bit different, but I see it, everyday, where people subscribe to a certain morality and a certain sort of ethos because it lends them a sort of cultural currency...and it happened at Wooster too, although it was usually amorality that drove them. In short, that means I run into a lot of cultural Christians who espouse some wonderful and correct things, but they do it for all of the wrong reasons, and I don't know that they realize it.

I'm not quite sure there's a real way out of the cultural conundrum Foucault points out, but he does leave the special room for the cultural margin, the people that work in the opposite direction of the system, but within it, and ultimately, that's what Christ did too. Call it a theology of sedition if you will. I do know Christ never called us to our faith in him out of what we gain from it within this world. Indeed, he calls us to give it all up for him, and that's the opposite of what Foucault says happens with cultural power and discourse theory. Just because something really is true, truer than Foucault says anything can be, doesn't mean our fallenness can't use it as just another discourse.

-Zack

"Bodies die, souls will rise"
-David Crowder

L25: Green

There aren't many words, especially adjectives, with as many meanings as "green". They all point to the color, of course, but the color means so much: young, inexperienced, alive, envious.

What if they all point to the same thing? I think, perhaps, they do, at least in my own youthful understanding of things. Well, young at least, if not youthful.

For me it just makes sense; to be young is to be quite alive, both in your distance from "natural" death and the energy that goes with it, but it's also to be inexperienced, and I think it is often to be envious because there are still so many things left in the world to experience, to do, to see, to feel, to be. Envy, I think, is the fallen state of adventurous. I suppose it's possible to be some of them but not all, or one of them and not the rest. But it is, at least, to be less "green." Right now, I'd say I'm pretty green, and not just because it's St. Patrick's Day.

I don't know that there is much real importance to a simple accounting and conflation of all the possible meanings of green, but I do like how so much of it comes straight from creation. Green literally means both alive and unripe in the same organisms and, at least in English, often in the same people.

I'm definitely far from "ripe," and even if that means inexperienced to a fault, at least it still means I'm very alive.

-Zack

"Our love was on the wing, we had dreams and songs to sing"
-The Fields of Athenry

L24: Terminology

My life has been pretty submersed in C.S. Lewis since late 2009 and joy is a constant theme, especially when you read the highly formalist Christian literature about Narnia I've been reading lately. It's not really terrible, well, I guess most of you don't assume formalist is a pejorative like I do. The biggest issue is really the assumption that formalism is Christian and the Christian approach to a text is formalist. That's modernist arrogance though, and it's rampant in the American church, has been for some time, and continues to cripple us. Literature is probably the least of most of our worries. But it's pretty central to mine, and I couldn't help it if it wasn't.

Most ironically, Lewis' work is steeped in the "ahead of its time" post-modern. All the references to the "numinous," the very nature of unattainable joy in the Earthly realm that drives all of his work (most of all, his own autobiography), and the importance of story over dogma all point to post-modernity. I don't know if it's because he didn't have to mindset to do it or not, but if he could have reduced the centrality of ideas in his thinking, he'd have been the first Christian post-modernist. Indeed, most of his work was a critique on modernist approaches to the faith.

Of course, I opened this talking about literary criticism, and that's where things fall apart. Lewis himself was an almost perfectly formalist critic, and it's unfortunate. It allows for all of those who write about him to fall into his school of thought and, in doing so, to get trapped in it when approaching his writings on faith. I don't think he would have liked it that way. I can't agree with his approach to literature, but he would be the first to tell you that he wrote his criticism about stories and poems, not faith, so approaching his work on faith the same way he approached The Faerie Queen is an unfortunate reversal of what he would have ever wanted. Ironic enough as that is, doing what the author wouldn't have wanted points to non-formalist approaches, and taking the formalist approach would be what he wouldn't want.

It's all a circle, and I'm probably the only one who will ever read this that would ever care about it.

But I miss college sometimes.

-Zack

"We can be redeemed, oh, all of us"
-David Crowder

L23: Theme

I stopped believing in over-arching grand narrative a long time ago. For some people (C.S. Lewis), that's a very unchristian (but not the book) thing to do. Well, I guess I should restate that. I stopped believing in the necessity of Grand Narrative a long time ago. I do know God has a purpose and goal and work everything out for the good and all of history is tending toward his ultimate end reality and all of that. But I don't think we can break that down, at least not on this side of eternity, as much as we would like to. I think it's God's narrative, necessarily, and we can, at best, work within our role and hope to realize what it all means on the other side of here.

So maybe I do believe in grand narrative. But I don't believe in pursuing it, I don't believe in a priori fitting it all together and coming up with what meant what, before we reach the end. That's basically like mapping out a plot (an exercise I don't really believe in either, but it's done "successfully" in many lower-tier English classes all of the time, and probably in even the higher ones at Hillsdale...) before you've finished the book. At best, it's conjecture, and I'd argue it's mostly immoral.

