Takeoff

I'm writing this in the midst of a two hour layover in Chicago's O'Hare airport, en route to St. Louis for InterVarsity's triennial National Staff Conference.  This is my first time in Chicago, and it's sort of a bummer, to say the least, that I don't get to go out and see any of the city.  I guess, in theory, I could, if I wanted to go through security again.  But I don't, far from it.

So I'm here.

And I could read, but I've done a bit of that already and I know it rarely gets me motivated like writing does.

So I'm writing.

I'm looking forward to SC11 (as it's apparently going by these days), but I don't quite know what to expect beyond the descriptive marks on a page, a very ambiguous page, delineating our schedule for the extended weekend...or extended last half of the week, if this is work instead of retreat.  Honestly, I'm not too sure how to think of it.  In a lot of ways, I could say that a lot of the time in my job.  Usually, I measure it by energy expended, so it's hard to tell.  There's something intensely fulfilling about the "job" I do, but at the same time, it's often challenging work.  I don't expect SC11 to be unchallenging by any stretch, but I don't know what to expect really, and i imagine it will be challenging in the best possible way.  Right now, I mostly just know I'm looking forward to worship and to seeing people.

There's a guy a few feet from me practicing balance on one foot, dipping down to touch the floor.  He's about 6'3", and I know he's on staff in the pacific northwest.  I'm sure he doesn't recognize me, though I recognize him and a few others around from ONS.  I'm probably being unnecessarily anti-social right now.  I'll be plenty social the rest of the week.

A man just walked by, tall black hat set atop hopelessly fluffed out hair.  Jewish, I imagine, and Hasidic.  There was a time in my life when I had never been to an airport without seeing some Hasidic people somewhere.  That wasn't true anymore after this past summer, twice, in Detroit and once, in Madison.

Of the seven books I'm reading, two of them are steeped in American Jewish culture, but are quite different otherwise.  It's a culture I don't know much about, and it's also a culture I'll never really be able to wrap my mind around.

I do enjoy Klezmer bands though.....and like that, I distilled an entire race of people to a single thing I experienced once, in Wooster.


We've got to experience culture to be anything at all, but if we don't do it correctly, we'll start separating the people from the culture.  So many people come back from other countries and talk about how they learned that no matter how far away you get, people, at the heart, at the same.  That's true, but that heart is a lot deeper than we think sometimes.  Most of the time, I think we immerse ourselves in a culture and try to figure out ways to cut away the culture and realize what lies beneath.  But that's useless because, though something must lie beneath, we just cut away the things, mentally, that are different from ourselves, products of our own, often bigger and more prevalent, worldwide, culture.

Cross cultures to live.  Cross cultures at your own caution.

And sometimes, stop the analysis and just be.

Abide in me, Christ said.  We do far too little abiding and far too much attempting to ascertain.

But just abide.  Just be.  I'd tell you how to do it, but if it was something to "do" it wouldn't be abiding at all.

-Zack

"The system's broken, the schools closed, the prisons open"
-Kanye West