God calls us to abide in him, and part of that is not knowing what's next. "you will hear, to your right and to your left, this is the way, walk in it." To me, that doesn't sound like we can fit it all together on our own before we see where we end up. I've tried that a lot in my life, and I can construct quite the interesting sequence of events, none of them accidental, that get me to where I am today, and it would be, well, interesting to see...but to draw conclusions about the future from it not only often fails, but it is an exercise in small faith. The honest truth is, I can't tell where I'm headed, just by where I've been. But I can tell by where I am, from where I've been, God's got it under control, no matter what.

-Zack

"The low moon helps me sing"
-Feist

L22: Silence

It is common literary practice, especially among the theorists, to consider a voice a form of agency and thereby personhood. To be able to speak, to have the ability and the presence within a given space to vocalize internal thoughts is the pathway to existence.

This makes sense, because it is in giving up that ability, at least temporarily, that we come closest to our creator. God meets us in the silence, when we stop talking, when we escape the places where everyone and everything is doing all they can to assert their agency by voice and come to a place where there is nothing to be heard but the voice of God.

It is a call to silence and a call to refreshment, but it is largely a call to give up self as well, or at least any claims we might think we have to our own selves, to our own personhood, in contrast to the glory that is the maker and ruler of all. God does not forcibly take our own selves from ourselves, but he will willing receive and renew those who willingly take a step back, and even for a moment, allow for silence to hear his call. Dying to self has always been the key, and he has always been in the resurrection business.

-Zack

"the nearness of there feels more near to here"
-David Crowder

Inside the Sound

I don't know why God invites us into a life of suffering. It's much easier to picture a world where everything becomes brighter, everything becomes good, everything becomes whole, the moment Christ takes over. I guess I can relate to the Pharisees sometimes, because no matter what I know and believe about Jesus (or at least, by putting that aside for just a second), I kind of wish he was the ultimate conquering messiah who would just come and set things right. Of course I know that's not right, that's now what he was doing, that's not the total, long-view purpose of God's Kingdom, but I do sometimes wish it were that easy.

But it's not, and the reality we have is better, at least in the long run, for it. But it doesn't change how my humanity doesn't enjoy the sort of suffering endemic to the human condition...and it's not even like I suffer in the same ways so many around the world do on a daily basis...but it's not like I enjoy what I do go through either. There's a big difference between en-joy and to "count it all joy." I'm learning that. Because I can count it as eventual joy, and I can do what I can to view everything as a learning experience and as a step further toward the "prize." But suffering wouldn't be suffering without suffering, and without suffering, there isn't the long-view learning to be had.

I'm sorry for how all of my posts might seem like endless pontificating these days. I'm just trying to make sense of a life I just don't understand right now, and I do that by writing. If it weren't for the blog-format and the publishability though, I'd get too self-concious and never get these thoughts out...or I'd never have to process them to the point of being able to share them with others, as this kind of is. It's a sad substitute, I'll admit, to a real person to talk through things (and, honestly, be more honest), but it's what I've got right now, and it's what I'll use. I've enjoyed the lent posts, but I do apologize how they seem to get shorter and far more parochial as I go. I don't mean it that way, and I don't have a plan for them at all. Sometimes I get stuck around issues and thoughts and have to write around them like digging a hole around a post or something...you can't do much to the post itself, but by digging around it, eventually you'll get to the point that you can remove it.

I wish I could say more and I wish I could say different things. But right now, I mostly just need to be as clear in my thoughts as I can be, so I can get to sleep and face a new day and all the excitement that may be on the way.

Goodnight world.

-Zack

"You never stop until my final breath is gone"
-Hawthorne Heights

L21: Promises

If only we could learn to cling to the promises. First and only. If only we could realize that too good to be true might often be the case in this world, but too good to be true is the currency of truth in which our Lord most often deals.

If only we could love as he loves. To not love in spite of flaws, but to love wholly, flaws and all. And even at that space, where he loves unconditionally, even the lowest, most flawed of us all, to still provide the rescue out; to love us in our sin and have and keep us as his while we come out of it and stumble back in. To want to save us even when we don't realize we need the saving.

We can't do that. We cannot be what we are not, and we can't have that counted against us. And he never will. He only counts the response, and his patience is unending.

Knowing God is knowing one's own imperfection, but knowing God is realizing that He'll never stop loving, healing, chasing, rescuing, despite the level of imperfection. He just loves us, and who am I to understand that, and to know anything of it at all? I can't explain it, I can't fathom it. And sometimes, the most I can do is depend on it even when I don't feel it.

But even then, it's never let me down.

-Zack

"You are not the only one who feels like the only one"
-David Crowder

L20: Waves

We never quite know where we're going, and somehow, that's part of the beauty of all of it. To stare into the great unknown and say "this will all one day be my home." Because all we don't really know are the details. Just details of who, what, when, and where. But we know the why, and we know it is beautiful: because God has willed it, and He perfectly loves us all as individuals, as His children. And somehow, that has to be enough. But staring into the great unknown, sometimes greater than other times, and right now quite great indeed, I know that it is enough. It is enough to know that I might not know anything else, but I know my life is in the hands of someone far greater than myself. All He asks is that we have faith in that fact. A simple action, far from easy.

But the waves come with the evening, a divine rhythm that reverberates within us all. In and out and up and down and good and bad and joyous and tragic. All at once. Creation is a series of endless ands, because He wants us to see this is all more than me, more than you, more than us until us is eternal.

-Zack

"We will run so far from here"
-Newsboys

L19: Last

I've always believed that it was never about the destination as much as the journey, and I'm still quite sure of that truth. But in light of that I've been undercutting patience for years. When the adventure wasn't ripe, I've been too quick to discount the steps the journey was taking. But there is real merit in the end result, or at least that's what I think I've been realizing lately and I hope it's true.

Because right now it seems I'm tied to an excruciating process of patience and the adventure is far from ripe. The patience is part of the journey and I don't like to admit that. I don't like to be in a place where I've got to "wait and see." But so often that's exactly what God calls us to do. Perhaps I've been inordinately blessed with a processes of progress in my life to this point. Up til now, so much of my time has been spent feeling like and seemingly learning that if i'm not moving forward then I'm not doing something right.

But right now, and probably times before when I've ignored it, the major lesson is just waiting. Because the end result is coming, and it will be worth it, despite the journey, at least this time and probably more times later.

I do still hope and think I know though, that end results of patience are just new steps along the journey.

-Zack

"it's like a book elegantly bound in a language that you can't read just yet"
-Death Cab for Cutie

L18: Lifted

We once stood atop the mountain, stretched our arms wide and thought for a moment we could fly. I remember closing my eyes then and wondering how things could be so wonderful. But now I just wonder where it all went.

It's the silence that disturbs me most. The deafening inactivity, the raging calm and the maddening expanse of placidly portrayed miles.

We used to dive in head first, we used to jump without fear because we knew we'd be caught. But we now distrust even ourselves.

There's a broken mirror in which we see ourselves. If it wasn't whole in the past, we at least understood its brokenness. Now we believe more in the brokenness than we do our own existence.

But even so, His love lifts us. Slowly, steadily, we'll learn to fly again.

-Zack

"If the silence takes you then I hope it takes me too"
-Death Cab for Cutie

L17: Mist

I want to get closer, closer to the heart of it all, closer to the center of all reality that we all hang from and so rarely acknowledge. I want to get close enough to feel the rays, to bask in the heat that might only be a metaphor, because the lightness might only be a metaphor, and light might not even mean heat, when you're that close to the Father.

I want to be so close that, were it as much a waterfall as it sometimes feels, I would be drenched in the spray. But if it were a waterfall, then I wouldn't want to be drenched in the spray, because I would want to drown in whatever the source would be.

But I also want to strip it down, to get down to the core and cut through all of this endless metaphor we use because we just can't understand, we just can't get that close to know it at all. So we build things around it.

And there's nothing wrong with that, because we're limited, we're powerless, we're absolutely nothing without what is probably little more than a subatomic amount of all of that glory that gives us life and keeps us alive and lets us love and lets us know and say and hear and be.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with the desire either, to get closer.

-Zack

"I can't lie on my bed without thinking I was wrong"
-Phoenix

L16: Spring

There's a kind of rhythm to the world, a kind of persistent beat that drums itself, slowly or quickly, regularly or with syncopation. But it's a beat that goes on.

Winter leads to spring and spring would be a nuisance without it.

But as it is, spring is beautiful, even if just a transition to warmer days.

It stretches beyond all of that. We need winter. Not just the cold winter that, in the northern United States seems to stretch from November to April, but the winters we go through proverbially, from time to time and with regard to everything in our lives.

I don't love winter. I don't know how to love winter. But I love that it exists, because as soon as the first snow falls, spring is on the way.

-Zack

"You are my everything and I will adore you"
-Jennie Lee Riddle

L15: Home

For five years, I've been grappling with the idea, the theory, the essence of "home" and "home-ness." I've been all across the board as I've worked to come up with some sort of definition, with my ultimate decision being that the idea of home is at best a feeling and some kind of constructed necessity more than a naturally existing phenomena.

I don't quite retract all of those thoughts littered across many blog posts in many places, but I've been realizing more and more lately that the idea of home, whatever it is exactly, is something we're all going to at least long for, and I think that's ultimately tied into our deeper longing for belonging. "Home" itself isn't really anything. It doesn't have to be and really, it's just a name we've attached to all sorts of things over the years. "Home" itself is no sort of necessity at all, but there's an idea of belonging that goes with it to some degree that points toward a feeling of belonging, a feeling of comfort, a feeling ultimately, of love, and that is home, as we tend to define it. But you don't need a home to feel that. I've never felt that my part of Ohio is more home than I do now, but I live there as little as I ever have in my life too.

There is a linguistic use of "home" too, pointing to the place your parents are or the place you grew up, though that is quite literal, and quite boring, and ultimately, quite meaningless (quite ironically).

-Zack

"Claim the stars as ours, I know just where they'll be and what they'll say; they will sing"
-Mae

L14: Dreams

If my dreams came true, the dreams I actually have while I sleep, not my hopes and wishes, people would turn into other people a lot.

I had a dream during a nap this afternoon where I received a card from someone that had a few blank pages built in...sort of a letter-card. I don't know if those exist or not, but they should, it seems a good idea.

I've also had dreams in which I'm not present, like I'm watching a movie or reading or something.

I had a dream the other day that I was sitting with someone who also carries around a copy of Hymns II.

I'm glad I can mostly remember my dreams, but they often really are realities I wish were true, or I'm someone in them, better than I am now. Strange things do happen, from time to time, and I often wonder if they mean anything.

But if they do or if they don't, I don't know that it would change anything.

-Zack

"There's a tough word, on your crossword, there's a bedbug nipping your finger, there's a swallow, there's a calm, here's a hand to lay on your open palm today"
-The Decembrists

L13: Stay

"Abide in me"

One year ago today, exactly, I turned in a 100 page dissertation on what it means to abide without actually talking about it for more than a sentence or two. It is simply to be, to strip away all we know, all we see, all we think, and most importantly, all we assume, and to simply be.

Today, I went to a Bible study in which we discussed what it means to "abide." I gave it my best shot, but the leader was looking for an answer, and thus "we" decided it meant doing something more than simply being..."bible study, prayer, practicing love."

Nothing against those, but I don't think that's what abiding is. It is to simply be, to exist. To abide in something is to exist in a state within that particular thing's frame of reference.

What I did discuss, at length, in those 100 pages, is the necessity to decenter, and that, truly, is what abiding is.

"the dude abides" because the dude found a way to be the perfect hero without any actual action, to exist in a truly decentered state.

We abide in Christ because we have decentered all else and put him at our center...our only center. Everything else, yes, even all we do for him, is and, if we are abiding must be, periphery.

One year may pass, but I could still write about this stuff forever.

-Zack

"I need more now than philosophy; some god in outer-space doesn't mean anything to me"
-John Mark McMillan

L12: Hopeful

There's a constance to the concept of hope that keeps us looking forward. To know that here isn't forever, to know that now is not eternal. But to know that what we have now, what we do what we say what we think can point us toward that ever-coming, nearly but never present hope.

Because this is just a way-station, just a stopping point between many gaps before we reach whatever it is that is coming. There is something here, but the gravest mistake we can make is to confuse it for but the shadow of what is to come.

The best we can hope for, whatever it means, is to see a dim reflection. Even though that is the case, I would rather stare into that dark reflection than look toward or forward to anything else. Because at least, as a reflection, it offers hope of something greater. Outside it could be very real, very tangible, even more than a reflection (though I doubt it), and even if that is the case, I would rather see eternity reflected darkly than the things of this world that offer no hope with all clarity. Perhaps even, it is our ability to see them for what they are and as they are that makes that dim reflection all the more appealing.

-Zack

"When the skyline looks this way, I never want to sleep tonight"
-Mae

L11: Beneath

I wish we could get beneath it all, the skin and bones, the words, the facades, to the place where there's nothing but truth and to find whatever it is that we might find there, just for the sake of finding it, just for the sake of knowing it, just for the sake of seeing and holding it.

But we dance and we dance, around and around, we never find the place where, beneath it all is hearts beating and voices singing. We never come to the place where all that is is love and community and there is no such thing as loneliness because deep down we all just want to be loved and to love, and deep down, beneath it all, no one is unlovable.

But we're stuck out here, we're stuck in this game and we don't know how to get out, or at least I don't, so I just collide, over and over again, into the places I wish I could sink past but can't. It doesn't stop me from trying, but it is the outcome, over and over and over again, as I try to get beneath it all, but just can't.

I wish we could transcend it all, all we see and all we think we know, and come to a place where we realize it's not what we know but who, and who knows us in turn. There's a lushness there, onward and inward, something warm, something vibrant, and it resonates on every string and every rhythm of every heart.

If only we could go deeper, then maybe we could go there, but we can only go together.

-Zack

"you move the earth but now the sky is falling"
-Anberlin